Roger Corman

Roger Corman, who for decades dominated the world of B movies as the producer or director of countless proudly low-budget horror, science fiction and crime films, died on Thursday May 9 2024 at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 98. Corman produced more than 300 films and directed roughly 50 of them, including cult classics like “A Bucket of Blood” (1959), “The Masque of the Red Death” (1964), “The Wild Angels” (1966) and the original “The Little Shop of Horrors” (1960), which he shot for $35,000 in two days on a set left over from somebody else’s movie. When he got tired of directing, he opened the door to Hollywood for talented young protégés like Francis Ford Coppola (“Dementia 13”), Martin Scorsese (“Boxcar Bertha”), Jonathan Demme (“Caged Heat”), Peter Bogdanovich (“Targets”) and Ron Howard (“Grand Theft Auto”). Corman also nurtured was Jack Nicholson, who was 21 when Corman gave him his first movie role, the lead in “The Cry Baby Killer” (1958), and 23 when he had a small part as a masochistic dental patient in “The Little Shop of Horrors.” Before he went on to stardom, Nicholson acted in eight Corman movies and wrote three of them, including “The Trip,” an uncautionary tale about LSD. In 1970 Corman formed his own production and distribution company, New World Pictures. What he did next surprised Hollywood: He became the American distributor of Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers.” The film earned Bergman nominations for Academy Awards in 1974 as writer and director; its cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, won an Oscar. “Cries and Whispers” made a profit of more than $1 million in American theaters. Corman spent a year as an engineering student at Stanford University in the middle of World War II, then spent his sophomore and junior years at the University of Colorado as a cadet in a Navy program. He returned to Stanford when the war ended, graduating in 1947 with a degree in industrial engineering. But after working for just four days as an electrical engineer, he quit engineering forever. He later enrolled at the University of Oxford on the G.I. Bill. After six months at Oxford and six months in Paris, he came home and sold a chase-across-the-desert script to Allied Artists for $3,500. He was so unhappy with the finished film, “Highway Dragnet,” directed by Nathan Juran, that he decided to become his own producer. On Dec. 26, 1970, at the age of 44, Mr. Corman married Julie Halloran, a former Los Angeles Times researcher whom he had been dating off and on for six years. With his wife and his brother as co-producers, he formed New World Pictures. He sold New World in 1983, keeping the valuable film library, and promptly created a new production and distribution company, Concorde-New Horizons. In 1997 he sold Concorde-New Horizons and its library for $100 million. He is survived by his wife, Julie, and his daughters. Catherine and Mary,