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Home , Apocalypse Now Redux, Filmways, One from the Heart, Tetro, The Conversation

Week 4 –

Introduction Bill: Hi again, welcome to week four of the course. Jon and I decided to be outdoorsy for this week’s lesson, and once you see Apocalypse Now, you might understand why. We’re on the Oregon State campus today, and we’re going to be talking about ’s 1979 , Apocalypse Now, and we’ll just jump right into the questions we have today.

Apocalypse Now and the Auteur Renaissance Bill: So Apocalypse Now is sort of seen as the film that ends the great 70’s auteurist experiment in the same way that , another Coppola film, is thought to have begun it. Can you speak about why Apocalypse Now is important to the auteur renaissance?

Jon: Yeah, we’re getting to the end of the 70’s and the studios are collectively getting impatient about dealing with these directors who have all this power and all this money at their disposal and making movies sort of their own way, and studios resent the fact that they don’t have the kind of control that they’d like to have over . And along comes Coppola, making Apocalypse Now, and he goes off to the Philippines and it seems like he’s spending an outrageous amount of money, things go wrong as you’ll all see when you see Hearts of Darkness, the documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now. But there’s this sort of collective fear in Hollywood that it isn’t that a director is going to make a small personal film that’s going to fail, but they’re going to make a big personal film that’s going to fail, and Apocalypse Now looks like it’s going to be that kind of movie. The irony is that it’s not. The film is a huge, hundred million dollar success, huge box office film. And, in a way, doesn’t cost any more than the James Bond film, Moonraker, released the same year, which is a terrible film. So, I mean, in a way what they were worried about was never really justified. But at the same time, it was sort of symbolic. That Apocalypse Now could have been terrible, so it really is the last time the studios are willing to invest this kind of money in a film, except for one other and that’s Heaven’s Gate, and Heaven’s Gate, which comes out two years later, is a film they invest in on the very day that they decide to pull back on their investment in Apocalypse Now. So they pull back on their investment on Apocalypse Now and let Coppola control the film after that in exchange for a loan that he couldn’t possibly repay. It’s one of the dumbest moments in Hollywood history. And they throw all this money at a western made by the recent academy award winning director Michael Cimino, a western that eventually becomes known as Heaven’s Gate, and that film is a total disaster and is exactly what they were afraid of – a big personal film. In a way, that’s the film that sort of breaks the back of auteurism, but it’s really Apocalypse Now that is the first film that suggests that this could go terribly wrong.

Bill: Right, right; there was only production concerns with Apocalypse Now, but there was probably the sense that one wrong move in any direction and the whole thing would have collapsed.

Jon: Yeah, you know, you’ve got an actor having a heart attack, which kind of screws things up; you have terrible weather, the monsoons hit way before anyone expected them to, so you have terrible weather; and the terrible weather leads to all these cost-overages; at one point, one of the sets that they had constructed from scratch gets wiped out in a monsoon. So it’s kind of everything that could possibly go wrong, goes wrong. Plus, you’re shooting on water, it’s always very difficult to shoot on water. They’re shooting on a river. You’re dealing with helicopters owned by the government, and the government is busy taking them away to fight rebels. It’s the worst-case scenario, in a way. And when you see this movie, it is so brilliant, and so accomplished, and so visionary. Well, he actually finished something this good, given the situation, actually shows that the auteur theory wasn’t a bad idea. But the studios wanted out because they wanted another formula, they wanted a formula where they didn’t have to trust anyone to make these movies. They wanted a formula where they could go out and throw a bunch of money at special effects, which is what they get in the 80’s, and get the kind of blockbuster they want. Apocalypse Now just never looks like that kind of movie.

Heart of Darkness => Apocalypse Now Bill: It’s based off of ’s . Can you talk about the relationship between those two texts?

Jon: Yeah, I mean, Heart of Darkness is something a lot of high school seniors read, or used to read. I hope they still read in literature classes. And it’s this sort of classic anti-colonialist story. Marlow travels up river and he sort of narrates the story of going to find Kurtz, who is this trader who has gone native. And what “gone native” means is that he’s no longer “European,” that he’s gone over to the dark side, literally. So they travel up river and they find him, and Marlow finds him, and he’s talking about the “horror” and he’s really gone, well, he’s really gone native. He’s gone spiritual in a way that western culture can’t handle. And in the end, Marlow sees this and then Kurtz dies, speaking of the horror, which you get in Apocalypse Now. And then Marlow goes back to Europe. And it’s interesting, because the novel doesn’t end with this sort of moment with Kurtz, which is how Apocalypse Now ends, and we can talk about that in a little bit because there’s lots of endings to Apocalypse Now, but Marlow goes all the way back to Europe to talk to Kurtz’s wife, and Kurtz’s wife says, “Well, what were his last words?” and Marlow lies and says, “Your name.” You know, “He said your name.” which is kind of fascinating, because the novel ends with a lie, which sort of restores the imagination of Europe, the family values of Europe; whereas that’s absolutely not where Kurtz was at the end of his life. And so, what , who wrote the original screenplay and then Coppola who adapted it and made the movie – what they saw was that Heart of Darkness was, you know, number one a trip up rivers, so that’s repeated in the film, but it was also a journey into the heart of darkness inside of yourself, and the heart of darkness that’s in your soul. And it was also this anti-colonialist argument that, you know, the problem with colonialism was this assumption that the “primitives” were less spiritual than Christians, and the argument is that our arrogance in Vietnam was that we thought that we were the superior civilization and they could only learn from us, only benefit from our involvement; and certainly the film argues against that.

Bill: Right, right. And for a primer on the Vietnam War, kind of history, please do check out the links posted in the weekly assignments to kind of fill in maybe some memory gaps about what that war actually meant. Jon: Yeah, and you can’t understate or underestimate the importance of Vietnam to directors of this generation. You know, they either went to Vietnam, or when we see Oliver Stone, I mean, Stone’s shot a series of about the Vietnam experience, beginning with JFK, which is a film we’ll see. You know, he actually went to Vietnam. Others did their best to not go to Vietnam. So Vietnam is this sort of central – you know, when I was a freshman in college, it was the last draft year and they did the draft lottery on television. We didn’t have TVs in all our rooms, we didn’t have computers – it was pre-computers- but we did have a kind of central TV room and everyone went to the TV room to see when their draft number came up, and then, you know, your draft number came up and you left the room; and the longer you were in the room, the safer you were, because the less likely you’d be to be drafted. So, you know, Vietnam even in my life, you know, I didn’t get drafted; that was the last draft year and they didn’t end up taking anybody, but, you know, it was certainly part of my life. Apocalypse Now is examining an experience common to young men of that generation.

The Fall of Coppola’s Career Bill: A collective consciousness. So, Coppola’s really in many ways the premier director of the 1970’s; he has The Godfather, he has The Godfather part 2, he has starring , and Apocalypse Now in ’79. But then his career kind of falls and stalls a little bit in the 80’s and subsequently. Can you explain why that is?

Jon: Yes. Two reasons. One is that he becomes this sort of poster boy for everything that’s wrong with auteurism; you know, the uncontrollable, uncontrolled director. But he also becomes – you know, he is ambitious, he really is that figure in Hollywood – he founds a company called , and that’s in the late 60’s, and then, after Apocalypse Now, he founds Zoetrope Studios, and Zoetrope Studios – I’m going to wait a second until the truck goes by. Should I? Should I not have worried about that?

Camera Guy: It’s kind of hard to tell. I mean, it’s going to have picked up some.

Jon: I’ll just wait until the bus goes by. The people walking by, I’m guessing, with these microphones, we’re okay. Right?

Camera Guy: We can’t hear them.

Jon: But that’s pretty loud. Okay, so can you um –

Bill: Sure – in many ways, Coppola is the premier director of the 1970’s, he has The Godfather part 2, he has The Conversation starring Gene Hackman, and Apocalypse Now in ’79, but then his career seems to really stall and disappear in many ways in the 80’s and 90’s, can you explain why that is?

Jon: Yeah, I mean, part of it is he becomes this sort of poster boy for auteurism, for everything that’s wrong with auteurism. You know, he’s the director that did Apocalypse Now, and even though it didn’t end up bombing, it scared everybody to death, so he was the director who was, like, out of control. But also, he went out of his way after Apocalypse Now to found – he bought a little studio, the old Hollywood General Studios lot, and actually went in the pages of Variety and Los Angeles Times and said, I’m going to make a studio that undermines the rest. I’m going to make a competitive studio; it’s going to be an artist’s studio, it’s going to be a repertoire studio.” And this was a troubling thing to say in mainstream Hollywood. So when was finally completed, and it was a film that was very experimental and really maybe wouldn’t have made a lot of money anyway, Colombia Pictures maybe deliberately pulled the rug out from under him, didn’t release the film when they said they would –

Bill: What year is One from the Heart?

Jon: ’82. And I should say that Colombia comes in at the end, but they play hardball and then other studios pull out, and he has a hard time just getting the film into theaters, he loses $27 million dollars of his own money on the film and it really sort of changes American film history. And, you know, I don’t think you really have to be all that paranoid to say all the studios saw this guy they could gun for and they got him; that Coppola really represented something they couldn’t allow to happen in a . And he became, in a way, not only the poster boy for everything that sort of went right in the 70’s, he also became the poster boy for everything that could go wrong in the 80’s.

Bill: And is the difference between him and someone like Scorsese just that Scorsese’s films were, while being very personal, still had that more bankable… I mean, obviously, Scorsese also had a couple of semi-flops in the 80’s.

Jon: Well, see, I was going to say that the big three, a lot of people think, are Altman, Scorsese, Coppola; and all three struggle in the 80’s. Altman sort of makes a comeback just because he hangs in there long enough. I think Scorsese makes, in a way, a comeback because he hangs in there long enough and because he was never the kind of auteurist celebrity that Coppola was. And Coppola was, it was about Coppola. I mean, Coppola and Wells become these two figures that really have all too many similarities, because just as it was necessary for the studios to make sure that Wells didn’t become the model of the Hollywood director, Coppola is the same story. Some people may wince and say, “Oh God, Coppola, how can you talk about him in the same breath as Wells?” First of all, I think, talent-wise we can’t. But even second of all, you know, Wells never had a film as successful as Godfather, and Coppola had three films that successful. And not only brilliant artistically, but also popular in ways that Wells could only have dreamed of. Now Coppola is making these sort of little films – , for example, which I thought was terrific. So he’s sort of had a strange career; he’s gone kind of in the reverse, you know, most people start with these little personal films and then they make these big blockbusters. He hits the scene with the biggest blockbuster of the 70’s and now he’s making little personal films. But, as they said on the Oscar ceremony this year, people in his family have either won – Sophia has won , or been nominated - Nick Cage also has won, who is also a relation of his – Roman was nominated this year – so a lot of Coppolas have been nominated for academy awards.

Bill: They’ve done pretty well for themselves.

Jon: Yeah. Apocalypse Now vs. Bill: So another version of this film, Apocalypse Now Redux came out in 2001, can you explain what the differences and similarities are between those two?

Jon: Yeah, and I do want to warn you, so some of you who are picking this up on Netflix probably know that both versions of the films exist, Redux came out in 2001, so that’s 22 years after the original, and it’s quite a bit longer; it’s almost an hour longer and it has two long scenes that Coppola didn’t include in his original version. It’s not really a “director’s cut” per se, because he didn’t want those scenes in it. One is a long scene on a French plantation in the middle of a river that’s really kind of dreamy and beautiful and really quite fantastic. And then there’s another scene with the Playboy Bunnies that goes on after this scene goes on. So after they are air lifted in the helicopter, they all join together and the GIs from the boat all have this sort of strange night with these sort of, these Playboy Bunnies who are these very interesting characters and very different from each other, but neither scene works and they both hold up an already long film, so he had dumped them. But because he owned the film, because of, basically, ’ shenanigans in 1976 to ’79 over the financing of the film, Coppola actually owned the negative of the film, which is unheard of in Hollywood. You know, when you see a film in Hollywood, you say, “Oh, that’s the director’s film.” It’s not the director’s film, it’s the studio’s film, but Apocalypse Now, Coppola controlled the negatives, so he was able to re-release the film in a different form with a different company, , owned by Disney at the time, instead of United Artists, which owned the original film, and nobody could stop him. The film is great still, the added scenes are gorgeous, you can see why he felt bad about having to cut them but you can also see why he had to cut them in terms of the flow of the film. But in a way, Redux is interesting because it shows that, you know, in a way, he’s been able to make money over and over again with this movie and it all would have been United Artist’s money if they didn’t get nervous in 1976 to ’79 and start pulling their money out of the film and say, “Okay, it can be your film but we don’t want to be exposed here.” Because they were afraid it was going to be this big auteur flop. It’s not an auteur flop, huge success, and Redux exists because of that.

Apocalypse Now and its Four Endings Bill: Apocalypse Now had four different endings. Can you lay out what those four endings are?

Jon: Well, I can talk about the various endings, yeah. I talked about the ending of Heart of Darkness, and I think that’s the problem, it’s that he couldn’t figure out how to end Apocalypse Now like Heart of Darkness, where Willard goes back to the US and speaks to Kurtz’s widow and says, “Yes, the last words on his lips was, you know, your name.” So then he had another problem: okay, how do I end this thing? When you see Hearts of Darkness, you’ll see quite a bit about how Brando sort of arrives out of shape, he doesn’t look like he should be in the movie, there’s sort of a ponderous scene in an otherwise action- packed film. So it’s kind of hard to figure out how to end the film. And so Coppola had several endings; one was on the 70mm release print, which is actually the version I saw first, had no ending credits, so it just ended with these explosions – and just sort of, it ends with an apocalypse. But he thought that was too exciting; in other words, oh cool! They’re blowing people up! So that didn’t really fit the movie. So then he had another one where Willard decides to stay. Where Willard comes out – and I think this is on some DVD still – and he comes out and he stands in front of the Montagnards, the followers of Kurtz and you kinda don’t know what he’s going to do; it’s almost like he doesn’t know what he’s going to do. He’s killed Kurtz and he doesn’t know what to do. Then there’s an ending where he gets on a boat and he calls in the air strike and the credits roll and you see the explosions over the credits.

Bill: Very different.

Jon: Yeah, very different. And what was funny was when he went to Cann –

Bill: .

Jon: The first version he showed was the 70mm version, so that was the one that just had the explosions at the end, but he said – and he won the Grand Prix for it, the top prize – he said no, he didn’t like the ending of it. And he asked the critics what they wanted, what they thought he should do. And you would think critics would be thrilled, and they blasted him for it. You know, “What’s wrong with Coppola, doesn’t even know how to end the film.” And it’s funny, because he did exactly what they had wished some director would do, like, involve them in the process. He involved them in the process and he paid for it.

Apocalypse Now and the Vietnam Bill: Hang on one second… Vietnam… here we go.

Jon: I live in my own world.

Bill: Vietnam proved to be a difficult war to film; at least while it was going on. Can you explain –

Jon: As in impossible.

Bill: Yeah, impossible. How does Apocalypse Now fit into the history of the Vietnam war film?

Jon: Yeah, there were no Vietnam War films shot during the Vietnam War. And that was both a box office thing in the feeling that nobody would go see one because it was something nobody wanted to know about, and also the politics were just too complicated. It was too unpopular, and Hollywood is all about being popular so it just didn’t happen. When the war ended, it really took a while for Vietnam films to come out. You know, I think it’s the most sensational which makes it the most problematic. The war looks like a lot of fun in Apocalypse now, which even Coppola realized that maybe that was dumb. He afterwards said –

Bill: Are you talking about the helicopter sequence?

Jon: You know, he said it just looked like fun. You know; surfing, and water skiing, the action, and the camaraderie, you know. I think he got the sense that he was trying to make a “war is hell” movie and it was just too beautiful. And so in the Cannes acceptance speech when he won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival he was saying that, you know, “I set out to make an anti-war film and I don’t think I did it.” So he was sort of riddled with self-doubt when he made the movie and you can maybe see why. Where it fits with other ones, well, if you look at something like Deer Hunter, which is more about what happens after the war, and Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, there are a number of fantastic Vietnam films and then you have a whole series of films about the returning vet. I mean, Rambo is the most famous, but even Die Hard is about returning vets; even Lethal Weapon is about returning vets. So you’ve got this sort of – once the war is over, the sort of sense of what the war has done to us is something that has to be dealt with, and Apocalypse Now isn’t about that. It’s very much about the war, and it’s about the feeling that the war created, what it was like to be there; and I think Platoon is the only one that even comes close – Oliver Stone’s Platoon, to what it must have felt like to be in that situation.

Kirk Kerkorian in Colombia Bill: So the final question I have, or series of small questions, but, in several different essays on this time period, you talk about four stories that were really sort of central to this Hollywood transition from auteur products to what becomes the blockbuster model. So let’s just talk briefly about each of them. First is the Kirk Kerkorian in Columbia story.

Jon: Okay, I’m obsessed with Kirk Kerkorian; he’s a very successful takeover artist, and also kind of a shakedown artist as well. And what he would do is buy a lot of stock in companies with no intention of doing anything except forcing them to pay what’s called “greenmail,” which is, in other words, they pay him more than the stock is worth to go away; and he made a career out of doing this. Now, he owned UA, MGMUA, and, kind of on a whim, he bought 20% of Colombia, and the justice department went after him and said, “Look, you can’t own two of the six major companies in the film industry.” And Kerkorian said, “Why not?” and so there was this big court case about it and it went as high as the highest court in California, and the California judge said, “Of course he can; there’s no compet – “ He basically said there’s no competition in the film industry anyway, so what’s the difference? And the irony is that he never really wanted to own Colombia; he kind of didn’t even want to own MGMUA; he wasn’t very happy where he was, but he just wanted to get paid off. And what happened that kind of screwed things up was that there was a big fire at the MGM Grand, which was one of his hotels, and he had to pour so much money into the rebuilding of that and actually dealing with all these lawsuits from the people who were staying there that he had to back off of MGMUA. The irony is that, not all that long later, when he finally got back on his feet, he went after 20th Century Fox. So he’s such an interesting kind of whacky character. He was involved in the first rebuilding of Chrysler, the sort of post-Iacocca rebuilding of Chrysler. So a really interesting character; self-made immigrant millionaire, but also a really interesting character, who I actually think his case is important, because it basically said that the studios could have collusive relationships and there’s nothing the government could do about it.

Bill: Maybe a name to look up more on your own is Kirk Kerkorian.

Jon: Yeah, yeah, yeah; it would fill a day of Googling, I think.

Sony Betamax Bill: How about the Sony Betamax story?

Jon: Oh, yeah; this is quick. Those of you who are pirating films might be interested in hearing this story, because it actually is relevant to you. Right around 1980, you have the advent of the VCR and the VHS tape, and this enabled people in their homes to basically tape, to duplicate, copyrighted films, studio films. And with the advent of paid TV, where you had full length, uncut films, the ability to get basically the same film that you would have seen in the theater. And the studios, of course, weren’t getting any piece of this action; they were upset. So they went after Sony, who made the Betamax machine, one of the two major video cassette recorders. And they said they wanted $100 on every machine and they wanted $1 on every blank tape to sort of, in a blanket way, cover potential and future copyright infringement. And the studios, in a way, had an argument here. You know, they had no profit stake in the duplication of their film, similar to the argument made about piracy. But, while this case got settled out of court, and while Sony is now the owner of Colombia Pictures, Sony is now not only someone they’d not sue, but actually a studio, one of the people who would litigate if you stole one of their films… one of the basic precedents that come out of this case is that Sony wasn’t liable for what people did with their machines and their technology. That, yes, people would use the VCR to basically illegally duplicate copyrighted material for their own possession and use, but that’s not the only thing a VCR can do. A VCR can do all these other things, and so long as a VCR can do all these other things and so long as a video cassette can be used for all these other things, then Sony isn’t liable for the illegal use of their technology.

Bill: Because it’s not made explicitly for that one purpose.

Jon: Exactly. Well, that’s what these various platforms are saying, look, you know, you can use a torrent site for any number of things; one of the things you can use a torrent site is to steal movies, but they can be used for other things. So we, the torrent site, can’t be held liable, but the person doing the piracy can be. And while it was impossible, basically, to enforce copyright infringement with the home use of a VCR, with the ability to now duplicate high quality movies on the internet, that’s a whole other story.

1980’s Actor Strike Bill: Another key moment here, or key event is the 1980’s actor strike. Can you speak about that for a moment?

Jon: Yeah, yeah. The actor strike didn’t work. What’s key about it is that it was led by Charlton Heston, which is so comical because we tend to think of him, or at least I tend to think of him, with holding the gun from my cold, dead hands; and also from Planet of the Apes, you know, “You goddamn dirty ape!” But he was the president of the Actors Guild, the Screen Actors Guild, and he was actually a good union man. Crazy person otherwise, good union man. So he led this strike, and the actors thought they had it planned perfectly. They went on strike to interrupt or sort of disrupt the fall TV season. So, you know, when pilots are being shot, the shows are being shot, they all went on strike. And the studios sort of collectively shrugged; it was sort of this amazing moment. They enforced what’s called the Force Majeure Clause in all the contracts, they locked all the actors out, and they said, “We don’t care. We’ve got all this stuff that we haven’t even released yet. We can do reality TV; there are no actors in that. Adios. We do other things; we don’t even have to make movies anymore; we’re a mining company, we’re an insurance company.” And it was sort of this moment of truth, I think, in Hollywood where the unions and talent had to realize that they were not in a position to negotiate anymore. The Collapse of AIP and Filmways Bill: That’s interesting. A final kind of important thing to keep in mind, I suppose, for the time period is the collapse of AIP and Filmways. What was this?

Jon: Yeah, well, I sort of know this story first-hand because I worked for Sam Arkoff who was the head of AIP when I was in grad school, and what’s interesting is that right around the late 1970’s, early 1980’s, you had maybe 10 or 12 B-movie companies, and American International is one, Cinerama is another, there are others; there’s a handful of these companies that are making these movies and making a little bit of money. And then interest rates – and it’s funny because you would never think – well, what do interest rates have to do with anything? But interest rates started inching up and then they hit about 20% for short-term interest and these companies just couldn’t do it. And one by one by one by one by one they fold. And the Filmways part was interesting. Filmways buys AIP. AIP is famous for, like, the beach party films and the Vincent Price sort of Edgar Allen Poe films, The Trip is an AIP film, Three in the Attic is an AIP film. They made these sort of exploitation B-films, and they were kind of going out of style, and then Filmways comes in, and Filmways was a real company, and then Filmways buys AIP and then Filmways goes under, and then Filmways is bought by Orion, and then Orion goes under. So you have this sort of domino effect of one company trying to be kind of like a studio, but because of the economic conditions can’t. And the studios really solidified their hold on Hollywood right around 1980. Not for anything they actually do, but because they’re the only companies that could possibly afford interest rates at that time.

Conclusion Bill: Wow. Well, that’s a helpful perspective to keep in mind as we finish up, really, the end of the 70’s and the end of the auteur era in Hollywood. Starting next week, we are kind of really in a different time period when we talk about Oliver Stone’s JFK. So until that time, and until next week, take care and we’ll see you then.