After a grueling edit and re-edit of The Godfather Part II, an exhausted Coppola was ready for the Christmas release of the sequel. Never one to sit still, he was thinking about his next project and accelerated his involvement in artistic affairs in San Francisco. He bought a radio station, KMPX-FM, with funds against future profits from The Godfather Part II. He purchased the Little Box Theatre and the building that housed it and became immersed in City magazine, an underfunded journal focusing on all things San Francisco. Over time, Coppola had infused the struggling magazine with needed cash, a magnanimous no-strings-attached gesture, but now, in addition to dollars, he sought to redefine the magazine. He put his name out and used it in a major ad campaign, fired and hired staff, and fired again, changed editorial policy, and brought in experienced editors from outside venues. Coppola attempted to put his imprimatur on City. His decision making, in an effort to make a major San Francisco magazine, was poor. Coppola did not really understand San Franciscans; he was a New York boy, and the San Francisco natives resented his reimaging of their town.
Pulitzer Prize–winning San Francisco journalist Herb Caen, who wrote columns for the Chronicle, put it this way: “Why would Francis Ford Coppola hire a Los Angeles advertising agency to persuade us Bay Areans to buy his City magazine? I suppose it should also be recorded that Coppola's new toy is being designed by Mike Salisbury—also of L.A.—but leave us not to be provincial. I'm not sure yet, but I think I preferred the OLD City magazine.”1
City had a short period of increased subscribership and revenue, but Coppola's money was seeping out the other end. Ultimately the magazine folded in 1976. Caen eulogized it in his column, placing Coppola at the center of its demise. More than the failure of a magazine, Coppola's involvement was indicative of his extreme behavior during this period in his life. There is no question that his successes led to excesses. On one level, it had been an artistic endeavor, part and parcel of Coppola's nature; in another way it was sheer arrogance. Coppola was imposing his newly found power indiscriminately. This ego-feeding conduct was evident in social activities as well. Coppola began hosting extravagant parties at his large home, inviting the great and near-great and wannabes for whom he would cook lavish meals. The house was truly a mansion, and in the days of 1970s overindulgence, all kinds of hanky-panky was rumored to have taken place under the Coppola roof. Eleanor Coppola, a shy, private individual, was unhappy with this unrestrained hoopla and would greet guests early in the evening and then retire to another part of the house.
Gradually, Coppola began to realize that no matter how many creative enterprises he was involved with in San Francisco, he was still an outsider and not necessarily beloved. He required a kind of attention and stroking, and he was not getting it, despite his influence. Perhaps, in part, this prompted Coppola to purchase a sprawling estate in Napa Valley. Intended as a retreat, the property was located in Rutherford, about 90 minutes from San Francisco, complete with a vineyard. Coppola could not then know how serendipitous the presence of the Rutherford vineyard would be.
April 8, 1975, when Francis Coppola won his coveted Academy Awards for The Godfather Part II, was a magical night for him. Carmine Coppola, in his acceptance speech, quipped, “If it wasn't for Francis Coppola, I wouldn't be here tonight. However, if it wasn't for me, he wouldn't be here.”2 It was endearing. Academy Award recipients can be forgiven for overlooking significant individuals during their thank-you speeches, and when Francis won the screenplay award and director's award he told his mother Italia that if he won again he would thank her. Then The Godfather Part II won for best picture, and, in addition to other remarks, he thanked the Academy for giving his father an Oscar and remarked there was something else he wanted to say but couldn't remember. Neither Carmine nor Francis thanked Italia. She was furious. In that sense, it was not Francis's finest moment as a devoted family man. Italia had been an actress in her youth, and her family had strong show-business ties in Italy. The Penninos had come to America from Naples, Italy. Italia's father composed Italian songs and was an early supporter of Italian films. As owner of the Empire Theater in Brooklyn, Francesco Pennino imported Italian films to air in his theater. From Italia's point of view, her influence on Francis's career was at least as major as Carmine's. Italia's father was a popular songwriter in Naples, and she referred to him as the “Irving Berlin of Italy.”3 Despite bickering about who deserved credit for Francis's artistic success, the reality was that like many first-generation American parents, Carmine and Italia would have preferred their children be doctors or lawyers, or in Francis's case an engineer; but since that was not the path they chose, Italia certainly felt she had earned recognition from her son on this occasion. There was also an unhappy Talia Shire, who had been passed over for best supporting actress in favor of the sentimental favorite, Ingrid Bergman in Murder on the Orient Express. Talia was also hurt that her brother had not acknowledged her. As she observed caustically, “All of a sudden there are a lot of relatives—aunts and uncles and cousins—all too willing to kiss Francis's ass and trade on his status.”4
Directly after The Godfather Part II's big win at the Academy Awards, Francis and Ellie went to Rio for two weeks of alone time. On their return from vacation, Coppola began formalizing Apocalypse Now so he could go into preproduction. As a gift to himself he had also bought a rare Tucker automobile; he admired Preston Tucker's life story. The car was a concrete tickler to remind him that he wanted to develop his biography into a film someday. He had been buying himself a lot of lavish gifts. He owned a helicopter, a Wurlitzer jukebox loaded with rare Caruso records, a room filled with trains, and many other purchases indicating Coppola was on a manic buying spree.
The Godfathers were so phenomenally popular that television rights were purchased by the summer. In July, NBC bought the rights to the two Godfathers, including all unused footage, in order to make a nine-hour miniseries that Coppola would reassemble in chronological order. The deal was purportedly for $15 million.
Coppola was now seriously focused on his next project, the Vietnam War story Apocalypse Now. The backstory of Apocalypse Now began when George Lucas and USC classmate John Milius were discussing the war in Vietnam in the late 1960s. The two were members of the original Zoetrope group. Milius, a crackerjack screenwriter, had heard of and spoken to returning soldiers about their experiences in Vietnam. He began to develop a project he originally called The Psychedelic Soldier, which eventually became Apocalypse Now. The plan was that Milius would write the script and Lucas would direct. The script became part of the bundle that American Zoetrope lost to Warner Bros. after THX-1138 flopped. When Coppola was in the black he repaid the money originally owed to Warner, and the developing scripts for The Conversation and Apocalypse Now reverted to his ownership. Originally, Lucas had owned the rights to Apocalypse, and in 1973 he refreshed Coppola's memory about the project. In the ensuing year Lucas and Coppola argued about monies to be paid for directing and producing and who would do what. These were old financial tensions resurfacing on yet another project. The two men were opposites when it came to money and how to use it. Ultimately, Lucas turned away from Apocalypse, but not without resentment. John Milius, who was a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), was brought on board to reshape the script, with Francis instructing him not to hold back. In the end, Lucas and Coppola came to a more amicable financial agreement for Lucas's lost rights and for his inability to direct Apocalypse in the future.
At the start of production, the only completed mainstream film about Vietnam was the jingoistic The Green Berets (1968), starring an aging, prowar John Wayne. The studios were skittish about Vietnam War vehicles so close in proximity to the contentious environment that had divided the nation for years. On May 7, 1975, President Gerald Ford declared the official end to the Vietnam Era, but the nation was yet to heal. Coppola was hard at work reshaping the voluminous Milius rewrites. Coppola was bringing the screenplay closer to its original conception—a river journey loosely based on Joseph Conrad's story Heart of Darkness.
Francis Coppola began to assemble his production team, believing at the time that the film would turn over in about a year. Initially planning to self-finance, he decided instead to strike a part-ownership deal with United Artists. He had already personally invested several millions in preproduction. Dean Tavalouris was again on board as production designer. Coppola was anxious to use Vittorio Storaro as the director of photography because he admired his photography on Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, and 1900. Storaro hesitated, not wanting to trump Gordon Willis and knowing how difficult it was to shoot a war film. Coppola convinced Storaro to accompany him to Sydney to look at potential locations. On the 27-hour plane trip Storaro read the screenplay. In Peter Cowie's The Apocalypse Now Book he is quoted as saying,
I never went to sleep, I just sat down, and I started to write down my visual concept of Apocalypse Now, inspired by Conrad's book, which I'd just finished. I landed in Sydney’…“and met with Francis.”…“We were able to discuss the main concept”…“and later he called Gray Frederickson (producer) to translate my outline.”…‘That was my first creative meeting with Francis and it was wonderful. It was one of the most remarkable encounters I've ever had in my life.5
Meanwhile, Fred Roos and Tavalouris were scouting locations. They determined that Queensland had tropical tracts that would be suitable. But the idea did not prove acceptable to Australia's burgeoning film community, which did not want Coppola's presence to dominate Australia's film industry. Coppola made the snap decision to shoot in the Philippines under the regime of Ferdinand Marcos, who for a hefty price would provide him with men and helicopters. Coppola chose Richard Marks as supervising editor. Walter Murch was in charge of sound design. Carmine and Francis Coppola would create the music.
For the lead role of Captain Willard, Coppola approached Steve McQueen, who wanted $3 million.6 Coppola was forced to alter his strategy and set his sights on a less expensive selection. Marlon Brando said he would accept the role of Colonel Kurtz. For the part of Willard, Coppola wanted Martin Sheen, but he was not then available. He selected Harvey Keitel, who was dismissed very early on and replaced with a now available Sheen, considered by some as the next James Dean after his performance in Terrence Malick's Badlands. Robert Duvall was cast as the irrepressible Lt. Colonel Kilgore, and Frederic Forrest, who had been in The Conversation, was cast as Chef. Sam Bottoms, who had appeared in The Last Picture Show, was part of the boat crew, and a 14-year-old Larry (Laurence) Fishburne was cast as Clean. Harrison Ford and Scott Glenn, a Vietnam vet (who would take a role in Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides) were also part of the cast. Albert Hall was cast as Chief Phillips, and easy rider Dennis Hopper does a star turn as a whacked-out photojournalist.
Apocalypse Now takes place in-country at the apex of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Captain Willard, a man conflicted by duty and virtue, is assigned a confidential mission to hunt down and terminate with extreme prejudice Colonel Walter Kurtz, a former rising military star operating outside the purview of the industrial military complex.
The central metaphor of Apocalypse Now resonates in its title: the confrontation of good and evil, the quest for a spiritual path, and an inquiry into eternal truths. These themes address war, morality, and for director Coppola the very foundations of moviemaking as they then existed. He set out to create a film about America's military participation in Vietnam that would travel through what Conrad called the Heart of Darkness to examine and question the ethical code of the United States by employing an emerging cinematic language that rebelled against the notion of the “well-made” studio film.
From the outset the project infected everyone in its path with megalomaniacal fervor. Milius raved about actually shooting the film in Vietnam as the war continued to rage in Southeast Asia. On location in the Philippines, Coppola lost touch with reality and began to fantasize that he was Willard and that the out-of-control production was his own private trip into the belly of the beast. In reality the director was actually behaving more like Kurtz, operating out on his own, risking his sanity, career, possessions, and even his family.
Eleanor Coppola, Gio (age 12 at start of production), Roman (age 10), and Sofia (age 4) spent the better part of the production on location in the Philippines with Francis. The boys spent some of the time back in the states at school, but for the most part they were in the jungle. Francis had asked Eleanor to photograph the entire experience to create a documentary record of the making of Apocalypse Now. Ellie had a small crew and took on the assignment with great dedication. She shot copious footage and also amassed many stills. To maintain a record of times and places while she was working, she began writing what became Notes. It is a volume of enormous value in detailing the events of the filming, and, unplanned at the start, it is also the personal diary of Eleanor Coppola at a time of great strain and chaos in her marriage.
Notes is insightful in its descriptions, observations, and shared experiences with Francis Ford Coppola as he spirals downward psychologically during production and postproduction. It is courageous in its self-reflection as Eleanor Coppola struggles to cope with the belief that her husband is having an extramarital affair and that she has a great need to reevaluate her life as a person and wife.
Apocalypse Now was a culmination of directorial expression and excess during the American New Wave of the 1970s, when a new generation of filmmakers took over Hollywood and transformed what had largely been entertainment into personal statements with lofty narratives and aesthetic goals. After taking on organized crime to meditate on the corruption of American political and corporate values in The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, and the invasion of privacy resulting in the destruction of self in The Conversation, Coppola amassed the power and artistic hubris to tackle the nature of evil as personified by the country's aggressive engagement in the affairs of Vietnam.
Apocalypse Now is a series of narrative tableaus positioned in sequential order. We are introduced to Willard as he begins to unravel mentally in a hotel room; the officer is given his orders; a boat and crew are at his disposal; and he is escorted to his point of departure. Willard then embarks on a journey up-river to the Kurtz compound deep in the jungles of Cambodia. Each scene block of the odyssey is a saga unto itself. The crew progresses into an increasingly surreal set of circumstances until Willard reaches what Jim Morrison of The Doors quantified as “The End.” The structure is linear, without parallel storytelling, flashbacks, or flashforwards. Like Dante's The Inferno it is a descent into Hell. Coppola does not drive the story downward but horizontally—it is a cinematic trip up-river to Hades.
Cinematographer Storaro utilizes light, color, composition, and movement to illustrate the story, visualize motifs, and convey the emotional actuality of the characters—their time and place. Storaro's cinematography reproduces the reality of the moment and space through diaphanous layers of light. The images of Vietnam are illuminated with a sense of empirical truth. Storaro photographed Apocalypse Now in the anamorphic widescreen format to capture the horizontal axis of the sky, the jungle, and the river that is the conduit of this road movie traveling by boat. TechnoVision in Italy had just developed lenses with the optical properties to duplicate the high level of definition seen by the human eye. This registers in the brain's storage bank and is filed along with selective memories of a given period. The light in Apocalypse Now produces glare, contrast, and saturated colors, which embody the immediacy of the tumultuous 1960s.
Lateral tracking shots evoke the film's central metaphor. Throughout Apocalypse Now the camera often follows a character—most notably Colonel Bill Kilgore—as he briskly leads his men to his helicopter in a prelude to the air attack. Framed in a full shot in a straight-on profile, the camera tracks right to left, locked into the speed of Kilgore's confident stride. The trajectory of the camera movement not only defines the powerful charisma of the character, but the tabular direction is a gesture that continues to evoke a visual representation of the theme defining Willard's pilgrimage toward a confrontation with the other half of his psyche mirrored in Kurtz—his destiny is cinematically constant and inevitable.
Psychedelic drugs such as LSD transformed the consciousness of many young Americans during the late 1960s. Apocalypse Now takes place in 1969. Experiments with mind-altering substances that produce hallucinatory psychoactive states in the brain were spreading at home and at war. For the men fighting in Vietnam the experience of leaving boyhood for the terrors of the jungle and facing an enemy they didn't fully comprehend was a surreal and horrifying transition into manhood. For them, psychedelic drugs were both a rite of passage and a way to transcend the unimaginable existence they confronted.
In Apocalypse Now some of the members of the crew are under the influence of hallucinogens. Storaro's use of color sparks these psychic visions in the viewer's retina. Orange and green smoke fills the air with bright, gauzy fog. Lance (Sam Bottoms), the zonked-out California surfer, fires a canister of purple smoke he calls “Purple Haze,” a reference to the seminal Jimi Hendrix song. Hendrix, who provided the sonic soundtrack for drugheads during the era, had named the tune after a variety of acids chemically concocted for the experimental electric musician by Augustus Owsley Stanley III, engineer of countless sensory excursions taken by Baby Boomers.
Cinematography is an art of chiaroscuro, the attention to light and dark in a pictorial work. As Willard and the crew float into Kurtz's heart of darkness through the atrocities of war, Storaro's photography emphasizes conflict with tonal contrast. The environmental serenity of green foliage, blue sky, and water is counterposed to the presence of warriors with dark camouflaged faces, black metal weapons, and the burning yellow and orange of explosions that ravage the land expressed in a surreal display of deadly fireworks. The Kurtz compound is heavy with brush. The Colonel dwells in a cave where light isn't absent but represents the other side of brightness. The stark pools of light and the gloom of its reflected rays unify to expose that light and dark—good and evil—are configurations of each other. In an interview in Projections 6: Film-makers on Film-Making, Storaro told Ric Gentry,
Apocalypse Now was the sum of my work up to that time. It was everything I did in the moment of my past, and everything I could do in the moment of my present. It was through Conrad, in part, and the title of his novella Heart of Darkness on which Coppola's film is based, that I began to re-evaluate everything that went before. The concept of “darkness” itself was revealing. It is where light ends. But I also realized that darkness is not the absence of light but the antithesis of light.’…‘Light and dark are not only metaphors but the means by which we perceive and understand.7
The sound design by Walter Murch creates an aural environment that supports and enhances the thematic achievements of the visual narrative. Apocalypse Now is a sonic landmark which heralded a new era in the application of film sound analogous to the accomplishments in production design attained by William Cameron Menzies on Gone with the Wind.
Despite the incredibly stressful conditions that existed during the making of Apocalypse Now, both cinematographer Storaro and sound designer Murch elevated their crafts to a new level of competency, skill, and intricacy.
Sound effects and music interpenetrate to produce overlays of realistic, expressive, associative, and symbolic pertinence. The whirl of helicopter blades is a signature sound in Apocalypse Now that defines the authentic and sensory nature of the Vietnam War experience. In the opening of the film, Willard imagines the sound of a turning hotel ceiling fan into a synthesized blade thwarp that distinguishes his dream state. This is then blown out of his consciousness by the audio of an actual helicopter that flies over the building, thereby returning the psychically burned-out officer to the material world of Saigon.
Throughout the film, Michael Herr's narration8 puts us inside Willard's thoughts as he tries to reason the purpose of his journey. This inner voice is up close and resonates as if it were emanating from inside his head. It allows the viewer to experience Willard's twisted cognitive condition.
During the helicopter battle Kilgore plays a tape of Wagner's “Ride of the Valkyries,” which blares out of speakers mounted on the helicopter. The triumphant horn melody and the heavenly choral voices signify power and victory and bring associations of Nazi invasions and the superiority of a master race. The perspective of source and score interchange and interact with sounds of gunfire, helicopters, explosions, radio transmissions, and shouting voices of the combatants, which constantly shift to produce a hyperdramatic, cine-operatic encounter between sound and image.
To create the exterior ambiance of Kurtz's compound, Murch blended realistic Southeast Asian jungle sounds that had been recorded for the motion picture Lord Jim, music and singing of the Mung people of Cambodia taken from ethnomusicality records, Vietnamese dialogue spoken from various depths in a hidden valley, and a bird-presence track recorded at the San Francisco Zoo bird room.
The interior of Kurtz's lair is depicted as a dank, wet ruin. There are the sounds of seeping water and echoed drips from various parts of the dark location that acoustically outline the space. Jungle inhabitants are represented by cricket sounds and the suction-cupped fingers of a Philippine lizard known as a gecko.
Coppola and his team of film editors—supervising editor Marks, Jerry Greenberg, Murch, and Lisa Fruchtman—struggled incessantly to find a fitting conclusion for Apocalypse Now. After trying every available possibility inherent in the raw footage they arrived at the concept that after Willard's ritualistic killing of Kurtz, he reads the man's typewritten diary and finds the message “Drop the bomb—exterminate them all!” written in scrawl. The Doors song “The End” is heard at the beginning and end of the film. As sung by the Dionysian rocker Jim Morrison, who had attended UCLA with Coppola, the modal, tribal ode is an Oedipal drama that deliberates patricide. Its presence establishes a preordained affinity between Willard and Kurtz. Willard then emerges from the cave carrying the diary, throws down the murderous knife, and is acknowledged by the tribe as their new leader. Willard rejects this and leads Lance, the only survivor of his crew, back to the boat. They turn the vessel around to travel the river once again. They receive radio contact asking for conformation but Willard shuts it off. We hear Kurtz repeat Conrad's prophetic words, “The horror, the horror.” In an author's interview, supervising editor Marks talks about the struggle of cutting the ending. “Apocalypse was the quintessential difficult ending, mostly because Brando was shot in such a strange way. It was just endless improvisation, with Brando covered with overlapping cameras.’…‘I don't think there was ever a clear cut answer. Not that Francis didn't write an ending; he wrote them, but they weren't necessarily the ones that were filmed, and the ones that were filmed were changed a thousand times in the cutting room.”9 The fruitless search for a logical ending to a film about the Vietnam War is the consummate metaphor of Apocalypse Now. The war and the film can never truly be resolved and must lie within a conflicted American heart.
Time and cost overages on Apocalypse Now were stupendous. The quoted budget at the end of production was about of $31.5 4million.10 The film took three years to come to fruition. It had survived a massive typhoon and Martin Sheen's heart attack. Coppola was being vilified by the biting American press. In an attempt to mollify the naysayers, Coppola decided to screen an unfinished version at Cannes in competition where it received a warm reception and shared the Palme d'Or with Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum. On August 15, 1979, Apocalypse Now opened in limited release. A playbill was created by famed graphics designer Milton Glaser.11 The 16-page handout included a statement from Coppola to his audience. He says, “The most important thing I wanted to do in the making of Apocalypse Now was to create a film experience that would give its audience a sense of the horror, the madness, the sensuousness, and the moral dilemma of the Vietnam War.” He continued, “It was my thought that if the American audience could look at the heart of what Vietnam was really like—what it looked like and felt like—then they would be only one small step away from putting it behind them.”12
The Vietnam War was a seminal experience for the American public. The political divisiveness and the harrowing experience of visually seeing the war unfold on nightly newscasts left American society in pain and damaged. For those soldiers who had experienced Vietnam and for the families of those who died in the conflict, the trauma continued. Returning soldiers often received a hostile reception from the citizenry and had psychic wounds that took years to repair. Ultimately, Coppola hoped that his artistry could contribute to an arduous and lengthy healing process.
It took many years for Apocalypse Now to yield a profit. The overruns were enormous. In the end, the tally was positive, and the film received eight Academy Award nominations with Oscars for Storaro and Murch. With the tincture of time Apocalypse has been deemed by most to be a masterpiece. It was responsible for spawning a series of filmic endeavors addressing the war in Vietnam.
The Apocalypse Now chapter in Coppola's life had left him traumatized and hurt. For the major portion of the experience he had behaved badly toward many of his most trusted colleagues and most assuredly to his wife Eleanor. She had been denigrated in public and private while Coppola found reasons for pleasuring himself and justifying his uncivilized behavior. He still had hearth and home, but just barely. Francis Coppola, the gambler, had rolled the dice, but even with an ultimately financially successful film, it was questionable if he had won the toss.