Although Corman's box-office hits have usually been modest ones -- the lower your budget, the fewer tickets you need to sell to turn a profit -- his all-expenses-spared, all-profits-retained rules of moviemaking made him one of the most respected businessmen in an industry that commonly revolves around spectacular successes and monstrous failures. He's the model of the independent filmmaker who aims not for blockbusters, but for enough profits to keep making more movies. His distaste for squandering time and money is legendary. To the young Corman, a five-day shooting schedule was reasonable, anything over 10 days extravagant; he famously completed principal photography on "Little Shop of Horrors" in two days. In 1957 alone, he produced and directed eight movies. He may be the only director in history to turn down a major studio production because the budget was too high for him to get the job done right.

Corman was born in 1926 and raised in Beverly Hills, Calif., with his brother, Gene, who also became a film producer. He earned an engineering degree from Stanford, and an engineer's economy of means is his guiding aesthetic. Between 1954, when he produced his first movie, and 1970, when he retired from directing and founded New World Pictures, he directed about 50 films, overcoming the straitjackets of budget and genre with a sly sense of humor and a gut understanding of how to corral an audience's interest through camera movement and visually engaging screen composition. Even his shlockiest early movies are crafted with jaunty intelligence -- plenty of them are utter hokum (see "Teenage Caveman" or "The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent" ... on second thought, don't), but you're usually aware of Corman laughing along with you, not at you, from behind the camera.

For example, there's the splendidly goofy "Sorority Girl" (1957), starring Susan Cabot, one of Corman's ready-for-anything stock company, as an unaccountably bitchy and vicious coed who victimizes her sorority sisters (caught beating a pledge, she's indignant: "All I did was spank her a little"). Cabot also starred in "The Wasp Woman" (1960) as an aging cosmetics queen who ingests way too much rejuvenating wasp serum and turns into ... well, it probably should have been near the bottom of the makeup artist's risumi. And "It Conquered the World," made in 1956, is still a hoot. The ridiculous Venusian cucumber-crab creature at the center of the plot is about as menacing on-screen as "Sesame Street's" Mr. Snuffleupagus, so Corman concentrated on the characters' mounting trepidation rather than the alien's dubious shock value. Compare Bela Lugosi's wrestling match with the rubber octopus in Ed Wood's contemporaneous "Bride of the Monster": While Wood presumably thought the audience would be dumb enough to be thrilled by his inert monster, Corman knew not to try. "It Conquered the World" is a cheap entertainment made by an artist who knew exactly what he could get away with.

Though Corman's overtly comic trilogy of "A Bucket of Blood" (1959), "Little Shop of Horrors" and "Creature From the Haunted Sea" (1961) is responsible for much of his cult following, the poker-faced humor of the other quickies can be just as swell. Take "The Last Woman on Earth" (1960). Everyone in the world gets killed by a bomb that sucks all the oxygen out of the atmosphere. (Don't ask.) Everyone but three, that is: A married couple, Harold and Ev, and their friend Martin are fortuitously scuba diving off the coast of Puerto Rico when the holocaust hits. In a few minutes the oxygen's back. (I said don't ask.) The moment they can all breathe again, the first thing Harold does is stick a cigarette into his wife's mouth and light it. Naturally, a nasty love triangle soon develops, and eventually Harold and Martin squabble to the death. "I killed him," says Harold. Brief, blank pause. "Will we never learn?"

The screenplay of "Last Woman on Earth" was Robert Towne's first, and he also (pseudonymously) played Martin, which illustrates a long-standing principle of Corman's: Why bring two people on a location shoot when one ticket and one salary can cover your needs just as well? Actors played multiple parts, writers directed second-unit crews, production associates filled in as sound men. The positive side of this somewhat merciless brand of thrift is that it allowed -- forced, if you will -- Corman's crew members to learn all sides of filmmaking, and many of them moved up the ranks and out into the wider movie industry with experience that would have taken many years to rack up under any other producer. He's given career-making breaks to a throng of Hollywood heavyweights, not only Nicholson, Coppola, Towne and Scorsese, but also Bruce Dern, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, John Sayles, Gale Anne Hurd and James Cameron, among others. "Sometimes I think about all the people who have worked with me and gone on to become famous filmmakers," Corman once said. "I wonder if it's because they learned a lot by working with me or they figured that if I could do it anyone could?"

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