The Essentials: The Films Of Francis Ford Coppola

Shorts, specials and other curiosities

“Battle Beyond the Sun” (1959)
A brilliant example of Roger Corman’s genius for taking a sow’s ear and turning it into a slightly more marketable sow’s ear, the impresario acquired a sci-fi cheapie called “Nebo Zovyot” made by Soviet directors Mikhail Karzhukov and Aleksandr Kozyr and put Coppola to work on a dubbing script that would excise the film’s anti-American propaganda message. Coppola went further, shooting additional footage of two space monsters fighting each other (collaborator Jack Hill later claimed that one was supposed to look like a penis and the other a vagina) and adding in other bits of found and shot footage to deliver a film that story-wise scarcely resembles the original, which was a fairly straightforward tale of the race for Mars. This tribute to Corman’s waste not, want not philosophy would have been Coppola’s first directorial credit —except he used a pseudonym, Thomas Colchart for the work.

“The Terror” (1963)
Just one of four well-known names who reportedly did uncredited directing work on Corman’s 1963 cobbled-together haunted-castle yarn (future blaxploitation director Jack Hill, Monte Hellman and the film’s star Jack Nicholson being the others), Coppola was sent off to Big Sur to shoot some additional footage. The Boris Karloff film had only been written originally in order to take advantage of pre existing sets that were about to be torn down, and the result is again one of those Corman movies it’s easier to admire in spirit than in actual fact. Now it’s better known as source material that, along with the services of Karloff, another Corman protégé, Peter Bogdanovich would plunder deeply for his terrific 1968 film “Targets.”

“The Bellboy and the Playgirls” (1962) – co-directed with Fritz Umgelter
All our best efforts came to naught when trying to track down this early entry in the Coppola canon, so we can neither grade it nor tell you much about it, aside from the fact that it’s a comedy that is called “The Bellboy and the Playgirls” and it was originally shot wholly in black and white and in German. Coppola was hired to shoot a few more saucy scenes to up its marketability to the dirty mac market in the US, adding in some color footage of women one whom the titular bellboy is spying
literally through the keyholes of their hotel rooms. We can only imagine this is all as utterly hilarious as it sounds, though to be sure, being in charge of the additional nude scenes for a German smut flick seems kind of like a dream job for any 23 year old guy.

“Captain EO” (1986)
Early in the fall of 1986, George Lucas, as part of his partnership with the Walt Disney Company, debuted a breakthrough 3D attraction that starred Michael Jackson, the biggest musical performer on the planet. It was a 17-minute-long musical extravaganza called “Captain EO”… directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The film is fairly straightforward, with Jackson playing “the infamous” Captain EO, who leads a “ragtag band” of weirdo aliens and robots on an intergalactic journey. When they respond to a distress signal on a dingily mechanized, Giger-esque planet, EO runs afoul of the spidery Supreme Leader (Anjelica Huston), who, after EO comments on her inner beauty, hisses, “You find meeee beautiful?” EO then proceeds to liberate the downtrodden planet through the power of choreographed dance and 3D sparkles; shadows become light and pillars of clunky junk become neoclassical Roman columns (the best part, especially in retrospect, is when EO turns one of the black-clad robot guards into an eighties-era fop, complete with bopping blonde mullet). Coppola knew how to choreograph dance numbers (“One from the Heart” be damned) and was able to channel Jackson’s overwhelming charisma at the peak of his powers into a wonderful little performance. But when the film returned to several Disney parks following Jackson’s untimely death in 2009 (it had been replaced by the deeply lame “Honey, I Shrunk the Audience” in the late nineties), the seams really did show —the nonhuman characters were clunky, the 3D technology iffy even after a new polish, and the storyline virtually nonexistent (also: kind of sexist). But it’s is still Coppola at his most joyously, imaginatively unhinged, a side of traditionally serious, even somber filmmaker that we only rarely see.

“Faerie Tale Theater” TV episode “Rip Van Winkle” (1987)
Around the time he was dallying with time-travel shenanigans with the featherweight “Peggy Sue Got Married,” Coppola took a very rare TV gig, and turned in this Harry Dean Stanton-starring hour-long version of the classic fairy tale. It’s by all accounts a pretty anonymous work, seemingly shot in 1984 and not aired until 1987, and it was unobjectionable enough to be shown in school classrooms, along with the rest of the Shelley Duvall-fronted series, thereafter.

So, on that slightly deflating note, that’s our assessment of the career to date of one of the great masters of American cinema. Agree? Disagree? Do you imagine Coppola has another great film in him or is his glory all in the past now? Let us know below.

— Jessica Kiang, Oli Lyttelton, Erik McClanahan, Drew Taylor, Nikola Grozdanovic & Rodrigo Perez