Culture news This immense director who discovered James Cameron in Hollywood is dead: Roger Corman has left us at 98
Roger Corman was one of the most famous personalities in cinema and helped to bring out some of the greatest talents in Hollywood. He has just passed away at the age of 98, an opportunity to look back on the incredible journey of the man who revealed James Cameron.
The Farewell of the B-Series King
It is from his family’s own admission, to Variety magazine, that the world learned on May 11, 2024 the death of Roger Corman, pioneer of B-movies, at the age of 98. Those close to him explain that “his films were revolutionary, iconoclastic and captured the spirit of an era. When we asked him how he would like to be remembered, he replied: “I was a filmmaker, no less.”“. With titles like Attack of the Giant Crabs (1957), The Wasp Woman (1959) or even The Mask of the Red Death (1964), the director established himself within the film industry, by shaking up genres and transmitting emotions neglected by the big posters of the profession.
Discover Little Shop of Horrors on Amazon Prime
Corman notably helped to highlight faces like that of Jack Nicholson In Little Shop of Horrors (1960), as well as other industry giants, whether it is Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Denis Hopper or even James Cameron – to name a few. Having shot more than fifty films and produced more than 300 others, Corman truly participated in the development of modern cinema in distributing feature films by François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa in the United States.
Activism and cinematography
After receiving an honorary Oscar in November 2009, Ron Howard (The Da Vinci Code, The Grinch…) also saluted Roger Corman, first for his career, but also and above all for its policy of hiring numerous women for key management, creative and production positions, as well as for entrusting them with major roles. Walter Moseley, a great thriller writer, declared on the occasion that Corman offered “one of the few open doors”, beyond age, race and gender.
Corman was also known for his investment in various film teams, regularly emphasizing the need for fair remuneration of actors and staff during film production. Quentin Tarantino also toasted him, to send him a “thank you, from the movie buffs of planet Earth”. The director single-handedly held the reins of the B-movie market for almost half a century, which had largely disappeared in the wake of television. From 1955 to 1960, Roger Corman notably directed and/or produced nearly 30 films, all budgeted at less than $100,000, completing them all in less than two weeks. A truly great figure in cinema
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