RIP Roger Corman

You might have guessed that Roger Corman was one of my two favorites, the other being Stanley Kubrick.

At the age of 10 I was hiking to the Roxy theater in Santa Rosa to see the Roger Corman movies,
starting with The Pit and the Pendulum, and I missed very few. It is fair to say they had a strong
influence on my development, but Roger as their creator did not register. In 1982 at Threshold,
someone gave me a book (1982) about Roger that put all the pieces together:

https://www.amazon.com/films-Roger-Corman-Brilliance-budget/dp/0668053089

Years later, my wife and I were in a conversation about "who would you have dinner with if it could
be anyone" and I said "Roger Corman" That Christmas I received an invitation to have lunch with
Roger at the Grill, a Hollywood watering hole, this having been arranged by Jill through my sister
the attorney. She had written the letter to Corman's offices, explaining to Jill that "If it has
attorney's return address they will open it."

So I flew down to LA and drove to The Grill in a little back alley at the corner of Wilshire and Rodeo.
Arriving early I discovered that few doors away was the West Coast Picasso outlet, so I spent a couple
hours there, a story for another occasion...

So I had a long lunch with Roger Corman, and it was everything I could have wanted. It turned out
that we had a lot in common, he was more than generous with his time, and it was an amazing experience.

A few years ago he was hospitalized for an abdominal issue, and it happened that an old friend was
the administrator, who was "managing by walking around", happened upon Corman's chart, and remembered
my lunch story. He took a look at it and found something that sent Roger into surgery immediately for removal
of a tumor. He later commented that it was a lucky lunch.

So here's to Roger Corman, who created so many great (or at least interesting) movies and gave half of
Hollywood a career, not to mention inspiring more than one amplifier design.
 

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