Celebrating Roger Corman, the Most Influential US Filmmaker in the Last 60 Years
I have only half-joked that after Orson Welles, Roger Corman is the most influential filmmaker in American cinema history. If you grew up with the movies of Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Francis Ford Coppola, Bruce Dern, Brian De Palma, Vincent Price, George Lucas, or literally, dozens if not hundreds of others, you are a fan of Roger Corman. With his passing earlier this month, cinema history saw another giant off to into Valhalla. There have been plenty of memorials, think pieces, and articles about him in the ensuing weeks, but I think I’ll take a more personal approach. A very young Jack Nicholson. I think I can safely say that I grew up on Corman productions and the first movie that I remember of his was The Terror from 1963 with Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson, and Sandra Knight. Now, to be sure, the directing is credited to Roger and this is fair. But the second unit work included Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill, and Nicholson himself. It’s not a great...