Almost ten years after his monumentally successful, two-part Godfather (1971-1974) epic, Francis Ford Coppola (b.1939) offered another diptych returning to the theme of family so central to the earlier work while also pointing towards the increasing interest in Americana that would guide his subsequent films. Based on short novels by the Oklahoma cult writer S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders and Rumble Fish were made back to back within weeks of each other using many of the same Tulsa locations and sharing the art director Dean Tavoularis, cinematographer Stephen Burum and the young and then undiscovered actors Matt Dillon and Diane Lane. Even more than the shift in tone across the Godfather films, these two films about restless adolescence are remarkably distinct in style and approach to their source material, with Rumble Fish offering a brooding, nocturnal and dream-like fantasy of lost youth as a complement to The Outsiders’ brightly lit ode to Fifties nostalgia.