Obituary: Roger Corman, Hollywood’s ‘King of the B-movies’ who opened a film studio in Connemara

The resulting 20 movies, filmed by local crews who were “learning on the job” but with directors from Los ­Angeles, were described as “shockingly bad” by the critics. Things came to a rather nasty head at the Galway Film Fleadh in September 1997 over the premier of Criminal Affairs. It was branded “nasty, racy and violent” and led to lurid headlines about a state body subsidising porn in Connemara.

Corman himself was rarely on set, but would make infrequent but energetic visits to a house he had built adjoining the studios called “The Manor House” and proceed to dramatically cut costs and generally “make a nuisance of himself” as one veteran remembered.

His Concorde Anois Teoranta ­studio, heavily subsidised by an Irish government trying to kick-start a film industry, eventually went into decline, but lives on in the legend of the film industry.

Corman, who is reputed to have produced and directed more than 400 mostly forgettable films, launched the careers of directors Martin ­Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Peter ­Bogdanovich as well as actors like Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Bruce Dern and Denis Hopper among many others.

But it wasn’t out of altruism. He just had a good eye for talent and was prepared to give “unknowns” a chance to produce, direct or act because they came cheap and worked hard.

His Irish adventures were immortalised in a documentary It Came from Connemara directed by Brian Reddin which featured extensive interviews with Corman himself, in which he explained the logic of a Hollywood producer opening a film studio in the west of Ireland with no history of the genre.

In 1963, as he explained in the documentary, he was shooting a film in Liverpool called Young Racers with his “assistant” Francis Ford Coppola and had built “a travelling studio” in a Volkswagen bus.

“The labour laws were very strict in England but were easier in Ireland, so I said what you do is you just put the bus on the ferry from Liverpool to Dublin and shoot (his next film) Dementia 13, which was Francis’s first film, in Dublin,” he said.

Because of his prolific output, ­Corman kept a keen eye on other film productions and, as a way of cutting costs, also used unwanted film sets built by more profligate directors. He returned to Ireland in the late 1980s to shoot a World War I aeroplane epic in the wake of the successful film, The Blue Max, which had been shot mainly in Wicklow.

After it was finished a former ­Royal Canadian Air Force pilot bought the aircraft and kept them in Weston aerodrome where they were used in several films including Corman’s Von Richthofen and Brown.

During the filming of this epic ­Corman had something of a breakdown and withdrew from the industry. Several years later he returned to set up his own studio. According to his version of events, the Department of Arts offered him better terms to build a studio than the Department of Industry and Commerce, with the proviso that it was built in Co Galway, the constituency of then minister ­Michael D Higgins.

Built in an abandoned factory at Baile na hAbhann with the backing of Údarás na Gaeltachta, it was a condition of the contract that the company name was in Irish. At its peak the studio had a workforce of 83, including many local people. The films were generally shot in three weeks with none released to critical acclaim.

Corman’s studio eventually went into decline with the lifting of restrictions on workers across the EU. His cheap and cheerful output was also overtaken by the Hollywood “blockbuster”. Film technicians who had trained at Corman’s studio also found more lucrative employment elsewhere and were not slow to abandon their mentor.​

Roger Corman was born in Detroit but the family moved to LA when he was 14, where he developed a fascination with film. He joined the US navy and later graduated as an engineer. In the early 1950s he studied English at Oxford before moving to Paris.

Back in the US his interest in film was rekindled when he saw what he called the “B-movie crap” that scriptwriters were churning out. He wrote a script called Highway Dragnet and got $3,000 for his troubles, setting him on the path to becoming a major movie maker.

He achieved critical success with Machine-Gun Kelly (1958) starring Charles Bronson and two years later made a spoof and highly successful horror movie, The Little Shop of ­Horrors (1960), while he sparked a long-time collaboration with the ­cadaver-like Vincent Price. The same could not be said of films like War of the Satellites, Night of the Blood Beast and Night Call Nurses, which were eminently forgettable.

He had more success with the graphically violent Wild Angels (1966) and The Trip (1967) which achieved cult status, but was accused of promoting LSD. Much of his output, like The House of Usher, The Tomb of Ligeia and The Masque of the Red Death were horror movies which were financially successful.

He made millions by setting up his own production company, New World Pictures, which he sold on for a healthy profit before starting again. Because of his Hollywood connections he also liked to take small parts in big films, appearing in Coppola’s The Godfather Part II and as an FBI police chief in The Silence of the Lambs.

In 1972 he married a researcher at The New York Times, Julie Halloran, who later worked with him as a producer in her own right. They had two daughters. Roger Corman received an honorary Oscar in 2009 for his “unparalleled ability to nurture aspiring filmmakers.”