Legendary “B” movie director and producer Roger Corman passed away last Thursday, 9 May 2024, at the age of 98. His career spanned an uncountable number of films (estimates vary wildly; even Corman didn’t know how many he’d made), and he launched hundreds of careers.
Readers most likely know Corman from The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), which spawned a Broadway musical and a popular film adaptation of the musical in 1986. His influence reached even broader than that one bit of comedy horror genius, and Corman worked with some of the greatest actors in Hollywood.
Last month I reviewed A Bucket of Blood (1959), a kind of proto-Little Shop featuring a would-be Beatnik stumbling into a career as a sculptor with a rather lethal methodology. The trope of the homely nerd staggering blindly (and often painfully) into stardom and/or super powers would be repeated time and again, including in Troma Entertainment’s The Toxic Avenger (1984) Corman was not involved with that film, but his influence is evident nonetheless.
Corman was one of the greats. Hey may have had a reputation as a purveyor of trash, but he never lost money on a film (with the exception of a personal art film, which ultimately did make money about twenty years after its release!). He used every method at his disposal to cut down on budgets, even cutting films to 78 minutes so they could be mailed to theaters in four film canisters instead of five.
Rest in Peace, Roger Corman.
The Portly Politico 
Yeah. Between producing and directing, the man had multiple movies out every year from 1955 to 2021 (still 2 more in the can awaiting release too). And then there’s the acting – 45 movies since 1954.
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Pretty remarkable, isn’t it?
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Incredibly so. He may well have been the hardest working man in Hollywood.
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I can’t think of anyone harder working.
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J—is your blog active? I’ve been trying to catch up on it tonight and I can’t get through. It’s showing up in WordPress Reader, though.
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I’m having some odd tech issue with my server/hosting company.
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Roger that. Glad you’re still around. I grew a tad concerned given Renard’s sudden disappearance.
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FYI I think I fixed it. One of my plugins seemed to be suddenly breaking the site. I’m guessing a conflict between it, the latest version of WordPress, and the older PHP version I’m forced to use for my gallery plugin.
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Yes, that must be it. I noticed the site went down after you posted your latest selection of salacious beauties; I feared that, perhaps, the Happiness Engineers were cracking down on beautiful happiness—ha! Glad you got it resolved.
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True creatives don’t need a large budget.
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Amen. That also makes me feel better about my low-cost composing projects. 😅
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YES! I love John Carpenter. One of my favorite directors AND composers.
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Sad to hear about his passing. I’ve only watched Little shop of horrors from the 1960’s once or twice. The remake musical from the 90’s or whenever I’ve seen multiple times. I love that movie! Totally apropos or something 😝
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Yes! The original is so quirky. I love the 1980s musical film, too. The songs are so fun.
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Yeah, they really stuck to your head for weeks after watching it.
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I had a student years ago who sang “Somewhere That’s Green” for a musical festival a few years and I accompanied her on piano; I loved playing with her.
Here’s a cast record from the 2003 run for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr87uGnVEDU
We cut out a lot of the dialogue at the beginning of the piece. Very fun song.
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