Director, producer and distributor Roger Corman’s world seems suspended between magnetic poles: At true north he could be described as the godfather of independently produced and independent-minded film; way down south is the Corman who looks more like the godfather to Don Simpson, a crude flipper of hot cake flicks who originated the high concept, sensation-pummeling mainstream cinema we’re stuck with today. Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, director Alex Stapleton’s annotated filmography of the filmmaker’s wildly tentacular career, is less an attempt to reconcile those poles than to show how neatly and necessarily they are bound together, by both the financial nature of filmmaking and the stubborn question of taste.
“Taste,” says former prot�g� Martin Scorsese of Corman’s workshop, “was out of the question.” By 1972, the year he financed Scorsese’s first movie (Boxcar Bertha), Corman had been in the business for over two decades, made dozens of movies (10 in 1957 alone) and — as the title of his autobiography notes — never lost a dime. Much like Woody Allen, one of the many talents he goosed on to renown, Corman realized quickly that nose-to-tail filmmaking is only tenable when one has complete control. Corman’s business savvy balanced a keen sense of audience appetite with the carnal imagination (a “boiling inferno” in his description) beneath his gentlemanly persona. Stapleton chocks the film with money clips from the Corman archives, a mix of curdled rape fantasy films like The Woman Hunter, eccentric brow-lifters like the series of Poe adaptations starring Vincent Price, and chips of…
Georgianna Robertson Georgina Grenville Gina Carano Gina Gershon Gina Philips Gisele Bündchen Giuliana DePandi Giulianna Ramirez
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