Godfather (50 page)

Coppola was still bitter about his experience with
The Cotton Club
. He had been called in to salvage a production that was already out of control when he took over, yet he was already being blamed in some quarters for the film's tepid critical reception. His financial straits resulting from
The Cotton Club
compelled him to direct the romantic fantasy film
Peggy Sue Got Married
, which was not exactly his cup of tea.
“Peggy Sue
, I must say, was not the kind of film that I normally would want to do,” he explains. “At first I felt the script—although it was okay—was just like a routine television show.” Nevertheless, “the project was ready to go and they wanted me,” and he had so many debts that he simply had to keep working.
²

In July 1983, Arlene Sarner and Jerry Leichtling, a husband-and-wife screenwriting team, had brought
Peggy Sue Got Married
to the attention of producer Paul Gurion, who in turn interested Ray Stark in making the picture for his independent film unit. The title of
Peggy Sue Got Married
was derived from a popular song by the late rock-and-roller Buddy Holly. The scenario portrays Peggy Sue as a middle-aged woman whose marriage to her husband Charlie is on the rocks. She is magically transported back to her senior year in high school and comes to terms with her past life. The screenwriters presented the first draft of the script to Gurion on December 2,1984, and it was passed on to Coppola. Kathleen Turner (
Body Heat
) was picked to play the title role because she was halfway between the ages of the younger and the older Peggy Sue, whom she would be portraying in the movie.

Turner would not be available until she finished another picture, however, so shooting was postponed until August 1985. That gave Coppola time to tinker with the script, in collaboration with Sarner and Leichtling, during the preproduction phase. After all, Francis Coppola, the maverick, was not a director to be handed a script that he did not revise to suit his vision of the material.

One of the major inflections Coppola gave the script was to strengthen the emotional center of the film. His model was the last act of Thornton Wilder's play
Our Town
, “when the daughter goes back and sees her mother and her youth,” he says. “I was looking for more of that small-town charm and emotion.”
³
Our Town
is a work steeped in Americana that depicts the day-to-day lives of ordinary citizens living in a whistle-stop. Like
Our Town
,
Peggy Sue Got Married
is a paean to those mundane details of life that we take for granted—and that pass away all too fleetingly. The kind of emotion Coppola helped to inject into the screenplay is evident in the scene where Peggy Sue encounters her mother for the first time in her dream of the past, after the hands of time have been turned back to her teen years. Peggy Sue is touched to see Evelyn, her mother, looking so young. She hugs Evelyn and blurts out, “Oh, Mom, I forgot that you were ever this young!” Peggy Sue is pleased to have her mother restored to her, but Evelyn wonders why her daughter is embracing her so warmly. This scene, more than any other in the movie, was inspired by a parallel scene in
Our Town
.

Later on, Peggy Sue becomes teary when she speaks on the phone with her grandmother, Elizabeth Alvorg, who has since died. Coppola indicates in the script that Peggy Sue be photographed in somber silhouette as she talks to her “dead” grandma, because Peggy Sue is “literally reviving the ghosts of memory.” She knows what lies ahead: “death and decay for the family she once took for granted.”
⁴

Kathleen Turner observes, “I saw Francis, together with the original writers, take out gags that undercut the sentiment” of the story.
⁵
For example, Coppola deleted a farcical sequence marked by smatterings of piquant sex, in which a male student hypnotizes Peggy Sue to make her take off her blouse. In fact, the more Coppola worked on the script, the more he found it an endearing, bittersweet tale and the more he found himself getting involved in it.

Coppola was going for deeper characterization in the rewrites, so he developed the role of Charlie Bodell, Peggy Sue's wayward husband, in the revised screenplay. He shows how Charlie's failed career aspirations help to account for his unhappiness in his later life. Coppola also strengthened the role of Richard Norvik, who had a crush on Peggy Sue in high school. Richard,
a science whiz kid, reminded Coppola very much of himself when he was in high school. Like Richard, young Francis was a technology fanatic—his nickname in high school was “Mr. Science,” because he loved to experiment with electronic gadgets.

When it came to casting, Coppola conferred with Gurion much more harmoniously than he had with Robert Evans on either
The Godfather
or
The Cotton Club
. It was actually Gurion and not Coppola who chose Coppola's nephew, Nicolas Cage, to play Peggy Sue's unfaithful husband. Sofia Coppola, the director's daughter, would appear as Peggy Sue's kid sister Nancy. Many members of the supporting cast willingly took part in the film just to work with Coppola: Don Murray (
A Hatful of Rain)
and Barbara Harris (
Family Plot)
were cast as Peggy Sue's parents, Jack and Evelyn Kelcher; Maureen O'Sullivan (
Hannah and Her Sisters)
and Leon Ames (
Meet Me in St. Louis)
as Peggy Sue's grandparents, Elizabeth and Barney Alvorg; John Carradine (
The Grapes of Wrath)
appeared as an old friend of Barney's.

Two staples of Coppola's production crew were on hand, production designer Dean Tavoularis and editor Barry Malkin. The underscore was to be composed by John Barry (
Body Heat
), who was responsible for the background music in
The Cotton Club
. Coppola selected Jordan Cronenweth as director of photography, because he was impressed with Cronenweth's work on Ridley Scott's
Blade Runner
.

Because the picture is essentially an extended dream sequence, Coppola had Cronenweth suffuse the movie with bright, saturated colors to give it a nostalgic glow. “The basic approach,” said Cronenweth, was to make
Peggy Sue Got Married
“a contemporary
Wizard of Oz
, painted with broad strokes.”
⁶
After all, Peggy Sue is knocked into the middle of her high school years the way that Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
is knocked into the middle of next week. The present film is a fanciful picture of the past that is meant to crystallize for the viewer Peggy Sue's yearnings for her lost youth. Hence, the movie is bathed in a golden glow and amounts to a valentine for a vanished past.

As always Coppola prefaced the shooting period with a couple of weeks of videotaped rehearsals, ending with a taped run-through of the whole script. “It was like acting school, with all the improvisations,” some of which resulted in rewrites of the dialogue, Turner remembers. “[P]eople were really getting involved in the process and it was working.”
⁷

Principal photography commenced near the end of August 1985 and involved location filming in Petaluma, California, which Coppola and Tavoularis had selected to serve as Santa Rosa, the small California town in
which Peggy Sue grew up. Setting the film in Santa Rosa is perhaps an homage to Hitchcock's
Shadow of a Doubt
(1943), which was co-written by Thornton Wilder and which takes place in the same sleepy town of Santa Rosa. Coppola was partial to the town because it was only an hour away from his Napa estate.

The shooting phase lasted eight weeks, ending in late October, and it proceeded without any noticeable mishaps. Turner recalled that she got along famously with her director, once she made one thing perfectly clear. She had heard about Coppola's penchant in the past for monitoring a scene while it was being shot on the TV screens in his Silverfish trailer. So she told him that if he was inclined to watch a scene being filmed in
his
trailer she would perform the scene in
her
trailer. And that was that.

Coppola was absolutely determined to bring in the picture on schedule and on budget in order to wipe out the bad press he got for the overages on
The Cotton Club
. “We were under such pressure to finish it on schedule that we averaged close to an eighteen-hour day,” says Turner.
⁸
Coppola even shot the last scene, the reconciliation of Peggy Sue and Charlie, between 1:00
AM
and 4:00
AM
on the last official day of the shoot. Coppola of course collaborated closely with editor Barry Malkin on the final cut, and postproduction went as smoothly as the shooting period had. The premiere was set for the fall of 1986, after the plethora of teen flicks released during the summer had played out.

The opening credits of
Peggy Sue Got Married
are accompanied by Buddy Holly's original recording of the title song. From the film's opening sequence onward, Coppola demonstrates that he is in total control of his material. The picture begins with a shot of a TV set on which Charlie can be seen doing a commercial for his hardware store. Coppola's camera pulls back to reveal Peggy Sue primping at her dressing table before departing for the high school anniversary party. Her back is to the television set, indicating that she has, at this juncture, turned her back on her philandering spouse.

Coppola pulled an adroit visual trick in the shot of Peggy Sue's reflection in her dressing table mirror in this scene. Because it is a large mirror, the camera would have been visible in the mirror if he placed it behind Turner as he photographed her image in the mirror. So he arranged to have Turner's double sitting at the dressing table with her back to the camera. There is, in fact, no mirror at all—only a frame—so that it is really Turner herself, and not her reflection, that is facing the camera.

Like Natalie Ravenna in
The Rain People
, Peggy Sue Bodell has walked out on her husband, for the time being at least. She is separated from Charlie,
and their two children, Scott and Beth, live with her. She has become more successful in her business—running her own bakery—than Charlie has in running his hardware business, although Charlie was the once-promising class hotshot in high school. Peggy Sue is embarrassed by Charlie's goofy TV commercials as “Crazy” Charlie, the Appliance King, which her teenage daughter Beth, of course, thinks are terrific.

At any rate, Peggy Sue manages to pour herself into her glittery prom dress, which is described as a “blast from the past.” As she struggles into the outfit, she implies that it must have shrunk while hanging in the closet all these years (!). But the gown is really an uncomfortable reminder that her figure is not as slim as it used to be and serves as an apt prelude to the woeful evening ahead in which she is forced again and again to acknowledge that she is neither as young nor as resilient as she once was. When she arrives at the party, which is being held in the school gym, she is chagrined to see an enormous blowup of a photograph picturing herself and Charlie as king and queen of the senior prom. The photo captures them at a moment in time when their relationship was happy and carefree rather than sad and careworn, which is what it eventually became. Some of the alumni regress to high school behavior, thus Walter Getz (Jim Carrey) begins behaving like the class clown he once was. He says that his motto in high school was, “When it comes to girls, what Walter wants, Walter gets!”

Visual metaphors abound in the movie. As a balloon floats upward toward the rafters of the gym, one of the alumni reaches for it, but it gets away. So too, many of the hopes and dreams that Peggy Sue and her classmates nurtured when they were young have eluded their grasp, driven off by the frustrations and disappointments of later life—epitomized, in her case, by her foundering marriage to Charlie. When Charlie himself makes his appearance at the reunion, he is at first barely visible in the shadowy doorway. He is but a dim figure from Peggy Sue's past, someone whom she will get to know all over again, as she relives the past and is thereby able to come to terms with the present. She is distressed at seeing Charlie again—she had hoped that her two-timing husband would have the decency not to show up at the reunion.

Peggy Sue in due course is crowned queen of the reunion. When an enormous cake, topped with sparkling candles, is wheeled in to celebrate the occasion, Peggy Sue faints dead away. She wakes up back at old Buchanan High in 1960, her senior year. Although Peggy Sue appears physically unchanged to the filmgoer, her friends and relatives in 1960 see her as seventeen.

The movie has its share of sly ironies that play on the audience's knowledge
of the subsequent course of history. Since Peggy Sue is a visitor from the future, she makes a number of remarks that baffle those around her. She giggles when she discovers that her father has just bought the family a new car—an Edsel. Although her father is proud of this vehicle, Peggy Sue is already aware that the Edsel, with its gaudy grilles and tasteless chrome decorations, would become the Ford Motor Company's biggest commercial failure. At another point her parents are chagrined when Peggy Sue takes a couple of swigs from her dad's whiskey bottle as she announces “I am an adult! I want to have fun! I'm going to Liverpool to discover the Beatles!!!”

Peggy Sue has brought with her on her trip down memory lane her forty-two-year-old mind, and she thus views things from a more mature perspective than she possessed the first time around. So, when Peggy Sue tells her younger sister that she would like to get to know her better, she adds a perceptive remark that could only have come from her older self: “I have too many unresolved relationships.”

One relationship she has failed to resolve in her later life is that with her estranged husband, Charlie Bodell, who, of course, is still a teenager when Peggy Sue meets him in the course of her return visit to her youth. She and Charlie married right after high school but have since split up because Peggy Sue discovered that he was cheating on her with a younger woman, whom she calls “Charlie's bimbo.” Asked at the reunion why she has separated from Charlie, she answers laconically, “We just married too young, I guess, and ended up blaming each other for all the things we missed.”