112) Filmmaker

Filmmaker (1968)

Director: George Lucas

Starring: Francis Ford Coppola

When George Lucas was a film student, he won the National Student Film Festival with his short film THX-1138B: 4EB/Electronic Labyrinth (catchy title). The prize for winning was a scholarship to observe a production at Warner Brothers. That production was Francis Ford Coppola's Finian's Rainbow. Lucas and Coppola struck up an instant rapport, given they were the two youngest people on the set by a long way, so when Coppola was preparing to film his next project, The Rain People, he hired Lucas as a production assistant.

The Rain People was a different type of film project. Rather than filming on the studio lot, Coppola and his small cast and crew road tripped their way across America filming as they went. Lucas's primary role on set was to capture footage for a 'making of' documentary. That documentary ended up becoming Filmmaker.

This film has been mentioned a couple of times in various books I'd been reading for my research on Coppola and I'd been quite keen to see it. However, being that Filmmaker is only a short film, just over half an hour long, and was not overly marketable, it was never released in any formal capacity (hence the lack of poster). But in this wonderful age that we live in this obscure film still somehow made its way onto Youtube.

Just by watching Filmmaker you don't really get any insight into what The Rain People is about. Lucas's film is not about Coppola's film. Lucas's film is about Coppola himself. You get the distinct impression that for the young Lucas, the main reason to be on this trip was to observe Coppola. You can really see why for the young filmmakers of his generation, Coppola was seen as a bit of a standard barer. Even at this early stage of his career he is thinking big picture, he is thinking about the future of cinema. There is a really interesting scene in Filmmaker in which Lucas captures Coppola in a heated phone discussion with the Directors Guild, who are demanding that he employ an extra Assistant Director. Coppola starts to rant and rave about the future of cinema and how the system is going to crumble under its own weight and how his generation of filmmakers won't need Hollywood. It's really interesting to hear when you have that hindsight knowledge of where Coppola would take his career, starting his own production company in San Francisco and eventually launching his own film studio.

This would be a really interesting film to watch in conjunction with Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper's Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, their excellent documentary about Coppola's experiences in the Philippines making Apocalypse Now. While Lucas's film shows us a pre-Godfather Coppola, a young dreamer who none the less already shows many of the personality traits that would make him a big time mover and shaker in the following decade, Bahr and Hickenlooper's documentary shows Coppola at the absolute apex of his megalomania.

On a more trivial note, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola have two of the most famous beards in world cinema (you need Steven Spielberg's to complete the holy trinity of beards), but for the production of The Rain People though, both of them had to shave them off. Because the film was being produced on the road, and they were constantly needing the cooperation of different townspeople Coppola decided that his crew needed to look as reputable as possible, which meant beards off. There were no shots of a beardless Lucas, but there were a fair bit of clean-shaven Coppola and all I can say is that is a face that needs a beard.

As far as 'making of' documentaries go, Filmmaker is pretty rough. There are no formal interviews, and no real discussions about the film The Rain People itself. Rather, it is just behind the scenes footage, mainly observing Coppola and the way he operates. It is not the sort of highly processed 'making of' you'd expect to find as a DVD extra, which is nothing more than a bit of marketing for the film. But it is worth hunting down if you are interested in Coppola. It provides some unique insight into the way he thinks and the way he works.