Roger Corman holds a machine gun on the set of Bloody Mama, his low-budget 1970 gangster film.

For nearly 60 years, Roger Corman has been making indie films with budgets that wouldn’t even cover the catering costs of multiplex fare like Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol.

The legendary king of B-movies has produced or directed close to 400 films, including cult classics like 1960’s The Little Shop of Horrors (which he famously shot in just two days), 1975’s Death Race 2000 (co-starring a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone) and the so-bad-it’s-good Carnosaur horror series from the ’90s. In the p...