Avuncular, legendary cheapo genre director Roger Corman will finally be recognized by Oscar this year, with a Lifetime Achievement award for his prolific and influential body of work.
In addition to producing 300 pictures, and directing 50, the mild-mannered Corman also apprenticed and mentored some filmmakers you may have heard of, such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, James Cameron, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdonavich, Monte Hellman and Curtis Hanson, just to name a few, and launched the acting careers of Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, David Carradine, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Pam Grier, and Robert DeNiro, among others.
The American New Wave is impossibly indebted to his generosity, DIY-attitude, mentorship and near-sociopathic compulsion to scrimp and save on every production nickel, mostly by hiring kids out of college to direct his decidedly-B cheapo schlocky, genre pics. He basically just threw pictures at kids like they were crackerjack prizes. “You direct it then!” Corman once famously said to a young Peter Bogdanovich, who was then an editor trying to cobble random Boris Karloff footage into a film that he eventually turned into his debut, “Targets.”
After doing his own tour of duty under crank-em-out picture house AIP (American International Pictures) Corman also founded New World Pictures in 1970, an indie production/distribution studio, through which he produced cult-classic “Death Race 2000.” Can’t wait for the Corman montage — the Oscars are about to get a whole lot more women-in-prisony.
The Academy will also honor the great Lauren Bacall and venerable cinematographer Gordon Willis (“The Godfather,” “Annie Hall,” “The Parallax View,” “Interiors,” every great movie of the ’70s) with Lifetime achievement awards.
Here’s the trailer for Corman’s 1960 “Little Shop of Horrors,” which he claims to have shot in two days and a night. A young Jack Nicholson appears in this flick too.