Godfather Read online

  The essay by Walter Murch, which appears as the foreword of this volume, is reprinted from the New York Times (1 October 2000, sec. 2, pp. 1, 24–25, copyright 2000 by Walter Murch) by permission of the author.

  The interview with S. E. Hinton, which is quoted in this book, is reprinted from the New York Times (20 March 1983, sec. 2, pp. 19, 27, copyright 1983 by the New York Times Co.).

  Some material in this book appeared in a completely different form in the following publications: The Movie Makers: Artists in an Industry (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1973, copyright 1973 by Gene D. Phillips); “Francis Coppola,” Films in Review 40, no. 3 (March 1989, pp. 155–60, copyright 1989 by Gene D. Phillips); Conrad and Cinema: The Art of Adaptation (New York: Peter Lang, 1995, copyright 1995 by Peter Lang, used with permission).

  Chronology for Francis Ford Coppola

  1939 Born April 7 in Detroit, Michigan, to Carmine and Italia Coppola.

  1957 Attends Hofstra University on a drama scholarship.

  1960 Earns a Bachelor of Arts degree at Hofstra and enters the film school of the University of California at Los Angeles, where he studies on campus for two years.

  1962 Is hired by Roger Corman, an independent producer, and works on Battle Beyond the Sun, The Young Racers, and other films.

  1963 Directs his first feature, Dementia 13, a low-budget movie made for Corman. The assistant art director is Eleanor Neil, whom Coppola marries after completing the movie.

  1966 As scriptwriter for Seven Arts, an independent production unit, Coppola is given a screen credit for co-scripting This Property Is Condemned and Is Paris Burning?

  1967 Directs You’re a Big Boy Now, his first film for a major studio; it enables him to earn his Master of Arts degree at UCLA, which is conferred the following year.

  1968 Finians Rainbow, a musical with Fred Astaire.

  1969 The Rain People wins the Grand Prize and the Best Director Award at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Inaugurates American Zoetrope, an independent production unit in San Francisco.

  1970 Patton, for which he coauthors the screenplay, wins him his first Academy Award, for Best Screenplay.

  1972 The Godfather wins him an Academy Award for coauthoring the screenplay of the film, which he also directed; the picture is also voted the Best Picture of the Year.

  1974 The Conversation wins the Grand Prize at the Cannes International Film Festival. The Great Gatsby, the last picture for which he wrote a script without directing the film, is released. The Godfather Part II wins him Academy Awards for Best Director and for coauthoring the screenplay; the film becomes the only sequel up to that time to be voted Best Picture of the Year.

  1979 Apocalypse Now, which had an unprecedented shooting period of 238 days, wins him his second Grand Prize at the Cannes International Film Festival; one of the first major films to deal with the Vietnam War.

  1980 Inaugurates Zoetrope Studios in Hollywood.

  1982 One from the Heart, a commercial failure, forces him to close his independent studio in Hollywood; he continues to run an independent production unit, American Zoetrope, in San Francisco, producing films for release by major studios in Hollywood.

  1983 The Outsiders and Rumble Fish are made back-to-back in Oklahoma.

  1984 Assumes direction of The Cotton Club, a film with a troubled production history up to that point.

  1985 “Rip Van Winkle,” a telefilm, is first broadcast.

  1986 Peggy Sue Got Married becomes a major hit.

  1987 The Gardens of Stone, his second film set during the Vietnam War.

  1988 Tucker: The Man and His Dream, after some false starts, is finally made.

  1989 New York Stories, an anthology film with segments by Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Coppola.

  1990 The Godfather Part III, the final sequel to The Godfather.

  1991 Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper’s feature-length documentary Hearts of Darkness, about the making of Apocalypse Now.

  1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a commercial success; Coppola receives a Golden Lion as a Life Achievement Award at the Venice International Film Festival.

  1995 The National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, which preserves films of enduring quality, includes The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and The Conversation in its collection.

  1996 Jack, a vehicle for Robin Williams.

  1997 The Rainmaker, from the John Grisham novel.

  1998 Recipient of the Life Achievement Award, the highest honor that can be bestowed by the Directors Guild of America. A jury orders Warner Brothers to pay him $80 million for reneging on a deal to film Pinocchio—the largest victory by a filmmaker over a major studio up to that time.

  1999 American Zoetrope, Coppola’s production unit, releases The Virgin Suicides, written and directed by his daughter Sofia.

  2000 Coppola edits (uncredited) the release version of Supernova, after the director, Walter Hill, departs the project.

  2001 Theatrical release of Apocalypse Now Redux, with fifty minutes of additional footage added to the film as originally released. Release on DVD of The Godfather Trilogy, with a documentary about the making of the three films.

  2002 Gala tribute by the Film Society of Lincoln Center of New York for his lifetime achievement in the cinema, May 7. American Zoetrope releases CQ, written and directed by Coppola’s son Roman. Sight and Sound’s international poll of film directors and film critics chooses Coppola as one of the top ten directors of all time and The Godfather and The Godfather Part II among the top ten films of all time.

  2003 Premiere magazine conducts a nationwide poll for the one hundred greatest films, and The Godfather Part II leads the list in first place. The American Film Institute honors the best one hundred heroes and villains in cinema history with a TV special aired on June 3, including Michael Corleone in Godfather II as a legendary villain. The Motion Picture Academy sponsors a screening of One from the Heart, with Coppola leading a discussion of the film. Francis Coppola serves as an executive producer for American Zoetrope on Sofia Coppola’s second feature, Lost in Translation.

  2004 A nationwide poll published by Premiere magazine lists The Godfather as one of the seventy-five most influential films of all time, because it raised the gangster film to the level of a cinematic epic.

  Prologue

  Artist in an Industry

  Isn’t Hollywood a dump—in the human sense of the word? A hideous town, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement. This is no art, it’s an industry.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald

  This isn’t a business, it’s a racket.

  —Harry Cohn, producer

  At 7:00 PM on the evening of May 7, 2002, Francis Ford Coppola took his place in a special box overlooking the auditorium of Avery Fisher Hall in New York City’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The occasion was a gala tribute sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center honoring Coppola’s lifetime achievement as a filmmaker. Several cinema artists associated with his career were on hand to pay tribute to him, and these same individuals will be cited throughout this book. But Coppola himself was the main attraction.

  One of the reasons that Coppola’s career is so fascinating is that, despite the wide diversity of genres in which he has worked, all of his films reflect in varying degrees the artistry of the director who made them all, as I shall endeavor to show in the course of this study. Coppola himself has declared that a good director does not make a group of separate films—rather each film that he makes is a series of installments in the same film. As he puts it, “Why do we continue to think in cinema that one makes one film, then another?… I prefer to think that my films are the same film. You know, if you take all of my films from first to last, it is all the same film.”1

  This is another way of saying that it is the director more than anyone else involved in the production of a film who leaves his personal stamp on a motion picture. Filmmaking, it is true, is a corporate effort, to which a whole host of individual
s, from actors to technicians, must make their contribution. But it is the director who must create a unified work of art from all of these varied contributions.

  Indeed, the premise of this book is precisely that the director alone can confer artistic unity on a motion picture. The director, after all, is the single controlling influence during the production of a motion picture. It is up to him to blend all of the varied contributions of cast and crew into a unified whole.

  Only the director, then, can create a unified work of art out of the corporate effort that characterizes the making of a motion picture. In describing the central role of the director in the production of a movie, another critic has said that the director’s function is that of quarterback, orchestra leader, trail boss, company commander, and, at times, lion tamer. When the role of the director is viewed in this fashion, moreover, as the guiding light of film production, it is clear that he is the true author of a film in much the same way that a writer is the author of a novel.

  The auteur theory, which proposes that the director is the center of the filmmaking process, can be readily applied to European directors working in relatively small industries, such as those in Sweden or France, where they can with relative ease control every aspect of the production of a film from beginning to end. At first glance, however, it seems much less apparent that an American director like Francis Coppola, working in a much larger and more complex industry, could gain a similar artistic control over his films.

  On closer examination, however, it is clear that Coppola has been able with a fair degree of consistency to give his movies the imprint of his own personal vision and style in much the same fashion as his European colleagues have done, regardless of the diversity of genres in which he has worked. Indeed, one suspects that the “factory system” in Hollywood studios presented him with a challenge to his artistic creativity that sharpened his determination to turn out a succession of films over the years that he could in a real sense call his own.

  Filmmaking, it is true, involves a whole host of individuals, from actors to technicians, who collaborate with the director on a movie. Yet genuine auteurs are directors who have nevertheless been able to impress their films with their personal trademark, regardless of the number of collaborators involved with them on a given picture, by systematically influencing every phase of the production process—from script to scoring—as Coppola has done.

  Richard Schickel observes about film critics and scholars that, with few exceptions, “we are all auteurists now. The reason is self-evident: Directors are responsible for the movieness of movies. This is to say, they are in change of all the things that are unique to film as an expressive form. As the senior officer present on any picture, the director gets most of the credit or blame for its success or failure.”2

  In fact, Geoffrey Chown states in his book, Hollywood Auteur: Francis Coppola, that Coppola’s career demonstrates that the auteur theory is still a valid approach to film criticism. As he puts it, while writing his book on Coppola he acquired “a new appreciation of the value of the auteur theory.”3

  Other commentators on Coppola’s films have willingly conferred auteur status on him. Chuck Kleinhans calls Coppola one of the more celebrated examples of auteurism, given the manner in which his work has evolved from the 1970s onward. Although Coppola has worked within the commercial system, he has made a number of films that seem personally important to him “and that were highly regarded as cinematic art”—films that demonstrated both his “artistry and personal vision, from The Godfather to Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”4

  Expatiating on this point, Coppola biographer Michael Schumacher adds that Coppola is equally adept at creating small personal films like The Conversation, as well as huge productions like Dracula. Hence, he is “as close to being an auteur as could be found in American film.”5 As such, Coppola has helped to make possible the individualism and independence that are hallmarks of today’s new breed of directors. Consequently, Mast and Kawin conclude in their history of film that Coppola is “the single most important film figure of his generation.”6

  Coppola himself personally agrees with the fundamental tenets of the auteur theory concerning the pivotal role of the director in the filmmaking process. “The auteur theory is fine,” he states, “but to exercise it you have to qualify, and the only way you can qualify is by having earned the right to have control.”7 Coppola has certainly earned that right.

  The present study is designed to provide a complete critical study of Coppola’s career. Therefore, it focuses not only on his most celebrated achievements—like the Godfather movies, which together compose a supreme cinematic epic, and Apocalypse Now, a great antiwar film—but it gives equal time to Coppola’s other important pictures, which have not received the critical attention they deserve in previous studies of his work. These movies include Peggy Sue Got Married, a charming comedy-fantasy, and The Rainmaker, a superior courtroom drama. In addition, I have made an effort to reassess those Coppola films that have been accorded neither critical nor popular acceptance, such as The Cotton Club and Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Surely these neglected and underappreciated movies warrant the reconsideration offered here.

  In surveying the previous books on Coppola, I am obliged to note that a number of them, like Schumacher’s Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Cowie’s Coppola, are biographies and thus offer relatively little critical insight into the director’s movies. By the same token, books on individual films, like Harlan Lebo’s The Godfather Legacy and Cowie’s The Apocalypse Now Book, are mere production histories of the films in question. Moreover, the critical studies published in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Robert Johnsons Francis Ford Coppola and Chown’s book, are obviously incomplete and out of date, since Coppola continued making movies throughout the 1990s.

  My procedure has been to interview Coppola and others associated with his films, to read the screenplays and the director’s production journals, and to weigh the evaluations of other commentators on his work with my own. In this manner I have sought to achieve a balanced consensus.

  The present volume, then, represents an attempt to demonstrate, by analyzing all of his motion pictures, that Francis Coppola is a genuine cinematic artist who is also a popular entertainer. As a matter of fact, the very popularity of his movies is reason enough for some critics to write him off as a mere crowd pleaser rather than recognize him as an authentic artist of the cinema. That a director can be both is suggested by the fact that Coppola’s finest films—for example, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now—are also among his most popular.

  The following pages, in sum, pay tribute to a filmmaker who has been able through his resourcefulness to place on his films, not the stamp of the studio, but the stamp of his own directorial style. The present study is, therefore, intended not only for the cinema specialist but also for those filmgoers who have enjoyed Coppola’s movies, in order to provide them with a context by which they can appreciate his work more fully.

  Part One

  Hollywood Immigrant

  1

  Point of Departure

  The Early Films and Screenplays

  I was convinced in the beginning that there must be some discoverable method of working in pictures, which would not be completely stultifying to whatever creative talent one might happen to possess. But like others before me, I discovered that this was a dream.

  —Raymond Chandler

  “Hollywood’s like Egypt,” the late producer David O. Selznick once remarked, “full of crumbled pyramids. It will just keep crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands There might have been good movies if there had been no movie industry. Hollywood might have become the center of a new human expression if it hadn’t been grabbed by a little group of bookkeepers and turned into a junk industry.”1

  These are bitter words indeed to come from the man responsible for producing films like Gone with the Wind (1939). Nonetheless, Selznick has accurately expressed the perenni
al problem that has vexed motion picture makers since the movies developed from their humble beginnings into a full-scale industry: the problem of trying to make motion pictures that are personal, unified works of art a director can truly call his own despite the fact that he is working in a complicated commercial industry. Yet many a filmmaker has succeeded in this hazardous enterprise, and Francis Ford Coppola is one of them.

  “The trouble with American filmmaking is that producers don’t allow the risk of failure. If a good film can’t risk being a failure, it won’t be really good.” So said Francis Ford Coppola when he spoke with me at the Cannes Film Festival, one of the international festivals at which a movie of his had won a prize. Add to that the five Academy Awards he has received during his career and one can see that Coppola’s penchant for making films that, in his words, “depart somewhat from the ordinary Hollywood fare” has often paid off. When I talked with Coppola in Cannes, I noticed that his stocky build and full beard make him an imposing figure. Yet I found him cordial and cooperative when he shared with me some of his reflections about his movies. The festival, of course, attracts film directors from around the world, but Coppola was as unmistakably American as the Queens section of New York where he grew up and went to school. As a matter of fact, he has kept his New York accent over the years despite his living most of his adult life on the West Coast. The material I gleaned from our conversation can be found throughout this book.2