Godfather

by Gene D. Phillips

  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.

  Working for Corman, Coppola explains, “I felt as if I were climbing the ranks of the cinema industry.” His peers at UCLA, as ever, regarded his employment as Corman’s “roustabout” as treason. They insisted that they would never stoop to working on exploitation films for the youth market and snidely predicted that Coppola would wind up a Hollywood hack. “I was prepared to do anything in order to make more films,” Coppola counters, and the best opportunity afforded him at the time was under the aegis of Roger Corman, who, after all, possessed a good deal of commercial savvy when it came to turning out pictures on the studio conveyor belt.19 In short, working for Corman amounted to an intensive practical course in the mechanics of film production.

  In the meantime, UCLA’s film school was conducting a script competition, offering a two-thousand-dollar prize to the winner of the Samuel Goldwyn Award for the best student screenplay. In a single marathon working session Coppola expanded the scenario of an earlier short film, The Two Christophers, into a seventy-page screenplay entitled Pilma, Pilma, while consuming innumerable mugs of coffee. The story concerns an extreme case of sibling rivalry, whereby a deeply disturbed youngster who is obsessively jealous of his older brother plots to murder him. According to Coppola, it was pure Tennessee Williams Southern Gothic, filled with the sort of lurid violence that characterizes Williams’s plays. Corman was exceedingly proud when his protégé was the winner of the prestigious Goldwyn Award, and he took ads in the trade papers announcing Coppola’s prize.

  One day Corman inquired if Coppola could recommend a sound engineer he could hire for The Young Racers (1963), a movie he planned to direct about sports car racing that would follow the Grand Prix racing circuit across Europe and incorporate footage from various racing meets. With youthful bravado Coppola volunteered, ‘I’ll do the sound.” With that, he says in Corman’s autobiography, “I immediately got the Nagra sound recorder out of the closet at the office and went home to read the manual.” The first step was, “Push button A …,” and Coppola proceeded from there to master the art of sound recording.

  “I had always thought a Grand Prix film would be fun to shoot with the races and the crowds,” says Corman.20 Robert Towne, who would later write some major scenes for The Godfather, also served as an assistant to Corman on the movie. Coppola was not only sound man but second unit director as well. Coppola betrayed his amateur standing as a sound recordist, however, when Corman screened rushes of the first day’s footage. Cinematographer Floyd Crosby (High Noon) commented that the dialogue was inaudible and scornfully blamed the tyro sound man. Coppola unabashedly blamed Crosby for allowing the noise of the camera to be picked up on the sound track. Corman feels that, because Coppola did not hesitate to talk back to the older and more experienced film technician, he showed that he had guts.

  In retrospect, Coppola explains that the movie was being shot with a camera that was somewhat noisier than the average motion picture camera (Corman never could afford state-of-the-art equipment). And yet the camera was not equipped with a blimp, a device that blankets the camera noise, since Corman’s itinerant caravan was traveling with a minimum of equipment. As a result, it was not possible to shoot the movie and muffle the camera noise on the sound track. “So we had to redupe the dialogue for the whole picture,” Coppola concludes. Mark Damon, who played a retired racing driver, was not available when the redubbing was done, and so his lines were spoken by William Shatner.21 In the end Corman says that he was satisfied with the sound track of the picture (although Coppola inexplicably received no screen credit as sound man).

  “Working as a team for the races was quite exhilarating for me” Coppola comments. “I was soundman and second unit director.”22 In the latter capacity he shot most of the actual racing footage that was incorporated into the picture. According to William Campbell, who played a champion racer in the picture, Coppola would go out onto the race track in the middle of a race with his hand-held camera, “shooting pictures of these damn racing drivers, driving past him within six feet!”23 As a matter of fact, Coppola’s exploits were somewhat less perilous than Campbell imagined. He would take his camera to trackside, lie on the ground, and photograph the racing cars as they whooshed by him, but he was not lying on the track, as Campbell suggests.

  When the movie was released, the critics basically felt that in making the movie Corman had aimed merely to make a routine low-budget actioner and had not even accomplished that minimal goal. Variety summarized “the hackneyed story” as having to do with Joe Machin (William Campbell), a daredevil Grand Prix champion and womanizer, “with a girl in every pit stop,” who turns out to have “a heart of gold beating beneath the grease and goggles.”24 But the feeble plotline about Joe’s multiple affairs is soft-pedaled in favor of following him from one racing event to the next. The movie engages the viewer’s attention only intermittently, when it thrusts the spectator into the cockpit with the driver to go careening around the race track at championship speeds—thanks to Coppola’s hand-held camera. So there were just enough thrills and spills amid the atmosphere of screeching tires and roaring crowds to satisfy the drive-in trade.

  After the location shooting for The Young Racers had been completed in England with the Grand Prix at Liverpool, Corman remembers, “I decided to finance a second film.�
� After all, he had already paid the travel expenses of the cast and crew to bring them to Europe for the first film. Therefore, shooting two movies back-to-back and employing the same crew and some of the same actors would really be a money-saving enterprise.

  Corman had brought over to Europe a Volkswagen minibus that he had outfitted with the technical equipment needed to shoot a film. “We had the minibus with the cameras, lights, and dollies,” Corman continues. “What we didn’t have was a work permit. The most logical place to shoot the film was Dublin, because we could just ferry the minibus over from Liverpool. Ireland was much looser with labor permits.” Corman wanted to keep the film’s budget to twenty thousand dollars, the amount he had left over from shooting Racers. He told Coppola that “if he could come up with an idea for a film in Ireland, he could direct it.”25

  Coppola was enthusiastic about the prospect of directing a feature film all his own. He told Corman, “Let me take a camera and some of the equipment and staff, and make a low-budget psychological thriller.” That night he came up with the concept of a “Hitchcock-type” horror scene and pitched it to Corman the following day.

  Dementia 13 (1963)

  Coppola described to Corman the following scene, in which, he says, he had included “everything I knew Roger would like:”26 “A man goes to a pond and takes off his clothes, picks up five dolls, ties them together, goes under the water, and dives down, where he finds the body of a seven-year-old girl with her hair floating in the current Then he gets axed to death.” Corman responded enthusiastically, “Change the man to a woman, and you’ve got a picture, kid!”27 Coppola willingly complied. Coppola now concedes that at that juncture he had no clear idea about who the woman was or what she was doing in the pond. So he arrived in Ireland with no script but with a secretary Corman had sent along to accompany him after Corman himself had returned to Hollywood. She was mandated by Corman to see to it that the young Coppola stayed within the stipulated budget. But Coppola sweet-talked her into allowing him to transfer the entire twenty thousand dollars that Corman had allocated for the movie into his personal bank account.