Known as the "King of the B Movies," the legendary filmmaker Roger Corman died on May 9 at the age of 98. Corman specialized in making low-budget genre movies with titles like "The Wasp Woman," "Attack of the Crab Monsters," and "Teenage Caveman." A producer of nearly 500 films, he also directed over 50 features. He's perhaps best known for giving many of Hollywood's most successful directors their first breaks. He received an honorary Academy Award in 2009 "for his unparalleled ability to nurture aspiring filmmakers by providing an environment that no film school could match."
In 2017, chief video correspondent Graham Flanagan sat down with Corman in his Los Angeles office for a wide-ranging conversation about his storied career. This is the first time this extended version of the interview has been published.
Corman is credited with helping launch the careers of actors such as Jack Nicholson as well as Academy Award-winning filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, and Jonathan Demme. Corman hired these directors in the early stages of their careers to helm low-budget features that the filmmakers have acknowledged as learning experiences they applied in their later larger-scale productions.
In fact, many of these directors hired Corman in small acting roles in movies like "The Godfather Part II," (Coppola), "The Silence of the Lambs" (Demme), and "Apollo 13" (Ron Howard).
In the interview, Corman shares myriad lessons learned while working in the film industry for more than 60 years. He talks about producing a movie that was never released based on Marvel's "Fantastic Four" series, as well as how he made a unique deal with Universal Pictures for the rights to the title of "The Fast and the Furious," which is the name of a 1954 film he produced.