'Change the Man to a Woman, and You've Got a Picture, Kid!'"

Thanks to TCM for tonight's foray into the macabre:

Francis Ford Coppola was still a graduate student at UCLA film school when he was hired by low-budget producer and director Roger Corman to write a new story and dialogue around a Russian science-fiction movie Corman had acquired, Nebo Zowet (1959).

....Coppola came up with a single scene, a Hitchcockian sequence that was purely visual and included "everything I knew Roger would like." As Coppola was further quoted by biographer Gene D. Phillips: "'A man goes to a pond and takes off his clothes, picks up five dolls, ties them together, goes under the water, and dives down, where he finds the body of a seven-year-old girl with her hair floating in the current...then he gets axed to death.' Corman responded enthusiastically, 'Change the man to a woman, and you've got a picture, kid!'"

As yours truly has pontificated many times in the past: they don't make 'em like they used to.

P.S. Dementia 13 co-star Mary Mitchel on producer Roger Corman and the kinds of breaks he gave to aspiring filmmakers like Francis Coppola: "At the time, the studios had no interest at all in young filmmakers. Nobody came out of the universities, nobody was considered to be knowledgeable or be of any value at all. In fact, [young filmmakers] were totally barred from any kind of jobs whatsoever, couldn't get near a studio or a set. There was no mentoring... 'cause there was nothing in it for the old guard. There was only one person who offered young actors and filmmakers an opportunity, and that was Roger Corman. His was the only company where you could get a foothold."