The Big Screen (76 page)
Authors: David Thomson
Between 1999 and 2005, George Lucas turned to three more
Star Wars
movies (a trilogy of “prequels” in the saga) with a new and joyless cast and titles it's hard to remember. The credits say Lucas directed these films, but with increasingly sophisticated effects and diminishing narrative energy. The next generation of kids and their young parents assured the world that they were happy with the “new”
Star Wars
pictures, and huge sums of money were made. But can the honest moviegoer detect a director? The second
Star Wars
series treated us like huddled and automatic consumers: they reduced movies to the level of fast food, filling stations, and those ads that are so familiar we chant along with them.
Lucas has vast premises now in Marin and San Francisco. Industrial Light and Magic thrives; that name is one of his most impressive strokes and the appropriate latest description of what we once called cinema or movies. With a net worth of over $3 billion, Lucas is a great entrepreneur, and a marker in industryâwhich is fine. Alas, his career and his contented lack of personality have also changed our expectation about the directing of films.
So in the San Francisco area in the mid-1970s, American film appeared to be having its renaissance, and a lot of people behaved like princes. Lucas, Murch, and Coppola all came to live in the Bay Area, where they attracted other filmmakers, every hopeful kid and his script, and sophisticated postproduction houses that helped develop the new technologies. Industrial Light and Magic grew, but Coppola had the Zoetrope building or buildings in North Beach, and Saul Zaentz (who had produced
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
) adapted his recording company, Fantasy, into a base for
Amadeus
(1984) and then, later,
The English Patient
(1996). Philip Kaufman (born in Chicago in 1936) came to Northern California, where he did a witty but frightening remake of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1978) before using the hitherto unnoticed location resources of the area, and a lively young cast, to make
The Right Stuff
(1983), a merry mix of Hawks and Preston Sturges, an affectionate satire on American glory, but a film that was ahead of its audience, in part because one of its chief characters (John Glenn, played by Ed Harris) was also trying to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate.
Francis Coppola was the center of all this: after the
Godfather
films, he had Oscar glory and a lot of money; he spilled over with reckless creative ideas; he had a flamboyant, nearly manic-depressive energy; he was an inevitable godfather himself. So he did everything he could think of. He started a magazine; he produced operas; he opened restaurants; he gave parties; he planned a resort in Belize; and he enlisted for special projects Tom Luddy, a Berkeley graduate, a movie theater manager, and then the innovative program director at the Pacific Film Archive. It was through Luddy that Coppola became host to so many foreign directors and their projects. So Zoetrope produced the restored version of Abel Gance's
Napoléon
(1927). It opened and promoted Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's
Hitler: A Film from Germany
(1977), and produced movies as varied as Carroll Ballard's
The Black Stallion
(1979, a true family entertainment) and Paul Schrader's
Mishima
(1985, avant-garde and banned in Japan). Further, the wrecked Nicholas Ray was given space at Zoetrope as he tried to complete his experimental psychodocumentary
We Can't Go Home Again
(1976).
As for Coppola himself, he took on the project of Vietnam, though that scheme had been initiated by othersâby Lucas and John Miliusâbefore it became the great white whale for Francis to pursue. It was a film that could not have been undertaken without the business's respect for the man who had made
The Godfather
, or without Coppola's own creative daring. But it was beset by disasters, as if it were a warning not to trust open-ended foreign ventures. Coppola decided to shoot most of it in the Philippines, where bad weather, the vagaries of local army support, and mounting costs added to the director's uncertainty over what to film and what
Apocalypse Now
might be “about.”
At the eventual Cannes opening (where the film won the Palme d'Or), Francis would say, “It's not about Vietnam, it
is
Vietnam.” That was exhaustion speaking, and a sign of filmmakers going overboard in self-concern. Vietnam
was
worse than the movie. Far worse. Still, Harvey Keitel had to be dropped for Martin Sheen. Marlon Brando turned up for work as Kurtz out of shape and apparently unaware of the Joseph Conrad material,
Heart of Darkness
. He wanted to discuss the part while Francis was striving to find a way of filming his great hulk. Coppola wondered if he was losing his mind, his nervous control, his picture, and even his family. His wife, Eleanor, published a diary book on the ordeal,
Notes
, one of the most poignant accounts of what people risk in making any movie. Here is her entry for April 8, 1978:
This morning I asked Francis what his inner voices were telling him to do. He said they tell him to do nothing, don't push, don't act, just wait. The complete opposite of the way he is used to being. He said he was afraid that his voices were telling him to be alone, with no one in his life. He said, “Can't you see how scared IÂ am, Ellie? You are saying, âHurry up and define our marriage, I'm not waiting much more.' United Artists is saying, âHurry up and finish the film, we can't hold off the banks and the exhibitors much longer.' And part of me is saying, âJust tough it out, don't make some quick resolution in order to get off the hook.'” He said the more he works on the ending, the more it seems to elude him, as if it is there, just out of view, mocking him. He said, “Working on the ending is like trying to crawl up glass by your fingernails.”
Well in advance of its opening there were hostile press stories about the imminent disasterâthere was by then a backlash in the media against the brilliant but arrogant kids who seemed to have taken over film.
Apocalypse
was confused, and it was hard to believe that Coppola himself had a clear or settled version of it. But it had breathtaking sequences (for example, those involving Robert Duvall as Colonel Kilgore, and in the feeling of a jungle growing on blood and drugs), an authentic sense of horror, and an aura of America's imperial decay. (In 2001 it looked a better film still when Coppola released
Apocalypse Now Redux
, a restored version, with several scenes that had been dropped in 1979.)
As a person, Coppola was troubled yet volatile. He seemed to have established a Northern Californian alternative, yet he nursed dreams of taking over a new Hollywood. So he moved to premises in Los Angeles to make
One from the Heart
, a deliberate throwback to the studio look of the 1940s. It is exquisite and well worth seeing, with color photography by Vittorio Storaro, gorgeous sets by Dean Tavoularis, a haunting score by Tom Waits, and the overall influence of Michael Powell, who was now director emeritus at Zoetrope. As a modest $2 million aside, it might have seemed a wonder of charm and pure cinema. But at $25 million and with more bad publicity over excess and mania, it was a disaster that plunged Coppola into debt. Few crazy indulgences or shattered budgets offend America as much as those in the arts.
Soon after the film opened to scathing press, I saw Coppola at his Rutherford home in Napa. The driveway sported a child's warning signs, made by Sofia Coppola, who was then eight. They were intended to frighten the bailiffs who might be coming to take the family furniture or the house. Francis was down, black and blue and broke, until he started cooking a meal. Then his enthusiasm came back. The Rutherford house was next to the old Niebaum winery, and Coppola had an idea to make something of it. He would repay his debts eventually. He has carried on as a filmmaker. He has been able to see Sofia make films. (
Lost in Translation
, 2003, is her best.) But some think his heart and his wealth now depend on the winery and his interest in food and drink. No scenes are more touching in
The Godfather
than those set at the table. He is a figure in the cultural landscape such as few American directors can match. In his special way, impulsive yet manipulative (a mix of Sonny and Michael Corleone), he used the 1970s to redefine the status of the American moviemaker. He is our Griffith, though he will die richer and happier than that pioneer, able to look back on a career that transcended the old-movie attitudes toward crimeâso long as it was organized, in the family, and just business. We are agreed now, I fear, that American business is ready to go beyond the law and society's moral principles. No great American director has had a darker vision or won Best Picture with it.
A little in advance of
One from the Heart
(1982) there had been a more emphatic and far-reaching failure (admittedly not in Northern California). Michael Cimino (born in New York in 1943) had gone from Yale and studying with Lee Strasberg to working for Clint Eastwood. Then, in 1978, he directed
The Deer Hunter
, using Vietnam and the working-class hinterland of America to tell a story of Dostoyevskyan brothers. The actors were too old to be new soldiers; the film had many elements that jarred with the facts of Vietnam. But it remains a devastating work, and it won Oscars for Best Picture and direction, as well as for Christopher Walken. (That Best Picture Oscar was presented by John Wayne in what would be his final public appearance, coming down a long, tricky staircase with style.) Thus it was no surprise at the time that United Artists hired Cimino to write and direct an epic Western to be known as
Heaven's Gate
.
The earliest budgetary ideas for the picture (under $10 million) were buried under eventual costs of over $40 million, thanks to remote locations that required hours of travel every day, frequent reshooting of the same scenes, the introduction of fresh action as the shooting progressed, and the gamble on Cimino's part that United Artists was too heavily invested to close the project down. We know the details of this thanks to the meticulous reportage and the rueful tone of Steven Bach's book
Final Cut
âand Bach was at the time one of the UA executives responsible for the film.
Bach's book is candid but not vengeful. After the dust had settled, he came to this conclusion:
One thing is certain: I believe there to have been not one day or one moment in the turbulent history of
Heaven's Gate
in which Michael Cimino intended anything other than to create “a masterpiece,” a work of lasting art. His certainty that he was doing so conditioned that history and much of the behavior of those around him. He did not set out to destroy or damage a company but believed he would enrich it, economically and aesthetically.
This may have been too far from “a cheap form of amusement.” Bach and Cimino were defending different things, art and business, and somehow history had brought them into awkward overlap. By dint of his own chronic maneuvers and the company's helpless respect, Cimino was allowed to behave like Lucian Freud painting a portrait. That is a perilous way of making a movie, but Freud was a great painterâand sometimes he abandoned a picture because it was not working out. It is next to impossible to abandon a movie, and very hard to press on, after the first few days, in the knowledge that it is not going to work out. Once that picture opens, however, anyone who can deserts the ruin.
Cimino was obliged to release the film in a shorter form than he had hoped for (149 minutes), but still with the roadblock of the Harvard graduation as its opening. (There is a more promising opening some twenty-five minutes later, as the Kris Kristofferson character arrives in Johnson County, Wyoming.) The premiere (on November 19, 1980) was a scene of gloom, and it was the 219-minute version. Bach felt the silence in the theater: “The audience was either speechless with awe or comatose with boredom. I began sweating icy rivulets in that silence that roared with quiet disdain.”
In the
New York Times
, Vincent Canby called the film “an unqualified disaster,” and many other critics were damning. Their verdict was supported by an eventual gross of less than $4 million. Not long afterward, United Artists itself was ended, the company that had been created to defend independent filmmaking and that had a roll of honor as great as any studio (from Fairbanks's
Thief of Bagdad
to
Annie Hall
, from
Red River
to
Some Like It Hot
). It was absorbed by Kirk Kerkorian's M-G-M and is still somewhere in that digestive tract. Michael Cimino is alive still, and a man of mystery. His career has never regained the power of
The Deer Hunter
. He has not directed a complete film since 1996. But the full version of
Heaven's Gate
looks better as time passes, and is further proofâif it was neededâthat self-conscious artists can make something extraordinary, and then kill it.
