Roger Corman Biography
Roger Corman was born in Detroit, Michigan, on April 5, 1926. After studying at Beverly Hills College in Detroit, he underwent training with the US Navy during World War II. In 1947 he graduated from Stanford University with a degree in industrial engineering.
After completing an apprenticeship in Hollywood in 1948 at 20th Century-Fox, working first as a delivery boy and then as a story analyst, he took a "cultural trip" to Europe, to Paris and Oxford, with a scholarship in English literature. Returning to the United States, he worked as a journalist and literary agent. He subsequently worked for American International Pictures and began his tireless career as a producer, distributor and director.
During his career, Corman directed more than a hundred films of various genres, including westerns, gangster films, teen movies, soft-core, science fiction and horror. He has been the subject of attention from nonconformist critics for his cultural background in romantic literature, surrealist avant-garde, psychedelic culture and for his attention to psychoanalysis and socio-political aspects.
Corman directed his first film, the western Five Guns West, in 1955, followed by more than twenty films in the 1950s alone, including Machine Gun Kelly and I, Mobster, portraits of the gangster world. The horror films based on EA Poe's stories, such as House of Usher and The Masque of the Red Death, represented his aesthetic redefinition of the fantastic in cinema.
During the Seventies and Eighties, Corman dedicated himself exclusively to the production and distribution of films by great European filmmakers such as Federico Fellini, François Truffaut and Ingmar Bergman. In 1970 he founded his own production and distribution company, New World Pictures, later replaced by the production company New Horizons Pictures and the distribution company Concorde.
In 1990, Corman returned to directing with the film Frankenstein Unbound, based on a novel by B. Aldiss, which showed his visionary inventiveness, his black humor and his cultured irony. In 1990 he also published the autobiography, written with J. Jerome, How I made a hundred movies in Hollywood and never lost a dime.
