Roger Corman, Hollywood filmmaker and Detroit native who was king of B-movies, dies at 98

Roger Corman, the king of B-movies and a towering mentor of A-list talent, lived a life that was as vivid as his movies.

The director, producer, writer and occasional actor in films such as "The Silence of the Lambs" died Thursday at 98 at his home in Santa Monica, California, according to a family statement on Instagram.

“His films were revolutionary and iconoclastic, and captured the spirit of an age. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he said, ‘I was a filmmaker, just that,’” read the statement.

A Detroit native, Corman was a Hollywood maverick who made hundreds of movies ranging from Vincent Price horror romps to 1960s biker flicks. Among his most memorable movies were 1960’s “The Little Shop of Horrors” and 1964’s “The Masque of the Red Death.”

His low-budget projects helped give a start to future legends of the film industry such as Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard and Francis Ford Coppola.

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Corman also founded New World Pictures, the company that distributed prestigious foreign films to American theaters from directors such as Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman.

In 2009, Corman was awarded an honorary Oscar for “his unparalleled ability to nurture aspiring filmmakers by providing an environment that no film school could match."

In 2015, he was feted at the Traverse City Film Festival, which screened several of his works and a documentary about his life, “Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel.”

It was a homecoming of sorts for Corman, who was born in 1926 in Detroit and grew up near 6 Mile. As he told the Free Press in 2015, his father was a civil engineer who met Henry Ford and designed a bridge at Greenfield Village for him.

Corman spoke about the creative pipeline gave Detroit a reputation as an incubator for Hollywood talent, saying, “if you couldn't make it in the automobile industry, you came to Hollywood.”

After his family moved to California, Corman attended Beverly Hills High School and Stanford University with plans to follow in his father’s footsteps and become an engineer. But the young film critic for the college’s Stanford Daily yearned to work in Hollywood. Ultimately, his career in engineering lasted all of four days.

“I got a job at U.S. Electrical Motors and I started on Monday and I didn't like it. I went in on Thursday and said to the personnel office, 'This is all a mistake. I really have to leave,'" he said to the Free Press.

Corman carved out his own creative path in the late 1950s and early 1960s, describing himself as “more or less part of the counterculture” with movies such as “The Wild Angels,” about motorcycle gangs, and “The Trip,” with a storyline involving LSD.

A maestro of getting the most out of a small budget, he inspired what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences called a longstanding joke that he "could negotiate the production of a film on a pay phone, finance it with the money left in the change slot and then shoot the whole film in the phone booth."

Corman was adept at spotting and nurturing talent such as Coppola (also born in the Motor City), who at one time was Corman’s assistant and went on to make “The Godfather,” and Oscar-winning actor Jack Nicholson, who did his first film with Corman.

Corman also helped launch the careers of women such as director Penelope Spheeris and producer Gale Ann Hurd. “I didn't have a great deal of money, and I wanted to get the best person for the job. I never discriminated between men and women. I just wanted whoever was best,” he said.

In a posting on X (formerly known as Twitter), Hurd, a producer of the “Terminator” films, wrote of his passing, “Roger Corman was my very first boss, my lifetime mentor and my hero. Roger was one of the greatest visionaries in the history of cinema.”

Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.