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  Early Years

  Francis Ford Coppola was born in Detroit, Michigan, on April 7, 1939, to Carmine and Italia Coppola. He received his middle name because he was born in the capital of the American automobile industry, in Henry Ford Hospital. Furthermore, his father was flautist and assistant conductor for the “Ford Sunday Evening Hour” radio concerts. He has used his full name professionally for most of his career, although he temporarily suppressed his middle name in the early 1980s when he heard that people tend to dismiss as an upstart someone who calls himself by three names. (His director’s credit on The Outsiders reads “directed by Francis Coppola.”) But he eventually reinstated “Ford” at the behest of distributors who wanted him to keep his full name for consistency’s sake.

  Young Francis was raised in a second-generation Italian American family. He was the second of three offspring, with an older brother, August, and a younger sister, Talia. He attended no less than twenty-two schools, necessitated by his father’s travels around the country at various times conducting the pit band for touring stage shows. But his childhood was spent mostly in Queens, and he thus has always considered his roots to be in New York.

  Because his family moved around so much, Francis was all too often the new kid on the block. He was skinny and awkward and describes himself in those days as an ugly duckling, comparing himself to Ichabod Crane, the graceless, scrawny central character in Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow. (Perhaps he recalled this childhood memory when he served as executive producer on a film adaptation of Sleepy Hollow in 1999.)

  While Francis was enrolled at New York City School P.S. 109 (the same school attended by the hero of You’re a Big Boy Now, his first Hollywood studio film), he suffered a great misfortune. In 1949, when he was nine, there was a polio epidemic in the New York area. After a Cub Scout outing in which the troop got caught in a deluge, Francis was dispatched to Jamaica Hospital in Queens with a stiff neck. The hospital did not have room for all of the polio cases, so there were racks of youngsters billeted in the corridors, he among them. The next day he tried to get out of bed only to fall on the floor. He could no longer move his arms and legs. Francis was paralyzed for a year, which he spent in his bedroom at home.

  No other children came to visit, because polio was a contagious disease. But nearly half a century later, when he made Jack, a film about a freakish kid with no friends, he remembered when, as a polio victim, he longed to play with other children. Still, some of his relatives brought him presents to cheer him up. “I had a television, an 8 mm movie projector, a tape recorder, a ventriloquist’s dummy, and puppets,” he recalls; “I became a ventriloquist and a puppeteer. I watched television a lot.”3 After nine months, young Francis began to recover, and he went back to school.

  The experience had been traumatic for Francis, who was left permanently with a slight limp. Indeed, the memory of this childhood episode surfaces in a monologue delivered by the hero of his film The Conversation, who remembers being paralyzed as a child. Significantly, the gadgets Francis had been given to occupy his time while he was quarantined continued to interest him, thereby beginning a lifelong preoccupation with technology. He cut together 8 mm home movies that his family had shot and invented stories out of them—tales in which he would always come out as the hero. Francis employed his tape recorder to add sound to these movies. He would then show his synchronized films to the neighborhood kids and charge admission. “I had a little movie company there on 212th Street in Queens,” he says.4

  Coppola realizes in retrospect that these home movies were the genesis of his ambition to become a filmmaker, someone who could bring together scenery, lights, dramatic action, and music to tell a story on film. His interest in movies was further sparked by his brother August, who took him to matinees at a movie theater on Queens Boulevard. He loved adventure films with Errol Flynn and horror movies—like the Bela Lugosi classic Dracula, which he would remake some four decades later.

  Talia Shire, his younger sister, recalls that, for her generation, Italian American parents wanted their sons to enter one of the professions, like law or medicine. Therefore, when Francis asked his mother for money to direct a home movie with a little Kodak camera, she refused. Francis recalls going “to the janitor, who gave me a quarter to help me.”5

  At age fifteen Francis won a scholarship to play the tuba in the band at the New York Military Academy at Cornwall-on-Hudson, where he transferred in his junior year of high school. Still the awkward, sickly adolescent, he hated what he termed the “phoney baloney” regime at the military school, with its overemphasis on sports, from which he was excluded because of his limp. Finally, when the script and lyrics he wrote for a school musical were revised by the faculty without his consent, he angrily quit the academy. Francis knocked around New York City for a few days and experienced some little adventures that he would later recall when he was making You’re a Big Boy Now—in which the hero rambles around New York and gets into trouble. He transferred in due course to Great Neck High on Long Island, from which he graduated in 1956.

  His heartfelt performance in the title role of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, plus some plays he had written, secured for him a drama scholarship for Hofstra University, in Hempstead, New York, where he majored in Theater Arts. Since Coppola had not attended any one high school long enough to make friends, Hofstra was important for him in that he developed a circle of friends among the theater majors.

  Two of his classmates, Ronald Colby and Robert Spiotta, would later be involved in producing some of his films. James Caan, who would appear in The Godfather and other Coppola pictures, was another classmate, as was Lainie Kazan, whom Coppola would cast in One from the Heart. Coppola participated in a variety of activities while attending Hofstra: He contributed short stories and one-act plays to The Word, the student magazine, thereby developing his skills as a creative writer. And he directed successful student productions of Eugene O’Neills one-acter, Rope, and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Coppola’s productions were much admired for the technical proficiency with which he mounted them, and he finally won the Hofstra Award for outstanding service to the Hofstra Theater Arts Department, conferred on him by the chair of the department.

  Nevertheless, he was still fascinated by cinema and founded the Hofstra Cinema Workshop, a club that screened 16 mm prints of classic films. After watching Ten Days that Shook the World (1928, a film about the Russian Revolution), Ivan the Terrible (1946), and other movies made by the legendary Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, Coppola wanted more than ever to be a movie director. “On Monday I was in the theater” he remembers. “On Tuesday I wanted to be a filmmaker.” Still he continued to devote himself to stage projects for the time being. “I was dying to make a film “ he explains, but he followed Eisenstein’s example by gaining experience in the theater before devoting himself to a film career.6 Coppola learned how to build and light sets, as well as how to direct actors for stage productions, because that is precisely how Eisenstein began. In due course he sold his car to purchase a 16 mm movie camera. He attempted to make a short film about a mother whose children disappear mysteriously during a trip to the country, but he possessed neither the experience nor the technical expertise to complete the project. Nevertheless, he had acquired a well-rounded experience in theater production while at Hofstra.

  Hoping to gain the expertise necessary to be a bona fide filmmaker, Coppola enrolled in the master’s program in film at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) after his graduation from college in 1960. At the time that Coppola entered the graduate program in film at UCLA, attending a film school had not yet become fashionable on university campuses. Film was simply not considered a serious academic major. Indeed, the UCLA film school was housed in wooden Quonset huts left over from World War II, which were situated in a wooded area that was isolated from the rest of the campus and the rest of the student body. Most of the film students were older than Coppola, and he experienced n
one of the camaraderie that he fondly remembered from the Hofstra Theater Arts Department. Carroll Ballard, who would later direct The Black Stallion (1979) with Coppola as his producer, states that the atmosphere was “competitive and ego-driven” and hence not very congenial—many of the students pictured themselves as the next Stanley Kubrick.7

  “All they knew,” adds Coppola, “was how to criticize the lazy ways of Hollywood film producers,” implying that they alone would be capable of making great motion pictures. Still, he made a few friends, including Steve Burum (who would photograph both The Outsiders and Rumble Fish for Coppola in the years ahead), Dennis Jakob (who subsequently served as a consultant on Coppola’s Apocalypse Now), and Jack Hill (who worked with Coppola on his early low-budget films).

  For the most part Coppola was disenchanted with the quality of the teaching and the limited filmmaking facilities at the UCLA film school: “We were given minuscule amounts of 8 mm film. We were put in a field and told to bring back a film.”8 Gradually, the students were taught to work with sound. They occasionally had access to a 16 mm camera and eventually to a Moviola to edit the footage they had shot. Furthermore, Coppola found the curriculum too close to that of a vocational training school. Since he had been schooled in the theater at Hofstra, he yearned to learn more about acting and directing, not just about the technical side of cinema.

  Coppola did manage to put together a promising featurette while at UCLA, a slight comedy entitled Aymonn the Terrible. It included a reference to Eisenstein’s Ten Days That Shook the World, which contains a striking shot of a huge bust of the former czar. Coppola’s scenario centers on Aymonn, a narcissistic sculptor who creates a twelve-foot bust of himself. The picture was photographed in part by Steve Burum, who was considered the best cinematographer in the film program.

  One of the faculty was former film director Dorothy Arzner (Craig’s Wife, 1936), the best-known woman director in Hollywood in the 1930s. She was impressed with Coppola’s student films and encouraged him to pursue a career as a commercial film director. Nonetheless, the notion of entering the movie business by way of one’s film school training was simply unheard of at the time. The common practice in the Hollywood studios was for an aspiring movie director to serve an apprenticeship in a film studio, where he would have to work his way up to the status of director by way of lesser jobs. So Coppola’s prospects for carving out a career as a Hollywood director were not very promising at that point.

  Meanwhile, Coppola was perennially broke. He could barely exist on the ten-dollar-a-week allowance his father sent him, and he also had to pay his tuition. He finally saw some light at the end of the tunnel when some friends of his suggested that he make a nudie film. He wrote a script and shopped it around until he managed to raise two thousand dollars to shoot the picture. At age twenty-one Coppola was entering the film business on the very bottom rung of the ladder by making a short entitled The Peeper. It was the only chance he had, Coppola explains, to actually “fool around with a camera and cut a film.”9

  The movie had a “cute” little premise, he recalls. Benjamin Jabowski, a would-be voyeur, hears about a photographer who is shooting pin-up pictures in the building next door to his apartment. The flimsy plotline deals with Ben’s efforts to sneak a peek at the photo sessions. But all of his attempts to do so backfire in a farcical fashion. For example, he laboriously hauls a gigantic telescope up to his room and focuses it on the window of the photographer’s studio across the way, but the lens is so powerful that all he glimpses is a belly button.

  Undeterred, Ben then peeks at the girls through the skylight on the roof above the studio. But he becomes so distraught when the photographer catches him in the act that he falls through the skylight into the studio below. Slapstick episodes like this in the movie prompt Coppola to describe The Peeper as a sort of “Tom and Jerry” cartoon. Actually the film may be looked upon as implicitly foreshadowing The Conversation, which deals very seriously with another kind of eavesdropping—that of a professional surveillance technician.

  Coppola constructed some simple, minimal sets in an abandoned department store in Venice, a town near Los Angeles. The sets consisted of four flats with pictures hung on them. “I had so little money, that I had no place to sleep, except on the set,” he remembers. It was very depressing to shoot scenes with a girl cavorting on a bed during the day “and then have to sleep in the same bed at night.”10

  When he sought a distributor to release The Peeper, Coppola found no takers for his soft-core, slapstick flick. Finally he showed it to a smalltime distributor who already had a rather silly Western skin flick on hand called The Wide Open Spaces. This little item was about a drunken cowpoke who gets conked on the noggin by a rock. Afterward he sees naked girls instead of cows sauntering around the prairie. The company asked Coppola to intercut his film with theirs in order to have a saleable commodity. Coppola accordingly devised some new material in order to combine The Peeper with the topless Western. He then had to raise an additional three thousand dollars to shoot the new scenes. One of the backers balked at kicking in more funds for the new version of the film. According to Coppola’s classmate Frank Zuniga, who helped with the editing of the film, Coppola then slumped to the floor and began clutching his stomach as if he were having some sort of seizure. With that, the backer anted up more money for the project. This was not the last time that Coppola would manage to get an associate on a film to see things his way by what appeared to be a sudden attack of illness.11

  The plot gimmick that Coppola dreamed up to provide the narrative frame for the two stories he was knitting together into one film is built around a character from each film who shares his tale with the other. The resulting movie, eventually entitled Tonight for Sure, was first released in 1961. In it two crusty codgers, Benjamin Jabowski (Karl Schanzer) and Samuel Hill (Donald Kenney), fancy themselves moral crusaders. They meet in a tawdry strip joint on Sunset Strip called the Harem Club, where they plan to stage a protest about the lurid shows presented there.

  Each of them recounts in flashback how he arrived at his present upstanding moral stance. They are really hypocrites who furtively ogle the strippers on stage with feigned disapproval while they are ostensibly plotting their protest demonstration against such lascivious shows. (One of the strippers is dressed as a cow girl and, thus, prefigures one of the Playboy Bunnies who is similarly attired while performing in a USO show in Vietnam in Apocalypse Now.) Coppola later described the expanded version of his original film as “an inane comedy, in which you saw a couple of boobs once in a while.”12 Some commentators on Coppola’s work who have not seen Tonight for Sure have assumed that there is full frontal nudity on display in the film, which is certainly not the case. The picture qualifies as a “nudie” because of the succession of topless girls who parade through the movie. Consequently, it comes across as an extended version of a bawdy burlesque skit rather than a porno flick.

  Although both the Cowie and Schumacher biographies of Coppola assert that Tonight for Sure is a black-and-white movie, all of the footage is in color (albeit muddy, dingy color), with the color photography for the Coppola segments shot mostly by his classmate Jack Hill. Carmine Coppola (listed in the credits as Carmen) supplied the jazzy score for the picture and would score other Coppola films in the future.

  Coppola was so eager for screen credits at the beginning of his career that in the film’s opening credits he generously gave himself sole credit as director of the entire movie—although he estimates that only about half of the complete film was his work.

  After completing Tonight for Sure, Coppola was commissioned to work on another skin flick. A producer had bought the American distribution rights to a 1958 German picture entitled Mit Eva FingDie Sünde (Sin Began with Eve), which had already been dubbed into English. He commissioned Coppola to interpolate some nudie footage in color into the black-and-white film, in much the same way he had amalgamated The Peeper and The Wide Open Spaces into a single film. The final film
was retitled The Bellboy and the Playgirls (and not The Belt Girls and the Playboy, as Chaillet and Vincent erroneously assert).

  Since this was the only Coppola movie I had not seen at the time I interviewed him, I asked him about it. He answered that this picture got him a few days’ work, “adding five three-minute nudie sketches in color to a stupid German movie that had been shot in black-and-white,” amounting to fifteen minutes of additional footage.

  The Bellboy and the Playgirls was long thought to be lost after its initial release on the grind circuit in 1962 and a subsequent brief exposure on videotape. So no previous commentator on Coppola’s work had apparently seen it. But one print of the film, owned by a private collector of Coppola memorabilia, surfaced recently, and I was able to view it. Having now seen the movie, I can attest that Coppola’s recollections of it are faulty. Since Coppola’s color footage is easily identifiable in the finished film, it is possible to state that the five Coppola sequences add up to nearly fifty minutes of screen time, thereby accounting for about half of the total ninety-four-minute running time of the finished product. This is about three times more footage than Coppola remembers.

  At any rate, Al Locatelli once more designed the sets for the Coppola segments, and Jack Hill returned as cinematographer on the picture. The color sketches feature Playboy Bunny June Wilkinson. In one of them, Coppola recalls, there were five girls sitting at dressing tables in a hotel room in various stages of undress. During filming one of the girls took Coppola aside and confided, “I’m only seventeen, and my father is going to kill me.” He replied, “Well, you can keep your bra on.” Since the girls were hired and paid to do these scenes, the producer reprimanded Coppola for making this accommodation to one of the girls when he saw the completed footage.