How I Made A Hundred Movies in Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime

What do Martin Scorsese, Peter Fonda, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, and Jack Nicholson have in common? They, along with so many other Hollywood stars, had their starts with Roger Corman, one of the film world's most successful directors and entrepreneurs.

Though he graduated from Stanford with a degree in engineering, Roger Corman long knew he wanted to be in pictures And with such memorable titles as The Little Shop of Horrors, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Viking Women, and The Beast with 1, 000, 000 Eyes, Corman carved a special niche for himself in the history of Hollywood cinema.

How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime details Corman's rise from Twentieth Century-Fox messenger to antistudio maverick and leading producer of low-budget "exploitation" films. His success began in the early 1950s when he produced his first film, The Monster from the Ocean Floor, for $12,000. Like so many of his other movies that followed, he shot it in under a week got excellent production values for the money, and still earned a substantial profit. The trick: ruthless efficiency, propriety-be-damned resourcefulness, a sense of humor, and the best young (and hungriest) talent Hollywood could offer. A specific Corman style emerged making him the darling of film school graduates, foreign critics, and American audiences just out for a good time.

Corman tells the stories of the often madcap making of his movies (the same actors portraying both cowboys and Indians; amusement park lagoons substituting for oceans; identical special effects shots spliced into five or six different movies) and discusses the wastefulness of Hollywood's major studios and why they spend too much for too little in return.

Witty, revealing and instructive, Corman-as well as many of the celebrities he's worked with-gives us the inside story of lucrative, intelligent movie making on a wing and a prayer.