(4 of 4)
Aspiring Updikes. On the strength of his first prize in the current festival, U.C.L.A.'s Lucas has been given a contract to expand THX into a full-length film under the guidance of Warners-Seven Arts Producer Francis Ford Coppola (You're a Big Boy Now), who graduated from U.C.L.A. in 1967. That kind of instant success is the exception. The rule is instant obscurity. A case in point is Marty Scorsese, 25, an N.Y.U. film-school graduate whose It's Not Just You, Murray won a first prize at the 1965 student festival—and might just well be the best university movie ever made. A 14-minute comic synopsis of low-class urban life that is vaguely reminiscent of Fellini's work, Murray is the picaresque tale of a vulpine conman who rises from petty-ante rumrunner to gunsel for "the Mob."
The film had a brief Manhattan art-house booking, and Scorsese was able to raise $24,000 for a 95-minute feature titled I Call First. Evocative of Marty, it cuts off a slice of life about an Italian-American bank teller who falls in love with a girl he meets on the Staten Island ferry, deserts her when he discovers that she was once raped, and returns to the vulgar bachelor world of his street-corner cronies. Flawed and immature in plot and structure, First nonetheless has an exact sense of the Lower Manhattan milieu and some authentic and hard-edged dialogue—but almost no commercial possibilities. Scorsese, who put up $6,000 of his own savings to direct the movie, is now filming TV commercials in London.
Like the products of the Underground-film world, campus movies are something of an acquired taste—which is one good reason why they have a limited commercial future. More than that, the bulk of them are simply the exuberant and untalented posturings of youth, which have no more claim to lasting attention than the sophomore poems and short stories turned out every year by aspiring collegiate Salingers and Updikes. Occasionally, of course, a gifted student like Coppola will graduate to the ranks of Hollywood professionals. In the long run, though, the contemporary enthusiasm for student films is likely to turn out a far greater number of enlightened appreciators than new creators. That in itself could be a big boon to movies: whether cinema grows as an art form depends largely upon whether film-educated audiences demand better things of it.