Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel – review

This lively documentary traces the remarkable career of the independent American film-maker Roger Corman, a tall, handsome Stanford engineering graduate who has produced and directed several hundred low-budget movies over the past half-century and kick-started the careers of, among many others, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, John Sayles, Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich and Bruce Dern.

In 1950 he decided to steer clear of the big studios after people at 20th Century-Fox robbed him of a credit and a bonus for his work on the Gregory Peck western The Gunfighter, and he struck a deal with a small exploitation company to make genre pictures (westerns, horror flicks, sci-fi, crime, biker pictures) on small budgets and short schedules aimed at young drive-in audiences.

Instead of the subtitle "Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel", this film could as easily be called "The Rebellion of a Hollywood Exploiter" for the way it records the ingenuity, daring and innovation that went into his productions and drove him to create his own studio and distribution company and to take his career into his own hands. He's a Gatsbyesque figure in many ways, and interestingly two of his proteges worked on Jack Clayton's The Great Gatsby: Coppola as screenwriter, Dern as Tom Buchanan.

Corman's great period was the 1960s and 70s, after which the big studios started to make expensive versions of his exploitation pictures and he was eventually driven to devoting himself exclusively to pictures for TV and the video market. Along with his exploitation of popular taste and whatever was in the air commercially, he exploited his employees unashamedly. But they loved him for the opportunities and the fun and for the surprising degree of artistic freedom he provided. At one point Jack Nicholson, in his extremely frank interview for the film, puts his hands over his face to conceal the tears.

Corman had genuine ambitions, which were perhaps realised more often through the distribution in America of foreign movies by Kurosawa, Bergman, Fellini and Antonioni than in the ones he directed, though Alex Stapleton's documentary is more interested in the schlock that came from his studio than the occasional masterpieces.

One of the greatest film-makers he employed, Monte Hellman, goes unmentioned and uninterviewed, and Bogdanovich's best Corman picture, Targets, an exploitation classic, is completely ignored. There's no reference to the two pictures with sizable budgets that he directed for major studios in the late 1960s: The St Valentine's Day Massacre, the first-rate gangster movie he made for Fox, and the western The Long Ride Home, which a worried Columbia took out of his hands and gave to Phil Karlson (it was finally released as A Time for Killing) for the bizarre reason that Corman wasn't spending enough money on it.