The Making of The Rain People - Legacy

Legacy

Dale Pollock, author of Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas, wrote of the film in 1983: "Filmmaker remains one of the best documentaries about the production of a movie, as fresh and insightful today as it was in 1968… The thirty-minute film has the fluidity and detail of a written journal coupled with a cinematic sense of movement as the Rain People company goes from location to location." In 1989 Peter Cowie, author of Coppola: A Biography, wrote that Filmmaker was "one of the most important analyses of Coppola's craft and his incipient philosophy." In 1999, Michael Schumacher wrote, "Lucas's documentary, Filmmaker, caught the essence of the ups and downs of making The Rain People, from the exuberance of working on a risky yet fulfilling project that flew in the face of the way movies were normally made in Hollywood to Coppola's angry telephone confrontation with a Warner Bros.-Sever Arts official "

Coppola himself later admitted that the documentary "may be better than ". In a behind-the-scenes segment on the film Tetro, Tetro: How to Make Movies, Coppola mentions how he used the same camera dolly on Tetro as he did in The Rain People and as seen in Filmmaker.

According to Pollock, Lucas himself was proud of Filmmaker, his most ambitious effort at that time, and a film that contributed to advancing his career. It was to be his last short film before making his first feature, THX 1138.