Fifty years into the blockbuster era, it’s easy to forget that the American film industry wasn’t always focused on making genre movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and vacuum up A-list actors. That’s not to say that there weren’t movies that dominated the cultural conversation — Disney animated films were very popular in the 1940s and ’50s, for example — but the idea of, say, spending the equivalent of $300 million on a movie based on a comic book would have been laughable to studio executives in the late ’50s and early ’60s. At that time, science fiction, action, and horror movies were considered disposable, low-budget fare made for drive-ins and kiddie matinees. And Roger Corman was their king.
Corman, who passed away in 2024 at the age of 98, was a prolific producer and director of B-movies, first with American International Pictures and then under his own companies, New World Pictures and New Horizons. (At the time of his passing, he had 489 credits as a producer, and 56 as a director.) Corman was famous for his no-nonsense approach to filmmaking, which can be summed up by the mantra “make ’em quick, make ’em cheap, and make ’em popular.”
