American B-movie director and producer Roger Corman, known for producing hundreds of low-budget films and giving some of Hollywood’s biggest stars their first roles, has died at the age of 98, US media reported on Saturday.
As a director and producer, the American made more than 500 films and received an Honorary Oscar in 2009, which recognized his decades of work and discoveries.
Corman sponsored a large part of what was known as New Hollywood, and without him, the careers of directors such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Ron Howard, James Cameron, and Peter Bogdanovich would not be understood. The King of the B series catapulted these into his first projects. See Dementia 13, Boxcar Bertha, Hot Jail, or Grand Theft Auto. Some of them recognized his work and let him make cameos in films such as The Godfather 1 and 2, The Silence of the Lambs, and Apollo 13.
But it also promoted names like Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Ellen Burstyn, Sylvester Stallone, and Dennis Hopper.
As a director, Corman flourished in the 1960s, becoming one of the heroes of drive-in cinema with low-budget films, especially horror and science fiction films such as Little Shop of Horrors, The Man with X-Rays in His Eyes, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Mask of the Red Death, The Red Baron, The Valentine’s Day Massacre, The Terror, or Hell’s Angels, among many others.
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