Roger Corman, prolific producer, mentor to Hollywood luminaries, has died at the age of 98

Roger Corman, a prolific producer of low-budget B movies who was also a mentor to future Hollywood luminaries including directors Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese, has died. He was 98 years old.

He died May 9 at his home in Santa Monica, California, his family said on social media. The cause of death was not given.

"He was generous, open-hearted and kind to all who knew him. A devoted and dedicated father, he was deeply loved by his daughters", his family said in a statement. "His movies were revolutionary and iconoclastic and captured the spirit of the era".

Corman has long been called "the king of B movies", as he has directed hundreds of B films in his nearly seven decades as an independent producer and director. In 2009, he was awarded an honorary Oscar.

His legacy extends far beyond his own films. Over the years, Corman has attracted a constellation of rising stars into his orbit, including such future A-list directors as Coppola, Scorsese, Howard and Jonathan Demme. It launched the careers of Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, William Shatner and Robert De Niro, among other notables.

Corman was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1926. He studied engineering, but turned his attention to Hollywood in the mid-1950s. Corman made a wide variety of genre films, including science fiction, westerns, and crime dramas, and produced The Monster from the Bottom of the Ocean, followed a few years later by Attack of the Crab Monsters. He has produced nine Blood Fist movies, from the 1989 original to 2005's Blood Fist 2050.

Many of his early films were shot hastily, with shooting schedules lasting days or weeks rather than months. Corman's first films were shot in about 10 days and cost less than $60,000 each, Corman said at an Academy event in 2016.

He founded the production company New World Pictures and then Concorde-New Horizons, which focused on home video. In 2009, he said that he viewed movies as a "compromise" art that had to exist between art and the business world.

He was known in the industry for preaching the value of pre-production, planning his shoots down to the smallest details, including camera placement, long before the cast and crew arrived on set. He later passed these skills on to his apprentice directors, including Scorsese.

"My theory was ... when you're shooting on such a tight schedule, you don't have time to make important decisions", Corman said. "You just have time to shoot".

He has directed shoot-em-ups, monster movies and horrors with catchy titles including Brain Eaters, Teenage Caveman, Wasp Woman and Attack of the Giant Leeches. He produced the movie Little Shop of Horrors, which was released in 1960 and in which actor Jack Nicholson played one of his first roles.

Sylvester Stallone's first two screen appearances were in the Corman-directed films Capone and Death Race 2000, released in 1975. In 2009, Stallone told Entertainment Weekly that when he was cast in "Capone", he felt that his "stardom" had arrived.

"We did Death Race 2000 in two and a half weeks. It shows it can be done", he told the magazine. "It's one thing to talk about the game. Roger lets you play the game".

Corman described his production process in the 2023 book Hollywood: The Oral History, written by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson, which says he made "fair deals" with directors who wanted to make their first movie.

The director "gets a small amount of money and makes his movie. I get the profits from the movie and he gets to launch his career", Corman said.

For example, Coppola was his assistant for several months before Corman directed Coppola's first feature film, Dementia 13, which was released in 1963.

Coppola helped with sound design and worked as a second assistant director on one of Corman's films, Corman told Conan O'Brien in a 2014 interview on the "Conan on TBS" show.

"I knew he was good, but I didn't envision him reaching the heights he's reaching now", Corman said.

Howard was a 23-year-old actor when he approached Corman to direct his first feature film, "Grand Theft Auto", which was released in 1977.

I said: "Ron, you always seemed like a director to me", Corman recalled Corman saying to Howard at the time.

Late Saturday, Howard said he was "grateful to have known him".

"He had many careers and quietly led our industry", Howard wrote on social media. "He remained sharp, interested and active even at age 98".

Several young directors would later ask Corman to star in their big-budget Hollywood films. He starred in Howard's Apollo 13 and Coppola's The Godfather: Part II. Demme cast him in small roles in "The Silence of the Lambs", "The Philadelphia Story" and "The Manchurian Candidate".

Even a chance encounter with Corman could change someone's trajectory in the industry. At a screening of Baby Angels in 1965, Corman happened to be behind Peter Bogdanovich, who was working as a journalist and film critic at the time.

They were introduced, and Corman, as Bogdanovich recounts in a 2022 interview, said: "I read your stuff in Esquire, would you like to write a movie someday?".

Bogdanovich, who became an Oscar-nominated director and screenwriter, said Corman offered him the opportunity to get into the business but paid little and did not acknowledge it.

Corman said: "I want you to rewrite the movie. There's no money in it - $300 ... You get $300 and no credits,'" Bogdanovich said. I said: "Okay, great".

When director Quentin Tarantino was a kid, he watched Corman's movies late into the night on TV, he said when introducing the producer at the 2009 Academy Awards honors. He recalled watching "Bucket of Blood", "Machine Gun Kelly" and "Rock All Night" on the small screen.

Tarantino reintroduced Corman in 2023 at the Cannes Film Festival, saying of him, "He has filled my eyes, my head, my heart and the hearts of countless viewers for decades with ineffable cinematic pleasure".

Korman is survived by his wife, Julie, and daughters Katherine and Mary, the family said in a statement released Sunday.

When asked how he would like to be remembered, he said, "I was a movie director, that's all", family members said.