Roger Corman took a stable engineering job in Los Angeles on a Monday and quit on Thursday. This episode traces how that four-day career became the foundation of an independent film empire spanning more than 500 films. We follow him from the 20th Century Fox mailroom at $32.50 a week to story reader, where his uncredited ideas on a Gregory Peck Western convinced him he had to become his own gatekeeper, through Oxford on the GI Bill and a $2,000 script sale that he leveraged into $12,000 to produce Monster from the Ocean Floor.

We break down the drive-in economics that made his ultra-low-budget model profitable before a film even opened, the logistics of shooting The Little Shop of Horrors in two days and a night, the 1960 pivot to color Edgar Allan Poe adaptations with Vincent Price, the counterculture hits The Wild Angels and The Trip, and ...