Saw Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, a documentary about prolific cheap film producer Roger Corman whose titles include Death Race 2000, The Big Bird Cage, The House of Usher, and the original version of Little shop of Horrors, upon which the musical was based, upon which was based the Steve Martin film everyone knows. He directs wild, freewheeling exploitation genre films. He discovered Jack Nicholson and William Shatner, both known themselves for crazy-eyed, go-for-broke performances. His films are lurid and stupid and amazing. However he is also an artist of some renown and thus is responsible for a few breakthroughs.
The first such breakthrough was with the youth-centric films of the 50s. The kids of america were sick to death of cheery little disney films and wholesome entertainment. They wanted something more aggressive, something that would allow them to dream about conquering the authority figures who seemed so powerful. The documentary draws a parallel between these outsider kids and Roger, a man whose work was roundly rejected by the respected established machinery of Hollywood.
Roger went on to discover girls and tits and aliens and explosions. Although he helped to distribute the films of Kurosawa and Bergman, he only produced films that would be the primeval ancestors of the summer blockbuster. Effusive praise is heaped on Roger by modern artsploitation kings, such as Tarantino, Carradine, and Scorcese (who is wryly introduced by the documentary as "Director of Boxcar Bertha")
This film is a love-letter to the accidental art of the cheap film. It seductively promises hidden gems, lurking in dollar-store direct-to-video bins. It half-heartedly condemns the Hollywood machine that first cast him out and then cannibalized him, but the film's true heart is in just chuckling over the sheer shameless, brave madness required to create such pure candy of films as Piranha, or It Conquered the World, or Night of the Blood Beast. Great fun.
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