Roger Corman: The Little Shop of Horrors cult B-movie director dies aged 98
“It became something of a joke in the film industry that Corman could negotiate a contract from a public phone, shoot the film in the phone box and pay for it with the coins in the change slot.”
Roger Corman, who directed a series of cult films including 1960’s The Little Shop of Horrors, has died aged 98.
His family told industry publication Variety that he died on Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, California.
“His films were revolutionary and iconoclastic, and captured the spirit of an age,” their statement said.
Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro are among the actors he helped develop. Directors James Cameron and Martin Scorsese cut their teeth on his films.
Many of his films became cult classics and he became famous for the speed at which he worked, often making two films at the same location and at the same time, in order to save money.
Roger Corman was born in Detroit on 5 April 1926. His father, William, was an engineer and he had intended to follow in his footsteps.
However, while studying at college, he became attracted to film-making and after a spell working for General Motors quit his job and went to work at 20th Century Fox as a messenger boy.
Having failed to make much progress, he set off for Europe where among other things, he briefly studied English literature at Oxford. He returned to the US with ambitions to become a screenwriter.
He sold his first script, The House in the Sea, in 1953 and it was filmed as Highway Dragnet the following year with Corman being credited as co-producer.
However, he was so upset by the changes made to his story that he scraped together some cash and set himself up as a producer.
Corman began directing in 1955 with Swamp Women and over the next 15 years he made more than 50 films, gaining a reputation for the speed with which he could turn them out.
It became something of a joke in the film industry that Corman could negotiate a contract from a public phone, shoot the film in the phone box and pay for it with the coins in the change slot.
The 1960 release, The Little Shop of Horrors, which featured a brief appearance by a young Jack Nicholson, took just two days to shoot with Corman using the set of a previous film, Bucket of Blood.
A stage musical based on the film opened in 1982 and would itself spawn a second film version four years later.
Corman decided to widen his horizons with a series of films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe and featuring Vincent Price as the lead in all but one of them.
