Simon Abrams Interviews Legendary Producer Roger Corman
Posted on September 5, 2015 at 3:31 pm
One of my favorite critics interviewed Hollywood’s legendary producer, Roger Corman, for New York Magazine’s Vulture, and it is a treat to read. Corman is by many measures the most successful filmmaker of all time because he made ultra low-budget films that were very popular with moviegoers, including “The Man with X-Ray Eyes,” “Little Shop of Horrors” (the original, with Jack Nicholson, that inspired the Broadway musical) and a series of adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe stories. At 89, he is still going strong, producing some of the SyFy channel’s nuttiest and most entertaining monster movies, like “Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf.”
Corman spoke to Abrams about the one that got away (“Easy Rider” went to another studio because one of the studio executives insulted Dennis Hopper) and the difference between making a theatrical release and a TV film.
“In a motion picture, you can wait a while, build suspense. I always preferred to hint at the creature and not disclose it until later. But Tom ‘s theory — and I think he’s right — is that in the theater, people have paid money to come in, so they’ll sit and wait, and expect the suspense to build. But in television, within the first five to ten minutes, they’ll simply change the dial. It’s a totally different concept.”
, released today, is the story of Corman, the self-proclaimed king of the B movie. No one would consider his films works of art, but he gave hungry and ambitious actors and directors their first opportunities to make movies. As told by Corman himself and graduates of “The Corman Film School,” including Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert De Niro, and Martin Scorsese, this comprehensive oral history takes readers behind the scenes of more than six decades of American cinema, as now-legendary directors and actors candidly unspool recollections of working with Corman, continually one-upping one another with tales of the years before their big breaks.
. And watch his movies, including 
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. Plus, this classic:
. He has never lost money on a movie. Some of his films became cult classics like the original “Little Shop of Horrors,” which went on to become a musical play and movie with much bigger budgets and much bigger box office than the original film. Some of Corman’s films have even achieved some critical and scholarly acclaim. But outside of his investors, it is likely that his most significant contribution to the art form of making movies was giving talented young film-makers a chance when no one else would — people like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, Gale Anne Hurd, Joe Dante, James Cameron, John Sayles, Nicholas Roeg, and Curtis Hanson. “Avatar” director James Cameron has said, “I trained at the Roger Corman Film School.” Actors who appeared in Corman films include Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Michael McDonald, Dennis Hopper, Talia Shire, David Caradine, and Robert De Niro.