Francis Ford Coppola’s ironic Hollywood origin story: “I more or less turned him on”
When Francis Ford Coppola made The Godfather, he was quickly heralded as one of the most vital voices in New Hollywood, symbolising a new era of cinematic experimentation and fearlessness. The movie featured powerhouse performances from the likes of Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, and with its pioneering approach to the gangster genre, it changed the art of filmmaking forever, and it’s no surprise that so many filmmakers consider it a cinematic hallmark to be frequently revisited and studied.
Coppola’s film was a huge success, and he followed it up with the equally acclaimed sequel The Godfather Part II and the Gene Hackman thriller The Conversation before rounding off the 1970s with Apocalypse Now, giving him quite the impressive decade. With several Oscars to his name (including one for co-writing 1970s Patton), Coppola became a cinematic icon, but if you’d told him a decade prior that this would be his fate, he probably wouldn’t believe you.
Before becoming a Hollywood filmmaker, Coppola made various erotically-charged low-budget films, which inevitably led him to indie cinema titan Roger Corman. He worked on several productions with Corman, including some of his horror B-movies, before seizing the opportunity to make a feature film with the filmmaker’s assistance, resulting in his debut, Dementia 13.
It’s quite striking to compare the low-budget horror movie to Coppola’s later works, because while the filmmaker would return to the genre with Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Twixt, Dementia 13 was utterly of its time, coming when this new era of horror – ushered in by the shocking 1960 releases Psycho and Peeping Tom – was still in its infancy.
The movie wasn’t exactly a well-thought-out project, but Coppola churned the movie out in rather quick time so that he could convince Corman to fund the production. “I knew that whenever Roger takes a crew on location, he can’t resist the temptation of doing a second picture, having already paid the crew’s expenses there. I played on this, managing to convince him that I should direct it. At the time, Roger wanted to make a movie moulded on the success of Psycho, so I told him a zesty horror scene which more or less turned him on,” Coppola once explained.
So, while shooting The Young Racers, the future The Godfather filmmaker came up with the idea for Dementia 13 and miraculously got it greenlit, and it was then released in 1963. Corman provided Coppola with $22,000 left over from his budget for The Young Racers, while the filmmaker secured a further $20,000 from another producer, allowing him to create his film on a modest budget of $42,000.
It’s ironic that Coppola’s entry into Hollywood was made on a tight and resourceful budget, because it seems as though he has since disregarded the importance of being smart with his money. When he released One From The Heart in 1982, he made $636,796 at the box office in the United States against a budget of $26 million, which he had funded himself. Unsurprisingly, it led him to file for bankruptcy, which he did once again in the 1990s following more financial failures.
Years later, he is still struggling to budget properly. With his most recent film, 2024’s Megalopolis, the filmmaker self-financed it at a whopping $120m, even selling some of his winery and taking out a loan to do so. Unfortunately for him, it only grossed $14.3m. Perhaps he should’ve taken a leaf out of Corman’s book, but it seems as though Coppola is still clinging to his ‘70s heyday, seemingly forgetting that he hasn’t had a truly successful movie in decades.
