R.I.P. Roger Corman (director, horror B-movies)

    Roger Corman: The Little Shop of Horrors
    cult B-movie director dies aged 98
    ----------------------------------------
    Roger Corman, who directed a series of cult films including
    1960's The Little Shop of Horrors, has died aged 98.
    His family told industry publication Variety that he died
    on Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, California.
    "His films were revolutionary and iconoclastic, and
    captured the spirit of an age," their statement said.
    Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro are among the actors he
    helped develop. Directors James Cameron and Martin Scorsese
    cut their teeth on his films.
    Many of his films became cult classics and he became famous
    for the speed at which he worked, often making two films at
    the same location and at the same time, in order to save
    money.
    Roger Corman was born in Detroit on 5 April 1926. His father,
    William, was an engineer and he had intended to follow in his
    footsteps.
    However, while studying at college, he became attracted to
    film-making and after a spell working for General Motors quit
    his job and went to work at 20th Century Fox as a messenger
    boy.
    Having failed to make much progress, he set off for Europe
    where among other things, he briefly studied English
    literature at Oxford. He returned to the US with ambitions to
    become a screenwriter.
    He sold his first script, The House in the Sea, in 1953 and it
    was filmed as Highway Dragnet the following year with Corman
    being credited as co-producer.
    However, he was so upset by the changes made to his story that
    he scraped together some cash and set himself up as a producer.
    Corman began directing in 1955 with Swamp Women and over the
    next 15 years he made more than 50 films, gaining a reputation
    for the speed with which he could turn them out.
    Famous faces
    It became something of a joke in the film industry that Corman
    could negotiate a contract from a public phone, shoot the film
    in the phone box and pay for it with the coins in the change
    slot.
    The 1960 release, The Little Shop of Horrors, which featured a
    brief appearance by a young Jack Nicholson, took just two days
    to shoot with Corman using the set of a previous film, Bucket
    of Blood.
    A stage musical based on the film opened in 1982 and would
    itself spawn a second film version four years later.
    Corman decided to widen his horizons with a series of films
    based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe and featuring Vincent
    Price as the lead in all but one of them.
    The House of Usher was released in 1960 and was followed by a
    string of others including The Raven, The Masque of the Red
    Death and The Tomb of Ligeia.
    His 1962 film, The Intruder, which examined racial tensions in
    America's Deep South, featured a young William Shatner and won
    an award at the Venice Film Festival.
    Despite this, the film flopped at the box office and became
    Corman's first film to make a loss, prompting him to remark that
    he'd stick to making films that entertained rather than carried
    a social message.
    For a time he became part of the 1960s counter-culture, making
    biker film The Wild Angels, which starred Peter Fonda and Nancy
    Sinatra.
    He also directed The Trip, which was written by and starred Jack
    Nicholson. The film was seen as the precursor of Easy Rider,
    with both Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper featuring in the cast.
    In the late 60s he set up his own production company, New World
    Pictures.
    As well as continuing to make budget movies, he also began
    handling films made by distinguished foreign film-makers,
    including Francois Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini
    and introducing them to an American audience.
    He sold New World Pictures in the 1980s but went on to form two
    more production companies. He also returned to the director's
    chair in 1990 with the film Frankenstein Unbound.
    Based on a Brian Aldiss novel, it starred John Hurt and Bridget
    Fonda and featured a brief appearance by Michael Hutchence, the
    lead singer of the Australian band INXS.
    In 2009 he received an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement and
    continued to work well into his eighties, producing the 2010 films
    Dinoshark and Sharktopus for the Syfy TV channel.
    The sheer quantity of films on which he worked is almost without
    precedent, as was his ability to find and nurture new talent.
    Many of his films have taken on cult status and few directors have
    been so successful at making popular pictures on such tight
    budgets.
    When asked how Corman would like to be remembered, he said, 'I was
    a filmmaker, just that,'" the family said in their statement.
    <https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-17127556>