The Directors Company

The Directors Company was a short lived film production company formed by Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin in the early 1970s in association with Paramount Pictures. The directors were allowed to make any film they wished provided they kept within a certain budget.

According to Friedkin, the idea for the Directors Company came from Charles Bludhorn chairman of the Gulf and Western Corporation who owned Paramount. Friedkin, Coppola and Bogdanovich were all coming off hit films and Bludhorn wanted to work with them. Friedkin says Bludhorn made the deal with the directors without informing Paramount's Frank Yablans, who was strongly opposed to the idea of the company.

Nonetheless in 1972 Yablans announced the Directors Company would make three films, each under $3 million - Paper Moon (Bogdanovich), The Conversation (Coppola) and The Bunker Hill Boys (Friedkin); he also said the company aimed to make 12 pictures in all and would possibly move into television. A board of directors consisting of three Paramount executives and three company directors would pass judgement on the films. Bogdanovich:

I thought it was a great idea... The money we could make was limited to a certain amount, which I thought was perfectly good, but Friedkin felt he wanted more money, and more money for the budget. Our deal was, we could make any picture we wanted, as long as it was three million or under, which was a lot of money in those days. We could also produce a movie for someone else if it wasn’t more than $1.5 million. We didn’t even have to show them a script! It was a great deal, and I wish I could get one like it again. That kind of freedom is worth gold, I think. It was a shame.

Peter Bart, a vice-president of Paramount at the time, was given the job of supervising the Directors Company. Each filmmaker was allowed to have a protege who could make a film for the company - Bogdanovich chose Orson Welles; who suggested the younger director make Daisy Miller. Bogdanovich later said that he wanted to help King Vidor made a movie about James Murray, star of The Crowd (2004). According to William Friedkin, the company had the opportunity to make Star Wars when Coppola brought them the script, but neither Friedkin or Bogdanovich were enthusiastic about it, so they passed.

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