The forgotten early erotic movies of Francis Ford Coppola
The 1970s are known to be one of the greatest decades in cinema history, with such filmmakers as Steven Spielberg, John Cassavetes, Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott making some of the era’s best movies.
Arguably, no director was quite as influential in the decade as Francis Ford Coppola, however, the mind behind The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and The Conversation, who won five Academy Awards at the time and whose career had surprisingly erotic beginnings.
In an interview, Coppola once said, “Film is an illusion. The audience just sees a lot of shadows on the screen. The emotion is in the audience. The trick is giving them something that unleashes that and suddenly they endow the images with their emotion. My theory is, when people say a movie is beautiful, I don’t think it can be unless there is beauty in the audience.”
He added, “I want to make a film about the future. You know the Alfred, Lord Tennyson quote? ‘For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be…’ That’s the movie I want to make. It would be called Megalopolis. I’m 81 so I hope I have enough years to make it. I want to give the children of the world a vision of the future that is beautiful. That is positive. That is a heaven on Earth, because I really think we can have that.”
But to do all that, you need to start your career, and to do that, you often have to compromise yourself. For Coppola, it meant moving into erotic movies.
Over a decade before Coppola released The Godfather, the filmmaker was learning his craft at USC Film School, shortly after which he would make a name for himself for a number of soft-core porn films. Aged just 21, Coppola penned the script for The Peeper, a short film about a creepy voyeur who attempts to spy on an adult photoshoot, with the movie gaining the attention of an interested producer, which led to the Playboy Bunny Marli Renfro being cast.
Though the film was largely rejected, Coppola found success when a minor production company signed the director on to combine The Peeper with their own erotic western, The Wide Open Spaces, with the final movie being churned out and named Tonight for Sure. Shortly after, a similar opportunity arose, with Coppola re-cutting a German movie, adding the British model June Wilkinson to the final 1962 film titled The Bellboy and the Playgirls.
Paying Coppola just $250 to create additional scenes with extra dialogue and narration, the director was also tasked with directing 3D footage that would add to the film’s commercial value. Featuring partial nudity, The Bellboy and the Playgirls was described as a ‘nudie cutie’ at the time, a genre of soft-core porn that was popular before the graphic hard-core porn of the late 1960s and 1970s, which gathered steam thanks to the release of Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat.
Essentially helping Coppola to gain a good foothold in the industry, the director doesn’t regret his time working on such divisive movies, stating in the book Francis Ford Coppola by Jean-Paul Chaillet: “I am not ashamed of these works because it was the only way for me to be able to work with a camera and make a film”.
In comparison to contemporary movies of the same ilk, the ‘nudie cuties’ of Coppola’s early career also seem rather tame, telling recurrent tales of creepy ‘peeping toms’ who spy on naked women. Such films offer nothing at all when it comes to artistic grace, playing on the salacious themes of many films of the time, including Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, which suggested that cameras and filmmaking were inherently voyeuristic.
Though Francis Ford Coppola would never return to the genre that helped him enter the industry, the director would once again touch on themes of voyeurism in the 1974 thriller The Conversation, starring Gene Hackman. In the three-time Oscar-nominated movie, Hackman plays a surveillance specialist who worries that the couple he is spying on is due to be murdered.
Take a look at a clip from the 1962 movie The Bellboy and the Playgirls below.
