Roger Corman

Wow. Where do you start with this guy? From the 1950s onward, the prolific Roger Corman has turned out over 500 low-budget genre films, as producer, director or as executive producer in his own studios. As such, he is often nicknamed “The King of the B’s”, although purists can argue the verity of that title, since technically his pictures were marketed as “A”‘s (ie- the films that people paid to see instead of the “B” picture added as filler). But for several decades, he has earned that misnomer, as his low-budget films are often more efficient than most.

As he worked through Allied Artists, American International Pictures and Woolner Brothers, and then formed his own New World Pictures, Roger Corman also had an uncanny ability to capitalize on the days’ popular trends. During the 1970s, New World found a niche in, of all things, distributing arthouse films by Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini! He also saw the worth of home video long before the major studios did, producing pictures for the new direct-to-video markets. Corman sold New World in the 1980s, and then formed Concorde-New Horizons. In this new phase of his career, he was more prolific than ever, although arguably favouring quantity over quality.

Corman was a veritable film school, as many future stars and directors got their big breaks through him. Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Bruce Dern, Peter Fonda, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Dennis Hopper, Joe Dante, and many many others, jump-started their careers in working on Corman’s low-budget pictures before moving on to bigger things.