Paul at 2009-08-24 14:03:57:
Coppola has this to say on the commentary track to The Conversation:
"The Conversation was an original screenplay written probably in the mid sixties, it's difficult for me sometimes to place these scripts because usually there is a kind of leapfrog effect in which I write a script, get three quarters through it, decide that it's terrible, abandon it, and then put it away and forget about it. The Rain People I wrote while I was still a UCLA student, and I went through that exact experience... These scripts tend to have some incubation time between the first attempt..."
It's interesting (and probably part of why he's so great) that someone like Coppola suffers from that kind of self doubt.