One of the highlights of my life was an evening getting drunk with Roger Corman and Richard Edlund. My wife was working on a project with Richard, and we were having a social evening at some Santa Monica private dinner club. Roger Corman and wife walk up and join while having after dinner drinks and the 6 of us proceed to get trashed while my wife and the other two film execs talked about the film "Charlie Wilson's War" they were working on. Both Roger and Richard have/had a love for the "make it work hacks" they'd have to create for various film stunts and physically created visual effects, and they shared stories of them improvising these make shift camera rigs, with lots of laughs.
So many bad Corman movies on Mystery Science Theater 3000. My favorite is It Conquered The World. Lee Van Cleef and Peter Graves. The quote at the end always gets me:
“He learned almost too late that man is a feeling creature... and because of it, the greatest in the universe. He learned too late for himself that men have to find their own way, to make their own mistakes. There can't be any gift of perfection from outside ourselves. And when men seek such perfection... they find only death... fire... loss... disillusionment... the end of everything that's gone forward. Men have always sought an end to the toil and misery, but it can't be given, it has to be achieved. There is hope, but it has to come from inside, from Man himself.”
As a side note, anyone who’s interested in seeing classic MST3K, they have a site gizmoplex.com. Sadly some movies (including It Conquered The World) are not available to stream. I guess they never got the rights to show them or they no longer had the original tapes.
I owe my one and only (bad) movie roll to a Roger Corman owned production. Was paid 50 Irish pounds out of the movie's, I think $25,000, budget. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0213094/). I can't really act but I think they were casting 28 roles and like 32 people turned up.
He wrote an entertaining book - How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood and never lost a dime.
Such a loss to the world of B-movies. He gave us to many fun popcorn classics to enjoy. Producer on almost five hundred films and director on over fifty. I'm going to watch one tonight in his honor.
He also gave so many actors their first break. Just copying from the news: Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd, William Shatner, to name a few.
While we're on it, what are some of your favorites? I probably don't know some of the movies I watched made/produced by him.
I know I've always loved "Death Race 2000" (1975). Actually like the re-make too "Death Race" (2008) (and he's listed as an executive producers for that too). The 2008 one really has nothing to do with the 1975 one except for re-using some names but both are good fun.
I’ve always thought “Little Shop of Horrors” (1960: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054033/) was excellent. Call it a B movie if you want, but there’s something fascinating about it.
Worked with a lot of directors on their first or nearly first movies, like James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdonovich, Ron Howard. Even the Fantastic Four movie he produced had some pluses (the Red Letter Media review is worth watching).
although it's another B-grade movie that punched above its weight.
Retrospective reception of the original has been varied. Some modern critics have described the film as being too subdued for the genre and have deprecated the quality of the acting. Others have praised the film's atmosphere and sophistication, with the critic Roger Ebert describing it and the other Val Lewton productions as landmark films of the 1940s.
Not to belittle Corman's work in any way, more to celebrate the range of B movies.
This is a good point. While we may have lost Roger Corman, now is the time to discuss any person or work that he was not involved with. There are so many other people both alive and dead that are not Roger Corman and so many movies that he was not involved with, and that should not be forgotten
