Why Francis Ford Coppola Made B-Movies and Adult Films Before The Godfather

Why Francis Ford Coppola Made B-Movies and Adult Films Before The Godfather

Five-time Oscar-winning legend Francis Ford Coppola has experienced a long and varied filmmaking career, but before the acclaim, the iconic auteur got his start in B-Movies and adult films. Best known for helming The Godfather trilogy and his problematic Vietnam magnum opus Apocalypse Now, Coppola was notable for being one of the first wave of film students to break into the studio system in the late-1960s. Penning the Academy Award-winning screenplay for Patton in 1970, Coppola would usher in the New Hollywood era with radical films like The Conversation and strike a chord with his collaborations with The Outsiders author S.E. Hinton in the early 1980s.

Coppola worked his way up by working on practically any production where he could gain experience, including what was then dubbed “nudie cuties,” which were films that showed nudity, but not sexuality. He first made an unfinished short film called The Peeper in 1962, which was expanded and re-edited into Tonight For Sure. Coppola was then quickly hired to do the same thing for a German sexploitation film called The Bellboy and the Playgirls. Before big projects came his way and his famous family flooded Hollywood, Coppola studied under low-budget producer extraordinaire Roger Corman, serving as an uncredited director on the cheaply made horror film The Terror and then shooting his first full-length feature, Dementia 13, over the course of nine days for $40,000.

Coppola took on these seemingly peculiar projects to gain experience and give his film career momentum. The filmmaker took every opportunity that came his way, including working as the dialogue director on the Corman film Tower of London, taking care of sound recording on The Young Racers, re-editing movies from the Soviet Union in order to “Americanize” them, and even serving as a second unit director or helping with script continuity. He even co-wrote This Property Is Condemned and Is Paris Burning? in 1966 and learned how to self-fund his projects. Nothing was beneath him, an attitude that ultimately helped him become a well-rounded filmmaker. Because of the experience at such a young age, Coppola was able to wow with his student film, You’re a Big Boy Now, a comedy that earned him his Master’s Degree at UCLA and opened the door to Hollywood.

Why Francis Ford Coppola Made B-Movies and Adult Films Before The Godfather

Given that Coppola worked on big-budget Hollywood projects far earlier than his contemporaries like Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg, his background gave him the confidence to direct stars like Marlon Brando, take on big-budgeted productions, and even tackle more personal projects like Tucker: A Man and His Dream. Given the early exposure on set in such a variety of different production roles, Coppola’s cinematic understanding has also seemingly led him to play with different aspects like the cinematography in Rumble Fish or with genres like horror in Dracula.

These early films have not aged well and are even hard to find, but the adage of “you have to start somewhere” rings true, proving that you can work your way up and use experience and knowledge to build up to bigger experiences. Case and point, The Godfather came exactly ten years after the adult entertainment and became the biggest movie of all time. Francis Ford Coppola has come a long way since adult films and B-movies, but the filmmaker has never shied away from his past, instead giving those early projects respect and gratitude.