Roger Corman, 98, Dies; Prolific Master of Low-Budget Cinema

He was hired as a messenger at 20th Century Fox for $32.50 a week and eventually rose to story reader. But, he wrote in his memoir, “I knew I was going to be a writer, producer or director of motion pictures, and I needed more background in the arts of the 20th century.” He enrolled at the University of Oxford on the G.I. Bill to study the work of T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence.

After six months at Oxford and six months in Paris, he came home and sold a chase-across-the-desert script to Allied Artists for $3,500. He was so unhappy with the finished film, “Highway Dragnet,” directed by Nathan Juran, that he decided to become his own producer.

An Inauspicious Start

With the $3,500, a borrowed one-man submarine and $6,500 raised from a dozen friends, he was almost ready to film “Monster From the Ocean Floor,” a movie about a man-eating mutant spawned by atomic testing. But he needed another $2,000 and a director. He got both by offering the directing job to a young actor, Wyott Ordung, if Mr. Ordung, who also appeared in the film, would put up the last $2,000.

On his first few movies, Mr. Corman produced, thought up the story, drove the equipment truck and filled in as a stunt driver. Knowing nothing about directing but needing another outlet for his energy, he became his own director in 1955 with “Five Guns West.” For the next 15 years, he directed almost all the films he produced.

He earned his first taste of respectability and the favor of European critics with a series of horror films based on Edgar Allan Poe stories, most of them starring Vincent Price. The series began with “House of Usher” in 1960, with a script by the science-fiction writer Richard Matheson, and culminated in 1964 with “The Masque of the Red Death,” photographed by Nicolas Roeg, and “The Tomb of Ligeia.”