Deep, deep, deep within the recesses of Roger Corman’s prodigious brain, the gentleman and the businessman vie for eternal dominance. Or so it seemed on a golden-hued autumn day in Santa Monica some years ago when Mike Elliott, a young Cornell graduate who was working for Corman’s film company as a runner, found himself cleaning his boss’s garage per the instructions of Corman’s wife, Julie. In the middle of Elliott’s ministrations, the tall, patrician Roger Corman poked his head inside the garage and uttered in his customary sedate and low tones, “Mike, you don’t really have to clean my garage.” Corman disappeared, only to re-emerge several seconds later to add, “But if it makes you feel any better, Francis Ford Coppola did it, too.”

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Indeed, when it comes to Roger Corman, the reigning monarch of the low-budget exploitation film, it is the businessman who usually has the last word. Of the more than 50 films he has directed and the more than 300 he has produced and/or distributed, some 90 percent have been profitable. In Hollywood, 90 percent profitability on this many films is enough to make you gasp, drop your cellular phone, and fall over dead into your Ty Nant water. But Corman has always known how to cut corners— some of his films are made simply to take advantage of an already built set; some are created primarily from bits and pieces of foreign films not released in the United States; some are written as they are being filmed. During his 40 years in the business, he has stayed almost wholly outside the Hollywood system but has come, ironically, to earn the respect of that very system. Profitability is part of it. But there’s something else, too: Corman has, over the years, displayed an uncanny eye for talent.

“I can’t think of anyone who has, quote unquote, discovered more of Hollywood’s most talented filmmakers,” says Gale Anne Hurd, who started out in the industry as Corman’s assistant in 1978, and who has since produced Aliens, The Abyss, and the two Terminator movies. For illustrious alumni, Corman’s unofficial film school rivals those of U.S.C., U.C.L.A., and N.Y.U. He green-lighted and financed the featurefilm directing debuts of Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Ron Howard, and James Cameron. He cast Jack Nicholson eight times and directed three of his scripts before the rest of the country discovered him in Easy Rider. He groomed Jonathan Demme from writer to writer/ producer to writer/producer/second-unit director to writer/producer/director. He directed Robert Towne’s first screenplay and produced John Sayles’s first three. He produced one of Martin Scorsese’s first commercial features.

Today, a balmy spring afternoon, Corman is holding a production meeting in his spacious Brentwood office. With him is Mike Elliott, who, in the meteoric fashion typical of many Corman employees, had parlayed his garage-cleaning skills into a job as Corman’s head of production. Corman, 69, all affability and reserve, all button-down and khaki, calmly sips coffee from a pink mug while Elliott updates him on their slate of 27 films—an enormous number, twice the size of some major studios’ annual schedules. Suddenly, Corman discovers a two-week period of inactivity in the schedule. “We might see if we can do a very low-budget picture in between,” he says. He suggests that a script be written based on whatever set is still standing at the beginning of the two-week hiatus.

Throughout the three stages of Corman’s career—as a director in the 1950s and 60s, and as the founder and president first of New World Pictures in the 70s and early 80s and then of Concorde-New Horizons since 1983—speed and resourcefulness have been his handmaidens. Many of the films that Corman directed were made in less than two weeks for well under $100,000; the film that he is perhaps best known for, the original Little Shop of Horrors, with Nicholson as a masochistic dental patient, was made in two days and a night in 1960, on a recycled set.

“Remember, Marty, that you must have some nudity at least every 15 pages,” Corman told Scorsese.

But not only does Corman shoot feature-length films in the time it takes other Hollywood mandarins to find a parking space outside of studio environs, he conceives of them that quickly, too. “Roger is very sensitive to the marketplace,” says Ron Howard, whose movie-directing debut, Grand Theft Auto, was produced by Corman at New World. “He reacts very, very quickly to trends.” Corman and his colleagues at Concorde-New Horizons keep a computerized record of which sets are standing, which scripts are ready to shoot, and what the major studios are about to release. Then, in the classic tradition of exploitation filmmaking, they echo the trends and preoccupations of the mainstream, but try to deliver a little something extra—more shirtlessness, more explosions, more screaming, more power tools. “We follow the current of the river,” says Corman slyly, “but try to find a new tributary.”

Bonnie and Clyde begat Boxcar Bertha. Jaws begat Piranha. Papillon begat I Escaped from Devil’s Island ... Roger Corman gazed out upon the major studios’ releases and saw that they were profitable. So he labored with great speed to recapture their audiences. Star Wars begat Battle Beyond the Stars. Dressed to Kill begat Stripped to Kill. The Hunt for Red October begat Full Fathom Five. Jurassic Park begat Camosaur ... When he was done, he was content. For he had tilled the soil; he had determined that it was fertile. The soil was rich. And now so was he.

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Concorde-New Horizons has studios in both Ireland and Venice, California—the latter a ramshackle affair that resembles a small warehouse— though today the crew is shooting a remake of Corman’s 1970 The Wasp Woman in the restaurant just below Corman’s office. The pace of production is rapid: the production manager, all of age 29, has worked on 17 Corman films in the past year and a half. Someone tells director Jim Wynorski that the star is still in the makeup trailer; Wynorski screams in protest, “This isn’t Makeup Woman, it’s Wasp Woman!” He grabs a script and proceeds to stand in for the actress so that her co-star’s close-up can be filmed.

To visit the set of a Roger Corman movie is to understand that necessity is not only the mother of invention, but it is sometimes also the midwife, the diaper launderer, the greeting-card writer, and the florist. When blueprints of the sets for Battle Beyond the Stars failed to surface two weeks before filming in 1980, a young model-builder named James Cameron stepped into the breach and was catapulted to the position of art director; when funds for light rentals petered out near the end of filming 1979’s Rock ’n ’ Roll High School, Corman ordered the crew to park their cars around the set and light the action with their headlights. In an early Western directed by Corman, actor Dick Miller played a cowboy, an Indian, and a member of the posse sent out to kill the Indian.

“If you can make a movie for Roger,” says Corman protege Joe Dante, who directed Piranha and co-directed Hollywood Boulevard at New World before moving on to make the Gremlins movies, “you can make a movie for anyone. There’s never enough time, there’s never enough money, there’s never enough support.... You have to learn all these shortcuts.”

One area of Corman’s films in which shortcuts have always figured is advertising. And so—regardless of their films’ subject matter—those trailers thought to lack a certain zest have, over the years, been embellished with a shot, cribbed from a 1970s Philippine movie called Cover Girl Model, of an exploding helicopter. In the trailer for 1974’s T.N.T. Jackson, a scene in which someone is buying flour was, through the magic of voice-over, passed off as a scene about evil henchmen smuggling deadly “China White.” For his 1982 Screamers, starring Barbara Bach, Wynorski shot a futuristic-looking trailer of a busty redhead in a lab coat being chased by a man whose body is turning inside out, while a slogan promises, “You will actually see someone turned inside out while he’s still alive!”— but neither character appeared in this fantasy-adventure set in the 1880s on a remote island. (Corman later spliced the footage into the movie after a riot broke out at an Atlanta drive-in.)

Posters, too, have been the object of overactive imaginations. Carl Franklin, who acted in and directed several films for Corman before he made One False Move and Devil in a Blue Dress, was somewhat surprised when the poster for his 1990 movie, Full Fathom Five, depicted two subs colliding, given that no such scene appeared in the film. The ads for T.N.T. Jackson, starring the black actress Jeanne Bell, boasted not false imagery but false honors—something called an Ebony Fist Award.

Even the titles of Corman films are fair prey. Former head of production Rodman Flender remembers Corman struggling to come up with a name for a film ultimately called Hour of the Assassin. At one point Corman blurted out, “I’ll call it Gold Diggers of 1988 if it will make people see it!” In the case of The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes!, an early film directed by Corman, the movie’s poster and title preceded the completion of shooting. Having already enticed his Boston distributor with an ad campaign, producer Sam Arkoff was shocked to find that Corman’s finished movie contained no beast, let alone one with many eyeballs. “Where the hell is the monster footage?!” he demanded. “Sam,” Corman responded, “I didn’t have much money.... You put in the beast!” (Arkoff did, using a punctured teakettle and much poetic license.)

“I have always felt some contempt for blind bureaucratic adherence to pointless rules,” Corman writes in his 1990 autobiography, the inaccuracy of whose very title—How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime—is further evidence of this worldview. He fosters the philosophy of the outlaw filmmaker; those who buy into it flourish under him. One of Coppola’s first jobs for Corman was to shoot and edit additional footage for a Russian science-fiction film that Corman had acquired. Two small monsters had to be created for the film; Corman delegated the task to Coppola, requesting “a little sexual symbolism in the monsters.” Coppola, however, proceeded to make models that were less than subtle—one male, one female. Corman’s jaw dropped to the carpet—he screamed, “This is pure-out obscenity! You’ve made models of sexual organs!”—but he was impressed by Coppola’s initiative, and went on to finance the director’s feature debut, Dementia 13.

Julie Corman recounts how Jon Davison—who later produced Airplane! and Robocop—got hired as head of marketing. While Davison was hanging around on the set of a New World movie that was being directed by his friend Jonathan Kaplan (a Corman alumnus who has since directed Bad Girls and The Accused), Julie, the film’s producer, was told that Davison had put himself through college by pirating and showing Corman movies on campuses. When she asked her husband what he thought of this, Corman replied without missing a beat. “Send him around. I think we have a job for him in distribution.”

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Corman grew up in a comfortable, middle-class Roman Catholic family. He read a lot of Poe. In 1941, when Corman was 15, his family moved from Detroit to Beverly Hills, where he went to Beverly Hills High School. “There was no way I couldn’t be interested in movies, growing up where I did,” Corman has said; he has also speculated that growing up during the Depression may have fueled his penchant for thrift. Primarily to please his father, Corman majored in engineering at Stanford. Then, after a term abroad at Oxford in 1950, studying literature, he got a job as a manuscript reader at a Hollywood literary agency. Seeing the wealth of bad scripts being submitted by clients, Corman decided to try his hand at screenwriting; the agency sold his first script, Highway Dragnet, to Allied Artists for $4,000.

He produced his next film independently, and parlayed its success into a relationship with American International Pictures, for whom he directed and produced movies through the late 60s. It was there that Corman honed his breakneck filming pace—on one 1957 movie, Corman and his crew pulled off 77 camera setups in one day (the industry average is more like 10); the shooting of another film that year spawned filmmaking’s immortal line “Who do I have to fuck to get off this picture?” In the late 1950s he met Nicholson and Robert Towne in an acting class in Los Angeles. In 1959, Corman made his cult classic A Bucket of Blood. A year later, he made The Little Shop of Horrors, which was briefly denied distribution because of its anti-Semitic overtones.

Corman cast Jack Nicholson eight times before the rest of the country discovered him in Easy Rider.

The thrill of making low-budget quickies began to fade, however, and with increased funding from A.I.P., Corman launched into what many consider his best work: an eight-film cycle based on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, including House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Raven. Lush and terrifying, these films star the likes of Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, and Peter Lorre; The Masque of the Red Death and The Tomb of Ligeia are regarded as classics of the horror genre. In 1961, Corman made his first financial failure after 17 successes in a row: The Intruder, about school integration, starring William Shatner. “It was too much of a political statement,” Corman now concedes of the critically lauded work. In 1963, he made the almost incomprehensible cult oddity The Terror; two of its five directors were Coppola and Nicholson. “It is something, in color, called The Terror, which it most certainly is,” wrote New York Times critic Bosley Crowther. (While European critics love Corman’s work, the Americans generally revile it.)

Eager to move on to bigger movies, Corman signed with Columbia Pictures in the mid-60s, only to bail out when it became clear that Columbia wanted him to continue making low-budget films. Corman returned to A.I.P., where he very successfully started to exploit the youth culture: his Wild Angels—cast with actual Hell’s Angels, some of whom saw fit to rough up Corman’s assistant, Peter Bogdanovich, during the filming of a fight scene—was made for just $360,000 but grossed more than $25 million. He then made Bloody Mama, an indictment of maternal smothering, starring Shelley Winters and Robert De Niro, in one of his first feature-film roles; the film’s end title reads, hilariously, “In memory of all mothers.”

Nineteen seventy was a watershed year for Corman. He married Julie Halloran, a researcher for the Los Angeles Times who had helped start the paper’s book-review section; he founded New World; and he halted his directing career. The reasoning behind this last decision was twofold. He had directed almost 50 films in 15 years and was exhausted; three of them—The Wild Angels, The Trip, and Gas-s-s-s!— focused on the counterculture and had been heavily edited by A.I.P. He did not direct again for 20 years. “I wasn’t against directing,” Corman says, “I just didn’t have any great ideas.” (He returned in 1990, when he directed Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound, starring John Hurt and Raul Julia, for Twentieth Century Fox.)

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In 1972, anxious to inject New World’s image with the redemptive quality of Art, Corman decided to start distributing films by Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, and Truffaut. Many best-foreign-picture nominations ensued, as did praise from Ingmar Bergman when Corman put Cries and Whispers into drive-ins. (“He was delighted,” recalls Corman. “He felt it was an audience he had never reached before.”) In 1983, Corman sold New World for $16.5 million; that same year he opened Concorde Films, choosing the name because he had read that hard C’s were important selling sounds.

Many of the films that Corman directed were made in less than two weeks for well under $100,000.

'Read the script, rewrite as much as you want, but remember, Marty, that you must have some nudity at least every 15 pages. Not complete nudity, maybe a little off the shoulder, or some leg, just to keep the audience interest up.” That’s what Corman told Martin Scorsese before sending him off to direct the Depression-era drama Boxcar Bertha. Over the years, Corman has memorized the speech he gives all his first-time directors, and has filled it with helpful tips. “I’m trying to put a floor under them,” Corman says of the speech. “If they follow what I say, it comes close to guaranteeing that, at the very worst, they will do adequate commercial work.”

It is as a nurturer of talent and as a provider of opportunity that Corman seems to have hit his professional stride. Having proclaimed to his colleagues, “Anyone who can operate a lathe drill can direct a movie,” he yields to his directors an enormous amount of freedom once they start shooting. Moreover, he understands that his directors will ultimately outgrow him: “Ron, do a good job for me,” he told Howard during pre-production on Grand Theft Auto, “and then you’ll never have to work for me again.”

The flip side of the Faustian bargain a filmmaker makes with Corman—let alone the likelihood that his film, unable to compete with major-studio fare, will go straight to video—has to do with Corman’s tightfistedness about time and money. And, for some, with the limitations of his vision. “I’m not sure he always understood or knew what I was trying to do,” says director Paul Bartel, who, after working on 10 films for Corman, was not able to interest him in making his cult classic Eating Raoul. Catherine Cyran, Corman’s former assistant and director of three films for Concorde, says of the tendency of Corman movies to objectify women, “It isn’t reconcilable. I don’t approve.” Indeed, Corman’s adherence to the principles of exploitation can be myopic: hot on the heels of success with Cool Breeze, a 1972 all-black version of The Asphalt Jungle, Corman told Scorsese he would back Mean Streets if Scorsese would make it all-black, too.

In the end, though, the opportunities that Corman has provided over the years have generated an enormous amount of goodwill. “I was a nobody,” Nicholson has said. “And I am eternally grateful Roger Corman stuck with me, because I didn’t have anything else going for me.” The goodwill flows even from the quarters where you would least expect it. “It was a fabulous lesson for me,” says feminist author Rita Mae Brown of her experience writing Slumber Party Massacre for Corman. One way that former employees, particularly Coppola and Demme, pay tribute to their mentor is by casting him in small parts in their movies. Sometimes a hint of retribution is apparent—in The Howling, Joe Dante had Corman fishing for change at a phone booth; in Apollo 13, Howard had Corman carping about the expense of the space program—but Corman nevertheless gallantly plays along. “I enjoy it,” he says, “but I don’t take it seriously.”

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What he is serious about is his own family. He and Julie—who with her husband owns Concorde-New Horizons and who, in producing family fare such as The Dirt Bike Kid and serious dramas such as Da, starring Martin Sheen, has helped to broaden the company’s repertoire—have four children. The eldest, Catherine, will graduate from Harvard in June and may take a job with her father; the next, Roger, is at Berkeley.

How will he end? Will he end? Given that a by-product of a career in the cinema is immortality, a certain part of Roger Corman will, of course, remain forever; this one man has made, inspired, or paved the way for thousands of movies. But sometimes, watching him in action, it is tempting to think that the man himself will go on forever; it is tempting to think that, just as in one of Corman’s movies, our hero’s final adversary will amount to nothing more than fierce-looking stock footage. His unceasing output suggests a life force that goes on and on and on. The end may be Poe-like: the coffin is exhumed many years later, and the position of the corpse reveals a struggle after burial.