Still, it was at New World that Ron Howard directed "Grand Theft Auto" (all about car crashes), Jonathan Demme directed "Caged Heat" (women's prison again) and John Sayles wrote "Piranha" ("Jaws" redux) and "Battle Beyond the Stars" (a "Star Wars," or perhaps "Battlestar Galactica," rip-off). Corman's influence on them is evident in the exploitation hearts of Howard's "Backdraft" and "Apollo 13," Demme's "Silence of the Lambs" and even Sayles' "The Brother From Another Planet." And Paul Bartel's delirious "Death Race 2000" retains enough cult appeal that a major-studio remake starring Tom Cruise, "Death Race 3000," is reportedly in the works.

In 1973, New World began an anomalous sideline business distributing foreign films in America, at a time when "art films" were the province of relatively few theaters in big cities. But Corman successfully marketed "Cries and Whispers," "Amarcord," "Autumn Sonata," "Breaker Morant," "The Tin Drum," "Fitzcarraldo" and other weighty fare across the country. Ingmar Bergman was tickled to learn that "Cries and Whispers" was showing at drive-ins, telling Corman, "Nobody ever thought of that before. I've always wanted my pictures to get the widest possible audience." Since not a lot of distributors were vying for foreign films, Corman acquired them cheaply and made money, prompting others, like the fledgling Miramax, to start snapping them up as well. Competition drove the prices way up, and Corman relinquished the field. As so often in his career, when aesthetic value conflicted with the bottom line, the bottom line held firm.

The '80s and '90s saw Corman fade into the netherworld of video and cable-TV originals with New World's successor company, Concorde/New Horizons, which has churned out a lot of martial-arts, sword-and-sorcery and horror movies, generally shot in unlikely corners of the Third World. They make money, and that's the extent of their ambition. The Concorde movies are frequently dull copies of recent hits; moreover, there are also bad sequels of dull copies of recent hits -- seven installments of the sub-sub-Van Damme kickboxing epic "Bloodfist," anyone? "Chopping Mall" (1986), a passable flick about killer robots produced by Julie Corman, is at least full of fun references: A group of besieged teens hides out in Roger's Little Shop of Pets, and veteran Corman star Dick Miller turns up briefly as the same dopey character, Walter Paisley, who a quarter-century earlier murdered people and covered them with clay to cause a beatnik art sensation in "A Bucket of Blood." As if to formally declare himself all washed up as an artist, Corman made a surprise return to directing for the 1990 time-travel stinker "Frankenstein Unbound," a film sunk by his refusal to spend a little more money on effects; nobody much noticed its brief theatrical run.

There's been a pervasive seepage of the Corman aesthetic into pop culture lately, especially in the way directors like Tarantino, David Lynch, Wes Craven and many others infuse buckets of irony into hoary exploitation subjects. In the mid-'80s, the stage and screen musical adaptation of "Little Shop of Horrors" rekindled interest in Corman's career. Five years ago he reemerged as an elder statesman of film by way of a Showtime series, "Roger Corman Presents," introducing new movies that were often inferior remakes of his classics. Besides "The Godfather Part II," you've probably seen him on-screen in "Apollo 13," playing a congressman, or in "The Silence of the Lambs," as the FBI chief, or as a courtroom witness in another Demme movie, "Philadelphia."

But as a filmmaker, he's never quite revealed himself, never put his considerable talent in the service of a really ambitious project that would display that talent fully. He never wrote the scripts he directed or showed much respect for them, nor did he care to give actors any guidance whatsoever: If they got their lines right and the camera was in focus, the scene was printed. "Art was not something I consciously aspired to create," Corman wrote in his autobiography. "My job was to be a good craftsman." Beverly Gray's biography implicitly revolves around one question: What would Roger Corman have been capable of if he had cared more about art than commerce? But obviously we'll never know. And if you don't mind leaving all expectations behind, to observe his odd genius at work through the scrim of a silly exploitation picture is still one of the more enjoyable ways to spend an hour and a half, and maybe that's enough.

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