- Born
- Died
- Place
Roger Corman
Roger William Corman (April 5, 1926 – May 9, 2024) was an American film director, producer and actor. Known under various monikers such as "The Pope of Pop Cinema", “The King of The B’s”, "The Spiritual Godfather of the New Hollywood", and "The King of Cult", he was known as a trailblazer in the world of independent film.
Many of the more than 500 features directed or produced by Corman were low-budget films that later attracted a cult following, such as The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), The Intruder (1962), X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963), and the counterculture films, The Wild Angels (1966) and The Trip (1967). House of Usher (1960) became the first of eight films directed by Corman that were adapted from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and which collectively came to be known as the "Poe Cycle".
In 1964, Corman became the youngest filmmaker to have a retrospective at the Cinémathèque française, as well as in the British Film Institute and the Museum of Modern Art. He was the co-founder of New World Pictures, the founder of New Concorde and was a longtime member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 2009, he was awarded an Academy Honorary Award "for his rich engendering of films and filmmakers".
Corman was also famous for handling the U.S. distribution of many films by noted foreign directors, including Federico Fellini (Italy), Ingmar Bergman (Sweden), François Truffaut (France) and Akira Kurosawa (Japan). He mentored and gave a start to many young film directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, John Sayles, and James Cameron, and was highly influential in the New Hollywood filmmaking movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He also helped to launch the careers of actors like Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd, and William Shatner.
As director
Frankenstein Unbound
Von Richthofen and Brown
Bloody Mama
Gas! -Or- It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It.
Target: Harry
De Sade
The Wild Racers
The Trip
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre
A Time for Killing
The Wild Angels
The Masque of the Red Death
The Secret Invasion
The Tomb of Ligeia
The Haunted Palace
The Terror
X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
The Raven
The Young Racers
The Premature Burial
Tales of Terror
Tower of London
The Intruder
The Pit and the Pendulum
Atlas
Creature from the Haunted Sea
House of Usher
The Little Shop of Horrors
Last Woman on Earth
Ski Troop Attack
As actor
SEGAL
Il cinema secondo Corman
Wasp Woman: Murder of a B-movie Queen
Sharksploitation
Martin Scorsese, the Italian-American Master
Lost Explorer
Roger Corman, the Pope of Pop Cinema
Hollywood in the Atomic Age: Monsters! Martians! Mad Scientists!
Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster
Time Warp Vol. 3: Comedy and Camp
Corman's Eyedrops Got Me Too Crazy
AGFA Mystery Mixtape #1
AGFA Mystery Mixtape #3: Sequelitis
Time Warp Vol. 2: Horror and Sci-Fi
Tales of the Uncanny
Ivan, the TerrirBle
The AGFA Mystery Mixtape Vault
Memory: The Origins of Alien
Dr. Jack & Mr. Nicholson
Bloody And Groovy Baby! A Tribute to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2
Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive
Monstres, l'ennemi de l'intérieur
Greetings from Tromaville!
Doomed! The Untold Story of Roger Corman's The Fantastic Four
Extraordinary Tales
Kings of Cult
It Was a Colossal Teenage Movie Machine: The AIP Story
Behind the Swinging Blade
That Guy Dick Miller
Monster Madness: Mutants, Space Invaders, and Drive-Ins