Monday, March 26, 2012
Merging art and commerce
— Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, March 18, 1972
By Edward Copeland
Picture this: The war Michael Corleone returns from at the beginning of The Godfather isn't World War II, but Vietnam. Perhaps Kay Adams looks more like a flower child (Diane Keaton had been a Member of the Tribe in the original Broadway production of Hair after all). Try to fathom what poor Fredo would be experimenting with once they sent him off to Las Vegas. If Paramount Pictures steamrolled over
Francis Ford Coppola from the minute he agreed to direct the film, these things might not be theoretical flights of fancy. On the commentary track of The Godfather DVD, Coppola tells how when he climbed aboard the project, Paramount handed him a completed screenplay that the studio had developed, much as they financed the writing of the novel, with Mario Puzo. Only for some bizarre reason, while setting the story's beginnings in 1945 satisfied Paramount for
the 1969 novel (which, remember, wasn't the blockbuster best seller yet as production plans began), it didn't work for a studio looking to make a quick feature on the cheap. The screenplay given to Coppola moved the events to the 1970s, added hippies and, according to Coppola, this quintessentially New York story would be filmed in Kansas City (though later in the commentary, Coppola refers to a plan to shoot it in St. Louis). "There was none of that post-war ambiance," Coppola said, which was one of the major attractions for him to the project in the first place since he didn't like the novel with its graphic sex and general tawdriness until he discovered the story of the family buried underneath the trash. I imagine that few people out there now have endured the actual reading of Mario Puzo's novel, which, awful as it is, spent 67 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. Coppola's commentary, recorded in 2004, tries to be as nice as possible about the book because Puzo became a close friend right until his death in 1999. Pauline Kael's review of the movie goes into a lot of detail about the novel before she even starts writing about how good she thinks the movie turned out to be, but a few of her words give you who haven't read it a much better idea than my fuzzy memory of it could conjure.
"The movie starts from a trash novel that is generally considered gripping and readable, though (maybe because movies more than satisfy my appetite for trash) I found it unreadable.…Mario Puzo has a reputation as a good writer, so his potboiler was treated as if it were special, and not in the Irving Wallace-Harold Robbins class which, by its itch and hype and juicy roman-à-clef treatment, it plainly belongs.…The novel…features a Sinatra stereotype, and sex and slaughter, and little gobbets of trouble and heartbreak.…Francis Ford Coppola…has stayed very close to the book's greased-lightning sensationalism and yet has made a movie with the spaciousness and the strength that popular novels such as Dickens' used to have.…Puzo provided what Coppola needed: a storyteller's output of incidents and details to choose from, the folklore behind the headlines, heat and immediacy, the richly familiar. And Puzo's shameless turn-on probably left Coppola looser than if he had been dealing with a better book…"
Of course, Coppola had a long way to go and many battles to wage before that finished film could win Pauline's seal of approval.
Before we delve deeper into some of the behind-the-scenes brouhahas, I do want to pause for a moment to mention the one detail of the novel still trapped in my brain that convinced me the book stunk. Admittedly, this stretch of Puzo's work thoroughly amused friends of mine around the same age (junior high), who found the entire sequence hysterical. On the commentary, Coppola raises this, though he can't bring himself to talk about it in clinical detail, other than to say the lengthy plot point stood as a key factor in his thinking long and
hard about whether or not he wanted to make a film version of this book. Now, the movie does show that James Caan's Sonny Corleone gets laid a lot, but that's nothing compared to Puzo's description of Santino. In the novel, covered over many pages, readers learn that Sonny isn't just a lothario, he happens to be a well-endowed lothario. Apparently, when standing at full attention, Sonny proves to be so mammoth in size that his mistress (who eventually will give birth to Andy Garcia for The Godfather Part III) requires corrective gynecological surgery because just having sex with him disfigures her vagina. (She needed the surgery or Baby Andy Garcia might have just slid out like a bowling ball through the return, dangling between her legs by the umbilical cord.) I know what you are thinking — did the Farrelly brothers help Puzo write The Godfather? I have no evidence to support such a rumor, though Peter was 15 and Bobby was 13 when the novel came out, so the two had hit the correct age for that kind of humor — and with The Godfather turning into such a huge hit, who could blame them for never wanting to abandon that mentality? Anyway, Coppola wisely decided that the film could leave out that part of the story, but what he did do borders on genius. He alludes to it by a simple, visual gag by unnamed female wedding guests after they spot Sonny sneaking off with his mistress for an assignation.
In Kael's review, she writes that Puzo claims that he wrote the novel "below my gifts" because he needed the money (other stories report that Puzo was drowning in gambling debts at the time). Coppola, Kael similarly said, told everyone he took the film for the money.
Though he never makes that case on the DVD commentary, most stories sound different depending on the storyteller and evidence exists that Kael had the story correct when she penned that Coppola sought the cash so he could make the movies that he wanted to make. In Kael's opinion, Puzo taking the dough turned out a much worse result than Coppola doing it for the money did. "(Coppola) has salvaged Puzo's energy and lent the narrative dignity," Kael opined. First, he had to land that job. Mark Seal wrote a fascinating look of the events surrounding the making of the film in the March 2009 edition of Vanity Fair titled "The Godfather Wars." In it, he chronicled Coppola's initial reluctance to take the job as well as Paramount, which back then had the oil company Gulf & Western as its parent, considering selling the property instead of ponying up the money to make it. According to Seal's article, Coppola's chief cheerleader for the job at Paramount was Peter Bart, then vice president in charge of creative affairs at the studio. Bart later would run Variety before leaving as the once powerful trade paper went into its death throes, with its probable mercy killing appearing imminent any day now.
"Bart felt that Coppola would not be expensive and would work with a small budget. Coppola passed on the project, confessing that he had tried to read Puzo’s book but, repulsed by its graphic sex scenes, had stopped at page 50. He had a problem, however: he was broke. His San Francisco–based independent film company, American Zoetrope, owed $600,000 to Warner Bros., and his partners, especially George Lucas, urged him to accept. “Go ahead, Francis,” Lucas said. “We really need the money. What have you got to lose?” Coppola went to the San Francisco library, checked out books on the Mafia, and found a deeper theme for the material. He decided it should be not a film about organized crime but a family chronicle, a metaphor for capitalism in America."
When Robert Evans, then-head of production at Paramount, heard what Coppola thought the story should be, Evans thought the young director had lost it. More importantly, he feared that Paramount execs above him such as studio president Stanley Jaffe would sell the
rights. Burt Lancaster had offered $1 million for them because he lusted after the role of Don Corleone for himself. The top studio brass weren't as hot as Evans on making the film anyway. Seal's account says "the studio bosses didn’t want to make the movie. Mob films didn’t play, they felt, as evidenced by their 1969 flop The Brotherhood, starring Kirk Douglas as a Sicilian gangster." Evans employed a last-ditch maneuver in hopes of keeping The Godfather, Seal recounts further. "(H)e dispatched Coppola to New York to meet with (Gulf & Western Chairman Charlie) Bluhdorn. Coppola’s presentation persuaded Bluhdorn to hire him. Immediately, he began re-writing the script with Mario Puzo, and the two Italian-Americans grew to love each other.'Puzo was an absolutely wonderful man,' says Coppola. 'To sum him up, when I put a line in the script describing how to make sauce and wrote, ‘First you brown some garlic,’ he scratched that out and wrote, ‘First you fry some garlic. Gangsters don’t brown.’'" Crisis averted. Now Coppola and Paramount just had each other to fight, especially about casting.Since they thwarted Burt Lancaster's dream of playing Vito, Coppola and crew would need an actor to play the don. During discussions, according to Coppola's commentary track, they determined that the Don needed to be played by one of the world's greatest actors and
Coppola narrowed that list to two men — Brando, who being in his 40s at the time was younger than the sixtysomething Corleone, and Laurence Olivier, who was in the right age range, seen in the photo at the left as he looked in 1973 in a television production of The Merchant of Venice playing the original Shylock. When casting The Godfather though, representatives described Olivier's health to them as precarious, almost implying the bell would soon toll for the actor. Of course, this wasn't the case and Olivier recovered soon enough that when Brando won the best actor Oscar for 1972 for playing Vito, Olivier held one of the other four nominations for Sleuth and didn't die until 1989. While Brando did get the part, the studio fought like hell to prevent it. His
reputation as difficult and eccentric superseded his reputation as brilliant in their collective minds and it took a screen test, makeup tests and many promises that he'd be on his best behavior before Paramount agreed to let him play the part. Aside from his usual pranks on the set (such as in the scene when two men carry Vito upstairs on a gurney and he secretly added hundreds of pounds of weights beneath the sheet to watch them struggle), Brando actually stayed on his best behavior. Brando saved his only stunt for Oscar night when the world met a Native American woman who called herself Sacheen Littlefeather. (Digression: Coppola won Oscars for adapted screenplay three times: for the first two Godfathers and for Patton. Twice, the films also won best actor and both times, the actors refused to accept the Oscar — though George C. Scott announced in advance he wouldn't if he won and had said the same when nominated for The Hustler.) Imagine another scenario, one Paramount considered before Coppola's hiring. At one point, they seriously planned to cast Danny Thomas as the senior Corleone. I don't know if the film's title would have changed to Make Room for Godfather.Casting Vito turned out to be a breeze compared to many names floated to play Michael before Coppola was involved and the director and Paramount displaying equal intransigence about who should play Michael. From the beginning, Coppola visualized the actors as certain
characters in his head, going so far as to bring them down to American Zoetrope's San Francisco offices before any discussions with the studio. In his mind, Sonny always looked like James Caan and no one but Al Pacino played Michael. Back when it looked as if Danny Thomas would be playing the Don, the Gulf & Western CEO approached Warren Beatty not only to take the part of Michael but to produce and direct the film as well, Beatty told Mark Seal. This was 1970, not even a full three years since Bonnie and Clyde. Beatty said to Bluhdorn, "Charlie, not another gangster movie!" Film lovers reaped the rewards of Beatty refusing that offer, not only because ultimately it would lead to Coppola and Pacino in The Godfather but because instead Beatty teamed with Robert Altman on McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Other actors considered for
Michael, some who actually received offers and turned them down included Robert Redford, Martin Sheen, Ryan O’Neal, David Carradine and Jack Nicholson. One thing became clear: Once Paramount determined that it would make the film, it fought about everything. They hated the idea of Pacino as Michael. Evans told Coppola that Pacino was too short for the part and that "a runt" couldn't play Michael. Caan called up Coppola before the film started and informed him that the studio and just offered him the part of Michael. Not only had Coppola always envisioned Caan as Sonny, he viewed the character as the Americanized one and that Michael should look more traditionally Italian which Pacino did and Caan did not, especially since Caan's ancestry was Jewish not Italian. The studio relented long enough to get production started, though Coppola just knew he'd be fired at any time so, as an insurance policy, he scheduled Michael's killing of Sollozzo and police Capt. McCluskey (Al Lettieri, Sterling Hayden) for the first week of filming. Coppola credits this memorable sequence, seen in the clip below, for selling the studio on Pacino and saving his job — temporarily, but the director continued to feel at risk as the studio tried to undermine his ideas at nearly every turn.Robert Evans didn't like Nino Rota's score. Coppola decided to start playing rough with the studio. His certainty that he could be fired any moment freed him in a way so he began telling them to fire him each time the studio wanted to change something important to him. That music qualified as one of those for Coppola. Evans wouldn't budge, so they agreed to let a screening decide. The audience loved the
movie so much, no one even noticed the score, if you can believe that. Another time, the studio complained that the film didn't have enough "action" in it and told Coppola that they planned to send an action director to the set to see how to pick it up. To beat them to the punch, so to speak, he came up with the scene where Connie (Talia Shire) gets into a huge fight with Carlo (Gianni Russo) when she intercepts a phone call from a woman and assumes he's cheating on her. She starts throwing every dish in the apartment at him. Coppola's young son even got in on the fun — handing objects to his aunt from offscreen for her to let fly. If the studio
wasn't bitching about scenes they didn't see, they'd whine about ones that they told him should be coming out. On the commentary track, Coppola refers specifically about a studio hack that he doesn't name since the man has died who constantly appeared on the set saying, "We don't need that scene" or "That scene has been cut." Fortunately, on some sequences, Coppola covered the sequences with two cameras so when this man showed up to try to stop the famous scene of the Don's death in the garden while playing with his grandson, Coppola was able to shut off one to appease him while the second camera continued to work. The studio particularly hated that scene because of the costs associated with flying in the tomatoes and the hack's belief that just
cutting from the previous scene to Vito's funeral would make the point just as well. The other incident when Coppola believed his firing was imminent concerned the scene where Brando as the Don met with Sollozzo. The studio only would tell Coppola that something dissatisfied them about the scene. Coppola offered to reshoot it, but he was informed that wouldn't be necessary so he knew what that meant. Then, on the commentary, he offers one of his many pieces of advice that he directs specifically for young filmmakers. They'll never fire you on a Wednesday. They'll always wait until Friday, wanting to use the weekend for a smoother transition. Coppola realized he wasn't just making a movie. If he famously described the making of Apocalypse Now as Vietnam, then shooting The Godfather paralleled mob warfare so Coppola hit them before the studio could whack him. Coppola fired four people that day — assistant directors and others that he suspected as being the traitors, and threw Paramount into disarray. With those four gone, he reshot the scene, Paramount didn't object any longer and Coppola didn't get the axe. The final battle over the film came down to the editing process itself. Coppola wanted to cut the film in his San Francisco studios, Paramount wanted to cut it in L.A. Evans relented, but warned Coppola that if he turned in a movie with a running time longer than 2 hours and 15 minutes, they'd move editing to Los Angeles. The first cut ran 2 hours and 45 minutes. Coppola got brutal, removing anything that added color or could be considered extraneous. When done, he had trimmed it to 2 hours and 20 minutes. He took his chances and delivered that to Paramount in L.A. Evans complained that he cut all the color and best stuff and they were moving the editing to L.A.. Coppola realized they would have done that no matter what, but they basically put back everything he cut and then some ending up with the cut we know that's just five minutes short of three hours.Once the film had finished and it became abundantly clear that Coppola had made a hit for Paramount, they loved him. Its very limited opening weekend in merely six theaters took in $302,393 (an average of $50,398 per screen). That calculates today to $1,646,978.41 on six screens for a $274,491.86 per screen average. As The Godfather became a bigger hit, Coppola didn't get to enjoy its early success because now that Paramount valued him so much, Robert Evans begged him to come help re-write Jack Clayton's troubled adaptation of The Great Gatsby starring Robert Redford. For three weeks, Coppola says he was "pulling his hair out" trying to fix that. In the end, Coppola doesn't think that Clayton used any of his revisions in the dreadful Gatsby adaptation, which might end up looking better once Baz "Short Attention Span" Luhrmann releases his 3D version of Fitzgerald's masterpiece.
"I felt so embarrassed…I was very unhappy during The Godfather. I had been told by everyone that my ideas for it were so bad and I didn't have a helluva lot confidence in myself — I was only 30 years old or so — and I was just hangin' on by my wits…I had no idea that this nightmare was going to turn into a successful film much less a film that would become a classic."
Well, maybe directing a movie isn't always fun, at least that's Coppola's recollection of his time on The Godfather. He shot the film for $6.5 million in 52 days, but he admits he felt like an outsider on his own set. (Since it did become a huge blockbuster, Part II received a
budget bump to $11 million and they actually got to go on location for shooting.) He speaks honestly about how the great cinematographer Gordon Willis and other crewmembers wondered why Coppola got the job. They didn't quite understand things that he tried but by the sequel, that had all changed. That took some time to happen though. Willis, the man who deserves much of the credit for the film's great look, often shook his head at Coppola's ideas. He particularly disdained high shots, though Coppola made him do some anyway, specifically when they try to kill Vito so you can see the oranges roll into the street and during the Sollozzo killing. Coppola recounts one incident when nature called and as he sat in the bathroom stall, two crewmembers walked in, unaware of Coppola's presence. "What do you think of this director?" one asked the other. "Boy, he doesn't know anything. What an asshole he is!" the other replied. It didn't help Coppola's confidence. Listening to his commentary, it doesn't just illuminate the history of the film's production, you also hear Coppola react to things that still bother him because of the cheap production such as obvious stock footage of cars driving in New York in the 1940s or cheap second unit shots of signs in Las Vegas. The low budget did force some ingenuity on him as well. When it came time to
film the sequence where Michael goes to the hospital to see his recovering father and notices the lack of security, they didn't realize until editing that not enough suspense had been built up because where they filmed had such limited space. George Lucas searched through discarded strips of films for shots made of the hospital corridor and they strung them together to give the illusion that it was longer and to increase the suspense. Late in production, there turned out to be several scenes that Coppola realized they needed, the most important being that he'd failed to write a one-on-one scene between Pacino and Brando. Since he was in a frenzy as it was, he called up his friend Robert Towne and he quickly cranked out that memorable scene where Vito tells Michael what to watch out for and expresses regrets that he has assumed his role as don since he never wanted that life for him. He dreamed of a "Senator Corleone" or "Governor Corleone." Finally, Vito sighs, "There just wasn't enough time." "We'll get there, pop. We'll get there," Michael replies. One of the best-written scenes in the entire film came from a screenwriter who received no credit for it. Forget it Robert, it's Hollywood.
The Godfather comes stocked with so many memorable sequences, it's damn near impossible to list them all, but perhaps the most famous one of all, one which Coppola conceived for the movie, remains the most imitated of them all. Coppola himself tried to do variations in both of the Godfather sequels but, as with most things, it's hard to top the original. The ending killing spree montage surrounding the baptism of Carlo and Connie's newborn son with Michael standing by to be the child's godfather came about as a matter of practicality. In the novel, the revenge taken on the heads of the five families and Bugsy Siegel-stand-in Moe Green out in Vegas (played briefly but memorably by the great Alex Rocco) covered about 30 pages or so in the book. In the script, Coppola needed to condense that to two pages. As coincidence would have it, around the same time of the contemplation about how to accomplish this, Coppola's wife gave birth to future Oscar-winning screenwriter Sofia Coppola. Baby Sofia wasted no time joining the family business, even though she took on the acting challenge of portraying a baby boy. Her birth inspired Coppola to unify the killings around the baptism ceremony, something that seemed even more appropriate once he reminded himself of the specific baptism text. "Do you renounce Satan?" Still, Coppola said that the ingredient that makes the sequence truly work came courtesy of co-editor Peter Zinner who added the organ tract. Play the clip and try to imagine the sequence without that organ. I think Coppola has that exactly right.
Now, one final time I'm going to plug the Vanity Fair article from 2009 by Mark Seal called "The Godfather Wars". It's online and free and I was tempted to use a lot of material from it, but I had to cut somewhere so I didn't get into the really juicy stuff involving the real Frank Sinatra, the real mobsters and the interaction between the Mafia and the studios. Hell, I didn't even go into the story of who the real Johnny Fontane might have been. It's all in there, so it's worth reading. However, I'm not done. The Godfather was a trilogy after all, so I have one more post coming, which mostly will just me talking about what I think about the film itself with a little bit of other gangster-related entertainment thrown it. I give you my word: I'll do my damnedest to make certain that my third part turns out better than Coppola's did. I end with one last bit from Seal's piece, relating to something from the novel and what Mario Puzo said once.
"One of the most quoted lines from Puzo’s novel never made it to the screen: 'A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.' Before his death, in 1999, Puzo said in a symposium, 'I think the movie business is far more crooked than Vegas, and, I was going to say, than the Mafia.'”
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Labels: 70s, Altman, Brando, Caan, Coppola, Diane Keaton, Fitzgerald, George C. Scott, Hayden, Kael, Lancaster, Lucas, M. Sheen, Nicholson, Olivier, Pacino, Redford, Sinatra, Towne, W. Beatty
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Saturday, March 24, 2012
America's first family
KATIE COURIC: What is your favorite movie?
SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Oh, I think it would have to be The Godfather. One and two. Three not so much. So — so — but that — that saga I love that movie.…It's all about family. So it's a great movie.
From CBS News interview during 2008 campaign
"I always felt it was a film about a family made by a family." — Francis Ford Coppola
"When we were editing…, The French Connection came out and I went to see it. It was this great, dynamic, exciting filmmaking…and I remember thinking, 'Compared to that, The Godfather is going to be this dark, boring, long movie with a lot of guys sitting around in chairs talking." — Francis Ford Coppola on the DVD commentary for The Godfather
By Edward Copeland
I swear I remember seeing The Godfather in the theater in its original run. Never mind that I didn't turn 3 until a little more than three weeks after its debut. (My parents cast no light on the veracity of my claim. My dad thinks I'm right because he says, "We took him to everything" but my mom doubts the story, given my age and the film's content.) Who's to say when The Godfather actually surfaced in our city anyway? They didn't hit thousands of screens simultaneously as they do now — movies had different release patterns then, more staggered. Honestly, I can't say I remember specifics from that early viewing, but I do recall other things. We bought and played The Godfather board game, which can be described best as sort of a Mafia-theme hybrid of Risk and Monopoly where players try to take over eight Manhattan neighborhoods — Upper West Side, Harlem, Park West, The Docks, The Bowery, Midtown, Wall Street and
Lower East Side — by controlling them with one of these rackets: Bookmaking, Extortion, Bootlegging, Loan Sharking or Hijacking. Like houses and hotels in Monopoly, each of the racket pieces came at a different price with Bookmaking being the most expensive, Hijacking the least. Building your rackets also cost more in some neighborhoods than others. I played this game before I started kindergarten, but we didn't play much because even adults found it complicated. (Read the rules in detail here.) I just wish I knew if we still had the game
somewhere. I do remember we owned the boring, rectangular box edition, not the edition that came in a case shaped like a violin. The first time I remember scenes from The Godfather relate to NBC's 1977 airing of the film, complete with its disclaimers assuring viewers of Italian descent that the Corleones in no way represented all Italian Americans, not that Italians were mentioned by name (something prompted by the protests launched by the Italian-American Civil Rights League, an organization founded and funded by real-life mob boss Joe Colombo Sr.). I’m not certain when I viewed the film uncut for the first time and had aged to the point where I could appreciate it. I know I read Mario Puzo's novel around seventh or eighth grade and realized, as I had when I read Peter Benchley's Jaws in sixth grade, that sometimes the trashiest, most awful novels translate into the best movies. When The Godfather turned 25 in 1997, fortuitous timing placed me in New York for a theater trip at the same time the movie played at a midtown cinema. Hearing the first few notes of that theme — heaven. You could say that The Godfather, which opened to the public 40 years ago today after previous premieres in New York and L.A., has occupied a more constant presence in my life for most of my years than my real godfather. What I find harder to fathom: That Paramount Pictures originally intended this film to be a quickie with a budget of around $2½ million and the studio only hired that 31-year-old director who never had helmed a hit because the suits figured Francis Ford Coppola would be easy to push around. The worst-laid plans of mice and studio executives… 
For the 40 years since its release, the imbedding of The Godfather in our culture borders on the astounding. In college, when I foolishly reviewed any damned thing for which I had a free pass, I endured 1989's awful Troop Beverly Hills with Shelley Long (when was the last time you heard a reference to that film?) Edd "Kookie" Byrnes (we're going to put your pop culture knowledge to the test today) played the father of one of Long's young girl scouts, a struggling actor. As Shelley solves all her troop's problems by the end, Edd gets a job of some sort and the big payoff joke turns out to be when he turns around with cotton in his cheeks doing a bad impression of Marlon Brando's Vito Corleone. I even noted in my college paper how timely a joke that was, 17 years after the film's release. Of course, the following year, Brando showed him how you really spoof Vito Corleone when he did it brilliantly himself in
Andrew Bergman's terrific comedy The Freshman. Now, those two films and the board game and recent video games hardly represent the only, best or worst influences the 1972 film had on our culture (Actually, The Freshman, might be among the best). I'm saving The Sopranos and Goodfellas for a different section later, but it should be noted that long before Tony started seeing Dr. Melfi (or De Niro sat down with Billy Crystal in Analyze This the same month), Saturday Night Live produced a sketch on Jan. 10, 1976, where John Belushi played Vito Corleone attended group therapy to discuss his feelings about the Tattaglia family. Guest host Elliott Gould assumed the role of the therapist. Hell, variations on "make him an offer he can't refuse" by itself
have been heard, said and repeated so often that it's taken a place among all those familiar phrases that you wonder where they originated only to learn that Shakespeare penned them. Offhand though, I can't think of any other film that cuts across generations and classes and races with its impact. Many popular films have come and gone in the four decades since The Godfather premiered, but when you start listing the titles where references to them can be recognized by nearly anyone, even those born well after they came out, maybe Star Wars comes to mind as another film like that (the original trilogy anyway — can anyone quote something from the prequels?) Glancing at the practically meaningless Top 10 grossing films at the domestic box office right now, few injected themselves as deeply into daily lives as The Godfather with the exception of Star Wars and maybe E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial, though I don't hear the references to it as I once did. (For the record: 1. Avatar, 2. Titanic, 3. The Dark Knight, 4. The Phantom Menace, 5. Star Wars, 6. Shrek 2, 7. E.T., 8. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (bonus points to anyone who knows which one that is), 9. The Lion King, 10. Toy Story 3.) Can anyone recall anything about the No. 1 grossing film except the colors blue and green? Even today, The Godfather, using mostly 1972 dollars, comes in at No. 279 with its gross of $134,966,411 (wedged between, Lord help the Corleones, Patch Adams and the 2006 Incredible Hulk). Of course, when you adjust ticket prices for inflation, The Godfather would rank No. 23 and its haul would total $617,963,700. As has been the case for a long time, the leader of the adjusted box office remains Gone With the Wind with a take of $1,582,009,400.COURIC: Do you have a favorite scene?
OBAMA: Love — love those movies. I — you know — so many of them. I think my favorite has to be — you know, the opening scene of the first Godfather where, you know, the opening scene of the first Godfather where the caretaker comes in and, you know, Marlon Brando is sitting there and he's saying "you disrespected me. You know and now you want a favor." You know it sets the tone for the whole movie.…I mean there's this combination of old world gentility and you know, ritual with this savagery underneath.
Many movies start impressively. Even more come up with "wow endings" — the kind a drunk Rick Blaine lashes out at Ilsa about in Casablanca. Both Casablanca and The Godfather deliver those sort of conclusions and Casablanca tosses in one of the most memorable
closing lines in film history. You could name lots of films that ended with terrific last lines. "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."; "The stuff that dreams are made of."; "Mother of Mercy! Is this the end of Rico?"; "Oh, no! It wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast."; "I'll go home, and I'll think of some way to get him back! After all, tomorrow is another day!"; "All right, Mr. De Mille, I'm ready for my close-up."; "Well, nobody’s perfect."; "Shut up and deal."; "I'm not even gonna swat that fly. I hope they are watching. They'll see. They'll see and they'll know and they'll say, 'Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly.’"; "Never you mind, honey, never you mind."; "What do we do now?" What I do is stop because I think you got my point several last lines ago. My destination for this section on The Godfather isn't that the movie contains a brilliant closing bit of dialogue because that happens to be one of the few things it doesn't possess. Then again, it doesn't need one because instead we get the pleasure of viewing one of the best closing images of all time. Back to the above clip, the scene President Obama cited as his favorite. While I consulted some lists to see if I suffered from cinematic amnesia, I couldn't think of a lot of movies that open with great lines. Shockingly, most of these lists I found didn't remember The Godfather but included movies as recent as Black Swan and Million Dollar Baby, where I barely recall details from the films let alone opening lines and others included what really weren't opening lines, the memorable bit coming after some other chatter. (I love Goodfellas to death. I love Goodfellas more than The Godfather, but enry, Tommy and Jimmy say other things in the
car before Henry in voice-over speaks those great words, "All my life, I always wanted to be a gangster.") Others cited Annie Hall with Alvy's great joke about the lousy food "and such small portions" but to me, that's opening joke, not a line. Great opening to a film, but not exactly line. (Brief aside, isn't it odd to think that in the early 1970s, while making The Godfather, Diane Keaton started dating Al Pacino, but they broke up eventually and she went from him to Woody Allen?) As always, there's "Rosebud" in Citizen Kane, but don't you think Orson Welles would feel sort of insulted if anyone really stay tuned to his film based on Charles Foster's last word? If you haven't played that YouTube clip above yet or if you have, play it again. You could play it for her — you can play it for me! Pardon me. What? You didn't know Rick Blaine was an inhabiting spirit? Don't worry — he hails from the White Lodge. You back? Good. Four simple words, said in darkness. "I believe in America." What a pithy, magnificent way to begin this small-scale epic and emphasize its overarching themes at the same time, As the image comes in to view and the viewer meets the undertaker Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto) and listens to him to tell Don Vito Corleone about the attack on his daughter, we slowly start to see parts of Brando, first his hand. In the DVD commentary track that Francis Ford Coppola recorded, Coppola explains how that beginning came to be. Originally, he'd planned to just dive in to that 25-minute wedding sequence so he could introduce all the characters. (Another aside: Why does it seem that directors who had their breakthroughs in the 1970s do the best commentaries? Coppola, Scorsese, the much-missed Altman. A better question: Why the hell don't Woody or Spielberg do them?) After Coppola had written a few pages of the screenplay, he showed it to a friend. At
the 1970 Oscars, Coppola won the adapted screenplay prize for co-writing Patton, which had that very memorable opening in front of that American flag (YouTube only has the audio) so the friend suggested Coppola should come up with an unusual opening along those lines. Coppola thought about it and went back to Puzo's novel, recalling that what struck him about the wedding opening had been the idea of the Sicilian tradition that the don had a duty to grant people's requests on his daughter's wedding day. OF the stories in the book that stood out to him the most was that of Bonasera, the undertaker, so that's how "I believe in America" the words were born. Coppola also tells how, for 1971, the way they pulled off the opening camera move was considered "high-tech." Slow pullbacks as utilized there just weren't done. They had to program a computerized zoom lens for the exact length of time Bonasera's monologue would last in order for the shot to work. Pretty damn amazing. The bigger issue working its way through the scene contrasts the lives two Italian immigrants made for themselves in American, already, in a way, setting up for The Godfather Part II, though that thought hadn't crossed
Coppola's mind since throughout the commentary he discusses his constant fear of being fired. The undertaker made an honest living, raised a family and went to the police for justice, as he thought good Americans should do. Instead, he gets slapped in the face when the boys who attacked his daughter, disfiguring her in some way, while found guilty and sentenced to three years receive a suspended sentence and walk out of the courtroom back on the streets. We don't know the story of young Vito Andolini yet — and we won't in this film. However, basically arriving alone, he soon learned to help himself and that's what he did — through illegal enterprises rising
to a power base of fear and respect. The American dream worked out very differently for him. His oldest son Santino, or Sonny (James Caan), can't keep a lid on his temper and by all rights should be Vito's successor. The next son, Fredo, sickly as a child, weak and rootless, the family doesn't know where he belongs. (Played by the gone-too-soon John Cazale, an actor who must hold the distinction of only making five feature films and having all five nominated for the Oscar for best picture with three winning. He died of cancer at 42 and was engaged to Meryl Streep at the time.) The youngest son, Michael (Pacino), just returned from fighting in World War II and also got higher education. He's been kept removed from the family business, because his father never wanted this life for him. Things change. Finally, they have baby sister Connie (Talia Shire,
Coppola's real-life sister and Jason Schwartzman's real-life mom) whose wedding all the opening ceremony concerns as she weds Carlo Rizzi (Gianni Russo), who Vito warns everyone to keep out of family business. Last but not least, the Corleones embrace Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) as an adopted son, now the family lawyer and consigliere. Michael courts Kay Adams (Keaton), a teacher whom he shocks with tales from his family such as when she asks about one man sitting and talking to himself. That's Luca Brasi, he tells her. Lenny Montana, a professional wrestler, played Brasi and that scene where he rehearses his speech to the don came out of necessity because Montana couldn't get through his scene with the legendary Brando because of his nerves. Coppola quickly added the practice scene to go before the scene between Vito and Luca, something Brando didn't help by taping a card to his forehead that read, "Fuck You." Montana kept trying to get that line out though. "Don Corleone, I am honored and grateful that you have invited me to your daughter…'s wedding…on the day of your daughter's wedding. And I hope
their first child be a masculine child. I pledge my ever-ending loyalty." Shew. The story that Michael shares with Kay about Luca and his father and the pop-singing sensation Johnny Fontane (Al Martino) who arrives at the wedding to sing, surprising even Kay, sets her back a bit. MICHAEL: Well, when Johnny was first starting out, he was signed to a personal services contract with this big-band leader. And as his career got better and better, he wanted to get out of it. But the bandleader wouldn't let him. Now, Johnny is my father's godson. So my father went to see this bandleader and offered him $10,000 to let Johnny go, but the bandleader said no. So the next day, my father went back, only this time with Luca Brasi. Within an hour, he had a signed release for a certified check of $1000.
KAY: How did he do that?
MICHAEL: My father made him an offer he couldn't refuse.
KAY: What was that?
MICHAEL: Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract. That's a true story. That's my family Kay, that's not me.
Kay eventually shows more strength than Karen Hill did in her life with Henry Hill in Goodfellas. Bobby Vinton sent champagne to their table at the Copacabana and impressed her. Of course, the Hills were real. The arc of The Godfather (What — you haven't seen it? Why the hell are you reading this? All these cats have been out of the bag for a long time.) As far as America goes, I've always loved this scene late in the film when Michael suddenly reappears to Kay after hiding in Italy for a few years AND having been back in the U.S. for a year or so. The movie does lack a proper sense of keeping straight how many years have passed. We know it's the 1940s because the war has ended and can narrow it to 1945 when Michael and Kay leave Radio City Music Hall after seeing The Bells of St, Mary's, a second unit shot filmed by George Lucas who worked on the film and owned part of Coppola's nearly bankrupt production company/fledgling dream studio American Zoetrope. As they walk and talk, Michael professes his love and informs her that he's working for his father now, which upsets her. She reminds him that he told her he wasn't part of that world and then Michael tries to make the case.
MICHAEL: My father's no different than any other powerful man. Any other man who is responsible for other people. Like a senator or a president.
KAY: Do you know how naive you sound?
MICHAEL: Why?
KAY: Senators and presidents don't have men killed.
MICHAEL: Oh. Who's being naive, Kay?
I love that. "Who's being naive, Kay?" Then he makes the promise that makes all the wackiness with year counting seem odd: He swears the Corleone family will be completely legitimate in five years. He even adds that his father knows that old ways don't work anymore. Here lies the million-dollar question: Do you think Michael believes that or is he just feeding her a line?
I have to say about Coppola, assuming he's being forthright in his commentary and that his job hung by a thread during most of the filming of The Godfather, that 31-year-old man held major cajones swinging between his legs. He had made no films of note, as far as Paramount could see (he believes his 1969 feature The Rain People that starred Caan, Shirley Knight and Duvall and featured future
Carmela Soprano dad Tom Aldredge got him the job), yet he began the movie with a 25-minute-long wedding sequence — a sequence that didn't get shot until about midway through the production schedule. The studio, production headed then by the infamous Robert Evans, made life even more difficult for the complicated shoot by telling Coppola that the entire wedding had to be done in 2½ days, so the direct felt as if everything was rushed. The problem, you see, The Godfather wasn't your ordinary trashy hit novel. In fact, when Paramount acquired it, the book wasn't even a best seller. Of course, that's because the studio didn't acquire it exactly — they commissioned it. Paramount paid Mario Puzo to write this novel and worked in conjunction with him all the way down the line. That's why they were looking to make a quick, cheap feature to hit theaters just as the novel had been arriving. Unfortunately for Paramount, The Godfather turned out to be its literary equivalent of Springtime for Hitler and the studio suddenly got renamed Bialystock and Bloom. The studio couldn't go the cheap route and had tied this blazing bonanza to someone who they no longer found suitable. Unfortunately for them, all the big-name directors they approached turned them down, because they didn't want to be seen as glorifying the Mafia. The budget jumped, but only slightly. From $2.5 million to around $6.5 million dollars. (Here's a fun statistic: Convert those 1971 dollars to 2011 dollars and The Godfather would have had a budget of $36,101,320.99. Adam Sandler's Jack and Jill had a production budget of $79 million. I tried to see what that equaled in 1971 dollars, but Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator doesn't accept figures greater than $10 million. The total domestic gross, as has been the case with most recent Sandler comedies, came in under the budget at $74,158,157. Who keeps funding these comedies for these insane figures?) Oh, but the casting wars. Writing about the behind-the-scenes turmoil involved with this film almost becomes more interesting than just talking about what's on the screen. That's why this is the first of several posts I'll be parceling out over the next couple of days. They don't need to be read in order, so we won't have to worry about that. Before I wrap this one, which tended to focus on the wedding, I felt I did need to mention that cat. Coppola just found it wandering around the set and threw it into Brando's lap at the last minute on a whim. Of course, Brando loved it and loved playing with it. He hadn't gone way off course to cuckoo town to wear he might have tried to wear it as a hat. Later today (I hope), the fight at the beginning between Coppola and Paramount. Tweet
Labels: 70s, Altman, Brando, Caan, Coppola, De Niro, Diane Keaton, Duvall, Fiction, Lucas, Movie Tributes, Pacino, Scorsese, Shakespeare, Spielberg, Star Wars, Streep, The Sopranos, Welles, Woody
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Sunday, November 27, 2011
Coppola's Vietnam
"My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was really like. It was crazy. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane." — Francis Ford Coppola
By Damian Arlyn
Apocalypse Now is one of my all-time favorite movies. In adapting Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness for the big screen, but setting it in Cambodia during the Vietnam War, director Francis Ford Coppola created one of the most ambitious, absorbing and awe-inspiring examples of what I refer to as "immersive" (and sometimes "meditative") cinema I've ever seen. Some call it the greatest war film ever made but I think, like all masterpieces, it transcends the genre in which it resides and becomes something wholly other: something deeper, more profound. It is about a man surrounded by madness, trying to hold onto his sanity as he goes to kill another man who has lost his. The protagonist's journey into the depths of the jungle actually is a journey into the darker regions of his own soul. Coppola's film was a landmark in motion picture history (winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes and receiving multiple Oscar and Golden Globe nominations) and his achievement is all the more impressive when one learns of what really was involved to make it. Although newspapers reported many of the difficulties encountered in shooting Apocalypse Now in the latter half of the '70s, it wasn't until 1991, when the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, was released, that the full story behind Coppola's Vietnam film became known. I actually watched the doc before I ever saw Apocalypse Now and it gave me an appreciation for the film that I doubt I would have had otherwise. To this day no other documentary (besides perhaps Burden of Dreams) more compellingly chronicles the aspirations, obsessions, insecurities and ultimate triumph of a young filmmaker tackling his biggest and most challenging project.
Hearts of Darkness was directed by George Hickenlooper (who died late last year) and Fax Bahr, but the majority of its footage was shot by Coppola's wife Eleanor during the filming of Apocalypse Now. As the director's wife, Eleanor had access to the troubled filmmaker that few other documentarians would. In addition to recording candid interviews with her husband as well as on-set interactions between him and his crew and actors, Eleanor recorded talks that they had alone in which Coppola revealed his fears about the project as well as his own career. After Eleanor turned her footage over to Bahr and Hickenlooper, they shot new interviews with Coppola, Martin Sheen, Laurence Fishburne, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, writer John Milius and even George Lucas. They then enlisted Eleanor to provide the film's narration (except for some passages from Conrad's novella Orson Welles read on an old radio broadcast) and premiered it at Cannes to great critical acclaim. In the U.S., it premiered on Showtime before being released theatrically 20 years ago today.
The film depicts Apocalypse Now's tumultuous shoot in a very honest and forthright manner. It didn't escape Coppola's notice, as he said in the now famous quote shown above this post, how much the story being filmed mirrored his own experience trying to tell it. Originally, Harvey Keitel was cast in the lead role of Capt. Ben Willard, but after seeing the dailies, Coppola was dissatisfied and replaced him with Martin Sheen. During the shooting of the now iconic "Ride of the Valkyries" helicopter scene, several copters suddenly were pulled away by the Philippines government to battle rebels. At one point, Martin Sheen had a heart attack and needed to be flown out of the country in order to have surgery. Marlon Brando, who was being paid the astronomical sum of a million dollars a week, showed up severely overweight and not having read the Conrad novella as Coppola had requested. Dennis Hopper's brain was so fried from drugs that he couldn't remember his lines. Eventually, Coppola was forced to abandon the script and make up a lot of it (including the ending) as he went along. What initially was slated as a five-month shoot lasted more than two years and the budget ballooned from $14 million to more than $30 million. In some very revealing audio tracks, Coppola confesses to his wife that he's certain the film is awful, will fail, that he'll become a laughingstock, etc. It is somewhat ironic that Coppola was correct that his career has fallen way short of its early promise while his contemporaries (Spielberg, Lucas and Scorsese) have, for the most part, continued to create films that are financially and/or critical successes. It did not, however, have anything to do with Apocalypse Now which, in spite of the incredible trials and tribulations faced during its production, was (and still is) considered one of his great accomplishments.
In an era where "making-of" documentaries are common features on DVDs (the best ones usually made by Laurent Bouzerau), it's difficult to appreciate what a rare glimpse behind the curtain Hearts of Darkness provided. Even today, most "behind-the-scenes" specials are puff pieces where the actors all are "thrilled" to be on the project, the director "couldn't be happier" with the work being done and the producer "loves everyone involved." Occasionally you get one like the Dangerous Days doc on the Blade Runner DVD/Blu-ray that has the courage to admit that the director wasn't easy to work with, that the studio was making things much harder than it had to be and the overall shoot was a bitch. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse put all of that out there. Although the film's place in cinematic history is secure, one almost wouldn't be surprised to see Coppola characterizing his experience working on the film by uttering the immortal last words of Kurtz as he lay dying, in both Coppola's film and Conrad's novella:
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Labels: 90s, Awards, Brando, Coppola, Documentary, Duvall, Fiction, Fishburne, Hopper, Keitel, Lucas, M. Sheen, Movie Tributes, Scorsese, Spielberg, Welles
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Saturday, October 22, 2011
"A person can't sneeze in this town without someone offering them a handkerchief"
How come you treat me like a worn-out shoe?
My hair's still curly and my eyes are still blue
Why don't you love me like you used to do?
•••
Well, why don't you be just like you used to be?
How come you find so many faults with me?
Somebody's changed so let me give you a clue
Why don't you love me like you used to do?
By Edward Copeland
Even if Hank Williams Sr. weren't well represented with songs that play throughout Peter Bogdanovich's film adaptation of Larry McMurtry's novel The Last Picture Show, somehow I think the movie would play as if it were a cinematic evocation of the music legend. Despite the fact that today marks the 40th anniversary of the film's release and The Last Picture Show took as its setting a small, depressed Texas town in 1951 and 1952 (even going so far as to have cinematographer Robert Surtees shoot it in glorious black & white), it contains a universality that resonates today both in human and economic terms. Williams' hit "Why Don't You Love Me (Like You Used to Do)?" that I quote partially above are the first words we hear, before any character speaks a line. In the movie's context, the lyrics could be describing the first person we see — high school senior Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms). With the way the U.S. has been going of late, I know very few people who don't feel like a "worn-out shoe" and wish fondly for past, better days and these feelings stretch from one end of the ideological spectrum to the other. Fortunately, The Last Picture Show itself hasn't changed. Age has served the film well, helped in no small part by its amazing cast.
McMurtry, who based the town in the novel on his own small north Texas hometown of Archer City, co-wrote the screenplay with Bogdanovich, the former film critic who was directing his second credited feature film after the fun and tawdry thriller Targets that gave Boris Karloff a great, late career role. (Under the name Derek Thomas, he had filmed a sci-fi feature called Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women in 1968 starring Mamie Van Doren.) In the novel, McMurtry renamed the town Thalia, but the film gave it another moniker — Anarene.
The movie opens on Anarene's main stretch of road and passes the Royal movie theater. The wind howls ferociously, blowing dust, leaves, trash and anything that isn't tied down through the air and down the street. The flying debris leads us to Sonny and that Hank Williams song, which comes from the radio of his old pickup that he's having a helluva time getting started. Actually, the pickup only half belongs to
Sonny — he shares it with his best friend Duane Moore (Jeff Bridges), who always seems to get it first on date nights so he can neck with his girlfriend, Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd in her film debut), widely considered the best-looking teen in town. Once Sonny gets that old pickup running, he spots young Billy (the late Sam Bottoms, Timothy's real-life younger brother) standing in the middle of the street with his broom, trying to sweep up the dust. Sonny honks at him and Billy smiles and climbs in the pickup with him. As he usually does, Sonny affectionately turns the mentally challenged boy's cap around backward and the two head to the pool hall owned by Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson). Sonny pays for what looks like a sticky bun and a bottle of pop, prompting Sam to shake his head. "You ain't ever gonna amount to nothing. Already spent a dime this morning, ain't even had a decent breakfast," Sam tells Sonny, but not in a mean-spirited way. "Why don't you comb you hair, Sonny? It sticks up…I'm surprised you had the nerve to show up this morning after that stomping y'all took last night." Sam's referring to Anarene High School's final football game of the year, where the team took a real beating. "It could've been worse," Sonny replies. "You could say that just about everything," Sam says. "It could've been worse" applies to most of the situations in The Last Picture Show, which can be described accurately by the overused phrase "slice of life." Plot doesn't drive the story — character, not only of the people but of the town itself, does. While you watch the movie, you aren't concerned with what happens next or how the film ends because you realize that life will go on for most of these fictional folks you've come to know even after the lights come up in the theater and the projector shuts off. Wherever the movie finishes will resemble a chapter stop more than a finale. (As if to prove the point, McMurtry returned to Thalia in four more novels, though Duane becomes the main character in the followups as opposed to Sonny, who decidedly takes the lead here. Bogdanovich even filmed the first sequel, Texasville, in 1990 with mixed results.)
Sam's reference to the previous night's football debacle displays an excellent example of what captivates the citizens in a so-called "one-stoplight" town such as Amarene, as the team's players (mainly Sonny and Duane, since they are the teammates we know best) get repeatedly berated by their elders the day after the loss. A common refrain becomes variations of the question, "Have you ever heard of tackling?" That even continues when Abilene (Clu Gulager), one of the many oil-field workers who live in Amarene, when he comes straight from work to Sam's pool hall, changes clothes and takes billiards so seriously that he has his own cue stick that he keeps in a case and assembles. While he's there, he collects on a bet he had with Sam on the game. Abilene isn't faithful in most areas of his life and that's telegraphed right away when we see that he'd bet against the hometown high school football team. "You see? This is what I get for bettin' on my own hometown ballteam. I ought'a have better sense," Sam says as he forks over the cash. "Wouldn't hurt to have a better hometown," the emotionless Abilene declares. Soon enough, football will fade from the town's collective memory as they move into basketball season. While sports may be important in holding this dying town
together, we never see an actual game of any kind. The closest we come is one instance of basketball practice in the school gym. That's because high school sporting events aren't what The Last Picture Show wants to show us. It's telling a coming-of-age story — several in fact — and not all concern the teen characters in the tale. It's also about love and loss, not always in the present tense. Of course, at its core, The Last Picture Show also deals with community and by community, I mean gossip. In this small a town, very few secrets can be kept, yet at the same time its citizens seem fairly discreet about what they know and staying out of other people's business. I've never read the novel, but I can see how easily it would work in book form. There's a story that Bogdanovich, who was then married to multi-hyphenate Polly Platt, who died earlier this year, read the jacket cover of the book and didn't see a way it could work as a film until Platt outlined it for him in chronological form. She must have done a brilliant job since she not only changed Bogdanovich's mind but led him to the road where he ended up directing and co-writing one of the best films of all time. the balancing act needed to transfer The Last Picture Show to the screen would have been very tricky for anyone to pull off, but I think the reason it worked boiled down to two key elements: its look and its cast.Platt, in addition to being the person who gave Bogdanovich the vision to turn McMurtry's novel into a feature film also served as the film's production designer and its uncredited costume designer, seamlessly taking the actors and Archer City, Texas, back in time nearly 20 years. Her work was helped in no small part by the legendary director of photography Robert Surtees' exquisite black & white images, which earned one of The Last Picture Show's eight Oscar nominations. Surtees received a total of 15 Oscar nominations for
cinematography in his career and won three: for King Solomon's Mines, The Bad and the Beautiful and Ben-Hur. He actually lost twice in 1971 — he was nominated for Summer of '42 as well as The Last Picture Show. He earned four consecutive nominations from 1975-78, when he made his last film before he retired. Other nominations included The Sting, The Graduate and Oklahoma! He showed a strong gift for using both color and black & white and his stark look in The Last Picture Show perfectly captured the time and place of the setting without letting any nostalgia sneak into the proceedings, which it really shouldn't. No one is looking back at the events from the future, so that element shouldn't be there. In a way, it's interesting to compare it to George Lucas' American Graffiti two years later. Both films look at high school seniors and eschew musical scores in favor of soundtracks full of the pop hits of the era. The difference is that Graffiti, while good, revels in a "good old days" spirit with barely a mention of sexual curiosity let alone activity while The Last Picture Show depicts an entirely different economic class that's having very few good times, but certainly getting drunk and laid. Of course, adults didn't exist in Graffiti whereas their roles prove integral in The Last Picture Show. Admittedly, I haven't seen American Graffiti in some time — Lucas hasn't re-edited it to make the drag race CGI and digitally replaced all the cars out cruising with hybrids, has he?
Despite the film's ensemble nature, Sonny truly serves as the center of this movie's universe. Timothy Bottoms wears such deep, soulful eyes that it made him a natural to play a role that required deadpan humor as well heartbreaking drama. While the other younger cast members mostly continue to flourish in the industry if we can still count Randy Quaid, who made his film debut as Lester Marlow, a rich kid from Wichita Falls who lures Shepherd's Jacy to a nude swimming party, but has now transformed himself from a talented character actor into a fugitive from justice on the run with his wife and being pursued by Dog the Bounty Hunter), Bottoms' star never seemed to take off after such a promising start. The Last Picture Show was his second feature following Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun and in 1973 he starred in The Paper Chase, but it has been mostly TV. low budget movies and downhill since then. (I suppose his most recent highlight was playing the title character in Trey Parker and Matt Stone's short-lived Comedy Central sitcom That's My Bush!) It's a shame because he's the key to so much of The Last Picture Show. Of those eight Oscar nominations that I mentioned it received, four went to acting and two won. All were much deserved, but Bottoms deserved a slot as well. I didn't add it up, but I imagine he appears in a great majority of the movie's scenes and a case could have easily been made for pushing him for lead — not that he stood a chance to win against Gene Hackman in The French Connection, but I would have nominated him before Walter Matthau in Kotch, George C. Scott in The Hospital or Topol in Fiddler on the Roof. However, I don't know if I could have evicted Peter Finch in Sunday Bloody Sunday for him.
Bottoms' Sonny though really serves as the line upon which so much of the movie's clothing hangs to dry. He's the first character we meet, introducing us to Billy, whose origin never gets explained, and more importantly Johnson's Oscar-winning Sam the Lion, who not only owns the pool hall but the diner and the Royal movie theater as well. Sonny takes us to the Royal for the first time, arriving late because of his delivery job. Miss Mosey (Jessie Lee Fulton), the kindly manager of the place who never has popcorn since she long ago forgot how the machine worked, tells Sonny that he already missed the newsreel and the comedy and the feature has started, so she only charges him 30 cents for admission. Imagine being able to see a movie for that cheap — and I imagine it wasn't that much more to get two movies and a newsreel, Now, the prices go up and up and up while, in general, the quality goes down further and
further. Once inside, he hooks up with his girlfriend Charlene Duggs (Sharon Taggart), who gets annoyed that he doesn't realize what an important day it is. It seems it's their one-year anniversary of going steady. With that perfect deadpan aplomb I mentioned earlier, Bottoms as Sonny simply says, "Seems longer." The main feature playing that night is Father of the Bride starring Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor. Though Sonny and Charlene have relocated to the back row so they can make out, it's clear that Sonny finds the giant image of Liz Taylor more alluring than the girl who is kissing him, While we met Duane earlier when he got off work from the oil field and went to the diner with Sonny, he and Jacy show up and take the seats in front of them and it's clear that Duane finds it very satisfying to be kissing Jacy because they don't seem to be watching the movie at all. When the movie is over and all the kids exit, they tell Miss Mosey they enjoyed it, but I bet they wouldn't want to take a quiz on it. However, that wind still howls giving the older woman trouble putting up the poster for the next attraction so Sam gives her a hand teasing the return of Sands of Iwo Jima starring John Wayne. The town can boast having a movie theater, but it certainly isn't first run. After the show, Duane lets Sonny have the pickup, so he drives Charlene out by the lake and they begin to make out. You can tell this is a choreographed routine for the teens because Charlene immediately unhooks her bra and hangs it from the rearview mirror, which is followed immediately by Sonny's hands going to her bare breasts as if they were magnets and her chest was built out of metal. Charlene complains that something's wrong
with Sonny — that he's acting as if he's bored or would rather be somewhere else. However, when Sonny does venture to place his hand somewhere else, Charlene goes nuts. "You cheapskate — you didn't even get me an anniversary present. Now, you want to get me pregnant," she barks as she starts to put her top back on. Sonny argues that it was only his hand, but she says she knows how one thing leads to another and she's waiting until she gets married. Sonny, a hangdog expression on his face, tells her that they should break up then. This shocks Charlene, but she gets mad, not upset. "Now don't go tellin' all the boys how hot I was," she warns him. "You wasn't that hot," Sonny sighs sadly in a monotone. He can't decide if he's depressed or relieved to be rid of Charlene when he shows up at the diner and tells the ever faithful manager/waitress Genevieve (the great Eileen Brennan) about it. "Jacy's the only pretty girl in town and Duane's got her," Sonny tells her. "Jacy will bring you more misery than she'll ever be worth," Genevieve declares. What a font of wisdom her character will turn out to be. Sonny remembers hearing the news that Genevieve's husband Dan finally is able to return to work, so he figures that means she won't be working much longer. In another moment from a 1971 film set in 1951 that could be taking place in 2011, she responds, "We've got four thousand dollars in doctor bills to pay. I'll probably be making cheeseburgers for your grandkids." If the bills are that high in 1951, calculate them now.
You will have to forgive me for saying so much — I have an unfortunate tendency to ramble about films I love — but I also needed to get you to this point so we could talk about the most important part of film dealing with Sonny, something that begins with doing a simple favor for Coach Popper (Bill Thurman). The coach asks Sonny if he will drive his wife Ruth (Cloris Leachman in her Oscar-winning performance) to her doctor's appointment. In exchange, he'll get Sonny out of physics lab. Sonny will take any excuse to get out of that class so he agrees. Mrs. Popper is surprised when Sonny shows up at her door — her husband didn't tell her that he wasn't taking her. It's all quiet and above board on that trip. However, when Sonny sees her again at the town's sad Christmas dance, she asks him if he could help her take out the trash from the refreshment stand. He does and the two share their first kiss. Ruth asks the teen if he'd be able to drive
her to the clinic again next week. "You bet!" Sonny replies. Many movies and works of fiction have told stories of affairs between older married women and younger men of high school or college age, but none have done so with as much meaning or affection as The Last Picture Show does in its depiction of Sonny and Ruth, which tosses most of those clichés out. Ruth isn't some oversexed seductress — she's a lonely, needy woman of 40 trapped in a miserable marriage. The movie doesn't spell it out directly, but in the commentary on the DVD, Bogdanovich says that Coach Popper is supposed to be gay. To me what's so stunning about Leachman's performance is that I can't think of her in any other dramatic roles. She's a comic actress extraordinaire. but she's so frighteningly good as Ruth I wonder why we never saw her explore really juicy drama. When Ruth and Sonny make love for the first time, it's such a mixture of elements when you have the overanxious boy rushing to lose his virginity while the 40-year-old married woman cries because she feared she never know that feeling again. As their affair continues, she actually seems to grow younger. Sonny also finds himself surprised to learn how many people are aware of what's going on between the two of them.
As great as Leachman is, she didn't win that Oscar in a walk. Her toughest competition came from the same film. Ellen Burstyn scored her first Oscar nomination in the same category, supporting actress, for playing Lois Farrow, Jacy's mother. Burstyn always is brilliant, but she
manages to make us have sympathy for Lois at the same time we realize that her somewhat crazy ways have rubbed off on her daughter and turned her into the superficial cocktease that she is. Jacy claims she loves Duane, but her parents won't ever permit her to marry a boy like him without a future. The Farrows are one of the few well-off families in town, thanks to her husband striking oil. Not that it has saved the marriage any because Lois has been having an on again-off again affair with Abilene for quite some time. Jacy tries to convince her mother that she married her father when he wasn't rich. "I scared your daddy into getting rich, beautiful," Lois tells her daughter. Jacy insists that if Daddy could do it, so could Duane. "Not married to you. You're not scary enough," her mother replies. Later, when Lois informs Jacy about Sonny and Ruth's affair, Jacy's shocked, "She is 40 years old." Her mother quickly says, "So am I, honey. It's an itchy age." The big scenes for Burstyn (and Leachman) don't come until after other developments.The fourth performer to earn an acting nod from the film was the great Jeff Bridges as Duane. It was his very first. He's good, but Duane actually isn't that large a part despite the fact he becomes the central figure in the book sequels. Duane's love for Jacy goes beyond reason. When she ditches him at the dance to go to the nude swim party in Wichita Falls, he takes it. When she finally agrees to put out,
he can't perform (though Bridges' facial expression when she exposes her breasts to him is priceless). They try again and he comes out all smiles and she cuts him down, telling him, "Oh, quit prissing. I don't think you done it right, anyway." Finally, as she ducks him more often, he leaves town to take another job elsewhere, but gives Sonny explicit orders to watch if anyone starts seeing her. One night, Abilene stops by the Farrow house to tell her dad that a well came in, but he isn't home. He ends up taking Jacy to the pool hall and having sex with her on a pool table, her hands grabbing hold of the corner pockets. After awhile, when the boy she'd been dating from Wichita Falls runs off and gets married, she pursues Sonny, who is powerless to resist, no matter how it hurts Ruth. When Duane returns and finds out that Sonny and Jacy are dating, he breaks a beer bottle against his face, injuring his eye. "Jacy's just the kind of girl that brings out the meanness in men," Genevieve tells Sonny when she sees him with the patch on his eye. Soon after, he and Jacy drive to Oklahoma to elope, only Jacy left a long detailed note so the Oklahoma state troopers detain them until her parents arrive and get the marriage annulled. Sonny rides back with Lois who tells him he's lucky they saved him from her.
In a way, I have saved the best for last, except it isn't really the last. If Timothy Bottoms' Sonny provides the line from which all the characters and stories dangle, Ben Johnson's Sam the Lion provides the posts that anchors his line. The story goes that Johnson didn't want to take the part because he thought it was too wordy and Bogdanovich, who had just completed a documentary on John Ford asked Ford to talk him into it. Ford reportedly asked Johnson if he wanted to be the Duke's sidekick all his life and told him that if he played the part,
he'd win the Oscar for supporting actor and that's just what happened. There are so many moments in Johnson's performance that I'd love to pick, but so I don't go on forever, I'm concentrating on one, which also happens to be my favorite part of the film. Sam takes Sonny and Billy fishing at this reservoir on land he once owned and it opens him up about the past. He talks about this crazy girl he was involved with about 20 years ago after his wife had lost her mind and his sons had died and how they always came out there. She challenged him to ride horses across the water. He didn't think they'd make it, but somehow she did it. Sonny asks why he never married her, but Sam tells him she already was married — one of those young marriages people get into that makes them miserable. He figured some day it would end, but it never did. "If she was here I'd probably be just as crazy now as I was then in about five minutes. Ain't that ridiculous? Naw, it ain't really. 'Cause being crazy about a woman like her is always the right thing to do. Being an old decrepit bag of bones, that's what's ridiculous. Gettin' old," Sam declares. What makes the whole sequence and monologue even better is the way Bogdanovich films it. He starts out in a medium shot where you can see all three characters, but as the tale grows more romantic he slowly moves the camera in on Johnson's face. As he starts to tell how they never ended up together, the camera pulls back out again.
The Last Picture Show has so many great moments, big and small, that I want to talk about them all but I do have to mention one final Sam moment before wrapping up Lois and Ruth. Earlier in the film, before Duane beats him up (they reconcile anyway) Duane and Sonny drown separate sorrows in sundaes at the diner when Duane decides that he just wants to get out of town — that night — at least for the weekend. He suggests to
Sonny that they go to Mexico. The two friends check their cash reserves and decide they can do it and get up and leave. Genevieve asks where they are going. "Mexico," they tell her. "Mexico?" As they drive the pickup down the street, they notice Sam sitting on the curb outside the theater. They tell him of their plans. He gives them some money, telling them that Mexico has a way of swallowing your money. Wistfully, he even says that if he were younger, he might go with them. There's something odd in the town — as if he has something else to say, but he just tells them he'll see them around and gives them a wave. Somehow though, even when you're watching The Last Picture Show for the first time, you know that will be the last time in the movie you'll see Sam. When Sonny and Duane come back, they go to the pool room and find it locked. They find that odd. They ask a man what's going on. He remembers that they've been gone so they don't know. Sam died. "Keeled over one of the snooker tables. Had a stroke," the man says. He adds the Sam left the diner to Genevieve, the theater to Miss Mosey and the pool hall to Sonny.
Back to that ride home from Oklahoma between Lois and Sonny. Before they get in the car, Lois tells him that he should have stayed with Ruth Popper. "Does everyone know about that?" he asks annoyed. She says yes. "I guess I treated her badly," Sonny admits. "Guess you did," Lois concurs. As she drives, Sonny says, "Nothin's really been right since Sam the Lion died." No, they really haven't, Lois agrees. Sonny guesses that she must have liked him a lot, but Lois says no, she loved him. Sonny mentions the story Sam told him about the girl and she's surprised. "He told you that? You know, I'm the one who started calling him Sam the Lion," Lois confesses as Sonny realizes that she was the girl that Sam talked about. She apologizes for getting slightly teary. "It's terrible to meet only one man in your life who knows what you're worth," Lois admits. "I guess if it wasn't for Sam, I'd have missed it, whatever it is. I'd have been one of them amity types that thinks that playin' bridge is about the best thing that life has to offer."
When Sonny gets back to town, he learns Duane, who has enlisted in the Army, is in town for a short visit. He asks if he wants to go with him to the Royal. Miss Mosey has to close the picture show. Duane agrees. The final movie is Howard Hawks' Red River. "No one wants to come to shows no more. Kid baseball in the summer, television all the time," Miss Mosey tells them. Imagine now. Out-of-sight prices, out-of-control crowds, declining quality of product, more at-home convenience, everything digital so there is in essence no difference between theaters and home. The next day, Duane boards a bus to his base to ship off for Korea. "I'll see you in a year or two if I don't get shot," he tells Sonny.
As Sonny works the pool hall, the scene mirrors the opening with the howling wind and blowing dust, only this time he hears a commotion. He runs outside and sees that a truck hauling cattle struck and killed Billy who, as usual was sweeping the middle of the street. A bunch of gawkers try to console the driver, explaining that the kid was "simple" and continuously asking why he had that broom. Sonny snaps. "He was sweeping you sons of bitches, he was sweeping!" he yells as he picks Billy's broken body up and lays it on the sidewalk.
Eventually, he works up the nerve to knock on Ruth's door and asks if he can have a cup of coffee with her. She apologizes for still being in her bathrobe this late in the day. Then, as she's starting to pour coffee, it's her turn to explode and she throws the cup and the coffee pot against the wall.
"What am I doing apologizing to you? Why am I always apologizing to you, you little bastard? Three months I've spent apologizing to you without you even being here. I haven't done anything wrong. Why can't I quit apologizing? You're the one ought to be sorry. I wouldn't still be in my bathrobe. I would've had my clothes on hours ago. It's because of you I quit caring if I got dressed or not. I guess because your friend got killed you want me to forget what you did and make it alright. I'm not sorry for you. You'd have left Billy too just like you left me. I bet you left him plenty of nights, whenever Jacy whistled. I wouldn't treat a dog that way. I guess I was so old and ugly it didn't matter how you treated me — you didn't love me."
Ruth sits down at the kitchen table across from Sonny. "You shouldn't have come here. I'm around that corner now. You've ruined it and it's lost completely. Just your needing me won't make it come back," Ruth tells him. He reaches out and takes her hand. She takes it and puts it to her face. He never says a word. The two of them just sit holding hands across the table.
Lots of people can quote the last lines of movies, but when you think about it, there aren't as many famous final ones as you would think. The Last Picture Show belongs in that exclusive company.
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Labels: 70s, B. Johnson, Bogdanovich, Burstyn, Cybill Shepherd, George C. Scott, Hackman, Hawks, Jeff Bridges, John Ford, Karloff, Liz, Lucas, Matthau, Movie Tributes, Oscars, R. Quaid, Sequels, Tracy, Wayne
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