RIP: Roger Corman, Pioneering Independent Producer and King of B Movies, Dies at 98.

Legendary B-movie king Roger Corman, who directed and produced hundreds of low-budget films and discovered such future industry stars as Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, has died. He was 98.

Corman died May 9 at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., surrounded by family members, the family confirmed to Variety.

“His films were revolutionary and iconoclastic, and captured the spirit of an age. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he said, ‘I was a filmmaker, just that,’” the family said in a statement.

Corman’s empire, which existed in several incarnations, including New World Pictures, and Concorde/New Horizons, was as active as any major studio and, he boasted, always profitable. He specialized in fast-paced, low-budget genre movies — horror, action, science fiction, even some family fare — and his company became a work-in-training ground for a wide variety of major talents, from actors like Nicholson (“Little Shop of Horrors”) and De Niro (“Boxcar Bertha”) to directors like Francis Ford Coppola (“Dementia 13”) and Scorsese (“Boxcar Bertha”).

There was something of a tradition among Corman’s protégés to give their former boss cameos in their films. Corman himself appears briefly as one of the US senators grilling the Corleones in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II. In the classic “terminate with extreme prejudice” scene at the beginning of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen is handed his mission to kill Col. Kurtz, his superior officers are named Col. G. Lucas and Gen. R. Corman, played by a young Harrison Ford and veteran character actor G.D. Spradlin, respectively: