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.
Related: Apocalypse Now: Why Francis Ford Coppola Fired The Original Willard Actor
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
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