With the release of Jaws and Star Wars back in the 1970s, producer Roger Corman lamented that Hollywood had learned his secret. Corman, longtime peddler of drive-in schlock, had made a fortune by producing low-budget genre pictures — exploitation movies, as they would become known. For the record, the term “exploitation” didn’t have a bad connotation in this case. Corman, and those like him, exploited the thirst of the audience with his movies…and occasionally a fading star that needed a paycheck.
