Roger Corman should be remembered as the model that filmmakers should try to emulate from now on
It’s safe to say that, prior to his death last weekend, Roger Corman had become a name that was almost unknown to a generation of movie fans… or, worse yet, know primarily as the butt of a joke, as the producer of the unreleased Fantastic Four movie from the 1990s or any number of low budget B-movies (or movies that could justifiably lay claim to letters further along the alphabet) that few people have seen. In some respects, that’s somewhat understandable: Corman was almost 100 years old, and hadn’t really been particularly active in the industry for some time — but if anything, his passing provides the opportunity to correct the record and put it as bluntly as necessary: Corman was the greatest gift to the movie industry imaginable in the last century, if not longer.
Arguably, there’s a case to be made for that being true on his passion for the medium alone. Corman wasn’t “just” a producer or director, although it’s in those fields that he had the most impact on the business. He was also a screenwriter and actor, with appearances in The Godfather Part II, The Silence of the Lambs, and Apollo 13 to show for it. He also shows up in Scream 3 as a studio executive, which is a fine in-joke of a cameo from director Wes Craven — a director who, perhaps surprisingly, isn’t one of the army of filmmakers who owe their careers to Corman.
The directors who could justifiably say that Corman offered them their big break include — and this is a long list, so get ready — Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, John Sayles, Joe Dante, Robert Towne, Jonathan Demme, Gale Anne Hurd, Nicolas Roeg, Peter Bogdanovich, Irvin Kershner, and so, so many more; James Cameron — who worked as an art director on the Corman-produced Star Wars rip-off Battle Beyond the Stars — has joked that he trained at “the Roger Corman Film School,” for example. (Corman likely loved the opulence of Avatar, let’s be honest.) When we start to include actors in there, the list gets even crazier: Robert De Niro, Dennis Hopper, Sandra Bullock, Peter Fonda, Charles Bronson, Tommy Lee Jones, and Jack Nicholson all arguably got their big moment in projects that Corman made happen. The subject even famously moved Nicholson to tears in an interview once:
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