Roger William Corman was born on April 5, 1926, in Detroit, Michigan. Initially, he followed in his father's footsteps and studied engineering at Stanford University. However, while in school, he lost interest in engineering and developed a growing passion for film. Upon graduation, he worked as an engineer for three days before quitting and taking a job as a messenger for 20th Century Fox, eventually rising to the position of story analyst.
After studying modern English literature at Oxford University and traveling in Europe, Corman returned to the US, determined to become a screenwriter and producer. He sold his first script, "The House in the Sea," which was eventually filmed and released as "Highway Dragnet" in 1954. However, he was horrified by the disconnect between his vision and the final product, so he took his salary and scraped together some capital to produce his own film, "Monster from the Ocean Floor," in 1954.
Corman used his next picture, "The Fast and the Furious," to secure a multi-picture deal with American Releasing Corp. (ARC),which later became American-International Pictures (AIP). He directed his first film, "Five Guns West," in 1955 and went on to direct 53 films over the next 15 years, mostly for AIP. He became known for his ability to produce quick and inexpensive films, often turning out multiple movies in a single year.
In the early 1960s, Corman began to take on more ambitious projects, including a series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations starring Vincent Price. He also directed "The Intruder," a serious look at racial integration in the South, starring a young William Shatner. Although the film received critical praise and won a prize at the Venice Film Festival, it was a commercial flop, which Corman considered the greatest disappointment of his career.
As a result, Corman opted to express his social and political concerns through his films in more subtle ways. He left AIP and formed his own production company, New World Pictures, which distributed a mix of low-budget exploitation films and art cinema from around the world. New World also became the American distributor for the films of renowned directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and Federico Fellini.
In the 1980s, Corman sold New World and continued to work through various companies, including Concorde Pictures, New Horizons, and Millennium Pictures. In 1990, he published his biography, "How I Made A Hundred Movies in Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime," and returned to directing with the film "Frankenstein Unbound."
Throughout his career, Corman has been dubbed the "King of the Cult Film" and the "Pope of Pop Cinema." He has mentored many notable filmmakers, including Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, James Cameron, Robert De Niro, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, and Sandra Bullock. In 2009, he was honored with an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
