A decade before he directed “The Godfather,’’ Francis Ford Coppola was a student at USC Film School who broke into the industry by helping to spice up soft-core porn like “Tonight for Sure.”
Coppola’s participation in another of these quaintly naughty efforts consisted of filming around 18 minutes in 3-D and color that was interpolated into an English-dubbed black-and-white German film released in the United States as “The Bellboy and the Playgirls.’’
Now, a two-minute excerpt of this stereoscopic oddity, featuring buxom Playboy model June Wilkinson, has debuted on Blu-ray as part of a just-released collection called “3-D Rarities,’’ with the compilation’s producer, Bob Furmanek, promising the entire restored film is coming in the future from his 3-D Film Archive.
The film’s American distributor paid Coppola $250 to “write additional scenes, sequences, dialogue and narration,’’ according to a contract that Furmanek dug up. The future Oscar winner is also widely believed to have directed the 3-D footage with Wilkinson and comedian Don Kenney, who plays a bellboy and aspiring private eye who spies on lingerie models.
Furmanek says there is partial nudity in the 18-minute Coppola sequence, which falls into a genre called “nudie cuties’’ that flourished before hard-core porn arrived on American screens in the late 1960s. But the “3-D Rarities’’ excerpt, which features Kenney in drag, doesn’t get any more risqué than the stereoscopic camera plunging into Wilkinson’s impressive décolletage.
The “Bellboy’’ excerpt hasn’t been included in sold-out shows for “3-D Rarities’’ at the Museum of Modern Art, which will show it again on Sunday at 2:30 p.m. and on July 4 at 2 p.m. But MoMA audiences have been treated to the extremely rare 3-D burlesque short “I’ll Sell My Shirt,’’ which consists of a routine where the comedy team of George “Beetlepuss’’ Lewis and Charlie Crafts entice lovely Corky “Da’ Brooklyn Lovebird’’ Marshall into stripping down to her underwear.
The compilation — executive produced by Greenbriar Picture Shows’ John McElwee and distributed on Blu-ray by Flicker Alley — features 3-D oddities going back to 1922. Included are a 1953 heavyweight bout between Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott; stereoscopic footage of an atomic bomb test; promotional shorts shown at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City; several 3-D trailers for feature films; and animated shorts, including Casper the Friendly Ghost’s elaborate and beautifully restored “Boo Moon’’ (1954).