A genuine American movie legend, the eighty-seven-year-old producer and director Roger Corman has been in the film business since the early 1950s. He is perhaps best known for the low-budget horror films he issued with remarkable speed in the early ’60s, including The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Raven (1963), and The Terror (1963), as well as the counterculture classics The Wild Angels (1966) and The Trip (1967), both starring Peter Fonda. In 1970, Corman founded the independent production studio New World Pictures, which became the U.S. distributor for foreign films by the likes of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Akira Kurosawa, and his Criterion list reflects his love of classic art-house cinema. Corman’s estimable career was celebrated in the 2011 documentary Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel .
Photo by Grant Delin
Biography via Criterion.
