Martin Scorsese, still struggling through his debut feature, years in the making, Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, recalled meeting Francis Ford Coppola in a loft on Great Jones Street. Coppola was in town to promote the New York opening of his first feature film, You’re a Big Boy Now, and had packed the loft with 40 or 50 young people, in denim, fringe, and beads—Scorsese had never seen this species at a Hollywood party, which, incredibly, this was. Scorsese was equally amazed by this guy Coppola. He had never come face-to-face with a director his age, a New York Italian-American like him who had made his own little movie and had written for the big Hollywood studios. Which one was this guy? Scorsese did not recognize in this new breed the complacency of what he thought of as a studio workingman. He saw in him the kind of filmmaker he himself dreamed of being: both of the system and an iconoclast. “You have to want to make a film so badly,” Coppola told the crowd that night on Great Jones, “that you would kill for it.” That’s me, Scorsese thought. I want to make Hollywood films—my own kind. “He’s like the older brother,” Scorsese said.
Steven Spielberg was just a film student at Long Beach State, almost 21 years old, when he heard Francis Ford Coppola was at Warner Bros., directing his next movie, the Fred Astaire musical Finian’s Rainbow—and “his door was open to any young film student anywhere in the world. You can just walk in and meet Francis.” To sit and talk about movies with a young filmmaker in his own office at Warner Bros.? Spielberg was nervous. He had first met Coppola through actor Tony Bill, who had appeared in You’re a Big Boy Now,but suspected he and Coppola didn’t dream in the same vernacular. Spielberg’s tastes were by his own estimation slightly old-fashioned; he didn’t love the European “art” filmmakers with the same passion as his friends did; he loved classical Hollywood, David Lean, Michael Curtiz, “and I didn’t think there would be room for me.” But Coppola, in his Warner Bros. office, took the time to listen. “That was a blessing in those days,” Spielberg said.
