Roger Corman was the powerhouse of B-pictures and pulp classics, who in a staggeringly prolific career lasting from the 1950s to the 2010s produced more than 400 movies, and directed more than 50 – films such as The Wasp Woman, A Bucket of Blood, The Wild Angels, The Fall of the House of Usher, Little Shop of Horrors and The Man With the X-Ray Eyes. And with his collaborations with Vincent Price on a number of inspired Edgar Allan Poe adaptations in the 1960s, Corman helped to make Poe a canonical figure within American literature and a figure of enduring pop-cultural importance, revered by academics who have made campus careers out of the author.
Corman was the entrepreneurial life force of low-budget independent cinema with celluloid in his veins, who became a living icon of cinephilia to generations of movie-makers by giving them their all-important first breaks and a lesson in getting movies made effectively, on budget and on schedule. His former employees include Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Carl Franklin, Curtis Hanson, Ron Howard, James Cameron, Joe Dante and Jonathan Demme. Francis Ford Coppola was an assistant director on one film and Peter Bogdanovich did some second unit work.
