I was thrilled to read yesterday that Roger Corman will be receiving an honorary Academy Award next year. I’ve been a fan of Corman’s for decades and consider him to be one of the most important people working in Hollywood for the past 50 years – as a director, producer, distributor and talent incubator. I had a contract to write a book about his career back in 1985 (and had agreement from Corman for participation) but I never completed it due to conflicting priorities.

As a director, Corman is perhaps best remembered for his series of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations for American International Pictures in the 1960s, for the original Little Shop of Horrors in 1960, biker film The Wild Angels in 1966 and LSD film The Trip in 1967 (starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, with a script by Jack Nicholson). IMDB shows that he has directed 56 films, starting with Swamp Women in 1955 up through Frankenstein Unbound in 1990. Corman specialized in working fast and cheap – one of his films was shot in a single day, others in less than a week. His most interesting film as a director came in 1962 with The Intruder, starring a young William Shatner as a racist in the south trying to incite racial prejudice just as civil rights was starting to take hold around the country. It is the only Corman film not to make a profit – had it done so, it might have moved his career in a different direction. (His autobiography is titled, How I Made 100 Pictures in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime.)

IMDB lists Corman as producer of 386 films. And as a producer, both at AIP and, from 1970, at his own New World Productions, Corman gave breaks to so many people in Hollywood that a list of people who DIDN’T work for him would be shorter than the list of those who had. Those he helped include Francis Ford Coppola, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, John Sayles – the list just goes on and on.

Corman often gave these people a limited budget but a free hand. He wanted B pictures – films that combined explosions, car chases or t & a with a hint of a social message. The results included early films directed by many of those listed above and cult classics like Big Doll House, Women in Cages, Boxcar Bertha, The Big Bird Cage, TNT Jackson, Caged Heat, Big Bad Mama, Deathrace 2000, Hollywood Boulevard, Grand Theft Auto, Saint Jack, Rock & Roll High School, Deathstalker, Barbarian Queen – exploitation films all but look up any of them at IMDB and then be amazed at the amount of talent early in their careers in front of and behind the camera.

People who acted in films he directed early in their careers include Mike Connors, Dick Sargent, Lloyd Bridges, William Schallert, Peter Graves, Lee Van Cleef, Charles Bronson, Morey Amsterdam, Robert Vaughn, Jack Nicholson, screenwriter Robert Towne, Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra, Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd, Michael J. Pollard, Harrison Ford, Susan Strasberg, Dennis Hopper, Fabian, Talia Shire and the indefatigable Dick Miller, who was in almost every Corman film (and cast in many other films by Corman “film school graduates” as a good luck charm.

Other Corman stars included Vincent Price, Ray Milland, Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone, Patrick Magee, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., Don Rickles, Stewart Granger, Mickey Rooney, Jason Robards, George Segal, Glenn Ford, Shelley Winters, Robert De Niro, Ben Vereen, Cindy Williams, John Hurt, Raul Julia … the list just goes on and on.

These people often repaid him by giving him cameo roles in their later films – Corman can be seen in Godfather 2, The Howling, Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, Apollo 13, Looney Tunes Back in Action, Rachel Getting Married and others.

As a distributor in the 1970s, Corman brought over the works of many great European directors – Fellini, Truffaut, Bergman and others. He promoted these films in the US by creating new trailers that hid the fact that they were in a foreign language and made them look like racy exploitation films!

My favorite Corman story involves one of his early films, one about car racing. Along with directing, Corman was driving one of the cars in the final race sequence. He was supposed to stay in the lead until almost the end, then slow down and let the hero pass him to win. But when the did the shot, at the end Corman floored the accelerator and came in first. They asked him why he blew the shot and he replied, roughly, I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose just because some scripts says so.

He’s 83 years old now and it’s nice to see him get this kind of recognition for his contributions to the industry and the art.