The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story

Frontispiece

courtesy of Yoshiko Poncher

Dedication

For Noah Eaker and Jenny Gersten

Epigraph

The path to paradise begins in Hell.

—DANTE

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Frontispiece

Dedication

Epigraph

∞ The Francis Ford Coppolas

I. The Dream

II. The Apocalypse

∞ The Shape of Things to Come

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

Also by Sam Wasson

Copyright

About the Publisher

∞

The Francis Ford Coppolas

The friends that have it I do wrong

Whenever I remake a song,

Should know what issue is at stake:

It is myself that I remake.

—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

In this life, he has made and remade movies, won and lost Oscars, won and lost millions, fathered children and grandfathered grandchildren, a great-grandson, lost a son. He has built temples, bombed temples, grown grapes, grown a beard, stomped grapes, shaved his beard. He has written and discarded drafts, completed and then recut movies, fought the studios, battled the current of the times, won battles, lost battles, lost his mind. He has created a filmmaking empire, a hospitality empire, made hell, made paradise, lost paradise, and dreamed again.

"I am vicino-morte," he said recently, turning from his current draft of Megalopolis. Do you know what that means?

"Morte . . . I know morte . . ."

"Vicino . . . it means ‘in the vicinity of’ . . ."

He keeps changing. They say you only live once. But most of us don’t live even once. Francis Ford Coppola has lived over and over again.

In the natural world we all know, he has been, like many of us will be, a child who became old and will die. But in his life as a filmmaker, he lives in new worlds of his own imagining, each a laboratory for his, and others’, re-creation. Beginning with his 1966 feature, aptly titled You’re a Big Boy Now, Francis Ford Coppola initiated a colossal, lifelong project of experimental self-creation few filmmakers can afford—emotionally, financially—and none but he has undertaken. Through the artistic and social ingenuity of his company Zoetrope—in Greek, life revolution—his living, dying, living production company and onetime studio, he has marshaled the stubbornly earthbound resources of filmmaking, business, technology, and the natural world to stage—and that’s what his Zoetrope laboratory is, a stage—literal worlds analogous to those of whatever characters he’s creating. As he famously said of Apocalypse Now, the paragon of Zoetrope-style filmmaking, he made a war to film war: My technique for making film is to turn the filmmaking experience, as close as I can, into the experience of [whatever] fiction we’re dealing with.

Creating the experience. The experience that re-creates the self. The re-created self that creates the work. These are the life revolutions of Zoetrope. They are what this book is about. How Francis Ford Coppola, leader, driving force of Zoetrope, sacrificed more than the normal man’s share to improve the world, the lives of the people in it, one filmmaking community at a time.

As no other filmmaker does, Coppola lives in his stories, changing them as they change him, riding round an unending loop of experience and creation, until either the production clock strikes midnight and the process must stop or, one hopes, he recognizes his new self in the mirror of the movie—for him, a documentary of his new internal landscape—and cries, That’s it! I got it! Now that I know this part of myself, I know what the movie is!

Sometimes, though, he never gets there. It never gets there.

And on a few occasions, he and the movie end up tragically far away.

But artistic perfection has never been integral to Coppola’s colossal experiment. Learning and growing have been. Living is. Dying is.

The adventure is.

August in Napa Valley. Lunchtime at Zoetrope, a world apart from the world. But not a dream.

Masa Tsuyuki was vigorously stirring a pan of leftover pasta, talking about the egg, the egg, the added egg, almost singing of its power to transform yesterday’s lunch into today’s delicious something . . .

Just outside, through the wide-open doors of the kitchen, two apprentices laded twenty feet of picnic table with plums and berries and summer salad and a cobbler someone brought from home. Gazing at the spread in disbelief, a studious-looking fellow paused at the top of the stairway leading down from the library. Wiping his eyeglasses, he volunteered to help, and was laughingly commanded, by Masa, to sit down and eat. He introduced himself to one of the apprentices—Dean Sherriff, artist, brought up to assist Coppola on the visual conceptualization for Megalopolis.

Megalopolis is the story—soon to be filmed—Coppola has been thinking about, quarreling with, adding to, altering, and rediscovering for forty years.

Forty years. The story keeps changing.

Coppola keeps changing. His work keeps changing. The Godfather he made in a classical style; Apocalypse Now opened him to the surreal; One from the Heart, he says, he made in a theatrical mode, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula he built, as an antiquarian, with the live effects of early cinema. But what was his style? With Megalopolis—sixty years after his first feature—Coppola would at last find out.

In preparation for the shoot, Masa, when he isn’t preparing lunch, is rewiring the Silverfish, Coppola’s forty-year-old bespoke mobile cinema unit. Anahid Nazarian, right-hand woman for forty years, is on the phone, ten to five, making sure everything they are going to need will be at the studio in Peachtree City, Georgia, before they need it. Now Anahid sits restfully, eyes closed against the sun. Behind her, a fireworks explosion of orange and gold lantana shoots up the stone wall of the Zoetrope library, once a carriage house. Perched on a garden box at Anahid’s feet, a butterfly alights on a zucchini blossom and then flies off.

Ready! Masa cries. Everybody sit!

Megalopolis is a story of a utopia, a story as visionary and uncompromising as its author; more expensive, more urgently personal than anything he has ever done; and for all these reasons and too many others, nearly impossible to get made. In the eighties, when Coppola, felled with debt after Zoetrope’s second apocalypse—the death of Zoetrope Studios in Los Angeles—was directing for money, he read the story of Catiline in Twelve Against the Gods, tales of great figures of history who, Coppola said, went against the current of the times. Catiline, Roman soldier and politician, had failed to remake ancient Rome. There was something there for Coppola. Something of himself. What if Catiline, Coppola asked himself, who history said was the loser, had in fact had a vision of the Republic that was actually better? Throughout the decades, he’d steal away with Megalopolis, a mistress, a dream, gathering research, news items, political cartoons, adding to his notebooks—in hotels and on airplanes and in his bungalow office in Napa—glimpses of an original story, shades of The Fountainhead and The Master Builder braced with history, philosophy, biography, literature, music, theater, science, architecture, half a lifetime’s worth of learning and imagination. But Coppola wasn’t just writing a story; he was creating a city, the city of the title, the perfect place. Refined by his own real-life experiments with Zoetrope, his utopia, Megalopolis would be characterized by ritual, celebration, and personal improvement, and driven by creativity; it had to be. Corporate and political interests, he had learned too well, were driven mainly by greed. And greed destroyed.

Over the years, Megalopolis grew characters, matured into a screenplay, tried to live as a radio drama and a novel, and for decades wandered like the Ancient Mariner, telling its story, looking for financing, or a star: De Niro, Paul Newman, Russell Crowe . . . The story of Coppola’s story became a fairy tale for film students, a punch line for agents . . . and in 2001, paid for with revenues from his winery, it almost became a movie. On location in New York City, Coppola shot thirty-six hours of second-unit material. But after September 11, he halted production. The world had changed suddenly, and he needed time to change with it.

He passed the script to Wendy Doniger, University of Chicago professor of comparative mythology (and years before, his first kiss). She introduced Coppola to the work of Mircea Eliade—specifically, his novel Youth Without Youth, the story of a scholar who is unable to complete his life’s work; then he is struck dead by lightning and rejuvenated to live and work again. Coppola, rejuvenated, made a movie from it. It was his first film in a decade. Thinking like a film student again, he kept making movies—Tetro in 2009; Twixt, 2011—modest in size and budget, fearing that Megalopolis, a metaphysical, DeMille-size epic, was and always would be a dream only, beyond his or anyone’s reach. Utopia, after all, means a place that doesn’t exist.

Then he decided to finance the picture himself, for around $100 million of his own money.

Coppola appeared at the picnic table. He was reading.

Around him, Zoetropers bustled into and out of the kitchen, finished setting places near him, and bustled away again. Coppola kept reading. His eyes on the page, he reached out for a locally grown plum and took a bite. Mmm, he said to the plum. This is a wonderful plum. Dean Sherriff cautiously took a seat opposite. Here is the architect I was talking about, Coppola said, passing his pages to Dean, embellishing a line of inquiry they had been discussing before lunch about what the future should look like. As he spoke, vaulting from architecture to technology, from technology to education, the table around him became populated, quietly, by Zoetropers and their salad, pasta, chicken, and fruit. Though he had come for lunch, Coppola was now the only one without food.

What do you think? This question he directed at the table. Everyone looked up.

What do you think? This is how utopia could be attained, how a Zoetrope film would always be made.

There was quiet—a quiet Coppola filled with the wisdom of Goethe and Herman Hesse, two cherished sources. From them, he changed to a painful story of grammar school and his homeroom teacher, the horrible Mrs. Hemashandra.

Coppola! she snapped. "What are you doing? What is that book you’re reading?"

Biology.

That’s a college subject and you’ll never go to college.

No, Coppola says to the table. That wasn’t the way to learn, celebrate, improve, create. What if, in the future, teachers were more like hotel concierges? "Good morning. What do you want to learn about today? What interests you?" What is your dream?

It could happen. Coppola knows it could. Because it has happened before, great changes to the rules of life. He had seen it happen with each incarnation of Zoetrope. But if it happened again, would it last? If it didn’t last, would it teach?

After lunch, the table was cleared. Coppola congratulated Masa on the addition of the egg to the pasta, the Zoetropers resumed their tasks, and he and Dean returned to the library, Dean to a desk, Coppola to an armchair, to decide the future of the world.

I

THE DREAM

The Modern Utopia must be not static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage.

—H. G. WELLS, A MODERN UTOPIA

Better ideas broke through, crashing against the old, forking with each burst. This was the dreaming Francis Ford Coppola, changed again, this time by the Philippines, rewriting (again) Apocalypse Now, spitting bullet sounds through his teeth as he hit the keys, tchoo tchoo. He did not know where he was going, where the story was taking him. But what adventurer ever did? Tchootchootchoo. Where was he now? Not here, not on his chair at the living room table in Baler, in the jungle, on an island in Luzon, a million miles from home. Was he lost? His story was, but Coppola was a regular in the whirlpool of loss and rediscovery, conviction and uncertainty, ecstasy and despair. Ideas came easy to him; the problem was, the dreaming never stopped. He was writing even when he wasn’t writing. He was writing when he was shooting, between setups. He was writing when he was editing! Sleep? If his eyes were closed, he was writing. But until he got to the Philippines, he had never had to write to save his life; to save everyone’s life; to save his family, his homes, his friends, the filmmakers (George Lucas, Carroll Ballard, Walter Murch . . .), his assets, his reputation, his dignity—all to save American Zoetrope, their wounded production company, his first, favorite, and biggest dream, the biggest dream anyone in Hollywood, since they first imagined the industry, had ever dreamt. Which, if he, if they, dreamed to completion, could grant them the freedom they needed to flee Hollywood or, if it followed their example, transform it entirely. And why stop there? If they could revolutionize the American motion picture industry, what couldn’t they change? Zoetrope could be a home for all creative people—writers, actors, sculptors, dancers, painters, scientists, even those who didn’t know they were creative, or who hadn’t found the opportunity to be. It would be an oasis, a paradise of self-discovery and celebration wide open to everyone. With the right financing and the right imaginations, what would stop Zoetrope from reconstituting American or even world consciousness into a single living, loving adventure the size of nations and the span of lifetimes, La Bohème for the planet . . .

O bella età d’inganni e d’utopie!

Si crede, spera, e tutto

bello appare!

Oh, beautiful age of deceptions and utopias!

You believe, hope, and all

seems beautiful.

Beauty for all!

And they said it could never be? Why think that way?

Blind to the world, he vanished into his Olivetti. Every late night—even after a sweltering day’s shooting and shouting, the physical toil of debating actors, corralling helicopters, praying to explosives, attending budget reports, racing tropical thunderstorms; and even after every morning, when the kids, mosquito bitten and yelling for breakfast, played around his bare feet; and above all, even after the doubts, doubts, doubts: about Apocalypse, about his ability to write and direct and produce this movie he still did not understand, about how this coming failure would destroy every plan for his future—Coppola returned home to a house often without electricity, a house illuminated only by candles, tore off his wet shirt, and sat down at the living room table to imagine, on paper, page after terrible, incredible, terrible page, the next day’s scene. He did not know what he was doing.

He knew what he was doing. Five Oscars. He had won them, hadn’t he? In 1971, Best Original Screenplay, Patton; in 1973, Best Adapted Screenplay, The Godfather; in 1975, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, Best Picture, The Godfather Part II. He was a king, the most powerful, most respected writer-director-producer in Hollywood and—with all the attention and media resources conferred on him—among the most impactful communicators on the planet. That year, one critic wrote that Coppola’s influence over people’s minds is much more profound than any American politician’s today. Imagine what he could do with that influence!

And yet he still couldn’t get Paramount to finance Apocalypse Now. Five Oscars and the greatest filmmaking streak in memory—Godfather, The Conversation, Godfather Part II, back-to-back-to-back—weren’t enough to get even Paramount, his home studio, patrons of all three (consecutive!) masterpieces, to go for his Vietnam movie. Did Paramount expect Coppola to deliver a Godfather—as he had delivered Godfather II to be able to make The Conversation—every time he wanted to make a movie? That was no kind of freedom.

He had, instead of Paramount, Godfather money—and a growing media empire: a commanding eight-story office tower, the Sentinel Building, in North Beach, San Francisco; a twenty-two-room Victorian-style mansion with a bespoke basement screening room not too far away, on Broadway; a breathtaking estate in Napa Valley; a blue Mercedes limousine, compliments of Paramount; shared interest in a private turbojet; property in Mill Valley, where he and his friends could go and write; a San Francisco radio station, KMPX, where he could test material; the Little Fox Theatre, where writers and directors could try out ideas in a format that’s incredibly inexpensive compared to film; an apartment at the Sherry-Netherland in New York; Cinema Seven, his new distribution company; satellite offices at Goldwyn studios down in L.A.; the rights to The Black Stallion, which he had hired Carroll Ballard to write and direct; the rights to John Fante’s The Brotherhood of the Grape, his next film if it wasn’t to be the original musical of the life of Preston Tucker, who had also dreamed bigger than the rest; an unusual TV idea developed at the behest of the Children’s Television Workshop entitled First Contact, to which Carl Sagan would act as Coppola’s scientific advisor; a film he would produce for the eighty-year-old King Vidor to direct; a chronological reimagining of both Godfathers into an epic showpiece for NBC; and, until recently, ownership of City Magazine, which, had it worked, would have been the veritable writers room of the multimedia network that would publish pieces for Coppola’s theater, radio station, and movies. I don’t need more power, he had said. The most powerful man on earth is a film director. When he makes a picture, he is a god.

What came after that?

I’m at a Y in the road, he said before he left for the Philippines. One path is to become a manager and an executive who brings about great changes. On the other, there’s a very private notion to put my energy into developing as a writer and an artist. In the next five years I want to break through creatively by my own standards. I don’t think any film I have made even comes close to what I have in my heart.

Coppola’s heart: in 1968, he had won the initial incarnation of Zoetrope a development deal for seven original scripts by seven of his friends—before Warner Bros. pulled out, stiffing him with $300,000 in debt and decades of old dreams lost. The money he made in the intervening years was enough to get him and Zoetrope out of the red and back in the game, but to change Zoetrope from a little company into its own fully financed, self-sustaining, self-sufficient development, production, and distribution entity, he would need more than just Godfather money. He would need Paramount-level money. Imagine it . . .

Well, Paramount had told Gray Frederickson, producer of Godfather and Godfather II, months earlier, we think it’s just a little too early for a Vietnam picture.

Paramount, it turned out, was not alone. No one in Hollywood wanted Apocalypse Now.

How could that be? The Godfather, by one 1974 tally, made $285 million (plus the $10 million NBC paid for onetime-only television rights); then there was the box office from Godfather II (13 percent of the gross was his!); and, of course, American Graffiti, which he produced for George Lucas, was the highest grosser ever for any film made for under a million dollars—$50 million in the United States alone! And nobody had wanted that picture, either! When would they realize he, not they, was Fort Knox? That he was the future? Variety had certainly figured it out: Coppola’s commercial touch thus far verges on the phenomenal.

So, Apocalypse Now: he would have to make it himself. He would have to find the money himself. And he would do it without an agent.

In the years after he left Freddie Fields and Creative Management Associates, Coppola didn’t take on new representation; Fields had screwed him, he had discovered, on the Zoetrope–Warner Bros. deal. Nor did Coppola need to be charged an agent’s percentage for work he, with his track record, could get himself. Nor would it be wise to bring on a traditional lawyer to negotiate his Apocalypse deal with financiers. If he or she charged Coppola their hourly rate, Coppola could have bankrupted himself before he raised his first dollar for the movie. But that’s where lawyer Barry Hirsch was different. Hirsch, whom Coppola discovered through Pacino, charged, significantly, a percentage. (That gave us the opportunity to go out and do things that didn’t come to fruition without the client having to bear the responsibility of an hourly fee, Hirsch explained.) With Hirsch negotiating on his behalf, Coppola wouldn’t have to foot the bill until they had a deal.

They needed about $14 million.

Hirsch flew to the Cannes Film Festival, the international nexus of debuting and selling distribution rights to finished films. But Hirsch didn’t have a finished film; he had a script about a Vietnam movie to be directed by Francis Ford Coppola. What he sold, territory by territory—and on a scale unprecedented—was foreign presales, the right for international distributors to release the unmade Apocalypse in exchange for money up front—winning Apocalypse around $7 million. With that first investment secured, Hirsch picked up an additional $7 million for the domestic distribution rights he sold to United Artists, an organization Coppola regarded with special admiration. Since its founding, in 1919, not by executives but by filmmakers Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and Mary Pickford, United Artists had more than earned its reputation for being the most progressive, filmmaker-friendly financial entity in Hollywood. Fifty-five years later, its current leader, Arthur Krim, was no different. Coppola considered him one of the very great men of the movie business.

The deal Hirsch negotiated wasn’t just innovative—probably the biggest prefinancing deal ever won from foreign distributors—it was a beauty. Seven years after the movie’s initial release, the rights to Apocalypse Now would revert to Coppola. As a studio would, he would own the movie—as he wished he had owned American Graffiti—and all the proceeds to the movie, less profit participants, like stars . . .

That was United Artists’ condition. He had to sign a star.

Coppola was incensed. Did Godfather have stars? Brando had been box-office poison then, remember? And when had movie stars become de facto producers, effectively green-lighting movies? If they could even get Al Pacino—whom Coppola had made a star in Godfather—how much would his movie star fee cut into Coppola’s budget? And what if Pacino didn’t say yes? If Nicholson didn’t say yes? If Redford didn’t say yes? Whose fault is it that there are only six world stars today? Coppola opined to the trade press. We should go back to the old studio system, not in an exploitative, crass way. But every studio should be developing talent. I can’t afford to work with people I started with.

Hat in hand, Coppola drove up from Hollywood to Malibu to meet with Steve McQueen. But McQueen said he didn’t want to star in Apocalypse if it would keep him in the Philippines, away from his family, for three months. Coppola, who was never away from Eleanor and the children (Gio, Roman, Sofia) for more than two weeks, who brought them to every location just as his father, Carmine, had brought his wife, Italia, and his three children (August, Francis, Talia) with him to wherever his flute was needed, urged McQueen to do the same and offered him, instead of the starring role of Willard, the much smaller role of Colonel Kurtz. McQueen said no.

Pacino said no.

Martin Sheen had scheduling conflicts.

Outraged, exasperated, Coppola picked up his Oscars and threw them clean through the dining room window of his big house in Pacific Heights.

It was then back to Hollywood, to Marlon Brando, for what Coppola knew from The Godfather would be a fierce negotiation. To play Kurtz, Brando wanted a million dollars a week with a guaranteed minimum of three weeks plus a mouthwatering piece of the first-dollar gross:

Ten percent, Hirsch offered Brando’s agent, Jay Kantor.

No, no. Marlon hates United Artists. He doesn’t trust them. Make it another 1.3%.

11.3%?!

This is how a five-time Oscar winner got a movie made? By being squeezed by an actor whose career he rescued in The Godfather?

This was Hollywood?

I began to see, Coppola said, if this kept up, the industry would someday be paying $3,000,000 for eight hours, plus overtime, and have to shoot at the actor’s house.

In the old days, before their production, distribution, and exhibition monopolies were broken up by antitrust regulation, the studios had the resources to keep actors under long-term contracts. Though they had less freedom to choose their own projects, contract players worked more (finishing a picture Thursday, starting a new picture Friday) than they did as freelancers, and in the greenhouse environment of a full-service production enclave, they grew much faster artistically. They weren’t prisons, those old studios. They were paradises. I feel very strongly about term contracts, Coppola said, amid failing to cast Apocalypse Now. If you have a good talent program and the management as it were is interested in acting—and not just [in] business and are not just guys in suits—then it should be a privilege for an actor to be associated with the program. As Coppola saw it, Hollywood studios should invest their own money—$500,000 each, he suggested—to train their actors. Every studio in this town should have a theater within its walls where it is developing talent, he said. I liken the movie business to a country that runs on petroleum. They bitch about the price of oil, but aren’t out digging for more oil. Movie companies run on talent—performers, directors and writers—but the studios haven’t been developing talent. They were scared, shortsighted, living hand to mouth. They want to know what they are going to get this year, Coppola said. If only they could imagine, with a little time and artistic training, a different and better future of more and better artists, and yes, more money, too, just a little farther down the road . . . But they didn’t pay executives to dream . . .

What did they pay them for?

As Hirsch settled the deal with Brando’s agents on Brando’s terms, Coppola and his partner, casting alchemist Fred Roos, forged ahead, signing exciting actors (but not yet stars) Frederic Forrest, Sam Bottoms, Albert Hall, and Laurence Fishburne to Apocalypse Now. The proposed seven-year contracts would grant Coppola’s actors a full fifty paid weeks a year (as opposed to the forty weeks with an enforced three-month vacation in the old studio days). It won’t be too long before the studios are copying us copying them, Coppola said. Plus, we’ll have a significant reservoir of talent for our films. Furthermore, each actor’s agreement would be tailored to the artistic needs of the individual. One clause in particular struck many in the industry as, at best, naïve and, at worst, foolish. Signing term contracts with Coppola, each actor would be offered the dramatic training of his or her choice—anything from conventional workshops to foreign language instruction to music lessons—and Coppola would foot the bill. Our purpose, Roos said plainly, is to develop stars. And develop lives: I want folks working with me to know there’s other things in life than work, Coppola stated. It was a position he would maintain for the rest of his career.

Exclusive in all areas of show business except for television, the contracts allowed for loan-outs to other studios for worthy projects, pending Coppola’s approval; attendant salary increases; and down the line, should the money really flow, profit participation. No one was going to get rich quick on this deal, but they had Coppola’s assurance—and given his track record, no reason to doubt him—that they would do good work, low on budget, high on art. Perhaps foremost, the contracts introduced into the competitive, highly anxious world of freelance Hollywood a home, a repertory, and, Coppola hoped, a kind of family.

It’s not a baseball team, Robert Altman scoffed.

Harvey Keitel, signed to play Willard, thought Coppola’s contract notion similarly absurd. Hand over the reins to his career?

Martin Scorsese, Coppola’s pal, got it: I think it’s the right concept in trying to break down the $3,000,000 syndrome.

Then, in February 1976, three months before setting out for the Philippines, Coppola began the ordeal of joining his story to Brando’s ideas. They would meet for hours on end in Brando’s compound up on Mulholland, expanding and contracting the work in progress, making circular advances in accord with Brando’s changing whims and inspirations. Brando could be as brilliant as he could be childlike, one second arguing persuasively for creating Kurtz against his counterpart in Heart of Darkness, the next second, overcome with an intense fascination with termites, frolicking through a flower field of non sequiturs. Coppola, charged and enervated by turn, welcomed every contradiction: [Kurtz] is mad, Marlon, I mean his madness is our madness . . . in the larger context, the guy is nuts. It had to be yin and yang, Coppola argued: if the lines between good and evil, Willard and Kurtz, were clearly delineated, then the movie would let America off the moral hook for Vietnam. There was no total good, no total evil. This movie had to implicate America. By the end of the movie, you had to understand Kurtz: he was, in a way, a part of Willard. Willard starts to come apart a little bit, Coppola told Brando, and the audience feels that ‘Ah, that Colonel Kurtz is crazy.’ And you begin to get the idea that what makes Kurtz crazy are the same kind of things that begin to have this effect on Willard.

Coppola invited Brando to encroach on his own authority, permitting the actor a creative power aligned with Kurtz’s stature. In one sense, this blurring of power boundaries was all part of the seduction: Coppola, acting as his own producer, needed to keep Brando happy to get his movie made. In another sense, Coppola, as writer-director, was a genuine collaborator, always open to the new and better idea, even to the point of confusion.

Whose story was this?

It had started off as John Milius’s, a decade earlier. As far back as the mid-sixties, he had talked about doing the Vietnam movie he would eventually call Apocalypse Now. By the time Milius, Coppola, Lucas, Walter Murch, Caleb Deschanel, and Carroll Ballard graduated from their respective film schools, USC and UCLA, Milius was still talking Apocalypse. They all were. We sat around in my office on the Warner Bros. lot, Coppola remembered, talking about our dreams. Maybe Lucas, hitched to Milius since their days at USC, would direct it? Not as the macho, blow-’em-up film Milius had in mind, but as a Strangelovian satire. Lucas would shoot it fast and cheap, somewhere in Northern California, on 16 mm black and white. Coppola would act as producer. Before long, Milius’s Apocalypse Now would be, along with Lucas and Murch’s THX 1138, one of the seven scripts—seven was Coppola’s lucky number—paid for by Warner Bros. to be developed, under Coppola’s aegis, at American Zoetrope, his own production facility up in San Francisco, where they could work with creative independence, not too far from Hollywood and not too close. But after Warner pulled the plug on the whole Zoetrope dream, those scripts, formerly the property of Warner Bros., went back to Coppola.

Five years later, Coppola, owner of Milius’s script, offered it to Lucas to direct. But Lucas, agonizing over his space opera, declined, and Coppola decided to direct Apocalypse Now himself. He saw in Apocalypse the old-fashioned makings of a mainstream hit. It would be huge, Hollywood’s first major statement on the Vietnam War. It would be an event, a roadshow blockbuster. It would be that big and he would make that much; and he would invest the returns back into Zoetrope. He said, "I was really thinking of [Apocalypse Now], as I’m always thinking of it, as a way to finance ultimately what I have in mind for Zoetrope." Think The Longest Day for Vietnam. I figured this is a chance, he said, which was always the holy grail, [to] make some huge picture that makes a ton of money and then make little Roger Corman type budget art films.

But Milius’s script, upon closer inspection, wanted changing. It wasn’t that the script wasn’t working, Coppola explained. It’s that whenever you direct a script, even a good script, you suddenly understand its architecture and what its problems are. And Coppola was not John Milius. He was not interested in combat per se. In Milius’s ending, Kurtz dies in a climactic attack on his compound; U.S. Army helicopters come to Willard’s rescue, and he whips up his M16 and starts firing at them, laughing crazily. But Coppola had changed since that draft. By the time he got to the Philippines in March 1976, having already tangoed for days on end with Brando in Los Angeles, it would be hard to reason out one alternate ending from the next, separated as they were by thousands of discarded pages, so much time and space. One draft had ended with Willard meeting Kurtz’s widow in California; one, echoing Conrad’s opening to Heart of Darkness, began with Willard aboard a yacht in the Potomac. One draft opened with a shot of Willard’s head emerging ominously from dark water; one ended with Willard, Chef, and Lance floating downstream with Kurtz’s body . . .

Where was Coppola in this material? So many of Milius’s ideas—his soldier surfers, the napalm dreams of Colonel Kilgore, the kooky madness of what Coppola termed an L.A. war, with its drugs, sex, and Jim Morrison—appealed to Coppola’s taste for spectacle. I wanted to remember it like a dream, Milius had said of Conrad’s novel. I wanted to use the novel as a sort of allegory. But an allegory for what? Coppola wasn’t political. He had never been to war. Did he understand this?

Best wishes for a great picture, Lucas had telexed. Zap the VC . . .

Who did Coppola think he was? He didn’t know how it felt, body and mind, to live and sleep in the jungle, to be separated from his family for years, to wake up afraid and to sleep afraid, to be only afraid. And he was going to tell them where to put the camera? What a heart of darkness was? He grew up on Long Island! He hadn’t lived that story. Not the way he had lived the Godfather; he knew dynasty, Italy, guilt, and tradition. He knew what it was to be a second brother and a big man’s son. He knew the mind of The Conversation. He knew surveillance—that was his life, growing up alone, watching, listening from the outside. He knew The Rain People because he had lived it as he had made it, being on the road, imagining what it was to run from family. This was different; Vietnam had never been his. Nor had he experienced the moral paradox of war on a metaphorical level. He didn’t know what it was to lose himself in the spiritual spiral of doing bad to do good, as Willard would learn, as Kurtz had learned before he lost himself.

Had he ever lost himself?

No.

Had he ever lost his story?

No.

What if that was the story he was telling?

A story of how losing was actually becoming . . .

If so, what were its plot points? Its act breaks?

He didn’t know.

And yet, there they were. In the jungle in the Philippines.

There was the Olivetti. There were the keys, there was the page.

There were Eleanor and the kids. There were Dean Tavoularis, Fred Roos, Gray Frederickson, the magnificent Vittorio Storaro. All of them, his families. They had come all this way—from San Francisco, L.A., New York, Rome—because of him. Wagering their time, careers, comfort, reputations, goodwill—in some cases, their own families—because of him. Who did he think he was?

He couldn’t know the ending until he was certain he knew the beginning, but he couldn’t be sure about the beginning until he knew why and how it ended, and not knowing how it began or how it ended, he couldn’t be sure he knew what, in the most fundamental terms, the story was about, who Willard was, who Kurtz was, or why he, or they, were there at all.

He wasn’t like Brando, who sometimes would just open his mouth, and out would come genius, expertise on anything, a perfect soliloquy . . . Or there was his big brother, Augie, a real intellectual, who was naturally brilliant and effortlessly talented, who didn’t have to die and come back to life every time he sat down to write something . . . Or his father, Carmine, who could just lift the flute to his mouth and then . . . music . . .

O bella età d’inganni e d’utopie!

But him? Alone, he sat at the typewriter making bullet sounds, tchoo . . . tchoo . . .

A half-hour chopper ride from Coppola’s living room typewriter, on location in Baler, little rickety Cessna planes small enough to land on jungle airstrips had flown in production equipment that was trundled over narrow dirt roads and onto the beach not far from where a Philippine coconut plantation had been transformed into a Vietnamese village of seventy or so bamboo and thatch huts with a view of a 250-foot pier destined for destruction by gunship and rocket blasts from low-flying helicopters and A-5 jets. One could forget—it was hard to remember—that none of it was real. With my helicopters, said pilot and Vietnam veteran Dick White, the boats and the high morale of the well-trained extras we had, there were three or four countries in the world we could have taken easily.

The sequence required nearly five hundred technicians, actors and extras, a small armada of naval craft, more than a hundred assorted vehicles, surfboards and surfers, and a chopper squadron on loan from Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos—until the choppers were temporarily recalled, sometimes without notice, to contain an outbreak of Communist rebel forces in Mindanao, 150 miles to the south, only to be returned to Baler, their painted colors having been changed from U.S. back to Philippine colors, needing to be repainted U.S. again, and rerigged. You never knew when you were going to lose a helicopter or four or five, assistant director Doug Claybourne said. So it was hard to plan a day’s shooting for the assistant director team, when you’re unsure of how many helicopters you’re going to have. Giant floating fishnets, bomb-blasted out of the sea during a take, flew skyward. My god, thought Gray Frederickson, if a helicopter rotor caught one of those fishnets, that would be the end of everybody inside . . . One copter flew so close to a tree that it chopped the crown off, and the crew below ran from the hailstorm of coconuts. Dick White’s chopper caught fire in the air. [It] burned the socks off the guy in the back seat, flames came between my legs, blinded me . . . I jumped out and ran up on the side and put the water in my eyes to try to be able to see, so that was pretty scary. (I was responsible for that, Coppola said. It was supposed to burst into flame in the scene and I made the charge a little too strong.) Down on the ground, Joe Lombardi’s special effects cortege carefully arranged explosives in and out of the water, maintaining raging fires of different sizes timed to sync with the choreographed aircraft attacks overhead. If one wrong wire—of two hundred thousand feet of wire—were accidentally cut, the thing wouldn’t detonate or, worse, only part of it would: half the village would blow, and they’d have to do another take, which would cost more time, more money, more nervous emotion of cast and crew. They had to wrap at six each evening. And were up again before dawn.

From out of the trees, actual Vietnam vets—lost souls, Tavoularis observed, who drift around the Orient—peeked through the jungle. They talked about the real war, how it changed, forever, the insides of soldiers and civilians, the smoke bombs . . .

Black smoke or white smoke? Tavoularis asked.

No, no. There were a range of colors.

Get them. Let’s look at them.

Great gales of smoke, purple, red, green, yellow, marijuana, licked up by whomping chopper blades, the smell of burned rubber from the fire clusters along the shore . . . The landscape was unrecognizable, real but unnatural, like a believed dream.

There was the rumor that the rebel forces to the south were in the hills as close as ten miles away.

All that remained of this once-quiet quarter of Baler was the jagged maw of broken bamboo and palms X-ing in the rubble, a picture of annihilation drawn by an angry child.

Coppola was white-knuckling himself. The helicopter sequence was taking far longer than expected, and with so many variables impossible to control, it was physically and artistically without precedent, and dangerous beyond reckoning. What gets me so berserk, he was saying, talking to anyone who would approach him, speaking nonstop, in one unbroken monologue of present and anticipated fears and practical and wishful solutions, I think I can handle big problems pretty well. If they tell me a typhoon came and wiped out the set, or the guerillas attacked and killed all of us, I can deal with those kinds of problems, you know. But when they tell me that we blew a whole shot because some guy didn’t know something and wasn’t there, then I go crazy.

George Lucas had warned him: Francis, he had said, it’s one thing to go over there for three weeks with, like, five people and sort of scrounge a lot of footage using the Philippine army—this was the 16-millimeter Apocalypse Lucas would have made years before—but if you go over there as a big Hollywood production, they’re gonna kill you. The longer you stay, the more in danger you are of getting sucked into the swamp. But if he allowed himself to see the parallel between what he was doing to and in the jungle and what America had done to and in Vietnam, he would fold in self-recrimination. And then there would be no part of him left to consider the numbing details of making a movie on location. Or the ending.

Behind him, they whispered. They always whispered, Coppola thought. They had whispered on the first Godfather: This guy is full of shit. Fire this guy. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.

In a way, they would be right. He didn’t know what he was doing. But he knew that he didn’t know. What I do, he said, is create chaos and then try to control it. But there were two kinds of chaos: chaos in the pursuit of spontaneity, the golden moments in which Coppola seized his cameras on the life energy, and then there was, not too far from the act of creation, a bedlam that preceded destruction.

Brando, meanwhile, was threatening to take the million Coppola had paid him up front and run—before he’d even arrived at the location. I mean, Coppola sputtered to Barry Hirsch by phone, "that means the man is going to seriously not, I mean, take his money and not deliv— He listened as Hirsch counseled. Yeah, but that’s fine, that’s a lot of guys in offices. But here I am in this fucking country with about fifty things that are just quasi-in-my-control, like the Philippine government and the fucking helicopters, which they take away from me whenever they feel like, and they’ve done it three times already, and I’m shooting around that. What would that do to the story? The ending he didn’t have? Why should I make a picture less well than it’s possible to do because of some peculiar vise that I’m in. It seems to me the so-called deal which we’re trying to preserve is not more important than just my career as a director, and I feel that now as a producer, I’m being compromised as a director, and I don’t feel I should be in that position. You know, all I’m asking for is for Marlon to allow me to start him a little later, and what this all comes down to is that he wants to be there when his kids get out of school, well, Jesus. . . . Let’s go, let’s blow the deal and go to Redford." Coppola insisted he would assume responsibility. Let them say it was his fault, fine. I assumed there would be some malleability about Marlon. And I also didn’t realize the immensity of the constructions and stuff. I mean, the picture’s bigger than I thought, it’s just gigantic. . . . I mean it’d be very easy for me now just to say, ‘fuck it, it’s just too big, what should I do?’ But I’m not, we’re hanging on, and all I’m saying is that. We’re hanging on.

In desperation, he wrote to Arthur Krim, head of United Artists:

In the