Godfather (59 page)

Coppola fled to a secluded vacation spot in Guatemala before the film's premiere on November 13, “so I wouldn't have to wonder or worry about how the film opens,” as he recorded in his journal on November 19. He finally had Eleanor phone the front office to get the results of the first five days. “I knew that it would have to do at least seven or eight million dollars for it not to be a disgrace.”
³⁰
She reported that the picture took in over $31 million on the first weekend, the highest opening gross for any film in Columbia Picture's history.

On June 30, 1992, just a few months earlier, Coppola had filed for personal and corporate bankruptcy. One of his principal creditors was Jack Singer, who had loaned him a substantial sum in 1981 to help finance the production of
One from the Heart
, a loan Coppola had yet to pay back. “I was being sued and pursued by this man,” says Coppola.
³¹
Consequently, the profits from
Bram Stoker's Dracula
enabled him at long last to clear his debts and move on. American Zoetrope in San Francisco was healthy once more. The picture grossed $82 million domestically and went on to chalk up a worldwide gross of $200 million. (Furthermore, Coppola's winery, Niebaum-Coppola, was expanding, so he was finally out of the woods.)

By retelling the Dracula story in a fresh and original fashion, Coppola had “triumphed over an exhausted genre.”
³²
Moreover, the film was honored at the Academy Awards with Oscars for costume design (Eiko Ishioka), make-up (Michelle Burke), and sound editing (Leslie Schatz). Coppola has presented a fully realized version of Stoker's novel. As such, it is the yardstick by which all subsequent adaptations must be judged.

The only film of consequence that has been derived from the Stoker novel since Coppola's adaptation is Elias Merhige's
Shadow of the Vampire
(2000), about the making of Murnau's
Nosferatu
. This unusual, creepy movie is based on the fictional premise that Max Schreck, the actor whom Murnau cast as Dracula, was really a vampire who preyed on members of the cast and crew during production. Coppola had an implicit connection to the film in that Cary Elwes, who was cast as the cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner in
Shadow of the Vampire
, played one of the vampire hunters in Coppola's film. Furthermore,
Shadow of the Vampire
was coproduced by Nicolas Cage, Francis Ford Coppola's nephew.

Bram Stoker's Dracula
signaled that Coppola's auteurist impulse had
not only survived the financial upheavals of the past decade, but had prevailed. “There's no distress for me—for the first time in thirty years, no worries,” he reflected. “I can have time for repose.”
³³
In the decade from 1982 to 1992, Coppola had made nine feature films, averaging nearly one picture per year. It was no longer necessary for him to be a hired gun, taking on pictures like
Gardens of Stone
just to pay the bills. He could now afford to be choosy, and one film that he chose to make would bring him further critical and popular success: a courtroom drama entitled
The Rainmaker
.

Just keep your mind open and take in the experience; and if it hurts, it's probably worth it.

—Richard, a castaway in the film
The Beach

While waiting for his flight to Paris to take off from JFK in New York, Francis Coppola bought a copy of John Grisham's novel
The Rainmaker
. No less than five of Grisham's books had made it to the big screen, and so Coppola decided to take a gander at this one. By the time his plane touched down at Orly, he was hooked on filming Grisham's
The Rainmaker
as an American Zoetrope production. “I was down on my knees in gratitude that I had a book that I liked—with characters that I liked,” he says.
¹

Coppola took the novel to Paramount, his old standby, and the studio agreed to finance and distribute the film. Previous Grisham movies like
The Firm
(1992) had fared well at the box office, and Coppola's films in recent years had likewise made a bundle. In April 1996 he signed with Paramount to write the screenplay and to direct the picture. Michel Herr, who had provided the narration for
Apocalypse Now
, would take on the same task for
The Rainmaker
. (Coppola's
Rainmaker
should not be confused with the 1956 movie of the same title starring Katharine Hepburn.) This is the first script Coppola had written since
Godfather III
. He officially launched the project with an announcement to the international press at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

The story revolves around Rudy Baylor, an idealistic Southern lawyer who endeavors to maintain his integrity in a profession filled with too many sellouts. The main plot concerns the battle young Rudy, an eager-beaver attorney, wages against a huge insurance company that has cheated Dot and Buddy Black, a poor Memphis couple, out of the benefits they need to finance a critical operation for their desperately ill son Donny. Along the way Rudy assists an elderly widow, Miss Birdie, in coping with her greedy son, who wants to badger her into leaving him all her money. He also aids a battered wife, Kelly Riker, in escaping from her sadistic husband. Coppola sagely pared down the novel's complicated narrative by relegating the subplots about Miss Birdie and Kelly Riker to the background, so that he could foreground the main storyline about Rudy's fencing with the insurance company. As in
Tucker
, Coppola was once more making a picture about the little guy standing up to the establishment.

Coppola put together an impressive production team, engaging cinematographer John Toll, who had garnered an Academy Award for photographing
Legends of the Fall
(1994), to lens the movie. In addition, composer Elmer Bernstein, another Oscar winner for
Thoroughly Modern Millie
(1967), contributed the score. Barry Malkin, veteran of several Coppola movies, was secured to edit the picture.

The director cast the picture in much the same way that he cast
The Godfather
: instead of spending a big chunk of the budget on some expensive marquee names, he elected to people his cast with dependable veterans and promising newcomers. Jon Voight (
Midnight Cowboy
) was called upon to play Leo Drummond, the slick, fancy-suited chief attorney for the insurance company, Great Benefit. Roy Scheider (
Jaws
) won the part of Wilfred Keely, the sly, corrupt CEO of Great Benefit. Mickey Rourke (
Rumble Fish
) took the role of a venal shyster lawyer named Bruiser Stone, who hires Rudy right out of law school, and Danny DeVito (
Tin Men
) enacted the role of Deck Schifflet, Rudy's wily, down-at-the-heels mentor in the law office. Miss Birdie was to be played by Hollywood icon Teresa Wright, who won an Oscar for the classic film
Mrs. Miniver
(1942).

Coppola had a record of giving fresh young talent a boost dating back to
The Outsiders
. Running true to form, he selected Matt Damon to play Rudy and Clare Danes to play Kelly Riker. Neither of them had had a major role in a film up to that time. Damon found the whole idea of working for Francis Coppola intimidating: “I was so nervous that I'd let him down.”
²
So Mickey Rourke made a point of encouraging Damon. Rourke had never
fulfilled the promise he had demonstrated in
Rumble Fish
. The grizzled actor's notorious boozing, plus a string of flops like
Desperate Hours
(1990), had all but eclipsed his career. He hoped that Damon would profit by his mistakes: “You have a big opportunity, kid,” he told Damon when they first met. “I had that opportunity and I blew it. Don't piss it away! Focus on the work, don't waste your energy acting out. It gets you nowhere.”
³
The cast, as usual, spent more than a week rehearsing and improvising at Coppola's Napa estate in order “to teach the actors to be attentive and to listen” to each other, says Coppola. “You give them a chance to experiment; the goal is to get life into the camera.”
⁴

Coppola has a long-standing penchant for shooting films on location whenever possible. Therefore, it is not surprising that he opted to take the cast and crew to Memphis, Tennessee, where the story takes place. Filming began in September 1996. Collaborating closely with John Toll, Coppola shot a large part of the picture in and around the local courthouse. Filming in autumn, Toll used pastel colors to give the film the dreary, autumnal ambience appropriate for the essentially dark tale of some decent characters struggling, not to get ahead, but just to survive.

During shooting Coppola did not hesitate to manipulate his actors occasionally in order to evoke from them the emotional response he was looking for. For example, he took Damon aside just before the cameras rolled on a scene in which Rudy is fired by a client. Recalling the rumors that he was going to be replaced by Elia Kazan on
The Godfather
, Coppola told Damon that the front office was dissatisfied with his performance and was thinking of replacing him with Edward Norton. This news helped Damon to radiate insecurity in the ensuing scene.

As filming progressed, Coppola became concerned that the courtroom scenes were slanted too much in Rudy's favor. He worried that the audience would be able to guess what the verdict in the insurance case would be half an hour away from the ending. He therefore aimed to make it clear that an inexperienced young attorney was up against a high-priced corporation lawyer that he would find it hard to beat. Hence, during the hiatus from shooting occasioned by the Christmas holidays, Coppola cleverly reworked the last forty pages of the script. In the rewrites Rudy makes some tactical errors that jeopardize his chances of winning the case. In his revisions of the screenplay, Coppola thus injected a greater degree of uncertainty and suspense into the courtroom scenes.

For example, Rudy presents in open court some incriminating documentation against Great Benefit, which was turned over to him by a disgruntled former employee who had stolen it from the firm's files when she
was fired. Drummond maintains, much to Rudy's embarrassment, that stolen evidence is not admissible in a court of law. But Deck subsequently saves the day by finding a loophole, whereby evidence that has been stolen can legitimately be presented in court, provided that it was not stolen by the attorney who makes use of it!

Like the narration Michael Herr wrote for
Apocalypse Now
, the running commentary he composed for Rudy in
The Rainmaker
casts somewhat of a jaundiced light on the events in the story. Rudy observes members of his profession who have long since abandoned the ideals he still holds dear, beginning with flashy, sleazy Bruiser Stone, who is given to fraudulent practices like jury tampering. As a result, Rudy has a penchant for lawyer jokes, and his voice-over commentary is punctuated with them. At one point he quips sardonically, “When do you know a lawyer is lying? When his lips are moving.” He continues, “What's the difference between a hooker and a lawyer? A hooker stops screwing you once you're dead. Everybody loves lawyer jokes.” In fact, the film's overall sense of disillusionment with the legal profession is largely conveyed through Herr's articulate voice-over narration, which is usually right on target.

During the postproduction phase, Coppola returned to American Zoetrope in San Francisco to collaborate with Barry Malkin in producing the rough and final cuts of the film on Coppola's state-of-the-art equipment. The picture previewed well, so Coppola felt he was home free.

The Rainmaker
starts out with the image of the traditional statue of the Goddess of Justice standing outside a courthouse. Justice holds the scales of justice in her hands, and she is blindfolded to symbolize that, although she may be blind, she always triumphs in the end. Rudy Baylor, a greenhorn attorney with lofty ideals, still believes in Justice, although he finds himself operating out of a law office in a strip mall, working for a disreputable lawyer named Stone who is certainly no rock of respectability in legal circles.

But Rudy, an undertrained lawyer who has just graduated from a second-rate law school and is living in his car, cannot hope for a more appropriate employer at this point than Bruiser Stone. Commenting on Rourke's portrayal of Bruiser Stone, Kent Jones says that Coppola has always possessed a gift for telling character traits and audacious casting choices. Casting Mickey Rourke as a flamboyant shyster “is a stroke of genius; putting him in a turquoise suit with a white belt is nothing short of divine inspiration.”
⁵

Bruiser assigns Rudy to do some blatant ambulance chasing. He is to comb hospital wards for accident victims in order to drum up business for the law firm by soliciting them as clients. Rudy soon becomes involved with Kelly Riker, who is in the hospital recuperating from a beating that she
endured from her husband, a professional baseball player. It seems that his aluminum bat is his weapon of choice.

Rudy's other clients include Miss Birdie, a pixilated elderly woman who is determined to disinherit her ungrateful son. She soon becomes Rudy's landlady. So Rudy takes Kelly to stay with Miss Birdie in order to provide Kelly with a sanctuary from her heartless husband. In harmony with Coppola's pervasive theme about the significance of family in people's lives, he depicts Rudy as establishing a surrogate family, with Miss Birdie as the mother figure and Rudy himself and Kelly as her two “kids.” Rudy comments wryly on the sound track, “A lawyer isn't supposed to get involved with his clients, but there are all kinds of lawyers and all kinds of clients.”

Deck warns Rudy that the FBI. is getting ready to close in on Bruiser for his slimy illegal practices. Rudy accordingly opens his own shoestring, storefront law office, with Deck as his right-hand man. As Deck tells Rudy when they depart from Bruiser's office, Bruiser's business was never really a law firm—”it was just every man for himself.”