Aesthetics of a ‘schlockmeister’

If you haven’t heard of Roger Corman, surely you’ve seen a movie that was influenced by him.

In 2009, Corman was honored at the Academy Awards with a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, a long-overdue honor for an incredibly long, resourceful and feistily independent career making low-budget exploitation pictures, and for nurturing the early talents of such filmmakers as Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme and more too numerous to mention.

Luckily, most of those “more” are on hand in “Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel,” Alex Stapleton’s lively, engrossing and enlightening documentary about a career that can be described as surprising on multiple counts.

For one, Corman didn’t train to be a movie director (he graduated from Stanford in engineering). His patrician, well-mannered gentility made him better suited for the thoughtful, socially aware dramas he tried to make, before bowing to audience demand in churning out dozens of quick, low-budget horror and action flicks.

The director-producer who made box office gold with such exploitation titles as “Swamp Women,” “Bloody Mama” and “Women in Cages” provided crucial on-the-job training for such female filmmakers as Polly Platt, Penelope Spheeris and Catherine Hardwicke. And even while his company was producing such lowbrow exploitation pictures as “The Hot Box” and “Night Call Nurses” in the 1970s, it was distributing sensitive art-house films by Ingmar Bergman and Francois Truffaut. » Read more: Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel