Roger Corman, among the most influential American producers of the post-war era, has died in California at the age of 98. Famed for the rigorous economy of his exploitation pictures, he offered early work to such legends of the screen as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Peter Bogdanovich, John Sayles and Jonathan Demme.
Corman also played an important part in the progress of the Irish film industry towards its current rude health. In the late 1990s, his Concorde Anois studio, established in Connemara, provided work for emerging talent in the production of such pictures as Spacejacked, A Very Unlucky Leprechaun and, most notoriously, Jeremiah Cullinane’s Criminal Affairs. A screening of that film at the Galway Film Fleadh in 1997 kicked up a minor scandal that, examined retrospectively, says much about the cultural state of the nation in the pre-millennial years.
Corman was the most cultured and articulate of men. Raised in a middle-class family, he studied engineering at Stanford University and English literature at the University of Oxford. Only a few days into a job at US Electrical Motors, he decided he really wanted to make movies.
He worked his way from messenger to story reader at 20th Century Fox, before setting up shop as an independent producer. Corman’s first film, Monster from the Ocean Floor, a characteristically undemanding maritime creature feature, emerged in 1954, and he remained the King of Cult for the succeeding 70 years. Often produced for American International Pictures, Corman’s films – some of which he directed – were made quickly for an already established audience. He favoured genre. Snappy titles were vital. So were eye-catching posters.
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Yet nobody was in any doubt that he was a cultured man with a keen appreciation of cinema. Through the 1960s, he directed a series of lavish – though still relatively inexpensive – adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories such as Masque of the Red Death, The Tomb of Ligeia and The Fall of the House of Usher. His own 1962 film, The Intruder, starring a pre-Star Trek William Shatner as a messianic stranger in a small town, confirmed an engagement with social issues.
His favourite films included Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. He handled US distribution for films by Kurosawa, Bergman and François Truffaut on release. Twelve years ago, speaking to Xan Brooks at the Cannes film festival, Corman explained why he hadn’t followed his idols into the art house.
“Well, firstly I’m not sure I have the ability to make that type of film,” he says. “But secondly it’s an economic situation. All of those films were made in Europe with government subsidies. Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut did not have the necessity of having to earn their money back and so they were free to do what they liked. In the US it’s different. It’s a money-making industry, so that’s what you have to do.”
That quote does much to sum up the Corman aesthetic (if his approach can be so described). John Sayles, the acclaimed radical American film-maker, told me he and his crew used to hide any newly bought props whenever Corman dropped in on one of his sets. Any such expense was frowned upon.
For all that, no other producer did so much to shepherd the generation that dominated in the 1970s. Frances Ford Coppola, who worked with Corman in Ireland on the 1963 horror film Dementia 13, later found a role for his mentor in The Godfather Part II. Later on James Cameron, who worked in all fields for Corman – model-making, art direction, special effects – found the experience vital to his development as a maker of epic productions such as Titanic. “I found myself thrust among a group of people who thought as I did,” he told me in 2021. “We had no track record. It didn’t matter. There was a rush off this sense of the impossible being made possible.”
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Indeed, many of this week’s obituarists will conclude that he will best be remembered as a talent spotter and nurturer. “Most of the good ones were good from the very first day of their very first picture,” he told Brooks. “Maybe Jonathan Demme’s talent was not that evident on his first film. But I had faith in him and he got better.”
Martin Scorsese made his second feature, Boxcar Bertha, with Corman, but declined the producer’s offer to finance Mean Streets as a blaxploitation film. Corman’s caution with money inevitably caused the talent to move on. Jack Nicholson, who toiled in the Corman mines for a decade, was not going to work for “scale” forever.
Money was also an issue when controversies bubbled up concerning Concorde Anois studios, but it was chatter of sex and violence that caught the media’s attention. The studio at Tully received a start-up grant from Michael D Higgins, then minister for arts, culture and the Gaeltacht, and went on to make about 20 features. Controversy arose when Criminal Affairs, a robust exploitation thriller, was, to quote Michael Foley in The Irish Times, “inexplicably chosen to be shown at the Galway Film Fleadh”.
Antony Sellers, then programme director of the Film Fleadh, took issue with the words “inexplicably chosen” in a letter to the paper, but admitted the “film demonstrates hopelessly mishandled sexual politics”. The Sunday Times ran with “Irish agency ‘funding porn films’”. One imagines that image of shocked theatregoers at Springtime for Hitler in Mel Brooks’s The Producers.
“People were gobsmacked,” Hugh Linehan, in this newspaper, quoted a former Corman employee as saying. “I was surprised. I mean, these are the kind of films he makes, and these were the standard sort of nudity shots.”
Then in his early 70s, Corman moved on to make TV movies for Showtime and for the Syfy channel. By this stage, he was something more than a legend. He received an honorary Oscar in 2018 and, just last year, made a robust appearance at the closing ceremony of the Cannes film festival. Corman dies as an American original. “He launched many careers and quietly led our industry in an important way,” Ron Howard, who directed his first feature for Corman, said. “He remained sharp, interested and active even at 98. Grateful to have known him.”
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