Hollywood: Roger Corman, the king of trash films, is dead

He was the master of trash and horror films, but he didn’t want them to be called “B movies.” Because Roger Corman’s cheap films were not appendages to the main film, but were shown in cinemas as independent productions, as he always emphasized. Now the legendary director and producer, who in his long career supported later film greats such as Jack Nicholson, Sylvester Stallone, Dennis Hopper and top directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme and James Cameron, was at home in Santa last Thursday Monica died. He lived to be an incredible 98 years old.

Born in Detroit in 1926, Corman studied electrical engineering at Stanford as the son of an engineer, but only worked four days in the job after graduating because he realized he had made “a huge mistake,” as he told his boss when he quit . Instead, he started working in the film industry in 1953 – in the mailroom of 20th Century Fox’s Hollywood studios, where he quickly rose to become a screenplay editor, supported by his younger brother Gene, who worked as a film agent in Hollywood.

In his free time, he wrote his first script for the noir crime film “Highway Dragnet,” which he financed himself as a low-budget production in 1954, not to earn money, but to gain “experience,” as he later said. And they must not have been bad, because since then Corman has directed and produced over 400 films for screen and television, including classics such as “The Last Seven”, “The Cursed”, “Little Shop of Horrors” and “The Wild Angels”.

Corman was known as an extremely economical filmmaker for snap productions. His record was two days and one night, which he needed for “Little Shop of Horrors” in 1960, with which Jack Nicholsen began his career. Corman said that he himself attended acting school at the time to learn something about actors as a director. “And that’s where I met Jack for the first time in class. He was by far the most talented actor in the class.”

The independent filmmaker usually kept his distance from the big Hollywood studios. What bothered him was “that so many people want to have a say when it comes to big money. And since I’m absolutely anti-authoritarian, that didn’t suit me. When I make my own films, I can make my own decisions,” he said on the sidelines of the Munich Film Festival in 2011. Corman considered horror films to be the “safest genre” and comedy to be the most dangerous: “If the horror film isn’t particularly good, you add a few screams of terror and get away with it. But if no one laughs at your comedy, you’re dead.”

In 2009, Corman received an honorary Oscar for his life’s work. Two years later, his own life made it to the screen. In the documentary “Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel” (German title: “UFOs, Sex and Monsters – The Wild Cinema of Roger Corman”), prominent fans such as Robert De Niro and Ron Howard pay tribute to his achievements. Shortly before his 90th birthday, he was excited about a new project as producer of the remake of “Death Race 2000” and was looking forward to “spectacular vehicles and action to make you laugh, in the truest sense of the word,” as he told the “Hollywood Reporter” in 2016. said. In 1975 he brought the original to the cinema with David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone (German title: “Frankenstein’s Death Race”) as producers.

And here’s another tip from Corman for young people watching horror films: The monster always has to be bigger than the “leading lady”.with agencies

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