Attack of the Two-Headed Monster!
On art vs commerce & the profitable compromises of Roger Corman
It’s 1975. François Truffaut is back. The Story of Adèle H, his bracing portrait of doomed obsession, is a triumph, earning glowing reviews and an Academy Award nomination for star Isabelle Adjani. Oh, and it turns a small but tidy profit for its US distributor, New World Pictures. Job done.
It’s 1975. Cirio H. Santiago’s Cover Girl Models arrives with a whimper. Bearing the mystifying tagline “THE GIRLS WITH THE CENTERFOLD SPREADS,” this sweaty little picture offers audiences pleasures of a more… fleshy variety than those of the old French master:
Cover Girl Models inspired no Oscar campaigns. Roger Ebert, who swooned over Adèle H, never reviewed it. Beyond their shared release year, a Venn diagram of the two movies looks an awful lot like two lonely circles.
Look closer, though, and a pinprick of an overlap emerges. A mild-mannered, spectacled producer named Roger Corman.
Gruesome deaths, big breasts, and wacky premises. These were the hallmarks of the Corman project. He spent most of his long career (he died in 2024) churning out exploitation fare at an astonishing clip, ruthlessly targeting young audiences with cheaply made, salaciously marketed pictures.
Corman, who grew up watching his mother reuse postage stamps and buy bruised vegetables, was a penny-pincher by nature. He studied engineering in college and approached filmmaking like a city planner with a blueprint, taking a bird’s-eye view that let him optimise every variable, marshalling a gallery of hacks, strategies and shortcuts at every stage of the production cycle.
He had a bloodhound’s nose for what the market wanted and the gumption to deliver it before the majors caught up. When the studio system crumbled in the late 1940s, he spent the next three decades cashing in on thirsty drive-in theatres. When drive-ins flagged, he pivoted to VHS. He capitalised on Sputnik to launch War of the Satellites within months. When dinosaurs were in vogue, he rushed out Carnosaur, landing it in theatres weeks before Jurassic Park.
He was an OG clickbaiter, market-testing titles for maximum impact and commissioning brazen poster art that popped on drive-in bills and VHS shelves. He recycled mercilessly, reusing stories, sets and special effects wholesale, while buying cheap imports to reissue with jazzed-up titles and dumbed-down plots. Quick, cheap and dirty. This was the Corman way.
It worked. The overwhelming majority of the 450-plus movies Corman produced or directed turned a profit, an unrivalled hit rate in this notoriously risky business. His legacy endures through his protégés. A who’s who of late 20th-century Hollywood earned their stripes in the Corman factory, from Coppola to Scorsese to Cameron, not to mention legions of below-the-line craftsmen.
But few of his films are cherished today. He is remembered for the business he pioneered and the careers he kick-started, not the art he created.
It wasn’t always this way. For a brief period in the 1960s and 1970s, he flirted with a different kind of legacy.
Corman’s early directing efforts in the 1950s, bearing titles like Attack of the Crab Monsters and The Wasp Woman, were unapologetically schlocky, a convenient backdrop for horny twenty-somethings canoodling in drive-ins. But he began to tire of the churn. “[I] was beginning to take my filmmaking more seriously,” he later recalled. “I had never thought of myself as doing Great Art. I felt I was working as a craftsman.”1
As the 1960s gathered momentum, he let his artistic impulses off the leash. In 1962, he made The Intruder, a bracing portrait of Southern racism starring a young William Shatner as a rabble-rouser in rural Missouri. From the outset, the film was too hot to touch. His usual financing partners baulked, forcing the debt-fearing Corman to mortgage his house to get it made. “I’ve always been on the liberal, if not radical, side of politics,” he later said. “I read the book by Charles Beaumont and thought this is an excellent idea for a picture, and it fit my political beliefs. It was something I wanted to do—I wanted to do a more serious film.”
Critics adored it; audiences ignored it. For years, it was the only Corman movie to lose money. Its commercial failure haunted him, but Corman the Artist was just getting started. Through the 1960s, he directed a run of psychologically dexterous, critically praised Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, alongside several quietly influential countercultural films, including The Wild Angels (1966), whose guerrilla production and fuck-you sensibilities lit the slow fuse that Easy Rider (1969) later detonated across Hollywood.
The Corman of the 1960s directed with fire, fury, purpose. “He had surrounded himself with young and hungry filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill, Peter Bogdanovich, Nicolas Roeg, Robert Towne, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson,” notes his biographer, Beverly Gray. “And as the first hints of the counterculture started to appear, Corman had the instincts of a divining rod and the acute business sense to put the new zeitgeist on celluloid.”2
By 1967, the counterculture was in full swing. Corman decided to make a film about psychedelics. For research, he took LSD on the sun-dappled shores of Big Sur. For a few precious hours, the cold-eyed businessman gave way to the dewy-eyed creative. He spoke of discovering a wonderful, pure art form, one “transmitted through the earth from the mind of its creator directly into the mind of the audience.”
At the end of the decade, Corman sniffed a new opportunity. He launched his own production company, New World Pictures, in 1970, taking a ‘temporary’ hiatus from directing shortly thereafter. He wouldn’t direct again for nearly two decades.
If you’re enjoying Rough Cuts, please consider subscribing (it’s free!) or buying me a coffee (not free)…
Now one step removed from the director’s chair, Corman’s business instincts took the reins. The idealistic man who’d had that epiphany on the shores of Big Sur was consigned to history. Over the next decade, he deployed his mastery of the dark arts to unleash dozens of cheap, profitable exploitation movies of the Cover Girl Models variety.
Still, Corman’s artistic impulses endured. While making cheap shlock at home, Corman began importing and distributing arthouse films from abroad and repackaging them for US audiences (usually turning a profit in the process).
By the early 1980s, Corman resembled a walking, talking Criterion Channel, having brought Truffaut, Kurosawa, Herzog, Bergman, Fellini et al to young Americans. At his peak, he was North America’s leading distributor of international arthouse films, even as he continued churning out B-movie fare. It was the perfect synthesis of Corman’s competing instincts.
For a while, this balance of art and commerce held beautifully. But it didn’t last. The marketplace was changing, and the failure of The Intruder still cast a long shadow. Corman sold New World in the 1980s, immediately launched a new company, and left the arthouse behind. Over the decades that followed, his films remained profitable, but any pretence of art was gone. By the 21st century, he was producing SyFy channel fare far removed from Truffaut and The Intruder, bearing titles like Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf and CobraGator (both 2015).
In 2009, Corman received an honorary Oscar. The establishment that had long scoffed at his low-budget schlock finally embraced him. In his acceptance speech, he reflected on cinema’s “compromised” nature:
We all work in what I think is the only true modern art form […] traditional art has been done, let us say, by composers, writers, poets, painters, who could create their art individually. Motion pictures require, the filmmaker requires, a cast and a crew, and they must be paid. As a result our art is somewhat compromised. We’re compromised between art and business and I think that represents something of the compromised world in which we live.
It was this willingness to accept cinema’s compromises, to subsume creativity to commerciality, that explains Corman’s financial success. His legacy is secure, but not for the reasons once promised. “It comes down to the principle on which virtually all Corman alumni agree,” says Beverly Gray. “That Roger is a great businessman who once had the potential to make great art.”
In his autobiography, published in the 1990s, Corman revisited that mystical discovery on the Big Sur beach. “To this day, I’d like to think this could work and it would be wonderful,” he reflected. “I think of all the costs you could cut in production and distribution alone.”
How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime; by Roger Corman
Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers; by Beverly Gray
I didn't know him at all, I gotta find some of his work. Thanks for making me discover him! Cheers mate 💚 🥃