Roger Corman

Roger Corman was born in Detroit in 1926 to Anne High and William Corman, a civil engineer of Russian Jewish descent. He directed or produced more than five hundred films, almost all of them cheap and fast, and in doing so ran what everyone in Hollywood came to call the Corman Film School: Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich, Ron Howard, Joe Dante, John Sayles and James Cameron all got their first job from him, and Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda and Robert De Niro got early breaks. New World Pictures, which he founded in 1970, also brought Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut and Kurosawa to American audiences — in one ten-year stretch it won more Academy Awards for best foreign film than every other studio combined. He received an honorary Oscar in 2009.