Roger Corman, the King of the B-Movies, has passed away on May 9, 2024 at the ripe age of 98, and with him has died an entire epoch of film making.

It would take a book – a multi-volume book – to fully describe Corman’s career and impact on the film industry. He produced his first film in 1954 and his last credited films haven’t been released yet (though granted, most of his later films were probably only trading on his name). IMDb has him as an actor in 46 films (mostly cameos, such as his role as a penny-pinching Congressman in Apollo 13), the director of 56, and the producer of 493. From 1954 to 2024, there have been only a handful of years that have not seen the release of a Roger Corman production.

But sheer volume isn’t the only reason for his importance. Corman was notoriously frugal and business-minded. He brought his films in on time and under budget. There was a long-standing joke that Corman could negotiate a film’s production from a payphone, shoot it in the phone booth, and fund it with the change from the return slot. He holds what I believe is still the record for a professional production of shooting the original Little Shop of Horrors in two days for less than $30,000 (because his last film wrapped early and he didn’t want the sets to go to waste). The result is that nearly all his films turned a profit, making him arguably the most successful film maker in Hollywood history, by one metric (his autobiography is called How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime).

Yet, despite his penny-pinching and hard-headed business practices, he still had a solid reputation as a craftsman. His films were pure exploitation flicks designed to appeal to mass audiences, but they were also often laced with wry humor and sly social commentary. His It Conquered the World, for instance, featured an incredibly goofy-looking monster that resembles a giant cucumber with an angry face. It also has Peter Graves and Lee Van Cleef (both solid actors playing well-sketched characters) engaging in genuinely thoughtful debates about Van Cleef’s plan to collaborate with the alien for the betterment of mankind, while Beverly Garland steals the show as Van Cleef’s fiery wife.

That’s the sort of thing in Corman films: they were cheap, fast, and economically driven, but never quite lost sight of the artistic side. Later he partnered with Vincent Price on a series of gothic horror flicks that cemented that actor’s position as one of the great horror stars of the era. Price and Corman really were a perfect match in terms of sly humor, class, and macabre tastes.

(Corman was also the arch-nemesis of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew, not at all finding their approach amusing, while they found his films painful. Nevertheless, from a fan’s perspective, it’s a symbiotic relationship, as more people discover Corman’s films from the show, while the show benefits from his films being just the right level of cheesy to make some solid episodes).

On top of all that, and perhaps most importantly for his impact on cinema, Corman had an incredible eye for talent. He was a harsh taskmaster and highly demanding of his people, but in doing so he honed and trained some of the top names in Hollywood. The aforementioned Little Shop of Horrors featured a very young Jack Nicholson in one of his first roles (Nicholson would play in several other Corman films in his early career). Others who got their start under Corman included: Ron Howard, Bill Paxton, Joe Dante, Sylvester Stallone, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, Robert DeNiro, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese. And that’s only a partial list.

In fact, taken all in all, one could easily make the case that Roger Corman was perhaps the most important and influential film maker of the second half of the twentieth century. Certainly he’s up there.

In any case, he belongs to a time that is now past. We will never see his like again.