For every Orson Welles or Quentin Tarantino, directors with meteoric rises to critical acclaim early in their careers, there are hundreds of filmmakers who experience humble, if not uninspiring, beginnings. Look no further than Francis Ford Coppola, whose thankless debut effort featured zero indicators of the vision behind The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. A gifted intellect and wiz-kid with limitless dreams, Coppola signed on for any projects he could align himself with, including the role of splicing together two pre-existing movies into one Frankenstein creation. Before he was lucky enough to undergo a crash course in economic, low-budget filmmaking by Roger Corman, the Megalopolis director started at the lowest rung imaginable with Tonight for Sure, a cheap, bizarre, and aimless sexploitation film crossed with a Western that is proof that you always have to start at the bottom.
Francis Ford Coppola Merged Two Movies Together To Create ‘Tonight for Sure’
With the collapse of the classic studio system in Hollywood, the prospect of breaking into the film industry looked more arduous than ever before in the 1960s. During this time of imminent radical change in the industry, culminating in the New Hollywood movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s, film school became a viable source for discovering new voices. The seminal crop of movie brats, including Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and George Lucas, are celebrated as the inaugural class of directors to emerge from film school. Earning his B.A. at Hofstra University, Coppola still had many ways to go until forever altering the American canon of cinematic classics with The Godfather.
Of all the anonymous feature debuts by great directors, Coppola may have the most inauspicious start to a career considering that his first film, Tonight for Sure, fails even to receive recognition as the first Coppola film. That title is usually reserved for Dementia 13, a horror B-movie produced by exploitation master Roger Corman, a maverick industry titan responsible for giving Coppola’s peers their first break. Predating Dementia 13 is Tonight for Sure, which featured uncredited contributions from Jerry Schafer, whose unreleased Western-themed sexploitation movie, The Wide Open Spaces, was mashed together with a short written by Coppola entitled The Peeper to create Tonight for Sure.
Frustrated with the lack of creative freedom at UCLA’s graduate film program, Coppola dove into the world of “nudie” films to rebel against the school. The Peeper, about a man spying on pin-up models in his neighborhood, was a “cute little premise,” according to Coppola. The director was hired by Premier Pictures Company, which produced The Wide Open Spaces (about a cowboy who wakes up from a head injury and views cows as naked women) and he was tasked to combine Schafer’s film — one Coppola called “terrible,” — with The Peeper into a jumbled, incoherent mess that is Tonight for Sure. The 1962 amateur film, which makes the average Corman picture look like a blockbuster by the Walt Disney Company, follows two men, Samuel Hill (Don Kenney) and Ben Jabowski (Karl Schanzer), who meet at a burlesque show and discuss their perverse sexual encounters. The leftover footage from The Wide Open Spaces and The Peeper was incorporated into the characters’ backstories.
‘Tonight for Sure’ Does Not Hint at Francis Ford Coppola’s Future Greatness
During film production, the editing room is where the magic happens. Coppola, who served more as the haphazard editor rather than the director of Tonight for Sure, could barely muster up a comprehensible movie. Due to its extremely low budget and sleazy material, the film, featuring Playboy model Marli Renfro, is unsurprisingly impersonal, although it does feature a score by Francis’ father, composer Carmine Coppola. The low-rate and cheap nature of this glorified student film makes you appreciate Corman’s enterprise, which taught so many legendary filmmakers how to hone their craft despite making trashy exploitation movies. While you can feel the artistic expression of early trial runs, such as Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha and Peter Bogdanovich‘s Targets, Tonight for Sure has little substance to offer. It is an ill-fated attempt to cash in on the craze of sexploitation and voyeurism films, later perfected by Coppola in The Conversation.
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Throughout his filmography, featuring numerous masterpieces and hidden gems, Francis Ford Coppola would tackle themes of obsession and power in America, but these provocative dissections are nowhere to be found in Tonight for Sure. While certainly not a film that anyone would make space for in his career retrospective, Coppola recognized the importance of this 1962 amateur B-movie, stating, “It was the only scene I could find that actually gave you a chance to fool around with a camera and cut a film.” You have to start somewhere, but even for an artist as assured in his abilities as Coppola, Tonight for Sure has the potential to destroy anyone’s confidence.
Tonight for Sure is available to watch on the Internet Archive
Tonight for Sure
- Release Date
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August 9, 1962
- Director
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Francis Ford Coppola
- Cast
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Don Kenney
, Karl Schanzer
, Virginia Gordon - Runtime
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76 minutes
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