“The Accused”: Alumni from the Roger Corman School of Directing

One of the late Roger Corman’s many claims to fame is his knack for sniffing out talented future directors. Some of his most notable discoveries—Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich—entered Cormanville long before I did. But when I joined the staff of Corman’s New World Pictures in 1973 I met some eager young chaps who’d do just about anything for a chance to direct a low-budget genre flick. In those days Joe Dante (who’d go on to make such pop culture landmarks as Gremlins) was Roger’s trailer cutter, a quiet fellow who hardly seemed capable of commandeering a film set. And wandering the corridors of New World Pictures you’d find many a scruffy wannabe, each of them hoping for his big break.

 I especially remember Jonathan Demme, a shaggy-haired writer-type who favored brown-and-white saddle oxfords and would cruise the halls with his very tall wife in tow. (In later years he’d shed the wife and adopt a more blow-dried look.) When I first met him, he was just back from directing Roger a classic women-in-prison opus, Caged Heat. Later he moved on to much better opportunities at much bigger companies, eventually winning an Oscar for directing a 1991 blockbuster, The Silence of the Lambs. I also fondly remember Paul Bartel, a wildly eccentric sometimes-actor whose 1975 directing debut for Roger, Death Race 2000, led to such indie triumphs as the hilariously gruesome Eating Raoul (1982). And then there was Jonathan Kaplan, who graduated from sexy Corman nurse movies (Night Call Nurses) to action flicks (White Line Fever, 1975).

 Kaplan’s career hit the skids after years of being offered only the same kind of projects he’d already mastered, what he described as "boy meets truck, boy gets truck, boy loses truck and boy gets truck again." But in 1988 he bounced back with a powerful drama that helped Jodie Foster win her first Oscar. The movie was The Accused, a moderately-budgeted legal thriller. The top-billed star was Kelly McGillis, who had recently grabbed attention as the beautiful Amish widow in Witness, and followed that up by  playing Tom Cruise’s girlfriend in Top Gun. In The Accused, McGillis  was a hard-driving district attorney determined to prosecute the young men who joined in the gang assault on her client, a small-town waitress. It was by no means a given that Foster would take on the role of the rape victim. Due to the film’s graphic nature, the part of Sarah Tobias was turned down by a number of rising actresses. Foster at this point had largely backed away from acting, focusing on her studies at Yale, and there were some who felt she lacked the blatant sexuality the role demanded.

 When I watched The Accused, I didn’t know quite what to expect. The film starts just after the hideous doings in the back room of a scruffy bar. Foster’s Sarah escapes from her tormentors and ends up at a local clinic, shell-shocked. It’s the opposite of the spunky performances we usually associate with Foster. But gradually, as the legal proceedings move forward, we watch her character regain her sense of self—her cockiness, her anger. The rape sequence itself is held until near the end –-as a flashback mirroring goings-on in the courtroom—and it’s clear to see what’s triggered it: Sarah boldly flaunts her sexuality, until the moment when she discovers it’s too late to say “No.” The whole grotesque business, with looky-loos egging on the perpetrators, is hard to forget. Score another triumph for a Roger Corman director-in-the-making.  

 

Bloody Good Show: The Godfather, Part II

It’s been a long time—easily 50 years, in fact—since I saw the second Godfather film. I know that, snob that I was, I didn’t see the first Godfather when it debuted, because I was too arty back then to be interested in crime dramas. It wasn’t until a friend with impeccable intellectual credentials told me that The Godfather was essential Americana that I discovered for myself the brilliant picture that Francis Ford Coppola had given us of the underside of the American dream. As it turned out, Godfather II would be a feather in the cap of my former boss, Roger Corman. It won six Oscars, including several for Corman alumni. Francis Ford Coppola , who got his start fresh out of film school as Roger’s assistant, took home statuettes for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, while Robert De Niro (who’d been featured in Corman’s Bloody Mama) was honored with the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing the youthful Vito Corleone. Moreover, Corman graduate Talia Shire became a Best Supporting Actress nominee for her role as the godfather’s sister. 

 I returned to The Godfather Part II in part to savor the work of the late Robert Duvall, who plays it close to the vest as Tom Hagen, the godfather’s indefatigable fixer and adopted son. But I was also curious to see how a film could be both sequel and prequel to what had gone before. Honestly, I don’t think Godfather II (the first sequel ever to win a Best Picture Oscar) is quite as strong as its predecessor; by cutting between two stories set in two very different eras Coppola sometimes weakens the film’s throughline, and the ultimate conclusion doesn’t pack the wallop of the earlier film. Still, there’s much to admire. I was strongly impressed by De Niro’s work in the Sicily scenes, and the Lower East Side sections of the film allowed us to see his evolution from eager immigrant to godfather-in-the-making. And Coppola clearly had a marvelous time filming massive period crowd scenes, letting us in on the local color of New York’s Little Italy in all its tawdry splendor.

 By contrast, there’s the rustic but tony compound of Michael Corleone and family at Nevada’s Lake Tahoe, where they hole up while he’s busy deal-making with Las Vegas honchos. And we also get glimpses of both Miami and pre-Castro Havana. It is striking watching Al Pacino’s Michael becoming, in this film, more and more his father’s imperious son, the master of all he surveys. Pacino never won an Oscar for playing Michael in three Godfather films Though he earned Oscar nominations for the first two, it took him until 1993 (and the semi-interesting Scent of a Woman) to take home the golden statuette. But when I checked out the dates, I was struck by the fact that less than a year after Godfather II hit the screen, Pacino gave another masterful Oscar-worthy performance in a favorite film of mine, Dog Day Afternoon. That heist film, based on a true story, had Pacino as Sonny, a hapless young man determined to knock over a Brooklyn bank to finance his lover’s sex-change operation. If you see Dog Day Afternoon not long after Godfather II, I suspect you’ll be surprised that Pacino suddenly seems much younger, much shorter, and much more inept than in the previous film. That, of course, is what acting is all about.

 I should also mention that both Godfather II and Dog Day Afternoon also feature the gifted John Cazale, an ominous-lookng character actor who died much too young. 

 

Girls Gone Wild: Appreciating “Dance, Girl, Dance”

Until recently, I had never heard of Dance, Girl, Dance. This 1940 dramedy about two New York chorines who are roommates and (sometimes) close friends, is hardly Hollywood’s finest hour. It was produced by RKO, one of the less prestigious studios of the industry’s Golden Era, though a place where a number of major talents—think Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn,  and the Astaire-Rogers duo—got their start. Its two female leads were also on their way up: Maureen O’Hara plays the sweet, sensible Judy (though she’s eventually to unfurl a wild Irish temper): all she really wants to do is to burnish her skills as a classical dancer. Her counterpart is Bubbles, played by a blonde and brassy Lucille Ball as a gal who’ll say or do anything to make her way in the world. Of course they both fall for the same guy, though for very different reasons . . . and he turns out to be not worth having. Hijinks (including what we in the Corman world would call a rip-roaring catfight) ensue.

 So why was Dance, Girl Dance inducted in 2007 into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress? Clearly this has to do with the rising reputation of its director, Dorothy Arzner.  Arzner, who from 1927 to 1943 was the only female director in Hollywood, got her start back in the silent era. She entered the industry as a typist, thereby getting a close look into how scripts are constructed, then moved into the editing suite. As director she was responsible for about twenty movies, some of which have been lost. The first woman to helm a sound film, she invented the boom mike (at first a microphone attached to a fishing rod) as a way to improve the sound quality of Clara Bow’s first talkie, 1929’s The Wild Party. She was ultimately the first female member of the Directors Guild of America.

 The Criterion DVD on which I’ve just watched Dance, Girl, Dance pays tribute to Arzner via two fascinating extras. Film scholar B. Ruby Rich (whom I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing about women and sex in the films of the 1960s) hails Arzner as a competent and confident talent who was particularly smart on the subject of gender politics. Apparently skeptical about conventional marriages (the one in Dance, Girl, Dance is a doozy), Arzner seems happiest when focusing on the supportive relationship between women. In this film she also powerfully takes on the ”male gaze” in a scene wherein O’Hara’s character, accustomed to being ogled and laughed at by the lascivious men in her nightclub audiences, turns the tables. Never one to hide her own lesbianism, Arzner—who had cropped her hair short and wore man-tailored suits—made sure we sympathize with her female characters, no matter what they wear and what they do for a living.

 The second featurette on the DVD stars director Francis Ford Coppola, who was one of Arzner’s students after she retired from filmmaking and joined the graduate faculty at UCLA. Coppola  remembers “Miss Arzner” as both smart and gracious: she had a habit of bringing to class cookies that were much appreciated by impoverished film students, and she even once treated him to a simple lunch that felt like a life-saver. This was not the only nourishment she provided. Disheartened and broke, he at one point considered giving up his filmmaking dreams and returning to New York. In the nick of time she persuaded him not to lose heart, that he was going to make it as a film director. And, of course, he did. 

 

 

From Your First Cigarette to Your Last Dying Day: “The Outsiders”

 When I was growing up, youth cliques and gangs were a hot topic. West Side Story made it big on Broadway in 1957, and became a must-see film in 1961. It was five years later that S.E. Hinton (Susie to her friends) published a Young Adult novel called The Outsiders. It looked squarely at the lives of teenagers who, because of their looks or family situations, were regarded as social outcasts in their Oklahoma hometown. In the world of this story, teens are divided into two groups. The Socs (pronounced “soshes”) were more affluent, dressed better, and had cool cars with fins. The Greasers worn grubby jeans and T’s, started smoking at a very young age, and didn’t have much use for school. Hinton—who, remarkably, published the novel when she was sixteen—empathized almost entirely with the Greasers, whose underlying pain and sensitivity she understood. The narrator of her novel, Ponyboy Curtis, is a fourteen-year-old who—in the absence of parents—shares strong bonds of loyalty with his three older brothers. Though he's at the fringes of some brutal situations, like a rumble in a local park, he’s basically a good kid who’s polite to girls, loves sunsets, and ruminates over a poem by Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

 Following his acclaimed release of two Godfather films and Apocalypse Now, director-producer Francis Ford Coppola turned his talents to The Outsiders, after a librarian and her students at Lone Star Elementary School in Fresno, California brought the novel to his attention. Now his goal was to find a troupe of very young actors who could embody Hinton’s characters on the screen. C.Thomas Howell, then fifteen, appealingly played Ponyboy. His brothers—the tortured Dally and the take-charge Darrel—were Matt Dillon and Patrick Swayze. Other rising young actors in the cast were Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and (in a small part) Tom Cruise. A key role, that of a very young Greaser who proves himself both a hero and a martyr, was played by Ralph Macchio, just before he became The Karate Kid. (He apparently was 20 at the time, but convincingly looks about 13.) The film’s final moments, in which a close-up of Macchio is superimposed upon an image of Ponyboy writing his story is either hugely poignant or hugely corny, or both at once.

 As a movie, The Outsiders makes an interesting contrast to the much-beloved West Side Story. Its rivalries are purely social rather than ethnic. West Side Story of course pits Puerto Rican immigrants against white kids whose ancestry is probably not far removed from Ellis Island. But in The Outsiders the divide is almost entirely along economic lines. And, of course, there’s no singing and dancing in this film. Being a Greaser doesn’t seem nearly as much fun as being a Jet. The rumble in which most of the characters participate is less picturesque than grubby, fought in the mud during a driving rain.

 At my L.A. public high school there was not the kind of stark social divide portrayed in the film. Though I never heard anyone called a Greaser, we definitely had Soshes, who vied to gain membership in exclusive social clubs. A more innocent version of the kind of divide portrayed in The Outsiders shows up in both the stage (1971) and the film (1978) versions of a box-office hit, Grease. Hinton’s novel could have been an inspiration for that show, but I suspect there was something in the culture that inspired both projects. Ironically, a version of The Outsiders landed on Broadway in 2024, taking home the Tony Award for best musical.  

 

Robert Towne and Old Hollywood’s Best Alumni Association

The death of screenwriter Robert Towne on Monday made me lament the passage of time. Towne’s great era was the Seventies, when he wrote such gritty films as The Last Detail, Chinatown, and Shampoo, while also making vital (though uncredited) contributions to The Godfather and other hits. Though these were all major studio pictures, I will long associate Towne with his Roger Corman days, when he played the male lead in Corman’s 1960 cheapie, The Last Woman on Earth, while simultaneously pounding out the script on the set. This was filmmaking, Corman style: assemble some ambitious pals and get them to take on as many jobs as possible (for as little money as possible). Eventually, the idea was that they’d find out what they were really good at, and maybe move on to the big bucks. For many would-be Hollywoodites, it worked.

 Here's the opening of Chapter 8 of my independent biography, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers:  Roger Corman and the Academy Awards are not usually mentioned in the same breath. But on April 8, 1975, many of the big winners had a Corman connection. Best Film and Best Director Oscars went to Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather Part II. Best Supporting Actor was Robert De Niro, for his performance in the same gangster epic. Ellen Burstyn was named Best Actress for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, directed by Corman alumnus Martin Scorsese. Other nominees that year: Talia Shire and Diane Ladd, both up for Best Supporting Actress; cinematographer John Alonzo, whose very first film was Bloody Mama; and Jack Nicholson, favored to win Best Actor for his starring role in Chinatown. (The award went instead to Art Carney, for Harry and Tonto, leading Corman to joke that Nicholson’s loss had spoiled his personal sweep.) Robert Towne, who won the year’s Best Original Screenplay honors for his Chinatown script, surveyed the glittering multitudes and said, in the presence of reporter Bill Davidson from the New York Times Magazine, “This joint looks like a meeting of the Roger Corman Alumni Association.”

 For those who aren’t up on Corman’s long career, here’s the lowdown.  Coppola, straight out of UCLA’s film school, went to work as a Corman production assistant, then made his directorial debut, 1963’s Dementia 13, with money left over from Corman’s The Young Racers. In 1970, De Niro had a major role in Corman’s Bloody Mama. Corman produced Scorsese’s second film as a director, 1972’s Boxcar Bertha. Talia Shire and Diane Ladd both acted in early Corman movies, as did Jack Nicholson, who first met Roger (and Robert Towne) in a Jeff Corey acting class, then went on to play in multiple Corman movies including The Little Shop of Horrors, The Raven, The Terror, and his 1958 film debut, The Cry-Baby Killer. Nicholson, who remains deeply appreciative of Corman’s role in his career, recalled for Roger’s own memoir working on films whose budgets were so low that the actors all had to share the same script.

 Not everyone who worked for Roger in the early days became famous. But take the case of Dick Miller, who started out as a would-be screenwriter. Roger saw potential in the short, pugnacious Miller, and cast him in leading roles of films like 1959’s A Bucket of Blood. Eventually he became a featured actor (and good-luck charm) in all the films of a later Corman alumnus, Joe Dante. Eventually he starred in That Guy Dick Miller, a 2014 documentary made by one of his fans. I remember Dick well, and I hope the world will remember Robert Towne too.

 

 

Remembering the Wives: Eleanor Coppola and Samantha Davis

In Hollywood, as in the rest of life, wives sometimes get overlooked. But two recent deaths have reminded me of how complicated (though rewarding) it can be to unite in marriage with a major showbiz figure. Eleanor Neil met Francis Ford Coppola in Ireland, where he was shooting his first professional film, a Roger Corman cheapie called, Dementia 13. (She was serving as assistant art director on the project. It came about because Corman had shot The Young Racers in the Emerald Isle, and figured that cast and crew could quickly crank out one more film before they all went home. ) The Coppolas wed in 1963, produced three children, and stayed married for the rest of their lives, despite a good deal of turbulence, as he moved from the glory years of the Godfather films into more complicated territory. In 1976 Eleanor was present in the Philippines, with very young kids in tow, as Coppola shot his Vietnam epic, Apocalypse Now (released in 1979). The chaos of that experience (including Martin Sheen’s nervous breakdown and a typhoon that destroyed an expensive set) was captured in her diaries, which she shaped into a pull-no-punches 1979 book, The Making of Apocalypse Now. It’s been years since I read it, but I recommend it as a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the emotional toll that’s taken when a movie crew moves to a distant land to shoot a difficult film.

 So warmly was Eleanor Coppola’s book received that she helped turn it into a documentary film, which she co-directed with Fax Bahr and my old friend George Hickenlooper. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse appeared in 1991, and quickly picked up awards, including an Emmy for "Outstanding Individual Achievement – Informational Programming – Directing.” Thereafter, Eleanor tried her hand at feature filmmaking, directing the 2016 romantic comedy, Paris Can Wait as well as 2020’s Love is Love is Love. She also published a second book, Notes on a Life, which chronicled the doings of her famous family, including the death of her first-born son Gian-Carlo at the age of 22 and her husband’s much-maligned decision to cast daughter Sofia in a key role in The Godfather, Part III. Nor did Eleanor give up documentary filmmaking, chronicling the making of Sofia’s 2006 feature, Marie Antoinette. 

 Eleanor passed away on April 12 of this year, at the age of 87 in Rutherford, California, seat of the family’s well-known winery There’s little question that hers was a remarkably productive life.

 Far less well-known was Samantha Davis, who died on March 24 at the age of 53. She was the longtime wife of Warwick Davis, who starred in George Lucas and Ron  Howard’s Willow.. In this 1988 fantasy film, the still-teenaged Davis (all of three foot six inches tall) played a hero who saves a kingdom from evil usurpers. Part of the drama takes place in the village of the Nelwyns (supposedly a race of tiny people all under four feet tall). For these scenes, little people were recruited from around the globe, and they joyously bonded with one another, leading director Howard to say, “To see them interacting, performing, working hard, laughing, playing, carrying on . . . that was to me I think maybe the greatest experience in the movie.”

 On set Warwick first got to know Samantha, and they married soon thereafter. Though in Willow she was simply a villager, she did rack up several other acting credits, including a role in one of the Harry Potter films. Together they founded a charitable organization, Little People U.K.  His tributes to her memory are deeply moving.

 

 

Third Time’s Not the Charm: The Godfather, Part III

In 1972, everyone was talking about the screen version of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Who could forget the pageantry, the brutality, Marlon Brando stroking that cat? When awards season rolled around, The Godfather was nominated for eleven Oscars, winning Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay. (It was a great year for movies. In the Best Director category, Francis Ford Coppola was beaten out by Bob Fosse and Cabaret.)

 A mere two years later, a second Godfather film showed up on movie screens.  With Brando’s Vita Corleone dead and gone, Godfather II focused on son and heir Michael (Al Pacino), now a reluctant crime boss trying to reconcile himself to his new power. Michael’s story in the present day is interwoven with that of Vito as a young man (Robert De Niro) leaving Sicily in response to the massacre of his family. Unusually for a sequel, Godfather II was perhaps even more admired by critics and audiences than the initial film. It was nominated for nine Oscars, and won an impressive six, becoming the first sequel ever to be named Best Picture, even though it was up against such masterworks as Chinatown.

 You can’t blame Paramount Pictures, which had optioned Puzo’s 1969 novel, for wanting to take full advantage of its golden goose, even though, after the release of Godfather II,  Coppola considered the Corleone saga complete. That’s why Paramount hired a string of established writers and directors to come up with Part III. Some versions had the Corleones working with the CIA in Latin America. One involved a turf war with the Irish Mafia in Atlantic City. In another, Michael Corleone is killed early on, and the entire focus is on his surviving children.

 Some twenty years later, Puzo and Coppola were finally persuaded to return to the project, and much of the original cast signed on. The focus is now entirely on an ageing Michael, still trying to balance his criminal activities with a desire to lead a worthy life. It’s striking to see what time has done to the familiar Corleone family members. Michael is greying and fighting health problems. His estranged wife Kay (Diane Keaton) has a rather silly new hairdo, and her sadness over the hand she’s been dealt is a bit hard to buy. (Since we’ve all seen Keaton be adorably addled in Annie Hall, it’s easy to think she’d face tragedy with a blithe and dithering la-di-da.) Michael’s sister Connie (Talia Shire), whom we first met as a jubilant bride in Part One, has been turned by circumstance into a black-clad angel of death. New characters include Michael and Kay’s grown children. Son Anthony, who has turned his back on his father’s murderous ways, aspires to be an opera singer, and his stage debut in Palermo (in an opera that features Godfather-style violence) provides a nice excuse for the entire family to end up in Sicily. Daughter Mary (played by Coppola’s own daughter, future director Sofia) is her dad’s loyal sidekick. Her performance was much derided back in the day, but the truth is that it’s a thanklessly unconvincing role. And of course there are lots of thugs, connivers, and assassins-in-waiting. (Watch out if you see a cop or a priest on the streets; he’s probably a killer in disguise.)

 What makes Godfather III worth watching? Coppola is still brilliant at staging public spectacle:  a street fair, a night at the opera, an innocent-seeming place where danger lurks. Palermo and Manhattan both look gorgeous. And the music—that plaintive trumpet theme—lures us into a story that might not be quite worth telling.

 

 

The Bling Ring: Robbing the Rich to Keep for Yourself

You’ve seen the headlines about mobs of teenagers ripping off major department stores, loading up on trendy fashions and expensive jewelry and then disappearing into the night. It’s a recent phenomenon and an ugly one, reflecting have-not kids (often in thrall to older crooks) and their willingness to create chaos because they feel cheated out of an expensive lifestyle. 

 Filmmaker Sofia Coppola explored a different kind of “bling ring” in 2013, focusing on a real-life group of upper-middle-class SoCal teens who made it into the pages of Vanity Fair after being arrested for breaking into the homes of pop culture celebs (Paris Hilton! Lindsay Lohan!) and running off with some $3 million worth of cash and belongings. Coppola’s version, which she wrote and directed, fictionalizes the actual kids but sticks close to their crimes and motives. Taking advantage of Coppola’s usual cinéma vérité stylistics, it conveys the excitement of pampered teenagers, whom Coppola herself has called "products of our growing reality TV culture,” emulating their small-screen idols by literally swiping the expensive toys with which the stars surround themselves in their natural habitat. The original Vanity Fair article, by Mary Jo Sales, was called “The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” and within Coppola’s film we see the members of the informal gang (including its one boy) happily modeling Louboutins, Rolexes, and other expensive trinkets in their own bedrooms, with their parents totally oblivious to what they’re up to.  

 Coppola’s has been an interesting career. She is, of course, the daughter of a one-time Hollywood Young Turk (and one of Roger Corman’s  early protégés),Francis Ford Coppola, who segued from 1963’s Dementia 13 to 1972’s Oscar-winning The Godfather and its sequels. When making 1990’s The Godfather, Part III, Francis Coppola found himself short an ingenue, and gave the part intended for Winona Ryder to his own daughter, who had to put up with scathing reviews of her performance. Somehow she survived that debacle, and launched her own feature-film writing and directing career with The Virgin Suicides in 1999. This grim but fascinating adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ debut novel was followed by Lost in Translation, which garnered 4 Oscar nominations, including best director. At that point in Hollywood history, no woman had ever won an Oscar for directing, and Coppola too was shut out . . . but she did take home a statuette for her very original screenplay about two Americans adrift in after-hours Tokyo. Since then, she’s directed about seven other films, including an anachronistic life of Marie Antoinette and an upcoming biopic about Priscilla Presley.

 There’s no denying her cinematic skill, nor her unique perspective on young women in positions of power. But if we’re being uncharitable we can also view her as one of Hollywood’s Nepo Babies, the children of movieland royalty for whom doors open. It’s hardly surprising that such well-endowed young people spark resentment in those who were not so auspiciously born.  Still, everyone is a bit gaga about Hollywood connections, however obscure. One of the kids in The Bling Ring, the young boy who seems less comfortable than the others in taking what doesn’t belong to him, has a dad with industry ties, perhaps one reason he is accepted as part of this Hollywood-obsessed crew. But, as The Bling Ring shows, he earns one of the harshest sentences doled out by the legal system. By way of contrast, the character played by Harry Potter’s Emma Watson (the one big name in this very young and mostly unknown cast) is terrific as Nicki, who puts on a great show of contrition and basic innocence. Now that’s acting!