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Even during the Depression, his parents, William and Anne (High) Corman, and their two sons \u2014 Roger was 18 months older than his brother, Gene \u2014 lived comfortably. But his father had to take a major cut in pay, and to Roger it was obvious that the wolf was lurking around the next corner.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have always assumed that somehow shaped my attitude toward money,\u201d Mr. Corman reflected in his autobiography.<\/p>\n
Driven west by the harsh Michigan winters, the family moved to Southern California. After excelling at Beverly Hills High School, Roger spent a year as an engineering student at Stanford University in the middle of World War II, then spent his sophomore and junior years at the University of Colorado as a cadet in a Navy program.<\/p>\n
He returned to Stanford when the war ended, graduating in 1947 with a degree in industrial engineering. But after working for just four days as an electrical engineer, he quit engineering forever.<\/p>\n
He was hired as a messenger at 20th Century Fox for $32.50 a week and eventually rose to story reader. But, he wrote in his memoir, \u201cI knew I was going to be a writer, producer or director of motion pictures, and I needed more background in the arts of the 20th century,\u201d so he enrolled at the University of Oxford on the G.I. Bill to study the work of T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence.<\/p>\n
After six months at Oxford and six months in Paris, he came home and sold a chase-across-the-desert script to Allied Artists for $3,500. He was so unhappy with the finished film, \u201cHighway Dragnet,\u201d directed by Nathan Juran, that he decided to become his own producer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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An Inauspicious Start<\/h2>\n
With the $3,500, a borrowed one-man submarine and $6,500 raised from a dozen friends, he was almost ready to film \u201cMonster From the Ocean Floor,\u201d a movie about a man-eating mutant spawned by atomic testing. But he needed another $2,000 and a director. He got both by offering the directing job to a young actor, Wyott Ordung, if Mr. Ordung, who also appeared in the film, would put up the last $2,000.<\/p>\n
On his first few movies, Mr. Corman produced, thought up the story, drove the equipment truck and filled in as a stunt driver. Knowing nothing about directing but needing another outlet for his energy, he became his own director in 1955 with \u201cFive Guns West.\u201d For the next 15 years, he directed almost all the films he produced.<\/p>\n
He earned his first taste of respectability and the favor of European critics with a series of horror films based on Edgar Allan Poe stories, most of them starring Vincent Price. The series began with \u201cHouse of Usher\u201d in 1960, with a script by the science-fiction writer Richard Matheson, and culminated in 1964 with \u201cThe Masque of the Red Death,\u201d photographed by Nicolas Roeg, and \u201cThe Tomb of Ligeia.\u201d (\u201cThe Raven,\u201d released in 1963, was a horror comedy, starring Mr. Price, Mr. Karloff and Peter Lorre, that is sometimes considered part of the Poe series but was based only loosely on the poem of the same name.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Mr. Corman liked to call himself an outlaw filmmaker, and many of his movies celebrated outlaws: Peter Fonda as the head of a nihilistic motorcycle gang in \u201cThe Wild Angels,\u201d with real Hells Angels riding their choppers alongside the actors; Shelley Winters as the incestuous head of a murderous family in \u201cBloody Mama\u201d; drivers rated on how fast they drove and how many pedestrians they killed in the 1975 film \u201cDeath Race 2000.\u201d(That film was remade as \u201cDeath Race\u201d in 2008, with Mr. Corman as executive producer, followed by several straight-to-video sequels.)<\/p>\n
In preparation for \u201cThe Trip\u201d (1967), he spent seven hours hugging the ground beneath a redwood tree in Big Sur while tripping on LSD for, he said, the first and only time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cThe Wild Angels,\u201d \u201cBloody Mama,\u201d \u201cDeath Race 2000\u201d and \u201cThe Trip\u201d were all denounced by critics, and they all made money. One of Mr. Corman\u2019s few commercial failures was his most deeply felt film, \u201cThe Intruder\u201d (1962), the story of a rabble-rousing white supremacist. Mr. Corman gave the role of the Northern bigot who spreads hatred in a Southern town to a young stage actor, William Shatner. When no studio agreed to be his partner, Mr. Corman, a self-proclaimed lifelong liberal, provided most of the $80,000 budget and distributed \u201cThe Intruder\u201d himself.<\/p>\n
New World, New Honors<\/h2>\n
By 1970, Mr. Corman was burned out by directing and by his peripatetic bachelor life. That summer he completed the last movie he would direct for 20 years, \u201cVon Richthofen and Brown,\u201d about the World War I German flying ace known as the Red Baron and the Allied pilot who shot him down. (His next directorial effort, the 1990 science fiction-horror hybrid \u201cFrankenstein Unbound,\u201d was also his last.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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On Dec. 26, 1970, at the age of 44, Mr. Corman married Julie Halloran, a former Los Angeles Times researcher whom he had been dating off and on for six years. With his wife and his brother as co-producers, he formed New World Pictures.<\/p>\n
At New World, he was responsible for \u201cThe Student Nurses,\u201d \u201cPrivate Duty Nurses\u201d and \u201cI Never Promised You a Rose Garden,\u201d an intelligent and disturbing adaptation of Hannah Green\u2019s semi-autobiographical novel about a teenage girl with schizophrenia, which received an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay, by Gavin Lambert and Lewis John Carlino.<\/p>\n
He sold New World in 1983, keeping the valuable film library, and promptly created a new production and distribution company, Concorde-New Horizons. In 1997 he sold Concorde-New Horizons and its library for $100 million.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n