Those who nicknamed him “the king of the B series” were wrong. Because Roger Corman, who died Thursday, May 9, at the age of 98, in Santa Monica (California), arrived in the cinema when what we called the B movies began to disappear from cinema screens. Small productions with modest budgets produced either by independent companies or by specialized studio departments, offered as a program complement before the “big films”, the B series would gradually disappear in the mid-1950s and see their aesthetic absorbed by the television. No, Roger Corman is more the product of an era which saw the arrival of a new category of spectators and a new way of seeing, producing and distributing films.
At the end of the 1950s, adolescents constituted a recent segment of the public. THE drive-in, places at the same time for rapid consumption of films shot at full speed, for escaping from family life and for backseat flirtations, are multiplying. This was the favorable breeding ground for the birth and development of an extraordinary career, and for the journey of a manufacturer of so-called “exploitation” films who would shake up the margins of the Hollywood film industry but also invent a laboratory of shapes and a breeding ground for talents.
“Machinist/driver/producer”
He was born on April 5, 1926 in Detroit, Michigan. His family moved to Los Angeles in the late 1930s and he initially studied engineering (his father’s profession). After two years in the navy, he obtained an engineering diploma. He resigned two days after being hired at US Electrical Motors and found, in 1948, a job as a courier at Twentieth Century Fox before becoming a script reader for the studio. This work, which he considers bureaucratic, bores him. He obtained a scholarship, studied at Oxford then settled in Paris for several months.
Back in the United States, he started again at the bottom of the production ladder but managed to sell a script to the Allied Artists company. Distressed by the end result, Corman created a tiny production company and convinced a submarine-building company to use one of them for free in a film. He manages to get the machine loaned for free, and writes a screenplay. He laboriously collects a few thousand dollars to produce Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), directed by one of his friends Wyott Ordung, a story about a giant, mutating octopus, the first occurrence of science fiction in his work. “I was probably the only stagehand/driver/producer in the whole town”he will say in his memoirs, How I made 100 films without ever losing a cent (ed. Capricci, 2018).
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