A multimillion-dollar investment gone bad became a real-life “Little Shop of Horrors” for B-movie king Roger Corman.
The Hollywood legend — who launched the careers of A-list actors and directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro through his production of low-budget indie movies in the 1960s and ’70s — lost $60 million of his and wife Julie’s savings after a Ponzi-scheming investment manager squandered their money, according to the couple’s California lawsuit.
Corman, 88, who’s made more than 400 films, started working with Nicholson in the late 1950s and then cast him in a small but memorable role in a dentist’s chair in 1960’s “Little Shop.”
“I hadn’t really worked at all before,” Nicholson once told Time magazine. “When I got the lead in the movie, I thought, ‘This is it! I’m here! I’m going to be big!’ Then I didn’t get an interview for the next year. Roger’s the only guy who hired me for 10 years.”
Nicholson also starred in the Corman-produced “The Terror” in 1963, directed by Coppola. Corman gave De Niro an early shot as a gangster in his 1970 crime caper “Bloody Mama.”
But now, a chunk of the filmmaker’s silver-screen fortune is in jeopardy after $73 million of it was unwittingly invested by a shady hedge-fund manager, the lawsuit filed earlier this week alleges.
The money was funneled into a Ponzi scheme run by Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher in 2008, although finance company Citco promised to keep the fund in a “safe, secure place,” court papers said.
About $13 million has been recouped, but another $60 million is still missing.
“He doesn’t have any idea he has his own ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ brewing with his investment manager,” the Cormans’ attorney Don Howarth told The Post. “It’s like something right out of his horror movies — a nightmare.”
Critics have long described Corman’s “studio” as a virtual hands-on film school feeding Hollywood talent.
In the early 1960s, Coppola snagged a gig post-UCLA as Corman’s assistant on the black-and-white horror flick “Dementia 13.” A decade later, Coppola won Oscars for “The Godfather.”
Scorsese and Corman teamed up as director-producer in 1972’s “Boxcar Bertha,” and five years later, a post-“Happy Days” Ron Howard directed his first feature-length film, “Grand Theft Auto,” at age 23 under Corman’s wing.
The movie came about after the two legends cut a deal in which Corman produced a movie for Howard, a budding director, if “The Andy Griffith Show” child star acted in Corman’s “Eat My Dust” in 1976.
“He always told me: ‘Don’t congratulate yourself after you get a shot. Just run to the next setup and go,’ ” Howard told the New York Times in 2010.
In 2010, Corman won an honorary Academy Award for his work in film.
A spokesman for Citco declined to comment.