I feel like I lost the grandad that introduced me to movies.
Our loss is unmeasureable.
He pioneered the distribution of foreign films.
He showed us it's possible to please an audience and deliver quality films with small budgets.
He mentored talents by giving them artistic freedom within a set of financial constraints.
Scorsese, Cameron, Demme, Howard, Nicholson and other filmmakers and movie stars owe their careers to him.
He bucked the Hollywood system openly, plessantly smiling at Them as he made one box office hit after another, mentoring world class filmmakers, and introducing us to great foreign films.
He was often quoted as saying that the one film he made out personal rather than monetary reasons was a failure. The Intruder was a film Corman produced and directed from his feelings about racial tensions in the south during the civil rights era.
Indirectly Corman gave Mike and the bots at MST3K their careers by making his laughably bad movies, so they could be rediscovered by a new generation of film fans a couple of decades later through the comedic filter of Mike, Crow and Servo riffing Corman’s films at the Satellite Of Love. The comedic team is still going strong today under their present title of Rifftrax.
It's uncanny to think that Corman was anticipating a time of mass media, but you could make the argument that what MST3K did with Corman’s film was a long distance collaboration, with Corman releasing his films while intuitively predicting the era of VHS and the shared experience of watching bad movies with your friends in your living room.
Yet another way in which Corman blessed us.
If you can find this book, read it.
If you're lacking motivation, this book is the antidote.
Wonderful anecdotes, while casually sharing his practical, audience-oriented wisdom towards filmmaking.
RIP Roger Corman.
You showed that it's possible to make films cost effectively and wildly entertaining.
We need the business-oriented maverick he embodied in the era of the Message and committee filmmaking with unreliable test audiences.
Corman taught me, as a writer, that perfection is the enemy of the good. He made films he liked, films he enjoyed, films he could make money off of, and loved every minute of it. It's a shame to see Corman dead, and it will really be a blow when Lloyd Kaufman goes too. Those two were mentors that I never met.
Absolutely crushed. I know Corman from fond memories of late night and/or dull weekend film filler hours on Chicagoland TV in the 80s. Rest in peace.