Roger Corman names the future icon who did “the best job” under his wing
Producers who spent their entire career churning out B-tier schlock made on a shoestring budget aren’t typically the ones who become remembered as inspirational and influential icons, but Roger Corman was in a class of his own.
Throughout his storied career, he earned countless nicknames, and all of them were equally apt. Whether called ‘The Pope of Pop Cinema’, ‘The King of Cult’, or ‘The Spiritual Godfather of New Hollywood’, Corman was a force of nature who developed an impressive habit of talent-spotting.
First-time directors and unproven actors come cheapest, so Corman was inevitably going to be drawn to rookies and novices to take charge of his productions on either side of the camera. However, the names he plucked from semi-obscurity make for incredible reading, with many of them going on to become icons and legends in their own right.
Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Sylvester Stallone, Ron Howard, Dennis Hopper, and Robert De Niro are just some of the vaunted names to have cut their teeth under Corman, and every single one of them owed him a huge debt of gratitude and singled him out as one of the most important figures in their respective rises up the ranks.
Of course, there were plenty who went on to accomplish absolutely nothing after paying their dues as a Corman protege, but the acclaimed auteurs and award-winning actors who took cinema by storm handily outweigh the ones who were quickly lost to the sands of time.
Corman was a mentor and father figure to so many filmmakers that asking him to single out a favourite would be like asking a parent to pick their preferred child. Well, that wasn’t entirely the case after he revealed to Filmmaker Magazine that one of the aspiring directors he worked with in their earliest days impressed him more than the rest.
“I talk to all our new directors about sketching their shots beforehand,” he explained. “Scorsese did the best job that I’ve ever seen; sketched every one of his shots. I, myself, would sketch 80%. But Marty really sketched the full 100%. He was the only one. You don’t want to be solving problems during shooting that you could’ve solved before shooting.”
Scorsese’s second feature, 1972’s romantic crime drama Boxcar Bertha, was a Corman production. The producer was impressed right off the bat by the filmmaker’s commitment and dedication to the movie he was making, and as it turned out, more so than anyone else he worked with before their career took off.
Corman could see right away that Scorsese was cut from a different cloth, and those instincts have been continually proven true over the last half-century after he evolved from the latest in a long line of proteges into one of the greatest directors of all time.
