Producer Spawned Generations of Filmmakers

 

Producer/Director Roger Corman has passed at 98. Beginning in the 1950s and for decades, 'This King of the B Movies' produced (and frequently directed) hundreds of low budget films (including The Little Shop of Horrors, Attack of the Crab Monsters, and Dementia 13, mostly through American International Pictures specializing in scifi and horror (including a series of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations especially The Fall of the House of Usher). Later with New World Pictures, he helped import prestige foreign films like Cries and Whispers, Amacord, and The Tin Drum as well as action films like Death Race 2000. He hired and mentored some of the greatest Hollywood talent including Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, John Sayles, and so many more. He was boastful that virtually all his films made a profit despite tight budgets. He received an honorary Oscar in 2009.