Corman's been known for several decades as "the King of the B's," as in B-movies -- the cinematic world of papier-mâché aliens, mad sorcerers, car chases, exploding heads and topless outdoor catfights. But zoom in on the ceremonies for the 1974 Academy Awards: Francis Ford Coppola won Oscars for best picture, director and adapted screenplay for "The Godfather Part II," Robert Towne won the best original screenplay award for "Chinatown," and Jack Nicholson, Talia Shire and Diane Ladd were among the acting nominees. What they had in common was that they'd all worked for Roger Corman as wet-eared novices in the '50s and '60s.

For good measure, the best foreign film Oscar that year went to Federico Fellini's "Amarcord," which Corman's company, New World Pictures, released in America; the film for which Ladd was nominated, "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," was directed by Martin Scorsese, whose first major feature, "Boxcar Bertha," had been produced by Corman. What exquisite taste, what an eagle eye for talent! To top it off, Corman himself acted in Coppola's award-winning film, as one of the senatorial inquisitors in the big Mafia-hearing scene. So why wasn't Corman nominated for anything? Because in 1974, his company's premier productions were the likes of "Big Bad Mama," "TNT Jackson," "Caged Heat" and, of course, "Candy Stripe Nurses."

In the past half-century, Corman has produced, directed and/or distributed hundreds of movies, nearly all of them shot at breakneck speed on shoestring budgets, nearly all of them commercially successful, a rather large percentage of them -- how does one phrase it? -- beyond the bounds of conventional film criticism. Corman, like Mickey Rourke and Jerry Lewis, is esteemed in France, but you don't need to share the Gallic sense of whimsy to appreciate at least some aspect of his career in movies. "A Bucket of Blood" and "Little Shop of Horrors" paved the way for Sam Raimi's bravura no-budget horror comedies and for the gorily wry "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

The remarkably stylish Edgar Allan Poe adaptations Corman directed in the early '60s have justly been a staple of off-hours TV programming for ages. He inaugurated two of the great exploitation genres of the '60s, outlaw-biker and psychedelic-drug movies, with "The Wild Angels" and "The Trip," respectively. And after he retired from directing in 1970, he started New World Pictures and invited a generation to indulge, repeatedly, in the cinema of student nurses, student teachers and women in prison. (I don't think he ever got around to a movie about student nurses in prison, but I'd be surprised if he hadn't thought about it seriously.)

Corman defined his field in his delightful 1990 autobiography, "How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime":

"Exploitation" films were so named because you made a film about something wild with a great deal of action, a little sex, and possibly some sort of strange gimmick; they often came out of the day's headlines. It's interesting how, decades later, when the majors saw they could have enormous commercial success with big-budget exploitation films, they gave them loftier terms -- "genre" films or "high concept" films.

"Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Biography of the Godfather of Indie Filmmaking," a combative but insightful new book by Corman's former story editor Beverly Gray, elucidates the paradigm shift in Hollywood that occurred after the twin box-office triumphs of "Jaws" and "Star Wars." Before Spielberg and George Lucas, studios allotted big budgets to historical epics and character-driven dramas while tossing off exploitation films on the cheap, so Corman was at least competing in the same ballpark as the majors (albeit from left field). Since the mid-'70s, the studios' priorities have flipped and they've poured all their resources into aping, with far more polish, Corman's audience-pleasing strategies -- tongue-in-cheek, $100 million Arnold Schwarzenegger and Will Smith blow'em-ups that simply out-Corman Corman. A former Corman screenwriter pointed out to Gray that in Hollywood today, "There's nowhere you can go that isn't Corman."

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