Not a Pretty Picture

After a detour to Canada, where she wrote and produced a children's television program, Coolidge earned her master's degree in film from New York University in 1974.

On a grant from the American Film Institute, she made a hybrid documentary narrative film titled Not a Pretty Picture, which dramatized the date rape she'd survived.

Coolidge was in Los Angeles and turning at the AFI when Not a Pretty Picture came to the attention of Francis Coppola and his producing partner Fred Ruse.

Coppola was assembling filmmakers to take up residency at Zoetrope Studios, his ambitious film facility in L.A. Coolidge recalled, So they interviewed me.

They said, we're looking at women directors, and we think you're it.

I said it needs falling in love, they just never showed it, and then breaking up.

So I sat with Andy and Wayne, and we wrote it.

Coleman and Coolidge agreed that Atlantic didn't roll out the red carpet for a film school grad with not a pretty picture, one unproduced, and one abandoned movie to her credit.