You learn, of course, when you’re working with something good, but you also can learn when you’re working with things that are not good. You can see the reasons they’re not good. I would sometimes suggest what could be done, but essentially say “It isn’t worth the bother.” So I learned from that process. Roger Corman

Roger Corman was born in Detroit Michigan before his family moved out to California. Corman attended Standford University to study Industrial Engineering but left with six months to study to enlisted in the V-12 Navy College Training Program. Corman served in the navy from 1944-46 before returning and wrapping up his degree in 1947. He briefly worked at U.S. Electrical Motors but his career lasted only 4 days as he quit the same week he started.

Roger Corman instead decided to follow his younger brother Roger’s career path. Roger Corman was working in Hollywood as an agent and Roger decided to give filmmaking a go.

Corman started off at 20th Century Fox in the mail room before working his way up to story reader. But advancement wasn’t going to come at Fox so Corman used to GI Bill to study English at Oxford University. Upon his return he worked as an assistant to a literary agent.

In his spare time, Corman wrote and sold his first script: House in the Sea, then retitled Highway Dragnet. From his $2,000 commission, Corman raised $10,000 more to fund his first feature – the sci fi film: The Monster From the Ocean Floor (1954). It did well enough to encourage Corman to produce another film: A racing car thriller The Fast and The Furious (1955) which he sold to American Releasing Company. From the profits he was able to fund two more films for ARC which eventually changed their name to American International Pictures (AIP). Corman quickly became a leading filmmaker at AIP.

Corman’s first serious critical praise came for the film Machine-Gun Kelly (1958), a biopic of the famous gangster which gave Charles Bronson his first leading role.

1960 saw one of Corman’s greatest hits with House of Usher. Author Richard Matheson was hired to adapt Edgar Allan Poe’s original story and Vincent Price starred. The film spawned a follow-up with The Pit and The Pendulum, kicking of Corman’s Poe cycle.

Even though Corman was artistically and economically satisfied with the independent films he was making, in 1965, Corman decided to start working with the major studios. Corman signed a contract with United Artists and Columbia. But Corman soon butted heads with studio chiefs:

“Every idea I submitted was considered too strange, too weird; every idea they had seemed too ordinary to me. Ordinary pictures don’t make money.”

In 1966 Corman took a break from the studios and directed the first biker movie: The Wild Angels starring Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra with Peter Bogdanovich working as Corman’s assistant. Working for the studios was too restricting for Corman and he returned to his independent roots.

In May 1970, Corman founded New World Pictures which became a small independently-owned production/distribution studio that also distributed foreign films by directors like Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa.

During the second half of the 70s, New World Pictures saw it’s peak with films like Death Race 2000 (1975), : Cannonball (1976), Eat My Dust! (1976), Grand Theft Auto (1978), The Great Texas Dynamite Chase (1976), Deathsport (1978) and Smokey Bites the Dust (1981).

Corman sold off New World Pictures in January of 1983 and set up a new production company called Millennium Films, The New Owners of New World promised to distribute Corman’s films for 2 years but the business began falling apart. Lawsuits flew left and right. When the dust settled (out of court), Corman announced he would establish a distribution “cooperative” in Concorde Pictures in 1985.

Concorde’s films included Overexposed (1990), The Unborn (1991), and In the Heat of Passion (1992). They had a big hit with Carnosaur (1993), which led to several sequels. He financed Fire on the Amazon (1991, directed Luis Llosa) which had Sandra Bullock and Craig Sheffer in early roles.

Moving into the 2000s, Corman lost much of the drive in audience and but picked up a new buyer in the cable channel: Syfy making Sharktopus (2010) and Piranhaconda (2012).

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