Godfather (5 page)

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.

Because this movie is virtually inaccessible today, I shall describe it in some detail as an example of Coppola's apprenticeship in the movie business. The original German film, directed by Fritz Umgelter, stars Willy Fritsch, an enduring actor in the German cinema for four decades. His career was winding down when he made
Mit Eva
. On the other hand, the career of Karen Dor, his co-star, was just taking off, and she would later appear in two James Bond films.

The plot of the German portions of the present film concerns Dinah (Karen Dor), a young actress who refuses to do a seduction scene during rehearsals for a stage play. She claims that she is too “old-fashioned” to appear in such a compromising scene on stage before a live audience. Gregor, the director (Willie Fritsch), endeavors to loosen her up and take away her inhibitions by telling her randy stories about sexual relations throughout the centuries. There is a flashback to ancient Greece in which a young maiden is advised by a Don Juan with a wink, “Men believe that wives are for procreation and mistresses are for recreation.” Another flashback, to the Middle Ages, shows a lascivious knight seducing a damsel while her husband is away at the Crusades. Gregor eventually coaxes Dinah into going through with the love scene in the play.

Into the German film's tedious plot Coppola inserts a naughty storyline about George (Don Kenney), the bellboy from the Happy Holiday Hotel next door to the theater. George, addressing the camera, informs the viewer that he is taking a correspondence course in how to be popular with women. He is observing the rehearsals of Gregor's play from the catwalk in the rafters above the stage in order to learn how the young man in the play ingratiates
himself with his unwilling girlfriend. He then goes back to the hotel and seeks to gain entrance to room 299—which is occupied by Madame Whimplepoole (June Wilkinson) and her Pink Lace Girls—in order to make time with the girls.

The madame assures George that she is a designer of exotic ladies' lingerie and that the scantily clad girls merely model the undies for retailers. In one of the doubles entendres with which Coppola has laced these scenes, Madame points to one of the girls wearing a diaphanous nighty and declares, “This is one of our very best bedroom accessories.” Similarly, George adds in a voice-over, “These girls are hiding something, and I must uncover it.”

George is unconvinced by the madame's explanation. Masquerading as a telephone repair man, he attempts to install surveillance equipment in room 299 (shades of Coppola's later feature
The Conversation
). As in
Tonight for Sure
, this erotic romp at times slides into slapstick. At one point the girls, who are fed up with George's obsession with them, stage a free-for-all in which they pelt George with dollops of cold cream from the jars on the dressing tables. The scene recalls the pie-throwing fights from the era of silent comedy. They finally manage to discourage George's attentions by luring him to participate in a game of strip poker—after they have stacked the deck against him. So it is George who loses his clothes. He flees from room 299 in his shorts after wrapping himself in a window curtain.

At the fade-out the chastened George is watching the lovemaking on the theater stage below as he sits once more in the rafters. Once again addressing the camera, he says that he is aware that he has failed to become a Lothario—for now at least—but he is going to continue his correspondence course in how to be popular with women.

Fritz Umgelter's stilted handling of the action in the German film makes for fairly stiff performances from his cast, and no amount of creative manipulation of the two story lines on Coppola's part could salvage the film as a whole. Still Coppola provides plenty of door slamming and misunderstandings, after the manner of old-fashioned French farce, for his segments of the movie.

Coppola does not apologize for his exploitation films. “It was the only way for me to work with a camera and actually make a movie,” he explains. He may have gained experience by working on
The Bellboy and the Play girls
, but it did not enrich his bank account. In fact, Jack Hill received an exposure meter worth twenty-five dollars for his efforts, and Coppola himself did not get much more. He was still officially a student at the UCLA film school, and he was severely criticized by his classmates “for deciding to go
into exploitation films,” as he puts it. “I was called a cop-out because I was willing to compromise.”
¹³

Tonight for Sure
was reissued in 1983, presumably to cash in on Coppola's celebrity.
Variety
at the time dubbed the sixty-six-minute exercise in primitive filmmaking “disreputable” and “ridiculous,” adding that because of the absence of “below-the-belt frontal nudity” it would no doubt have received an R rating if it had been submitted for classification by the industry film censor at its re-release. In any event, it is not the stag movie its title seems to suggest. In fact, by today's standards, the film has no more nudity than an R-rated commercial film is allowed, as
Variety
points out.

The next phase of Coppola's apprenticeship as an aspiring young filmmaker began with his accepting employment from independent producer-director Roger Corman, known as the “King of the B's” along Hollywood's Poverty Row, which churned out low-budget pictures. These small-time studios were also known as “Gower Gulch” because some of them were located on Gower Street. Corman's aim was to exploit the youth market, which still flocked to drive-ins to see his cheaply made, sensational, action-packed movies. Corman's B pictures typically ran seventy-five minutes or less and were based on weak scripts. They were shot in two weeks or so without stars or even many accomplished actors in the casts, and they employed minimal, inexpensive sets and locations.

When Corman was looking for an assistant who would work for peanuts, he approached Dorothy Arzner, Coppola's mentor at UCLA, for suggestions, and she immediately put Corman on to Coppola, her most promising student.

Coppola in turn phoned Corman's office and was told by the office manager to send over some samples of his screenwriting efforts and that she would get back to him. He had recently been notified by the phone company that his phone was to be shut off because he had not paid the bill. He remembers sitting by the phone, praying, “Please don't cut off!” In a stroke of luck, the lady called back with a job offer only a couple of hours before his phone was disconnected.
¹⁴

Coppola was the first of several young filmmakers to whom Corman provided an entry into the film business in Hollywood, a roster that includes Martin Scorsese (
Raging Bull)
, Jonathan Demme (
Silence of the Lambs)
, and Peter Bogdanovich (
The Last Picture Show)
. To his credit, Corman showed his fledgling filmmakers the ropes and taught them his efficient penny-pinching methods for making a movie on the double and on the cheap.

Corman actually thought it propitious that Coppola had been exposed
to the soft-core porn market, because it meant he had already had some experience in cutting corners while making a low-budget picture. Having been trapped temporarily in the skin flick racket, Coppola comments, “I started to move up the exploitation film ladder.” He was willing to do any kind of production work to learn his craft, and Corman provided him with ample opportunities to do just that.
¹⁵

In his autobiography Corman recounts that Coppola's first assignment involved a Russian intergalactic space picture originally entitled
Nebo Zowet
(
The Heavens Call
, 1959), which “I had acquired rather inexpensively from Mosfilm.” He asked Coppola to edit the picture “and to write and loop English dialogue, so it made sense to an American audience,” and then to shoot and insert some special effects into the science-fiction picture. The film was released in the United States as
Battle Beyond the Sun
(1963). In Corman's autobiography Coppola is cited as saying “Roger's thinking” was that he could “jazz it up for American audiences. I had to translate the images into an English storyline” with dialogue that “fit the actors' mouth movements.” Coppola did not understand a word of Russian, so he simply watched each scene and made up what he guessed the characters might be saying to each other and then dubbed in the new English dialogue in place of the original Russian dialogue on the sound track. “I'd stay up most of the night to do the sci-fi [special effects],” Coppola adds. In order to impress Corman with his industry, he would catch a few hours' sleep at the editing table; so, when Corman arrived in the morning, he would find Coppola slumped over the Moviola, asleep.
¹⁶

In one scene a Russian astronaut has a vision in which a golden astronaut holding a golden torch materializes on a crag. The vision is apparently meant to signify hope, Coppola explains. But Corman instructed him to replace the golden astronaut with “a vision of two moon monsters … battling it out.” Coppola accordingly manufactured the monsters out of foam rubber and latex for the scene: “I shot that for him and cut it into the film.” The result, Coppola comments laconically, was a violent scene “where the Russians had the Golden Astronaut of Hope.”
¹⁷
At any rate, Coppola declines to comment on the results of his handiwork—he never bothered to see the finished product.

Corman did not want American filmgoers to know that they were watching a recycled Russian movie, so he told Coppola to invent fictitious American names for the individuals listed in the movie's opening credits. Consequently, the picture's cast was ostensibly headed by “Edd Perry and Aria Powell,” while the director was said to be “Alexander Kozyr.” The only authentic names in the credits belonged to Francis Coppola, who signed
the film as associate producer, Roger Corman, who was listed as producer, and Carmen Coppola (Carmine), who was credited as composer of the underscore. Francis Coppola, of course, was gratified to have gotten a screen credit at last on a legitimate commercial film rather than on an underground skin flick.

The plot Coppola concocted for this retread of a Russian sci-fi picture revolves around rival space missions to Mars staffed by astronauts from two antagonistic powers, North Hemis and South Hemis (the astronauts were Russian and American in the original film). Reviewers found this low-rent space opera absurd and suggested that Corman should have left it in the Russian cin bin where he found it. But Coppola recalled that at least one reviewer thought the special effects—including Coppola's rubber space monsters—were good enough to keep the kids at the drive-ins from setting fire to the concession stand.

Corman was pleased that the picture turned a profit, while Coppola, for his part, was pleased that Corman had provided him with a small office and editing room as a reward for his work on the movie—although Coppola had netted only $250 for six months of labor on the project. Corman “started to see me as an all-purpose guy,” Coppola says.
¹⁸
The producer would call Coppola whenever he was in need of a low-priced assistant, usually paying Coppola $400 a week at this point—a king's ransom for a graduate student in film school. He was gaining experience, moreover, as a dialogue director, a script doctor, and a second unit director at various times.