You're a Big Boy Now was concrete proof that Francis Coppola was a bona fide director. The film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival where Coppola was nominated for the coveted Palme d'Or. Geraldine Page was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for her role as the overbearing mother. Despite the reality that the film was a low-budget, studio-controlled vehicle, Francis considered he had paid his dues. He envisioned his filmmaking future as independent. He would fashion his own deals and create projects that met his artistic standards. He had been conceiving an idea for a film called The Conversation. Prepared to move full speed ahead, his professional life took an unplanned detour. Coppola told Peter Cowie in Coppola, “I had made a promise to myself—the one I didn't keep—a vow that somehow what could make me exceptional was the fact that I could write original screen material—write the screenplay, and then execute it as producer and director.”1
The year was 1968, and a declining old Hollywood was producing musicals to piggyback on the success of The Sound of Music. Funny Girl was in production, and the newly managed Seven Arts (merged with deteriorating Warner) had the property Finian's Rainbow. The 1947 Broadway musical with a whimsical, well-intentioned, antibigotry fantastical theme had not aged well but had a magnificent score. Warner-Seven Arts did not intend to pay for a high-budget blockbuster but banked on a youthful Francis Coppola to breathe air into the old chestnut. Seven Arts knew that Coppola had a background directing musicals in college and, coming off the youthful enthusiasm of Big Boy, Coppola seemed like a promising and prudent choice. This final project under Jack Warner's banner already had a commitment from the incomparable Fred Astaire to play Finian. The budget was set at $3.5 million with a 12-week shooting schedule, meager figures for a Hollywood musical. Francis wanted to refuse but convinced himself to consent based on the beauty of the score and the chance to involve his father Carmine as an orchestrator on the production. It would be Coppola's first opportunity to engage a family member in a Coppola picture, and the possibility that his father could be part of a film production at this stage of his professional life was heartening. Carmine had many unfulfilled years without a major breakthrough. His passion was not to play the flute, although he played masterfully, but to be a serious composer. Francis approached Carmine, who enthusiastically agreed to participate in Finian's Rainbow.
Coppola began production with a rehearsal period as he had with Big Boy. The cast was a mismatched conglomeration. British pop sensation Petula Clark played Astaire's daughter, the choice calculated to attract a hip, young audience (she was also under contract to Warner's record division). This notion was also applied to British crooner Tommy Steele and Canadian nightclub singer and TV star Don Francks, both playing love interests in the musical but with no acting chops. Keenan Wynn played a blustery segregationist senator. Coppola quickly concluded that the beauty of the Harburg/Saidy/Lane score was in no way supported by the screenplay. He tried to modernize certain details, but it didn't really have an impact on the storyline. He knew he would have to find a way to make it work. Fred Astaire, at 68, was a veteran of countless Hollywood musicals created in controlled studio environments with meticulously choreographed production numbers. In addition to being a superb choreographer in his own right, the legendary Hermes Pan had been hired to design the choreography for Finian's Rainbow. Pan and Astaire had collaborated on 17 Hollywood film musicals. From the outset there was friction. No studio sets with proper dance flooring were available for the film. Warner-Seven Arts wanted the existing back lot set originally used for Camelot to double for the countrified environment of Finian's Rainbow. Pan complained the set was not suitable for dancing and requested additional rehearsal time to iron it out. Coppola was pressed; there was no time. Pan was fired, and Coppola absorbed responsibility for the choreography. Francis Coppola was an artist with multiple gifts, but choreography was not among them. He tried, instead, to let the camera infuse the musical numbers with energy. He wangled eight days of location shooting, and for the rest, in essence, he fudged it. At best, the results were mixed. Coppola hired his UCLA buddy Carroll Ballard to shoot the second unit, and the result is a super-scenic Americana opening sequence. Other scenes survive through the sheer beauty of the song lyrics, but the film's overall impression is not compelling. To add insult to injury, Warner-Seven Arts decided to blow up the 35mm print to 70mm in first-run screenings in the old roadshow style. In changing the film's aspect ratio,2 the top and bottom of the frames were lost! If there were any acceptably choreographed sequences, the audience couldn't see those dancing feet. The box office was not particularly good, and Coppola learned another painful classic Hollywood lesson: decisions were made in the front office, after the fact, and without consultation with the director.
There were a few bright spots during the Rainbow experience. In production on the desolate Warner lot, Coppola noticed a young man quietly observing the shoot. Coppola approached him and asked his business. The young observer was a USC film student named George Lucas. Lucas had already won first prize at the third National Student Film Festival for his short film Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB and then a Warner Bros. scholarship affording him six months at Warner's studio. Unfortunately, the studio was in decline, and Finian's Rainbow was the only action on the lot. From the sidelines, Lucas watched Francis Coppola's work-in-progress. Lucas knew Coppola by reputation. Coppola was five years his senior, but the two were part of the young film school generation and ecstatic to have that bond. The two became fast friends although their personalities were polar opposites. Lucas was a slender, bearded young man in white shirt and chinos, reserved, cautious, and pragmatic; Coppola also had a beard but was extroverted, emotional, and a risk taker. Lucas came to the set every day, and Francis asked him to take Polaroids of the action. They talked about their futures, and Coppola told Lucas he envisioned a new era of filmmaking: low budget location shoots with the moviemaker in control from script through edit. With this in mind, he asked Lucas to join him as documentarian and production associate on his next venture. Setting aside an unfinished script of The Conversation, Coppola decided to approach Warner-Seven Arts for an advance on another project he had been developing—he was now titling it The Rain People.
Coppola began organizing The Rain People with the intent of fulfilling his independent filmmaker concept. He chose as producers Ron Colby, with whom he had worked on Big Boy and Finian's Rainbow, and Bart Patton, a classmate from UCLA. To cast the film he looked to young actors from the theater community who were just crossing over to film and television: the three lead actors, Shirley Knight, James Caan, and Robert Duvall, all fit the criteria. The lead actress was Knight, whom Coppola had met at Cannes when Big Boy was screened there in 1967. Knight was confronted by a hostile press reacting to her role as a racist prostitute in LeRoi Jones's film The Dutchman.3 An unnerved Knight was in tears, and Coppola comforted her by remarking that he would write a film for her. James Caan had been at Hofstra when Coppola was there and then studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse under the esteemed acting teacher Sanford Meisner.4 A year after The Rain People he would have his break-out role as Brian Piccolo in the made-for-television movie Brian's Song. Robert Duvall also studied in New York under Sanford Meisner and had a small but pivotal role in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).
The Rain People was a road picture that followed a young married and pregnant woman on a personal journey of self-discovery. Unsure of her status as wife and mother-to-be, she takes off in her station wagon to find out what she wants in life. Coppola took the entire cast and crew across the United States, formulating much of the story as they proceeded from location to location. Hitchhiker James Caan becomes Knight's companion on the road; the character is a brain-damaged ex-football player injured during a game. Caan becomes a kind of surrogate son as Knight sorts out her maternal feelings. Caan meets a violent end when Knight has a romantic encounter with Duvall, playing a widowed motorcycle policeman. Much of The Rain People’s script was improvised and written as Coppola took advantage of settings and circumstances while the caravan journeyed cross country. Although tempers flared from time to time and living conditions were barely adequate, most of the young cast and crew rolled with the punches. They knew they were participants in a guerilla filmmaking experience that was on the cusp of a revolution in filmmaking; at the helm was a passionate and astute trailblazer. Of the lead actors, Shirley Knight had the most difficulty with the experience. She and Coppola argued creatively, and it probably didn't help that, in fact, she was pregnant like her character.
Coppola had invested in equipment he could utilize on the fly. The tools of the trade were transported along with the troupe. Coppola displayed solid working knowledge of the camera and editing concepts and had the respect of his crew.
Cinematographer Bill Butler, who would also shoot The Conversation, recalls in the interview book Masters of Light, “I love working with Coppola because Coppola is heavy. The things that he's putting on the screen are heavyweight ideas. He gives you lots of freedom. He lets your creativity work for him. I like that a lot.”5 Editor Barry Malkin, who was also raised in Woodside, Queens, sat at a Steenbeck (then state-of-the-art as opposed to the Moviolas still in use in Hollywood) in the kitchenette of a trailer cutting material as it was processed. At a certain point he needed to catch up with the mounting footage, and the group holed up in Ogallala, Nebraska, for five weeks while he assembled the material. George Lucas, the film's documentarian (filmmaker: a diary by george lucas) suggested his girlfriend Marcia Griffin (who later became Marcia Lucas) become assistant editor and support Barry Malkin's editing process. Lucas's documentary was a 16mm cinéma vérité chronicle of the production. George Lucas shot, edited, and recorded it; it has become a classic accompaniment to The Rain People adventure. Lastly, after the show was in the final edit stages, Coppola needed sound work to round out its technical elements. George Lucas had a sound guru friend at USC and approached him on Coppola's behalf. Working with no sound library material (he was afraid of being caught since he was nonunion), Walter Murch became another addition to the expanding crew of young upstarts who eventually would be icons of the American New Wave of the 1970s. Murch, like Butler, observed in On the Edge: The Life & Times of Francis Coppola, “Francis had a tendency to hire people and give them a great deal of freedom to do what they were doing and authority over their domain. So in a sense you feel an upwelling of responsibility for him.”6
The Rain People opened in New York City in August 1969, about a year after the cavalcade had begun its journey. Coppola's family—Eleanor, Gio, and Roman—had been along for the ride. Throughout his career, Francis's family would travel with him whenever filming was away from home and lasted more than two weeks. He often involved family members. On The Rain People, Ellie's brother Bill Neil participated as production assistant. The final product received a lukewarm response, but Coppola made true on his investment with Warner, completing the film on time and under the $750,000 allowance. Most consequential for Francis Coppola was the moniker at the end credits—“Produced by American Zoetrope, San Francisco,” the name Francis Coppola had chosen for his production company.
And so the Zoetrope adventure began.