Film producer and ‘king of the B-movie’ Roger Corman (98) has died

The American film producer and director Roger Corman has died at the age of 98. His relatives have said this. He died at his home in Santa Monica.

Corman was known as ‘the king of the B-movie’. He directed many low-budget classics such as Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) and Little Shop of Horrors (1960). His films regularly marked the breakthrough of young actors who would later become Hollywood’s most famous actors and directors, including Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern and Ellen Burstyn.

Hundreds of productions

Corman has worked in the film industry since 1955. As a producer he worked on more than four hundred productions, and as a director he made many dozens. Among the best-known titles are The Raven and The Pit and the Pendulum. He had a big hit in the late 1970s with the film Piranha.

Corman was particularly successful with horror, action films and science fiction. In 2009 he received an honorary Oscar for his great contribution to film culture.

Corman often had to work with minimal budgets. His films also regularly had to be made in a very short time, sometimes within five days. When director Ron Howard asked for an extra half day to reshoot a scene in 1977, producer Corman told him, “Ron, you can come back if you want, but no one will be there anymore.”

‘Low budget offers certain opportunities’

Corman always saw producing low-budget films as a possibility, he said in a documentary in 2007. “There are a lot of limitations associated with working on a low budget, but at the same time there are certain opportunities. You can still gamble a little .You can experiment. You have to find a more creative way to solve a problem or present a concept.”

In addition to producing fast, cheap films, Corman also released prestigious foreign films in the United States. For example, he was partly responsible for the American distribution of the work of Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut and Akira Kurosawa. The films Amarcord and The Tin Drum won an Oscar for best foreign-language film.

Corman also appeared occasionally as an actor, including in the Oscar-winning The Godfather II from 1974 and The Silence of the Lambs from 1991.