In 1954, a young filmmaker named Roger Corman received his first screen credits as writer and associate producer of Allied Artists' "Highway Dragnet". Later that year, he independently produced his first movie, "The Monster from the Ocean Floor", on a $12,000 budget and a six-day shooting schedule. In 1955, Corman produced and directed the first official ARC release, "Apache Woman", one of five movies he had a hand in directing that year. Within a few months he would direct "Day the World Ended", half of Arkoff and Nicholson's first twin-bill package, and one of the first AIP films, "It Conquered the World". Corman would go on to direct over fifty feature films through 1990. As of 2007, he remained active as a producer, with more than 350 movies to his credit. Often referred to as the "King of the B's", the historically sensitive Corman has said that "to my way of thinking, I never made a 'B' movie in my life", as B movies, in the classic Hollywood sense of the term, were dying out by the time he began making pictures. He prefers to describe his metier as "low-budget exploitation films." In later years Corman, both with AIP and as head of his own companies, would help launch the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, Robert Towne, Jack Nicholson, and Robert De Niro, among many others.