Corman tells of his life and career making movies.

In these pages Roger Corman, the most successful independent filmmaker in Hollywood relates his experiences as the director and/or producer of such low-budget classics Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Little Shop of Horrors, The Raven, The Man with the X-ray Eyes, The Wild Angels, The Trip, Night Call Nurses, Bloody Mama, Piranha, and many others. He also discusses his distribution of the Bergman, Fellini, and Truffaut movies that later won Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Film category. Corman alumni—John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Vincent Price, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Peter Fonda, Joe Dante, and Jonathan Demme, among others—contribute their recollections to give added perspective to Corman's often hilarious, always informative autobiography.

Takes a look at a pioneering independent filmmaker who has produced more than 250 films on shoestring budgets (nearly all of them successful) and influenced a generation of filmmakers, including Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese.

A pioneer of independent cinema, Roger Corman is a fascinating study in contrasts. As the original King of the Exploitation Film, he has filled his movies with images of blood-sucking vampires, rampaging biker gangs, vigilante strippers, and abducting aliens, all while producing each of his four-hundred-plus films on a shoestring budget and making a profit on nearly every one. In the process, Corman became the role model for today’s independent filmmaker. This guru with a vision has also demonstrated an uncanny eye for talent, being among the first to recognize and employ the abilities of Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Ron Howard, John Sayles, and James Cameron to name but a few. Through interviews with eighty of Corman’s friends and associates and photographs, Beverly Gray takes you behind the cameras and into the heart of Cormanville for a firsthand, insider’s look at the man and the mogul, providing a compelling private and public perspective on this soft-spoken giant of the cinema.

In this autobiography, Roger Corman, the independent Hollywood film maker, relates his experiences as the director and/or producer of low-budget movies such as 'Attack of the Crab Monsters', 'The Little Shop of Horrors', 'The Man with the X-ray Eyes', 'The Wild Angels', 'Bloody Mama' and 'Piranha'.

Journey into the realm of VHS tapes and midnight showings where brawny barbarians rescue nubile virgins from evil wizards, giant snakes, and armies of the undead! Although originating in the era of the pulp magazines, sword and sorcery fiction enjoyed a cinematic boom in the 1980s; a decade that gave us Conan the Barbarian and The Beastmaster as well as more low-budget offerings like the Roger Corman-produced Deathstalker series and the Italian entries like Conquest and the Ator saga. Some of these movies are fondly remembered as cult classics today but many were released directly to VHS and lurked on the shelves of video rental stores before vanishing into obscurity. While some have long since lost their lustre, there are plenty of diamonds in the rough to be found. This book takes a comprehensive look at over 40 sword and sorcery movies from the 1980s, from the towering titans to the bargain basement sleaze-fests, unearthing them from their tombs and dusting them off so that they may shine once more.