Proud to make Hollywood trash

Roger Corman is the king of the B movie, said Tad Friend in The New Yorker. Over the past 60 years, the director and producer has churned out more than 400 low-budget films, including cult classics like 1960’s The Little Shop of Horrors—which Corman shot in just two days—and 1968’s Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. At age 87, Corman is still working, producing cut-price shockers for the Syfy cable channel. Their titles are self-explanatory: Dinocroc, Surpergator, Piranhaconda. “I balked at Sharktopus,” says Corman. “I told the network, ‘You should go right up to the acceptable level of insanity in a title, but if you go over it, the audience turns against you’—and then Sharktopus was one of their biggest hits.” Corman doesn’t apologize for making trash, but also contends that there is artistic merit in some of his movies, such as 1993’s Fire on the Amazon, in which a young Sandra Bullock played an environmentalist who briefly gets naked—for valid artistic reasons, of course. “She met a cynical journalist, and the coming together of their viewpoints seemed to be best symbolized by the coming together of their naked bodies,” Corman says, and then starts laughing. “As I say that, I’m aware that’s essentially a nonsensical statement.”

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