schatz@bambi.UUCP (Bruce R. Schatz) (05/17/84)
since no-one has supplied this, i'll try (please note the info is from books not from direct experience). Francis Ford Coppola got his medium break from Roger Corman who produced "Dementia 13", a 1963 quickie horror film directed by Coppola. (he had previously directed a crummy short porno film and then helped Corman in a variety of production tasks before getting the break). this was a reasonable "B" picture with a few nice touches. unfortunately, it had little effect and Coppola bummed around until getting his big break in 1967 by directing "You're a Big Boy Now" which he also submitted as his MFA thesis at UCLA. this was an amusing comedy of a young man and his growing pains. (i particularly remember the final scene when he and his girl lay down at the end of a conveyor belt in a soft pretzel factory and gobble the pretzels down as they fall off -- i was a pretzel fanatic suffering withdrawal symptoms from living in the West at the time). Coppola's reward from Warner's was a big picture, a filming of the old 40's musical about prejudice, "Finian's Rainbow". helping Coppola in this production, after winning a fellowship to observe Warner film production and discovering that this was the only current one, was a young USC film school graduate -- George Lucas. they stuck together for a while through Coppola's "The Rain People" and formed a independent production company -- American Zoetrope. (Coppola had meanwhile won an Oscar for scripting "Patton".) This company had a lucrative multipicture contract with Warner's which was summarily cancelled after the first picture bombed -- Lucas' first feature film "THX 1138". In debt and desperate for money, Coppola took the assignment to write and direct "The Godfather". He hit the jackpot with a huge commercial success (top ten at the time) and thus was on the list of bankable producers when Lucas, desperate for a deal for "American Graffiti", had his arm twisted by Universal to pick one. AG was a huge success thus giving Lucas the freedom to write his space epic which became ... "Star Wars" . and begat Raiders ... curiously, when Lucas had a chance to renegotiate his contract for SW after the success of AG, he chose control over the merchandising, traditionally considered "junk" by the industry. this, eg SW dolls et al, turned out to be the bonanza which gives Lucasfilm its steady income and enables them to handle all those great graphics people! for more info see: Dale Pollock, "Skywalking: The Life & Films of George Lucas" "Francis Ford Coppola: The Outsider", Heavy Metal, Sept 1983 "Roger Corman, "More than King of the Bs", Heavy Metal, April 1984