Whether it’s honing the fine art of making coffee as an office gofer or picking up after the hungry public as a busboy, everyone has to start somewhere.

The early movies of Francis Ford Coppola prove that people with great talent also sometimes start at the bottom of the ladder. Long before the iconic director helmed classics such as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, Coppola made ends meet by hitching a ride on the proverbial bandwagon of 1960s “nudie cuties” before being hired by B-movie maestro Roger Corman. (Corman also had a knack for identifying young talent: He worked with Oscar winners Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, and Jonathan Demme early in their careers.)

After earning a BA in theater from Hofstra in 1959, Coppola enrolled in film school at UCLA — and like many college students, he found that money was scarce. To earn some scratch while sharpening his behind-the-camera skills, he decided to cash in on the new breed of nudie films that Russ Meyer had kick-started with The Immoral Mr. Teas in 1959. Before that, nudity was seen only in “documentaries” about nudist colonies.

The result of Coppola’s efforts was The Peeper, about a man trying to spy on a nude photo shoot. But when Coppola shopped the movie around, he discovered that the only taker wanted him to merge his film with another tame skin flick called The Wide Open Spaces (in which a cowboy brained by a rock subsequently sees naked women whenever he looks at cows). The result, Tonight for Sure, was first released in 1961. Coppola followed it up with The Bellboy and the Playgirls; this time, he had to shoot new nude scenes and work them into a 1958 German film called Mit Eva Fing Die Sünde an.

Though he didn’t know it at the time, this sort of “cut and paste” work would soon stand Coppola in good stead after he was hired to be an assistant to Roger Corman. Corman had bought the rights to the 1960 Russian film Nebo zovyot. He handed the footage off to Coppola and asked him to fashion it into an American film titled Battle Beyond the Sun (1962) by slapping on a few new scenes, a popular trick in the ’50s and ’60s (and one Corman used several times later in his career).

Coppola worked with Corman again as an uncredited director of The Terror (1963), a wildly disjointed movie starring Boris Karloff and a young Jack Nicholson. Corman was the original director but gave the project to Coppola after becoming involved in another endeavor. Coppola soon followed suit, and in the end, several different directors had a hand in the finished product (though none were eager to claim credit for it).

Dementia 13 (1963), also produced by Corman, was the first feature-length film Coppola had full directorial control over; he also wrote the script. Often credited as a seminal entry in the slasher-movie genre, the film follows gold-digger Louise Haloran as she tries to scheme her way into being included in her mother-in-law’s will — but her plots are brought to an abrupt end by an unknown axe murderer who’s revealed in the surprise finale. While there’s never been a consensus on how good Dementia 13 really is, it’s become a cult classic — in large part due to its now-famous director.

After Dementia 13, Coppola began to come into his own with pre-Godfather movies like You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), which was critically acclaimed but ultimately overshadowed by The Graduate. The Rain People (1969) explores fulfillment and responsibility, themes that later movies, such as The Conversation (1974), echo. Coppola finally earned his stripes with Patton (1970), a portrayal of the infamously bombastic World War II general. The film won seven Oscars, including best screenplay for the script Coppola cowrote with Edmund H. North.

The closest Coppola came to a misstep during this period was Finian’s Rainbow (1968), a musical that opened to decidedly mixed reviews, but it was another musical, One from the Heart (1982) that nearly bankrupted Coppola. This financial loss resulted in 15 years of commercially oriented filmmaking, followed by the 10-year hiatus from which the director has only recently returned.

— Robyn Showers

Battle Beyond The Sun, The Terror, and Dementia 13 are available for purchase at amazon.com.