When people think of the New Hollywood auteurs who cut their teeth in the court of B-movie king Roger Corman, the names that come to mind are Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, and Martin Scorsese.
But Stephanie Rothman, who also worked as a director for Corman, was never afforded the opportunity to graduate from making low-budget exploitation fare to the mainstream studio system. “The cinema I longed to make remains an unhealed wound in my head,” says the 88-year-old. “But we all have wounds we live with, if we want to stay sane.” What the proto-feminist painter Artemisia Gentileschi was to the 17th-century Renaissance, Stephanie Rothman was to the 1970s grind house.
