CORMAN’S WORLD: EXPLOITS OF A HOLLYWOOD REBEL, a documentary about legendary low budget filmmaking icon Roger Corman, will have its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this weekend, but the picture has already been picked up. A&E IndieFilms purchased the rights as part of an investment in the project. Here is the synopsis:
Blue jeans, sock-hops and drive-in movies: the Fifties were America’s age of innocence. But stalking the depths of its post-nuclear bliss, mass paranoia became fuel for Joseph McCarthy’s brand of Red Scare terror propaganda. Bomb shelters were a deluxe feature in every American home, government-sponsored educational reels promised an imminent nuclear threat from across the Atlantic, and Hollywood, Babylon of the western world, hung on the brink of collapse. It was here, in the last-ditch machinations of a dying juggernaut, that a mild-mannered, civil engineer’s son would become the most influential force in modern moviemaking. Corman’s World tracks the triumphant rise of Hollywood’s most prolific writer-director-producer, the true godfather of independent filmmaking.
The doc is directed by first-tmer Alex Stapleton. It features appearances from Martin Scorcese, Jack Nicholson, Ron Howard, Jonathan Demme, Robert Deniro, Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, David Carradine, Pam Grier, Catherine Hardwicke, Eli Roth, Paul W.S. Anderso, Traci Lords (below), and more.