“Francis Coppola Wishes to Speak with You”

I was always trying to learn more about how to make movies back then, but in the late 1960s there were no movies available to study except in theaters, no old movies to see except in revival houses. I had to go to the UCLA film library in Los Angeles to find original screenplays. The ones that I could find that had been published were invariably the finished movie in print—which is not something you can really learn much from, because if it was a really good film, the finished product looks impossibly perfect. That published screenplay is not what they started with, and it will just discourage you into thinking that you could never write something as great as that.

I found it best to look for the earlier versions of the screenplays that I wanted to study and discovered they are not at all like the film that went through months of shooting and editing. They are not always blueprints for great films—they became great films while they were being made. If you look at the original screenplay for Annie Hall (if you can find it), you will see that the screenplay is not even about the character Annie. That story was crafted in the cutting room and by rewriting the commentary. The original screenplay versions of Star Wars were so long and shaggy that they had to be made into three films. I take nothing away from screenwriters saying this—their writing is the genesis of movies—just don’t beat yourself up in thinking the published screenplays are so perfect, you could never do that. Most people can’t do it, even great writers can’t necessarily do it, but you can learn a lot by studying the originals.

Since there was no way to watch older films, even classics, unless you could catch them at a revival house, I sought out the movies I wanted to study and made sound recordings of them by sneaking a tape recorder into the theaters. It worked surprisingly well. The audio quality was excellent, and I got the bonus of the audience’s reaction. This was a distraction until I realized how carefully the writers and directors plotted those reactions. Richard Zanuck told the story of his hearing the audience during a preview screening of Jaws. “We didn’t know what we had until we took it to Texas. I was out in the lobby while the film was being screened, getting a cup of coffee. I’ll tell you when that shark first jumps out of the water, the audience screamed so loud it shook the building. That’s when I knew we had a monster on our hands.”

I only had these tapes and what original screenplays I could find (I would buy bootlegged ones in Hollywood) to learn from—that and watching new movies and revival-house classics—but there were some surprise benefits. I learned how important the quality of an actor’s voice is to the performance. My God, in some of these old classic black-and-white movies the voices have so much authority and nuance. Yet, when watching the same film in its entirety, not just a soundtrack, there is so much going on visually that the voice quality can escape your notice, as well as how the music works to undergrid the filmmaker’s direction or misdirection of the audience’s attention.

Another thing I learned from these old movies concerned the mystique of a movie character and the mysterious power that a movie star can have over the audiences. There is a story that Clark Gable took Carol Lombard on a date while he was courting her. Both were already famous and they later married, but this was an earlier time. When he got her home, he parked his car in front of her apartment and said, “Can I come up?” To which she replied, “Who do you think you are, Clark Gable?”

There is actually a little more Hollywood to this story than might first appear. Many in show business are famous by their professional names, which are quite unlike their real names or real personalities. Woody Allen’s real name is Allen Konigsberg; Michael Caine, Maurice Micklewhite; Judy Garland, Frances Gumm; Natalie Portman, Natalie Hershlag. It is very hard for the public to separate the actor from the real person. Humphrey Bogart was often challenged by tough guys simply because he became famous for playing tough guys. He was far from a hoodlum, having come from a wealthy East Coast family. His father was a surgeon and his mother a wealthy heiress. In fact, his mother’s illustration of him was used for the original Gerber baby food ads. The point is that he was the opposite of the characters he played.

My first encounter with anything to do with Hollywood feature films as an adult occurred when the two most successful film school graduates, Francis Coppola and George Lucas, decided they were going to locate in Northern California, not Los Angeles.

It was 1970, and I was fresh out of film school myself. I had been lucky enough to get a job at a small film company in San Francisco owned by a distinguished inventor and audio engineer named Bill Palmer.

During World War II, American intelligence suspected that Germany had developed some new kind of recording device because though they sent bombers to every city where Hitler appeared to be giving a live broadcast, they were having no luck in killing him. Intelligence thought that they could tell “live” from “recorded” broadcasts because all known recording methods had a lot of background hiss. No loud hiss, must be a live Hitler broadcast, send in the bombers. But they never got him, so this made army intelligence suspicious.

Immediately upon Germany’s defeat, the military sent in specialists and found a new type of recorder, a tape recorder. Not wax, not vinyl, not wire, but magnetic tape. Bill Palmer and a partner, Jack Mullin, got their hands on the German machine and developed an American version. Soon, through the Ampex company of Palo Alto, all major studios and broadcast networks were using tape recorders. These engineers’ work also led to the early video recorders.

I started as a sound technician, but the company did every motion picture service there was, from script to screen. It was here that I learned how to make movies. If I wanted to know something, I went to Bill and asked. I quickly learned that when Bill explained it, it was so easy to understand, because he actually knew what he was talking about. You get the confusing answers from people who don’t.

Since film school I had been trying to finish my documentary historical film on boxing champion Jack Johnson, who was the inspiration for the Broadway play The Great White Hope, by Howard Sackler. If I had not been a poor film student, I might have been able to beat Sackler to the punch, but I could only afford to work on it nights and weekends, and then only when I had some extra money. But then something happened to change all that.

I had been away from my apartment for a couple of days, and as I opened the door upon my return, the phone was ringing. Picking up, I heard, “I have been trying to reach you for days. Francis Coppola saw your film and wants to talk to you.” This was the phone call all young filmmakers wait for, and I was no exception.

Coppola and several of his filmmaking buddies, including George Lucas, had founded a movie production company in San Francisco called American Zoetrope. The Zoetrope was an early moving image parlor device. You spun it, and while looking through a slit, you saw still drawings come to life and move in much the same way as a child’s flip book animates sequences of stick drawings.

Coppola had a policy of screening student and local filmmakers’ work at the end of the day every Friday. People were encouraged to drop their film off for these after-hours screenings. My film was not done yet, but I had a silent work print that I could show, so I had left it at Zoetrope Studios.

My film was made up of rare black-and-white still photos and even scarcer motion picture footage of Johnson, all of which I had located through painstaking research and contacting film and photo collections all over the world. The story centered on Johnson’s winning the Heavyweight Championship of the World and then going on to defeat the much-admired white ex-champion, Jim Jeffries. The Jeffries loss to a black man caused race riots across the country, and the movie footage of the fight itself was declared illegal. Also, Johnson was later arrested. So my film had rare and powerful stuff, and it made an impression.

Soon I was meeting with Francis and getting a tour of his studio. George was somewhere there finishing his film. This was before The Godfather and before the release of George’s first feature, THX 1138, which was also to be the first release of a multiple-studio film deal that had financed the Zoetrope studio. Coppola had also directed, but his claim to fame was winning the Oscar in 1970 for coauthoring the movie Patton with Edwin North, though no one ever remembers North, just Coppola. North had written The Day the Earth Stood Still and Young Man with a Horn, among many other films. According to the producer of Patton, John McCarthy, “Coppola’s script was effulgent, imaginative, airy, really awful good, but in need of some restructuring. We lined up North . . . He took the Coppola script and worked it to the point where it had more cohesion and hung together better, and had a much more workable dramatic structure.” Just for the record, dramatic structure is everything in movie stories.

Francis told me he liked my project and asked how he could help me. I said I needed a place to edit. His studio had all the latest in movie technology, and young filmmakers were drooling to get their hands on it; so was I. “Why don’t you come and work for us?” he said. Now, that was a bombshell I hadn’t expected. It was all very vague, but essentially I could work for them and finish my film as well. There were guys I knew who would have walked from Los Angeles on a bed of nails for this opportunity, but I turned him down.

I explained that I had just started a new job with another company, and I just couldn’t walk out on them so soon. He was taken aback, but what could he say? I was just some naive kid who hadn’t wised up yet. So he said that was very admirable of me.

Then he explained why he had originally called me in. He said his friend Martin Ritt was directing the motion picture version of The Great White Hope and my film would be a perfect short to run before the picture. He would call Martin and see what could be worked out. “Oh, and by the way,” he said, “you can still edit your film here.” And I did, but Ritt told Coppola he was too far along to include my movie.

I brought in my film and went to work. I still had a full-time job, but nights and weekends I was working away at Zoetrope Studios. Soon I started to notice something strange. They had all this fancy stuff, a trendy old brick warehouse with all the latest flatbed editing machines imported from Europe. They had huge black-and-white blowups of famous movie scenes and film directors (that would later find their way to ILM). They had the best carpet and office furniture that money could buy, and a huge old-fashioned espresso machine topped by a gold eagle. It was designed to impress and it did. Except there was one problem: All the little stuff you need to edit a movie, they didn’t have. No tape at all, no splicers for cutting film, no supplies of any kind. OK, I thought. I guess everyone just brings their own stuff. And that is what I did.

Within months, THX 1138 was released and it dropped dead. The studio hated the film and all the other projects Coppola had lined up. They cut off all money and even made Francis repay what had been spent. Zoetrope vanished from the landscape (at least until The Godfather), but I still had a job and was able to finish my film, Jeffries-Johnson 1910. Now I knew why there were no supplies: They were broke and counting on the release of THX to save them.

I entered my Jack Johnson film in the San Francisco International Film Festival and won a minor award, but they refused to show it, even though the opening festival feature was The Great White Hope. So a bunch of us local filmmakers, tired of being rejected every year, formed our own alternative festival and rented Fugazi Hall in North Beach, and my film was the feature of the evening. Coppola attended the S.F. Festival but then snuck out and came to ours, playing the tuba on the stage there, to the entertainment of everyone. We made Herb Caen’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle and embarrassed the stuffed shirts at the high-society festival that had ignored us.

I picked up a good review from the Chronicle’s movie critic, Judy Stone, and got a distribution deal from McGraw-Hill Films. When I got my royalty advance check, I walked into a downtown bank and approached a pretty young teller. She looked at it and said in a breathless movie starlet’s voice, “Are you an author?” That’s when I knew I had made the right career choice. I was twenty-four years old.

After my Jack Johnson movie, I tried to find grant money for the next documentary I wanted to make. The subject was Ulysses S. Grant, the famous Civil War general and president. I had read everything I could get my hands on about him, including his personal memoirs that had been published by Mark Twain. It was these memoirs that Gertrude Stein had instructed Ernest Hemingway to study if he wanted to learn how to write. Edmund Wilson compared them to Thoreau’s Walden and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It was these little-known aspects of this great man’s life that I wanted to bring to an audience’s attention by extracting them from the past. This project got me the chance at an internship with the American Film Institute, but I was unable to obtain the money to make the film, so it became an article called “Me and General Grant.”

Hanging out at Zoetrope the little bit that I did had by now caused my thinking to change. Out of college I had thought that if I could just work somewhere in the movie business and still make films on the side, I would be perfectly happy. Now that I had seen what the really aggressive young filmmakers were doing, it made me wonder if I should change tactics. I could continue to beg for filmmaking grants or do what producers did, get control of a property and leverage that to get a movie made. I could still use my historical material, just in a larger crapshoot.