In Christian Blackwood's 1977 documentary "Roger Corman: Hollywood's Wild Angel," actor Paul Bartel, who directed Corman's "Death Race 2000" and, later, "Eating Raoul," told Blackwood, "Roger believes, I think, in the producer as auteur. To a certain extent I think he doesn't really care that much who directs a lot of the films that he produces." As production executive, he retained approval of each film's basic concept (usually he came up with it), script, casting and final cut, so as long as a film's concept was salable to theaters, as long as it contained plenty of thrills, chases, humor and (starting in the '70s) breasts, he was happy to pay a novice director practically nothing to learn on the job, as he had done himself.

In "Hollywood's Wild Angel," Corman explained what he looks for in a project: "The picture must be visually oriented, and generally whatever is there will be exciting to me at that moment." Though he maintains a very low public profile, he's also declared that he likes to get a politically liberal point of view into his movies, though usually in a vague way: An outsider stands up for his beliefs and sticks it to The Man, who may be a Satan-worshipping prince, a buxom prison matron or a Venusian cucumber-crab creature. As a blanket statement, it's probably fair to say that there is no subtlety of ideas or structure or characterization to be found anywhere in his oeuvre. You seldom leave a Corman picture with questions, unless the question is "Didn't that same muscly guy die twice?" or "Why was her hair a different color in that one scene on the beach?"

Only once did he direct a movie about a political subject he was passionate about, "The Intruder," a 1962 drama about a Northern racist (played by the young, angry William Shatner) who shows up in a Southern town to incite violent resistance to school integration. Corman filmed on location in the Deep South, using locals as extras -- he didn't show them the complete script, which blasted contemporary ignorance, amorality and racism just when the civil rights movement was meeting bloody opposition. He barely finished shooting his small, stark, viriti-style film as the local cops, who correctly mistrusted his intentions, were ordering the crew out of town. When "The Intruder" failed commercially, he took it as a lesson: Aesthetic ambition without financial reward is just bad business. Of course, he didn't accept failure lying down; the film was retitled -- anything to lure ticket buyers -- "I Hate Your Guts!"

With the popular Poe films of the early '60s, which were created with slightly higher budgets and longer shooting schedules, critics and audiences finally took note of Corman as something other than a drive-in wunderkind. "House of Usher," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tomb of Ligeia" and the others are claustrophobic, lavishly decorated, convincingly creepy Gothic horror stories. The masterpiece among them, arguably, is "The Masque of the Red Death" (1964), a surrealistic dirge of a movie that proves, with its abstract choreography and symbolically loaded imagery, that Corman was capable of a higher kind of art when he thought the crowd would buy it. (The cinematographer on "Red Death" was Nicholas Roeg, and the queasily saturated colors of the film presage Roeg's own great 1973 psychological-horror film, "Don't Look Now.")

If most of the Poe films lacked Corman's deadpan humor, he made up for it with "The Raven" (1963), a jolly diversion in which Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Jack Nicholson chew the ominous scenery to a pulp, and "The Terror," which is absolutely inscrutable -- hardly surprising, since there was no story and it was shot by a tag team of directors including Coppola and Nicholson, none of whom, even Corman, had the foggiest idea what was supposed to be happening. Corman just wanted to get his money's worth out of the castle sets from "The Raven" before they were pulled down, so he commissioned the merest snippet of screenplay, retained Karloff for two more days of work at the end of the "Raven" shoot and let the cameras roll. Even Corman had to admit, with vast understatement, that "The Terror" is "somewhat confusing." If nothing else, it's a treat to watch the bemused Karloff and costar Nicholson fighting to keep straight faces.

Corman's pace slowed in the late '60s -- he directed "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre" and "Von Richthofen and Brown" for major studios and "The Wild Angels," "The Trip," "Bloody Mama" and the overwrought, absurdist hippie odyssey "Gas-s-s-s!" for his longtime independent backers, American International Pictures. But Corman thought many of these movies were hobbled by studio interference in the editing process, and he decided never again to be gainsaid by a releasing company. In 1970, at age 44, he got married (his wife, Julie, with whom he has four children, subsequently became a modestly successful producer herself) and started New World, which soon overtook American International as the most successful independent production company in Hollywood. Exit Corman the director, enter Corman the schlock mogul.

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