Chicago magazine has a nice piece in the December issue about the inspiration behind Francis Ford Coppola’s new film—his first in ten years—Youth Without Youth. If you’ve been paying attention, of course, you already know some of the story. The literary inspiration for the film is the book of the same name by Mircea Eliade and the book was placed in Coppola’s hands by Wendy Doniger, a professor of religion here at U of C and a longtime friend of Coppola.
The magazine article by Robert Loerzel tells more about the friendship:

Doniger says she and Coppola were members of a “little coven of misfits and existentialists” at Great Neck High School on Long Island in the mid-1950s. “We were anti–Doris Day,” Doniger says. They wrote Hemingwayesque stories, listened to jazz in Greenwich Village, and smoked cigarettes. Doniger remembers Coppola as a “gawky” boy with a head full of ideas.

But don’t read that “gawky boy” comment as too dismissive. Loerzel writes that “Coppola offers a little more detail: ‘She was, in fact, the first girl I ever kissed.'”
We have an excerpt from the book.