The last of my holy trinity of American pop culture (Stan Lee, Chuck Jones, and Corman) has finally passed away.
IIRC Wasn’t Corman an investor/backer in Easy Rider? IMDB doesn’t give him a producer credit. But he had such close ties with Peter Fonda and Nicholson. He must of been involved in some way.
Corman had made several biker films. He cast Peter Fonda in The Wild Angels a few years before Easy Rider.
My favorite Corman films are Bloody Mama with Shelly Winters and Robert De Niro in an early role. Boxcar Bertha with David Carradine and Barbara Hershey was way ahead of its time. Very edgy. Then he produced Big Bad Mama with Shatner and Angie Dickinson.
He also showed up in Apollo 13, as the Congressman who Jim Lovell is giving a tour to, who expresses doubts about whether continuing the space program is worth the costs.
I’ll say this for him. He was making movies with strong women characters when that wasn’t really a thing. Beverly Garland didn’t take no crap from anybody.
He used female crew behind the scenes, too. He wanted good people who would work for the price he paid. Gender and race were irrelevant.
There were three versions There was a made for TV version with Michael York in 1995. Corman executive produced all three.
Damn. I grew up on cheap Roger Corman flicks. Sometimes he even got some money and actual stars, like when he made Frankenstein Unbound back in 1999 – Corman wrote and directed that one, based on a Brian Aldiss novel, starring John Hurt, Raul Julia, and Bridget Fonda.
More often he stuck to exec. producing. But his stuff – even when awful – was pretty memorable. His *Little Shop of Horrors cost almost nothing and was shot in only a couple of days. *