DETROIT – Like it or not, Roger Corman is one of the most influential people in all of film.
The “King of Cult” is known for his work in independent film, distributing foreign films that maybe would not have seen the light of day in the States, his mentorship of people who became icons in the industry and famously making hundreds of low-budget movies of wildly different qualities. His IMDB page has nearly 600 movies.
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Corman was born in Detroit on April 5, 1926. After serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II, he got an engineering degree from Stanford University. His career in engineering lasted four days, quitting on the Thursday of his first week.
He wrote and co-produced his first movie, “Highway Dragnet,” a crime film B movie that was released in January 1954. While it didn’t do well critically, financially it did well enough for Corman to finance his next movie, “Monster from the Ocean Floor,” which was released in May 1954. It was about a man-eating sea creature in Mexico and took six days to film.
Most movies take at least a year to complete preproduction, filming and post-production. Big blockbuster studio films take at least two years to make. Corman managed to make and release a movie within five months. His next movie, “Day the World Ended” came out in December of the same year. The quick and cheap nature of his production became a staple of his career.
Over the next few decades, Corman managed to make at least three movies a year. They included such films as “A Bucket of Blood,” “X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes,” “She Gods of Shark Reef,” “The Wasp Woman,” “Death Race 2000,” and several underrated Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. It was a mixed bag. Corman described his filmmaking as “uninhibited, full of excess and fun.”
During this period, Corman hired and mentored several young filmmakers who would later find success, including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, Ron Howard, Joe Dante, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jonathan Demme and more.
Corman was responsible for getting many of the people associated with the New Hollywood movement into the industry.
The buried ‘Fantastic Four’ movie
An “ashcan copy” is a term that started in the 1930s to describe something being created to be thrown away for legal reasons. Several comic books have had their first issues as ashcan copies, filled with scribbles and incomplete artwork, just so they could copyright the character before anyone else could possibly use them.
It happens rarely in the film industry, but it still happens. For the most part, when a studio gets the film rights of an existing property, they’re given a time limit to go with it. If you don’t make the movie by X, the rights revert back to the original owner. Sometimes these movies get quiet releases where studios hope no one notices while they work on their real vision for the material, but sometimes they don’t release the movie at all. “Fantastic Four” is alleged to be the later type of ashcan movie.
Constantin Film AG obtained the film rights to The Fantastic Four in the mid-80s under the condition a film would go into production by Dec. 31, 1992, or the rights would revert back to Marvel. As the deadline approached, they decided to fast-track the movie and Corman -- who, again, was known to make films quickly and cheaply -- was hired to produce the film in September 1992. They began production on Dec. 28, 1992.
With the exception of a select few, everyone who worked on this movie assumed they were working on a large-budget comic book action movie that would get a huge theatrical release. Corman was one of the people who believed the movie was actually going to be released.
During production, the film was quietly purchased by Marvel for the specific purpose of making sure it would not get released. Avi Arad, who founded Marvel Studios, confirmed this in 2004, stating “We bought it to burn it. Some [bootlegs] appeared at comic book conventions just to drive us nuts. The deal was we buy it, we burn the master so we can do it right.”
The movie was basically finished when it was burned, but somehow a version managed to escape destruction. Pirated and bootleg versions of the movie circulated on VHS tapes before finding its way onto the internet.
Oley Sassone, who directed the movie, is much more supportive of the bootleg and pirated versions online.
“Thank God somebody bootlegged it and got it out there,” he told Vice in 2015.
Some of the cast members have called for Disney, who now owns the rights, to release the movie 30 years later. Disney has a new adaptation of Marvel’s First Family in the works featuring Pedro Pascal as Mister Fantastic. They likely won’t release the original 1994 adaptation, but they’ve made some surprising decisions in the past.
While Corman’s “Fantastic Four” remains trapped in the Negative Zone, he’s not the only Michigander who has worked on a Marvel movie. Sam Raimi, a native of Royale Oak, famously directed the 2002-2007 Spider-Man trilogy and later made 2022′s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”
The new “The Fantastic Four” is expected to be released July 25, 2025. It likely will have a larger budget than the 1994 adaptation.
