Cinema? We're Making Movies Here!

 The King is dead. Long live the king.

Last week Roger Corman, self-proclaimed King of the B Movies passed away at the age of ninety-eight. But not without leaving great giant footprints which so many others would follow. Academy Award winning director Ron Howard, after becoming tired of playing second fiddle to Fonzie on Happy Days went to work for Mister Corman and made a little film called Grand Theft Auto. That was back in 1977. In 2002, he won best director and best film Oscars for A Beautiful Mind. As a producer and director, his films have grossed more than six billion dollars. A pretty nice run for a guy who started by making a low budget comedy with car chases. 

Francis Ford Coppola, the man who brought us The Godfather saga, Apocalypse Now and helped spawn the careers of so many other filmmakers got his start directing a little slice of horror called Dementia 13. He got this job from Roger Corman. Francis has seen fit to pay it forward, helping to launch the career of his pal George Lucas in addition to putting out a very nice Cabernet Sauvignon. 

Did you like Silence of the Lambs? The director of that movie, Jonathan Demme won an Academy Award for it. All made possible by his early work at American International Pictures for, you guessed it, Roger Corman. He showed up on the scene in 1977, not unlike Ron Howard, with a little car crash movie called Breaker, Breaker! Mister Demme is also the director of one of the greatest concert films ever made, Stop Making Sense, and also a little movie called Philadelphia. Not bad for a "cult director." 

The list goes on, but I think my favorite bit of the Roger Corman legend comes from 1963. After directing a lavish, by Corman standards, adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven, he realized he still had horror legend Boris Karloff under contract for two more days. The slated golf outing was put off because of bad weather, and so using the left over sets along with the estimable talents of another protege young Jack Nicholson, the gang set to work fabricating a feature film over the weekend. The result was The Terror, If you have an hour and twenty-one minutes to spend trying to unravel the somewhat nonsensical plot I can almost guarantee you will want an hour and fifteen minutes back. 

But such was the genius of Roger Corman. The list of folks who began their trip to Hollywood working for him is immense. Robert De Niro, Joe Dante, John Cameron and the ubiquitous Dick Miller all got their start thanks to the King of the B's. To say that Mister Corman stomped on the Terra might be selling his influence a little short, but since we're on a budget, let's just say that he will be missed. For a long, long, time.