MST3K
MST3K
MST3K
3,187
pages
in: Movie Directors, Movie Producers, Recurring filmmakers,
and 9 more

Roger Corman

Sign in to edit


Roger Corman (1926-2024) was an American filmmaker whose career began in the 1950s. A screenwriter, producer, director and distributor (and sometime actor), Corman is considered to be a pioneer of independent moviemaking, known for tiny budgets, assembly-line production, and his reputation for profitability. His filmography includes cult classics such as The Little Shop of Horrors, Caged Heat, Death Race 2000 (with David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone), and Android. A number of notable people in the entertainment industry started their careers in Corman projects, including actors Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda and directors Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola.

A former engineering student, Corman entered the motion picture business as a messenger and became a producer/director after a stint as a story analyst and a brief detour to Oxford University. After returning to Hollywood, he saw an opportunity to make money and gain experience by making low-budget films to feed the drive-in and neighborhood theater circuits, which had been abandoned in large part by the major studios. Working from budgets of as little as $50,000, he quickly learned the art of making money with inexpensive films, producing and directing pictures for American International Pictures and Allied Artists. These films were short features (some as little as 62 minutes), but they were entertaining and endeared Corman to generations of young filmgoers.

During the early '60s, Corman became more ambitious and made the serious school-desegregation drama The Intruder. It was the only one of his movies to lose money, because few theaters would book it. Corman also began working in color, most notably on a series of adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe stories starring Vincent Price that won the respect of younger critics and aspiring filmmakers alike. Corman also employed many young film students and writers during this period, including Francis Ford Coppola, Curtis Harrington, and author Robert Towne. His output decreased as his budgets went up, and Corman moved away from directing and into producing. In the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, Corman was still producing exploitation films (such as Humanoids from the Deep), but his company New World Pictures also distributed several important foreign movies, including Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers and the groundbreaking Jamaican crime drama The Harder They Come. [1]

Reaction to MST3K[]

“ If you don't have any ability yourself, maybe you can make money by making fun of those who do. ”
- Roger Corman, at the IU Cinema, April 18, 2014


Corman also took issue with Cinematic Titanic's use of his 1959 film The Wasp Woman. Corman had re-made The Wasp Woman in 1995, and he claimed that this placed the characters from the original film under copyright retroactively. He threatened legal action against the Cinematic Titanic crew if they used or exhibited the 1959 film without compensating him. A compromise was eventually reached.

Notes[]

  • Roger Corman produced and co-directed the 1980 science-fiction film Battle Beyond the Stars and produced the 1978 film Deathsport, both of which were identified as films planned to be used in the potential Season 14 of Mystery Science Theater 3000. That crowd-funding effort was not successful, and it remains to be seen if either film will be used on MST3K in the future.
  • Roger Corman produced the first feature film adaptation of the comic book The Fantastic Four. It was never officially released, but copies were distributed through unauthorized users and online. This film was eventually used on Movie Jo Night, and some scenes were included in the RiffTrax presentation Super Zeroes.

Riffed Movies[]

MST3K[]

RiffTrax[]

Other[]

Gallery[]

References[]

Community content is available under CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted.
More Fandoms