Roger Corman Proved There’s Nothing Schlocky About Being One Of Hollywood’s Most Influential Mentors

I think when we mourn someone like Roger Corman, what we recognize is the rarity, the absolute preciousness, of the kind of mentorship he represented. He was a showman, a businessman, a guy with a nose for talent whose legacy will now and forever be the long list of Hollywood luminaries who credit Corman’s productions for their big breaks: John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, Gale Ann Hurd, Pam Grier, Peter Bogdanovich, Peter Fonda, James Cameron, and on and on. He got his own big break when he sold a screenplay for $2000 and folded that cash back into a producing career that spanned nearly 500 films and eight decades. He was a mainstay of the drive-in, the B-movie, the direct-to-video market; a director himself of over 50 films (including the well-regarded Vincent Price-starring Edgar Allan Poe “Cycle” that encompasses eight films between 1960-64); and finally an actor who made appearances in among other things, the films of a few of his proteges: Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Francis Ford Coppola and Ron Howard (Howard famously complained to Corman about the scant resources available for Howard’s debut, the Corman-produced Grand Theft Auto (1976), to which Corman said “If you do a good job on this film, you won’t ever have to work for me again”). Depending on one’s measure for success, the film was made in a few days for $602,000 and earned over $15MM in box office receipts. Not for nothing is Corman’s 1990 autobiography called How I Made a Hundred Movies In Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. 

He was a very specific kind of genius and it’s fair to wonder if his largesse was really just an ability to spot talent that could turn a quick buck. It’s an ugly thought, but one worth addressing given Paul Schrader’s immediate, and bitter, reaction to Corman’s death. My response is if you do something that helps someone, so long as you do no harm, the question of whether or not altruism is a real thing is moot. The quality of mercy is not constrained to the faultless, after all, and intention to me is not a disqualifier of grace. Corman helped countless people direct their first films, earn their breakthrough roles, fill the “experience” requirement on curriculum vitae and job applications — it’s arguable that the modern era in American film would be radically different without his influence. He reminds me of figures like Charles Koerner, in that sense, whose fostering in the 1940s of producer Val Lewton, among others, led to Lewton’s own mentorship of people like Mark Robson, Robert Wise, Ardel Wray, Nicholas Musuraca, Robert Towne and DeWitt Bodean. Koerner the production head of RKO Pictures who gave Lewton creative freedom so long as Lewton converted lurid, pre-chosen titles like “Cat People” into films with sub-$150,000 budgets and similarly-modest shooting schedules. Corman started as a producer for James H. Nicholson and Sam Arkoff’s American Releasing Company (later “American International Pictures”), learning a similar kind of thrift and ingenious efficiency. 

With ARC, he cranked out films to feed the bottomless appetite of new exploitation markets. But along the way, he made a few American masterpieces at odds with a body of work that’s popularly and affectionately dismissed as cheap and largely without merit. Corman’s greatest legacy, rightly so, is his role as a literal and mentor-in-spirit for an entire generation of artists, but I wonder if that serves to undervalue his genuine talent as a director of vision and style. The Poe cycle is the most obviously-prestigious of Corman’s body of work. Tired of making movies sometimes back-to-back over ten days on budgets south of $100,000, in 1960 Corman suggested an investment of $200,000 on a color adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. With writer Richard Matheson and star Vincent Price, Corman crafted an American answer to Britain’s Hammer Studios’ legendary horror productions all of deeply saturated colors, shocking splashes of gore, and twisted, gothic architecture. It was successful enough that Corman was tasked with The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) with the same team of Matheson and Price and then The Masque of the Red Death (1964) with an ailing Charles Beaumont taking over scripting duties. But for me it’s his passion project, 1962’s The Intruder, that casts a long shadow still over sixty years later. 

Based on a novel by Beaumont, Corman, even with his reputation for thrift, wasn’t able to secure funding for The Intruder. It was too hot, too controversial. Of the many skills Corman had, among them was being able to divine the zeitgeist as it was about to shift and capitalize on it just as it broke. The main character of The Intruder is Adam Cramer (William Shatner), a white supremacist organizer who ingratiates himself Harold Hill-like, into a small southern town in order to rouse its white population into violent opposition against the racial integration of their schools. Just five years after the Little Rock Five and seven years after Emmett Till, the wounds of Civil Rights were not only still fresh, but new wounds were opening daily. The year after The Intruder was released Martin Luther King, Jr. would lead his march on Washington — and two years after that Malcolm X would be assassinated. It’s in this environment that Corman and Beaumont sought to tell what the tagline described as “the motion picture that dares to portray our morals as they really are… we have the courage to show it, do you have the courage to see it?” Corman and his brother Gene did more than have the courage to show it, they put their own money into it when no one else would invest in it. Even with a budget of only $90,000, it failed to break even and Corman eventually sold its rights. Watched in 2024, it’s evergreen and incandescent in its righteous rage. Corman said he learned ever after to bury his social commentary beneath “a little nudity, a little action,” a mantra he passed along to his proteges. Jonathan Demme, in a 1983 interview with American Film magazine, recalls Corman’s other rules for making a successful movie: 

“Have something interesting in the foreground of the shot; have something interesting happening in the background of the shot; try to find good motivation to move the camera, because it’s more stimulating to the eyes; if you’re shooting the scene in a small room where you can’t move the camera, try to get different angles, because cuts equal movement; respect the characters and try to like them, and translate that into the audience liking and respecting the characters. To me, those are the fundamentals.”

In the first half of The Intruder, Cramer makes an impassioned speech pushing basic racist tenets like “replacement theory” to a crowd of rubes. Corman remembers shooting it with actual residents of the southeast Missouri towns where they set up shop, but only recording portions of it so as not to arouse the suspicions of the townsfolk. At the end of the speech, a cross is erected and burned and Corman uses a series of dissolves to illustrate Cramer’s pollution of religious fanaticism with nativism and nationalism. It’s a shot that’s as beautiful as it is damning of the ugliness right beneath the skin of the average American, and in its economy and poetry it rivals any shot from any film of this and any era. 

He directed Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern and Nancy Sinatra in The Wild Angels (1966) – a gorgeous, color teensploitation flick that deals with police brutality and the counterculture a couple of years before Fonda and Dennis Hopper would help kickstart the New American Cinema with their Easy Rider (1969). In fact it’s The Wild Angels married to Corman’s The Trip (1967), a film about an LSD bender for which Corman first dropped a little acid in order to get it right, that represent for me the headwaters of the 1970s, the greatest artistic period for American film. There are times I think the American 1970s are the greatest period of creativity in the history of the medium. Corman’s output as director as well as producer was proof of concept to aging studio heads overseeing a flagging box office at the end of the 1960s that there was a generation of young filmmakers, schooled in bringing in their projects under budget and in due time, who had their fingers collectively on the pulse of an unknowable-to-them audience of disaffected youth. He can be criticized for keeping his eye on the bottom line, but it’s his ability to anticipate what popular audiences wanted that turned the major Hollywood studios, for a time, into hotbeds for iconoclastic, revolutionary, even experimental work. What is Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), after all, says Demme in that same American Film interview, than a “classical Roger Corman movie. All the Corman moves are there – a little sex, a little violence, a little social comment. Also, make the audience like the characters even if they’re mafiosi.”

Again, like Val Lewton, consider the richness of ideas hidden in Corman films beneath silly-sounding titles like Teenage Caveman (1958), a no-budget furs and spears melodrama starring an impossibly young Robert Vaughn and miles of stock dinosaur and wildlife footage, that resolves in the end somewhere between John Boorman’s Zardoz (1974), George Miller’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) and Schaffner’s Rod Serling-scripted Planet of the Apes (1968). They discover a book from a far, pre-apocalyptic past and deduce that the “symbols have meaning,” which is also the refrain used to describe mysterious books discovered in Wes Ball’s The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024).

I’m not sure Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde (1967) happens the way it happens without Corman’s boozy, sleazy, jazzy Machine-Gun Kelly (1958) which captured Charles Bronson in an unusually talkative, vulnerable turn confessing his fear of capture one night to his girl Susan Cabot; or consider his near-perfect beatnik black comedy A Bucket of Blood (1959), that rare Dick Miller-starrer which is to my mind the best of the small “wax museum” subgenre of horror movie. If you squint, there’s even a little bit of Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) in the struggling artist’s plaster-of-paris medium of choice. All of these ideas are alive in just Roger Corman’s work as a director, without even touching the hundreds of films and dozens of classics for which he served as producer. Films like Bogdanovich’s magnificent paranoid film Targets (1968) and Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) for which Corman went uncredited; and Coppola’s innovative ax-murder flick Dementia 13 (1963); Scorsese’s languid, sexy Boxcar Bertha (1972), Monte Hellman’s and Charles Willeford’s extraordinary Cockfighter (1974) and of course Paul Bartel’s Death Race 2000 for which he was. 

Any remembrance of Corman eventually turns into a list, I realize, but I want to end with the thought that what’s left in the great man’s noisome wake is the romance of mentorship in its idealized form. It’s the idea that you not only find and nurture talent, but you provide guardrails within which they might succeed and, vitally, learn with their first salvos without ruining their future prospects. Compare that against modern missions to “raise up” new talent that are given small budgets without any kind of meaningful mentorship so that the opportunities are really invitations to walk proverbial planks over shark-infested waters. With Corman, if it’s “kid’s stuff” and “junk,” well, it made money and in the meantime these young creators learned how to edit, work under a strict budget and deadline, manage actors and crew, and see the fruit of their labors rewarded with the gratification of distribution to an accepting audience. It seems simple, but Corman’s death is so personal to so many because real mentorship is very difficult.

Many who didn’t directly benefit from the Corman factory regard him the way a lot of musicians talk about The Velvet Underground’s first album which, as the legend goes, only sold a few hundred copies but everyone who bought one started a band. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. said this once: “Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” Corman was about entertaining an audience while injecting a little social commentary in there for seasoning and resonance — and he was about telling everyone how to do it because there are gatekeepers and there are doormen who hold the gates open. Corman is about creating something, for heaven’s sake. We lost him on May 9, 2024, but he’ll live forever.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for purchase.