Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  But the dark, underlit look of the film was daring and unconventional. The wisdom of the day at the studios was that every picture had to be brightly lit. As Willis put it, “Screens were so blitzed with light that you could see into every corner of every toilet and closet on the set,” adding, “I’d always hear, ‘They have to be able to see it in the drive-ins.’” But Willis was going to do it differently. He insists, “There was no discussion of lighting. I just did what I felt like doing. The design came out of the juxtaposition of the bright, cheerful garden party wedding that was going on outside, and the underbelly in this dark house. I used overhead lighting because the Don was the personification of evil, and I didn’t always want the audience to look into his eyes, see what he was thinking. I just wanted to keep him dark.”

  The Godfather began production on March 29, 1971, while Bogdanovich was editing Picture Show, and Altman was finishing up McCabe. To all appearances, Coppola did not have much going for him. “Francis’s credentials at that point, as a director, were zip,” recalls Steve Kesten, the first AD, who was later let go, a victim of palace intrigue. “He was at the bottom of the abyss.” The tough New York crew was used to working down and dirty for the likes of Kazan, Lumet, and Penn. Coppola struck them as indecisive. “Running a set means you gotta be the guy that makes it go forward,” continues Kesten. “And it just wasn’t happening. Nothing got done. Francis was always having to be nudged along.” One day they were location scouting on lower Fifth Avenue. Suddenly Francis disappeared into Polk’s, a famous hobby store, and spent the afternoon buying toys with money he didn’t have. Every morning he would close the set and rehearse the actors till noon, leaving the crew sitting around cleaning their nails. This left only half a day for the actual shooting.

  Pacino twisted his ankle during the scene where Michael shoots Sollazzo, and by the end of the first week, Coppola was already behind. He was rewriting the script at night, sometimes during the day between setups, creating chaos with the production schedule. Actors showed up who had been written out of scenes and never notified. Coppola recalls, “It had gone terribly, and I was like in deep, deep, deep trouble because I hadn’t finished the hospital scene where McCluskey punches Michael. And they didn’t like the rushes.”

  Indeed, as Willis puts it, “When that dark stuff started to appear on the screen, it seemed a little scary to people who were used to looking at Doris Day movies.” The dailies were so dark the Paramount execs could make out nothing more than silhouettes. No one had ever sent in rushes like this before. Says Coppola’s sister, Talia Shire, who played Connie Corleone, “They were black, looked like shit.” Evans asked Bart, “What’s on the screen? Do I have my shades on?”

  Brando arrived at the beginning of the second week. Continues Coppola, “They hated Brando, said they couldn’t understand him.” Evans asked, “Is this movie gonna have subtitles?” Recalls producer Gray Frederickson, “The scene when Brando sees the body of Sonny Corleone, says, ‘Look what they’ve done to my boy,’ Evans told Ruddy, ‘This kid’s an imbecile, he can’t even get a performance out of Marlon Brando, that’s the most overacted, worst played scene I’ve ever seen.’”

  Most films used professional extras; the same faces would turn up again and again, looking like cookie cutouts. Francis didn’t want to use professionals, because he didn’t want The Godfather to look like other movies. He wanted the faces to look authentic, so he spent a lot of time casting the extras. Says Frederickson, “That was not the way Hollywood had ever done things before, and it freaked them out. Extras were extras. To the studio, it was just time wasted.” The day they shot Clemenza with the cannoli, Jack Ballard, Paramount’s head of physical production, told Francis, “If you don’t finish on time today, you’re not gonna come to work tomorrow.” Rumors flew that, indeed, Coppola was going to be fired.

  Al Ruddy was staying at Frederickson’s apartment in New York, and Frederickson overheard his conversations with Evans. He warned Coppola that he was about to be replaced. Francis won a few days’ respite, because nobody—not Evans, not Ruddy, not Jaffe—wanted to be the one to fire him. He had just won an Oscar for writing Patton, and somehow he managed to hang on to his job.

  Nevertheless, his problems continued. Coppola clashed repeatedly with his DP. He created so much turmoil and chaos on the set that strong-willed individuals were always tempted to step in to make sure the picture got made. Willis was a formidable presence, a man used to getting his own way, and like many cinematographers, wanted to be a director—the so-called DP disease. He shared the widely held conviction that Coppola did not know what he was doing. “It was hard for Francis because everybody was trying to pull his pants off,” says Willis. “He was not well schooled in that kind of moviemaking. He had only done some kind of on-the-road running-around kind of stuff.” He adds, “I was like Hitler. If anybody was doing the right thing to get this movie made from day to day, it was me.” He insisted that the actors make their marks, because the light levels were so low that if they missed them, they’d be out of focus, even invisible. Willis accused Coppola of abandoning the careful preparations they had agreed on and tossing up the deck every morning when he came to the set to see where the cards would fall. “I like to lay out a thing and make it work, with discipline,” he said. “Francis’s attitude is more like, ‘I’ll set my clothes on fire—if I can make it to the other side of the room it’ll be spectacular.’ You can’t shoot a whole movie hoping for happy accidents. What you get is one big bad accident.”

  Willis worked slowly and meticulously, which Francis, who was under brutal pressure from the studio to make up for lost time, found infuriating. He had grown up in the theater, and he liked and cosseted actors, was not going to straitjacket them to please the DP. Willis “hates and misuses actors,” he complained. “I said ‘They’re not mechanics, they’re artists.’ Gordy acted like a football player stuck with a bunch of fag actors.”

  Scorsese dropped by the set when Coppola was shooting the funeral of the Don. He recalls, “Francis just sat down on one of the tombstones in the graveyard and started crying.” Things came to a head with Willis one day when Pacino took a wrong (unrehearsed) turn off a corridor in the Corleone house and blundered into darkness, a portion of the set that had not been lit. Francis wanted to know why not, why his actors couldn’t have the freedom to go wherever they wanted.

  Willis said, “Okay, but I’ll have to relight, it’ll take a while.” Coppola shouted, “I want to shoot now.” Willis stalked off the set, went to his trailer, and refused to come out. Francis, looking for the camera operator, Michael Chapman, bellowed, “I want somebody to operate right away.” Chapman ran into the bathroom and locked the door. Realizing he couldn’t get any of Willis’s crew to lift a finger, Coppola screamed, “Why won’t they let me make my movie?” and marched up to his office. Finding the door open, he slammed it closed, and then proceeded to pound his way through it with his feet and fists. The blows sounded like gunshots, and Fred Gallo, the AD, thought, Ohmigod, he’s shot himself.

  In this case, the old cliché turned out to be true. The tension between Coppola and Willis proved creative. Coppola relied on his DP to frame the shots. Coppola’s strengths were writing dialogue, storytelling, and working with actors, not visual composition. Willis achieved a unique look—rich earth colors, buttery yellows and browns—that would go down in cinema history.

  On top of everything else, the production had all kinds of problems with the Mafia. The Italian-American Friendship Association, headed by Mafia boss Joe Colombo, Sr., made life miserable for Coppola by blocking his access to key locations. Recalls Ruddy, “When I was in New York, I got the call from Evans to go see Colombo. He was hysterical: ‘This guy called me up, he was threatening me, I told him you were producing the movie. He said, “When we go after a fish we cut off its head.” You gotta go see this guy.’ Evans hid out on the whole fuckin’ movie. He went to Bermuda with Ali.”

  The Godfather wrapped in September 1971,
after six months of shooting.

  COPPOLA WAS ANXIOUS to funnel the post-production money into his ailing company; he convinced Paramount to let him edit in San Francisco. The day arrived when Francis had to screen his cut for Paramount in L.A. Evans had a bad back, and he had begun taking painkillers and other drugs to alleviate his distress. “He had a guy come in every day, one of these Dr. Feelgood guys, who gave him an injection, a vitamin shot—who knows what it was,” says Bart. “I didn’t believe they were vitamins, I believed they were amphetamines.” Evans’s butler, David Gilruth, wheeled him into the Paramount screening room on a hospital bed. He wore fine black silk pajamas and black velvet slippers with gold foxes brocaded on the toes. Coppola could tell when he was bored by what he was seeing, because he’d hear the buzz of the motor as the producer lowered the bed to take a nap.

  Francis had brought his people—Murch, Roos, Frederickson—as well as Towne, who had helped him by providing—in a fine example of his allusive style—the key scene in which Don Corleone cedes power to Michael and the two men declare their love for each other while never directly mentioning it. Coppola paid Towne $3,000. He asked, “Do you want credit?” Towne joked, “Don’t be ridiculous. I only wrote a couple of fuckin’ scenes. If you win an Oscar, thank me.”

  Towne did not then know Evans. He took in the spectacle—the bed, the tassles, the black silk pajamas—thought, Do I really want to hear what this guy has to say? Evans started to hum, hummed for about three minutes, and then, as the lights went down, put his thumb into his mouth, where it remained for the next two hours and twenty-five minutes. Towne thought, If this man is running a studio, this industry must be in big trouble.

  There are as many versions of what happened in that screening room as there were people there, proving the adage that success has many fathers, failure, none. According to Evans, he met with Francis after the screening, alone. “The picture stinks,” Evans told him. “You shot a great film, where the fuck is it, in the kitchen with your spaghetti?”

  Evans claims that against Coppola’s wishes, he told Bluhdorn not to expect the picture for Christmas because it needed reediting. “I bent over too many times on this flick, Charlie, to take any more shit,” he said. “The fat fuck shot a great film, but it ain’t on the screen.” According to Evans, Coppola went back to the editing room, complaining bitterly: “You’re making this picture so long, Evans, half the people will be asleep before it’s all over.”

  Coppola believed Evans was just waiting for an excuse to take the picture away from him. “The deal was, I was going to edit the movie in San Francisco, at Zoetrope,” he says. “But he warned me that if it was more than two hours and fifteen minutes, he was going to yank the film to L.A. and cut it there, which I dreaded. So when we finished the film—it was about two hours and fifty minutes—I said, ‘Let’s cut it down as best we can.’ So we lifted out the nonplot stuff and got it down to around two-twenty. When Evans saw it, he said, ‘Where’s all that stuff that makes it so great? I’m yanking the film to L.A.’ So it was clear they were going to take the film to L.A. either way. We got to L.A. and we put all the footage back. I said, ‘See? Isn’t that better?’ And he said, ‘Yes, that’s better.’”

  “Evans felt that he was a filmmaker,” says Calley. “His fantasy was him on a hospital bed in a projection room running reels of The Godfather, repairing the chaos that Francis had dropped on the world. It was stuff out of his fantasies of what Thalberg was like.” But most of the people who were involved agree that Evans did support a long, three-hour version, and did lobby Yablans, who by now had succeeded Jaffe and become head of the studio, into postponing the release date, no small accomplishment.

  But almost nobody agrees that Coppola preferred the short version. Says Yablans, “Evans behaved very badly. He had everybody believing Coppola had nothing to do with the movie! He created a myth that he produced The Godfather. Evans did not save The Godfather, Evans did not make The Godfather. That is a total figment of his imagination.”

  Evans’s claims infuriated Francis, and would continue to rankle over the years. In 1983, when the two men were quarreling over The Cotton Club, Francis sent Evans a telegram Evans framed, in a red Lucite heart he hung in his bathroom. It read, in part: “Dear Bob Evans: I’ve been a real gentleman regarding your claims of involvement in The Godfather. I’ve never talked about you throwing out the Nino Rota music, your barring the casting of Pacino and Brando, etc., but continually your stupid blabbing about cutting The Godfather comes back to me and angers me for its ridiculous pomposity. You did nothing on The Godfather other than annoy me and slow it down.”

  Up to the end, Coppola believed he had a flop. He was living in Jimmy Caan’s tiny maid’s room in L.A. like an immigrant, sending his per diem back to his family in San Francisco. One day he went to see The French Connection, directed by his pal Friedkin, which had just opened with a big splash. He was accompanied by one of his assistant editors. On their way out of the theater, the assistant was raving about the movie. Coppola said, “Well, I guess I failed.

  I took a popular, pulpy, salacious novel, and turned it into a bunch’a guys sitting around in dark rooms talking.” The assistant replied, “Yeah, I guess you did.”

  The Godfather was shown to exhibitors in New York, who were not happy about a three-hour movie. Its lengthy running time would halve the number of screenings per night and reduce their profits proportionately. Predictably, the screening went badly. On his way out of the theater, an old-timer turned to Francis, who was standing by the door and said, “Well, it ain’t no Love Story.” It was the darkness before the dawn. When the picture was shown again, only a week and a half later, Ruddy came out of a screening wreathed in smiles, saying, “Through the roof, baby, it’s gonna be a monster hit!”

  Meanwhile, strains were showing in the Evans-MacGraw marriage. Evans used to say, “I had a great sex life with Ali until I married her, and I couldn’t fuck her once after our marriage. Couldn’t get it up.” Evans was afraid that MacGraw had been off screen too long, and he pressured her into doing The Getaway, to be directed by Sam Peckinpah. She was reluctant, preferring, claims Evans, to spend her time pressing flowers and writing poetry at Woodland. The Getaway started production in mid-January 1972, while Bob and Francis were still going at it.

  Later he would claim that the time he was required to spend in the editing room cost him his marriage because he didn’t have a chance to visit the set of the The Getaway where the flirtation between MacGraw and McQueen blossomed into a full-blown love affair and a seven-year relationship. Scoffs Yablans, “Evans pushed them together. He created the breakup with Ali, the public cuckolding. ‘Bob, you’re gonna lose your wife. These two are going at it hot and heavy.’ ‘It’s just a passing thing—’ He didn’t give a shit. It didn’t matter to him. He’s a very strange man. He couldn’t be married, couldn’t live a normal, sane life. He drove her out.”

  EVANS’S EAGERNESS to claim credit for The Godfather reflected his growing unhappiness with his deal at Paramount. He had turned the studio around, he felt, and had not been properly rewarded. Didn’t MGM give Thalberg a percentage of every film he made? More, he itched to see his name on the screen. Korshak negotiated a deal that gave Evans the right to produce a couple of pictures a year under his own name. And he would have points, a cut of the profits. Evans had no doubt which project would kick off his new deal: a phone-book-thick script he couldn’t make heads or tails of, Chinatown.

  Towne had conceived the idea, tailored to Nicholson and Jane Fonda, on the set of Drive, He Said. In the form of a Raymond Chandleresque detective story, it told the tale of how unscrupulous developers had made L.A. a boom-town by stealing water from powerless farmers. One day, during post-production on The Godfather, Evans called him. Over a meal at Dominick’s he told Evans about the script he was working on. He had appropriated the title, Chinatown, from a chance remark made by a friend of his, a cop. “The one place I never really worked,” said the cop, “was
Chinatown. They really run their own culture.”

  Sketchy as it was, Evans loved it, particularly the title, which he thought was commercial, and the idea of Ali—forget Jane—starring opposite Nicholson. He offered him $25,000 to develop it. When Chinatown became a go project, Towne was paid $250,000 and 5 percent of the gross, a sweet deal for a writer, one of the reasons people liked Evans; he made them rich.

  Evans wanted Roman Polanski to direct it. It had been three years since the Manson family had murdered Sharon Tate, but Polanski was still in the twilight zone. When he traveled, he carried a pair of Sharon’s panties with him in his bag. He was living comfortably in Rome and less than eager to return to the scene of his wife’s murder. “It was just bad memories,” says Polanski. But Evans, assisted by Nicholson, Towne, and Dick Sylbert persisted, and he finally agreed.

  Meanwhile, Evans was battling with his own studio. Bluhdorn and Yablans thought he was crazy to take on Chinatown, an elaborate, labyrinthine story. Bart reminded him, “I went through a picture with Bob Towne, The Parallax View, and it was a nightmare getting him to write. He’s the most anal man who ever lived.” But, he adds, “It was typical of Evans to bring the elements together and to get Towne to finish the fucking script. I certainly have to hand it him.” Evans was dazzled by Towne’s talent, or rather, what he perceived as his friends’ high regard for Towne’s talent. “I was star fucking,” Evans confesses. “I believed there was some magic, if Jack liked it.” Yablans may have thought Evans was crazy, but not so crazy that he didn’t demand half of Evans’s points. Or so Evans claims. (Yablans denies it.)