There were two major film schools in Los Angeles when Francis Coppola entered UCLA in 1960. Along with UCLA, the University of Southern California (USC) had a burgeoning film department. Of the two, USC was more hands-on, with an emphasis on student filmmaking. Coppola had entered the more academic master's program, and although Coppola was proving a competent screenwriter, he wanted practicum and collaboration. There was a prestigious faculty. In particular, he had one teacher who encouraged him greatly. This was Dorothy Arzner, the only female director in Hollywood. By then in her 60s, she was the first female member of the Directors Guild of America (DGA).
Roger Corman, the king of the B's,” combed the film school looking for an assistant; Coppola jumped at the chance. He soon proved a jack-of-all-trades and fulfilled any Corman request. Coppola was industrious and willing. One Corman assignment eventually led Coppola to England to shoot a Grand Prix sequence for Corman's The Young Racers. More than anxious to shoot a film of his own, Coppola pitched an idea he could accomplish with the equipment already at hand; he would go to Ireland and mount a low-budget horror film. Corman often used the technique of shooting two films back-to-back in the same general location—a sound economic strategy. Coppola would apply the same approach when he made The Outsiders and Rumble Fish back-to-back in Tulsa. Director Oliver Stone also employed this method when his production of Talk Radio took him to Texas. While Stone was in postproduction on Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July was being mounted, and Stone's production designer Bruno Rubeo dressed Texas to look like the streets of Massapequa, Long Island.1
In 1963 Coppola was able to write and direct Dementia 13 through the graces of maverick producer Corman. Bankrolled with more than $20,000 from Corman, Coppola hastily crafted a script. Dementia 13 is generally considered Coppola's first feature film. The thin plot deals with a dysfunctional family, a mysterious murderer, an old family secret, and an elaborate decaying castle as the main location; in the mix was the required Corman sex quotient. Coppola sold the idea to Roger Corman by describing it as a Psycho-like theme. Coppola was able to obtain some additional funds from a producer at a Dublin studio. His cast and crew were spillovers from The Young Racers and some of Coppola's own friends. As producer, Corman tinkered with Coppola's version, adding some additional elements: an axe murder and some narration for storyline clarity. The debut film was shown on a double bill with Corman's X—The Man with the X-Ray Eyes and opened to mixed reviews and a decent box office. Coppola was on the map. Most significantly, a young assistant art director, Eleanor “Ellie” Neil, was also on the set. A designer attending UCLA's master's program, the two quickly became a couple. After the film wrapped, Neil went back to Los Angeles to complete her degree and Coppola continued working with Corman. Several months later they worked together for Corman on The Terror.
On February 2, 1963, Neil and Coppola were married in Las Vegas. The marriage was spontaneous, and Eleanor had not even met any of Francis's family. Eleanor was the oldest of three children and the only girl. Her father died when she was 10 years old. The Coppolas set up housekeeping in Los Angeles, and Francis was offered a job almost immediately as a contract screenwriter for Seven Arts. Soon the family expanded with the birth of the Coppolas’ first child, Gian-Carlo, on September 17, 1963.
Coppola's eventual impact as a director is so powerful that his sizable credits as a screenwriter are often overlooked. He developed a substantial catalog of adapted screenplays for Seven Arts. As is often the case, some of these products never saw the light of day or were reworked before eventually reaching the screen, with credit redounding to other writers. Conversely, Coppola was the recipient of credit for screenplays he doctored for Seven Arts. Among the scripts he wrote under contract for Seven Arts are Reflections of a Golden Eye and Is Paris Burning?, cowritten with Gore Vidal. Coppola's second s on, Roman, was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine on April 22, 1965, while Coppola continued crafting the script under difficult circumstances. The original screenwriter, Anthony Veiller, was ill, and Seven Arts sent Coppola to provide assistance—although Veiller thought Francis was only there to learn the ropes from him. Veiller passed away, and Coppola was left with the arduous task of completing a complex script. It was at this point that Gore Vidal was called in. Vidal, the more experienced of the two, worked compatibly with Coppola to complete the task.
Coppola is credited as screenwriter for This Property Is Condemned, which ultimately was a flop after many failed business machinations, and he cowrote a version of Patton with Edmund North. The Patton screenplay had gone through several incarnations. The Coppola version eventually reached the screen, and the Academy Award–winning film yielded the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Coppola and North. In 1970, a 30-year-old Coppola, father of two, won his first of many Academy Awards, highlighting one of his multiple gifts: screenwriting.
Coppola was a bundle of energy and was not restricting his time to writing for Screen Arts. Unbeknownst to them, he was developing a screenplay he wanted to direct on his own. His desire to direct was fierce, and he pressed to make it happen. The clandestine script was You're a Big Boy Now, loosely adapted from a British novel.2 Coppola intended to finance the project through independent sources, but Seven Arts got wind of the plan and insisted it was their property because it was written while he was still under contract. Warner-Seven Arts stated the budget as $1.5 million, but Coppola asserts the film cost $800,000 all told.3 Still, Coppola would embark on his first mainstream film as screenwriter/director. Because of financial constraints, the film was cast with an admixture of unknown actors and established actors selected for lesser roles. Coppola was persuasive in personally hyping the script to well-known actors Julie Harris, Geraldine Page, and Rip Torn, who would appear alongside Peter Kastner, Karen Black, and Elizabeth Hartman, all of whom had barely any experience.
You're a Big Boy Now is essentially a coming-of-age story about a somewhat lovable, inept 19-year-old with overbearing parents who has yet to learn the ways of the world. Set in New York City with the “big boy” (Kastner) working in the stacks of the New York Public Library, the plot involves the foibles Kastner experiences, including sexual high jinks, on the road to manhood. Coppola made the city another character, utilizing high-tech equipment (with resistance from the traditional crew) that was flexible enough to allow him to maneuver through the actual public library (thanks to Mayor John Lindsay) and the streets and stores of New York. This infused the film with a vitality, almost a frenetic quality. For the score, Coppola used the jaunty rock songs of the Lovin’ Spoonfuls. In addition to breaking out of the studio-set mode, Coppola exercised another methodology he would use throughout his film-directing career. Comfortable as a theater director, Coppola believed in the value of rehearsal and spent the first few weeks of production preparing the cast through improvisation and character study. When the cast began working with the script they were well acquainted with their own characters and the characters with whom they would interact and were free to focus on line readings in a more informed manner. This is not a typical film director's approach. An exception was the late Sidney Lumet, who was known for this ritual; he came out of the Jewish theater and live television and saw the benefit of these preliminary activities and their cost-saving value; he maintained the director would need less takes.
Overall, the movie's dynamic communicated youth at a time when the lines were being sharply drawn between the older generation and the Beatles culture. Coppola has acknowledged an equivocal debt to director Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night (1964), stating, “it was definitely influenced by A Hard Day's Night. But it was all there already before I even saw Hard Day's Night.”4 You're a Big Boy Now received a mixed critical reaction, but the reality that Coppola was given attention as a director was of major significance. Rex Reed described him as “the Orson Welles of the hand-held camera.”5 The film also served to satisfy his master's thesis, and Coppola was now a graduate of the UCLA master's program. He was seen as a transitional figure, leaving old Hollywood and touting the birth of a new American filmic transition. He told a respected film critic of the Los Angeles Times, Charles Champlin, “I want to make films in Denver, Hartford, Seattle, places nobody ever makes films. Give me $400,000 and six guys who love to make films and I'll do it.” Champlin wrote, “It is one of those rare American things, what the Europeans call an auteur film.”6 What Coppola at the time was expressing was an evolving dimension of his artistic credo; it came to be known as the American New Wave.