The movies that made Roger Corman feel irrelevant: “They’re doing it bigger and better”
In 1955, Roger Corman made his first low-budget independent film, a western entitled Five Guns West. However, later that same year, he made his first sci-fi movie, Day the World Ended, and a career as ‘The King of Cult’ was born.
Over the next several decades, Corman became synonymous with a brand of low-rent B-movies, usually in the science-fiction or horror genre, with titles like It Conquered the World, Night of the Blood Beast, and Death Race 2000. Something strange happened in the 1970s, though—Hollywood started making B-movies with A-casts and top-of-the-line production values. However, instead of validating Corman’s fierce commitment to these genres, they made him feel irrelevant.
Corman’s first foray into Hollywood came when he got a job as a messenger in the 20th Century Fox mail room in 1948. He worked his way up to story reader, which meant he could immerse himself in scripts that came through the studio. Eventually, Corman figured he could probably write his own script, and the result was The House and the Sea. Allied Artists optioned it, and when it was being turned into a film, Corman asked the producer if he could work on the movie. He even offered to do it for free, simply wanting to see how motion pictures were made.
This attitude of, “Hey, I could probably do that”, eventually led Corman to become a producer and a director. Before long, he was churning out movies at a rate that would make most modern filmmakers’ heads spin. Even though he made good money as a purveyor of independent films and helped launch the careers of future luminaries like Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Stephen King, and Jonathan Demme, Corman was never respected by the Hollywood establishment. After all, he made sci-fi and horror pictures, genres that had classically been viewed as low art.
In 2024, the genre pioneer told Film Ink, “These were the product of low-budget independent filmmakers. The major studios were not dealing with that. Every so often, they would make a science fiction or a horror film, but in general, they stayed away from it.”
In 1975, though, everything changed. When Corman sat in a cinema watching Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, he witnessed the birth of the modern blockbuster and Hollywood finally embracing the genres he’d been working within for decades. This isn’t to say there weren’t growing pains, though. After all, Corman ruefully revealed, “I remember when Jaws came out, the New York Times lead critic said, ‘What is Jaws but a big budget Roger Corman film?'”
Fascinatingly, Corman believed the critic was correct in his assessment: Jaws really was a Corman film with a healthy Hollywood budget. However, he felt the critic hadn’t quite grasped the real implication of the film: “It was not only bigger, it was better.” Jaws wasn’t just a slapdash Corman movie with more money; it was an artist like Spielberg taking the horror genre seriously and delivering something more substantial and artistically relevant than anything Corman had made. The B-movie king realised, “The major studios have caught on.” In a bittersweet moment, he recognised the paradigm had shifted.
By the time Corman saw Star Wars only two years later, he knew the entire landscape of Hollywood had changed – and it risked leaving his brand of picture behind. He admitted, “Shortly after Jaws, out came Star Wars, and I thought, ‘We’re in a lot of trouble here.'” Corman knew that his knowingly janky B-movies would struggle to compete if audiences could get their sci-fi and horror fixes from big-budget Hollywood productions with established movie stars and state-of-the-art special effects.
Ultimately, Corman continued making films as he always had. He even tried to cash in on Jaws and Star Wars by making Piranha and Battle Beyond the Stars, blatant rip-offs of Spielberg and Lucas’ behemoths. Then, as the decades proceeded, Corman watched with fascination as these kinds of movies, made by filmmakers who were fans of his growing up, became the biggest game in town in Hollywood.
In the end, the man who was looked down upon by the Hollywood establishment for staking a claim in the sci-fi and horror genres noted, “That type of science fiction and horror film are the mainstays, along with comic book characters, for $100-200million pictures today.”
