Roger Corman

Roger Corman (1926 to 2024) was an American film director and producer, a trailblazer of independent film known as the Pope of Pop Cinema. Born in Detroit and trained as an industrial engineer at Stanford University, he began as a mailroom messenger at 20th Century Fox and then produced and directed hundreds of low-budget features, among them A Bucket of Blood, The Little Shop of Horrors, The Wild Angels and The Trip, and the eight-film Poe Cycle that began with House of Usher. He co-founded New World Pictures and founded New Concorde, distributed foreign directors such as Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut and Kurosawa in the United States, and gave early opportunities to Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson and James Cameron. He received an Academy Honorary Award in 2009 and died in Santa Monica, California, on 9 May 2024.