The B movie king who hired Scorsese, Coppola and Cameron

Roger Corman was an American director and producer known as the King of the Bs, and he hired Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron and Ron Howard when they were aspiring filmmakers. A B movie is a low-budget film, originally made to fill the second slot of a double bill. Corman helped create hundreds of them, and the careers of actors Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro and Ellen Burstyn began in his films.

The Academy gave him an Honorary Award in 2009, at its first Governors Awards. Relay has 17 of his films, and the ones below show how different his cheap movies could be.

Who was Roger Corman?

He was born in Detroit in 1926 and died at his home in Santa Monica, California, on May 9, 2024, aged 98. He treated small budgets as a method, not an excuse. "There are many constraints connected with working on a low budget," he said, "but at the same time there are certain opportunities."

His memoir carries the title How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. As the third film below shows, the title was not always true.

Which Corman films are on Relay?

Haunted Palace (1963)

The Haunted Palace was advertised as Edgar Allan Poe's work, the author of "The Raven" and "The Fall of the House of Usher". It is not. It is based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, a story by H. P. Lovecraft, the American horror writer, adapted by Charles Beaumont. The distributor, American International Pictures, put Poe's name on it to suggest a link to its popular Poe series.

Price plays both a man who inherits a house and the warlock ancestor who was burned at the stake and cursed it. Corman later said: "I think they had planned to turn a Lovecraft story into a Poe story all along." He told Fangoria magazine in 2015 that it might have started a series of Lovecraft films, but none followed. Its art designer, Daniel Haller, went on to direct two Lovecraft films of his own.

Horror

Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961)

Corman was in Puerto Rico shooting The Last Woman on Earth with a small cast and crew. Rather than send them home, he asked them to stay and had the writer Charles B. Griffith rewrite the previous year's Beast from Haunted Cave to fit the locations already scouted.

The result is a comedy about criminals trying to smuggle the Cuban treasury out of revolutionary Cuba who meet a sea monster. The monster suit was made from cheap materials including tennis balls and black oilcloth. TCM describes it as closer to Mack Sennett's slapstick than to Creature from the Black Lagoon. The advertising sold it as a straight thriller, and audiences who expected one were annoyed.

Horror

The Intruder (1962)

This is Corman's serious film. William Shatner, then thirty and five years before Star Trek, plays a man who arrives in a Southern town to stir up opposition to school integration. Corman shot it in 1961 in Charleston and East Prairie, Missouri, after buying the rights to Beaumont's 1959 novel.

Variety reported that the story cost Corman four financial backers, and permission to film in two integrated schools was revoked after interference from school-board members. The Motion Picture Association first refused approval because of a racial slur in the dialogue. Corman would not cut it, and a committee reversed the decision in March 1962. Critics praised it, including Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who called it "an angry little film", but it failed commercially. Corman had paid for it himself.

Crime

Which Corman film should you watch first?

The Haunted Palace is the best fit for Halloween, with Vincent Price at the centre. Creature from the Haunted Sea is the one to pick for a comedy, and The Intruder shows what Corman did when he wanted to say something.

Relay also has The Little Shop of Horrors, A Bucket of Blood and Attack of the Crab Monsters, covered in What is a B movie? and Cult classic movies.