With the trimaran scuttled, they scrambled for a plan. According to an Esquire piece on Bert, “a Cuban exile, hired to fly Huey to Havana, trie[d] to sell the information to the Mafia.” It was a crazy time. Someone took a shot at Huey, whereupon a squad of Oakland Panthers came down to protect him. Finally, Steve and Benny Shapiro simply drove Huey down to Mexico. “I did everything I had ever seen in any of those movies,” recalls Blauner. “I stopped and got gas, used cash so there’d be no paper trail. I was gambling in those days, betting on ball games. I called the bookmaker from a pay phone like it was a normal Sunday, so that he’d think I was home betting. Benny was riding shotgun. When I got him across the border, he got on a plane to go down to Mexico City, and then he disappeared into the hills, waiting for Artie. I cried when I saw Huey get on the plane, ‘cause I figured I’d never see him again.
“When I got back across the border from Mexico, I pulled over to the side of the road, and stopped. I looked at Benny, and I just felt thirty thousand feet high. ‘Cause this was the first thing that I could think of that I had ever done under conditions of life and death—I could’ve gotten shot—for only one reason, the love of another human being. Totally without a reward. It had no bearing whether it was right or wrong, it was the fact that I had done this incredible thing, put my life on the line, for a loved one.”
Artie minded Huey at Benny and Bert’s hideaway in Jalapa. Jalapa was an inaccessible jungle compound on the west coast of Mexico that Bert, Benny, and a few others bought in 1968 when they thought fascism was riding the coattails of the new Nixon presidency. Artie had no illusions about Huey. “Artie’s take on Huey Newton was that he was a crazy person who had killed all the people he said he had killed,” says his sister, Dorien Ross. “Artie felt that he was in the midst of an insane thing, because this guy was off the wall, seriously paranoid, got in fights wherever they went. Artie wasn’t political. He did it for Bert.”
Finally, Goldstein says, Bert called him, asked him to find someone to sail Huey to Cuba. Goldstein found a captian, aka “Pirate,” who had a lot of experience going back and forth to Colombia—presumably smuggling narcotics—to take Huey and his wife, Gwen Fontaine, on his boat from Acapulco. According to Goldstein, Bert agreed to stand good for the boat if it was confiscated. When they were in Cuban waters, the captain lowered a dinghy, Huey and Gwen aimed themselves at the beach. The dinghy capsized. Huey didn’t know how to swim and Gwen saved his life, dragging him onto the beach. They were immediately arrested by the Cuban authorities. Nevertheless, Huey had been successfully smuggled out of the country. In some sense, it was BBS’s biggest production.
It had been three years since Marvin Gardens, and Rafelson finally got a project set up, Stay Hungry, with Jeff Bridges, Sally Field, and an unknown Arnold Schwarzenegger. Toby did the production design. Bob’s longtime girlfriend Paula (now Toby’s sister-in-law) visited the set, and he also managed to sleep with Field a couple of times. Coming off The Flying Nun, she was insecure about her sexuality, worried about her small breasts. Bob instructed Toby to supervise her look, make sure she was sexy. Toby was in the same bizarre position as Polly Platt, having to beautify the woman her husband was sleeping with. She finally left him. “It wasn’t out of jealousy,” she says. “I just developed a contempt for him, and a feeling of—if not compassion—at least a feeling of kinship with these other women. I thought, These are my sisters. I felt he was using women to feel more powerful, more loved, more studlike. It destroyed my respect for Bob. I lost patience with bullshit.” She continues, “He was devastated—or so it seemed. His marriage was important to him. Not because he loved me so much, but because he wanted that structure. It legitimized him in some way. It anchored him.” She stayed at the Château Marmont until he moved out of the house on Sierra Alta. Rafelson never again made a good movie. As Burstyn puts it, “In both Bob’s and Peter Bogdanovich’s cases, their best movies were made in partnership with their wives. And when the marriages ended, their work was not ever up to that same level.”
On January 17, 1975, the cops raided Bert’s home. His kids and their friends were having a wrap party for the school play. The neighbors called the cops, who handcuffed twenty-six-odd kids in a circle in the living room before taking them, along with Bert, to the station house where they were booked. The cops grabbed pot, hash, and three amphetamine pills.
On January 22, Stanley Schneider, working on Three Days of the Condor, ate some ice cream, lay down on the couch in his office, and died of a heart attack. Openly weeping, Bert was incoherent with grief over Stanley’s death and Huey’s disappearance. Friends thought that he was close to a nervous breakdown. A few weeks later, Bert copped a plea, and the drug charges were dropped.
COPPOLA INSISTED that The Conversation be released on his birthday, April 7, 1974. It was well reviewed, but did disappointing business. Postproduction of Godfather II was affected by the love-hate relationship between Coppola and Evans. Evans claims he called him, begged him to rescue it. As Sylbert puts it, “At first, Francis told Bob Evans, ‘Don’t ever darken my toilet paper again.’ But Francis is very good at collecting it, not very good at putting it all together. He got scared. Bob had to go up there.” They previewed the film in San Francisco at the Coronet Theater in November 1974. Says Evans, “When Francis walked in, everybody stood up like he was a king. By the time the picture was over, three quarters of the audience had walked out. Why? He didn’t use any of the Havana sequences. He cut out the best part of the fuckin’ picture. I had to help him reedit Godfather II totally.”
According to Coppola, “It was in my deal that Evans have nothing to do with it, and he didn’t. He wasn’t involved one iota in Godfather II.”
At the beginning of the new year, Coppola became the first director ever nominated for two pictures by the Directors Guild. In February, Godfather II got eleven Oscar nominations and The Conversation received three. Both films had been nominated for Best Picture, along with Chinatown, Lenny, and The Towering Inferno, and Francis found himself in the enviable position of competing against himself. He personally received five nominations, and two other members of the Coppola clan, his father, Carmine, and sister, Talia Shire, were nominated as well. Hearts and Minds was nominated for Best Documentary, and Burstyn got her second nomination for Best Actress in a row, for Alice. Paramount, which had had a record year, dominated the Oscars with an astonishing number of nominations, including eleven for Chinatown. Yablans was quoted as saying the studio’s motto should be, “If you don’t like it, fuck you!”
Coppola had expected The Godfather to clean up two years before, and was keenly disappointed when he lost Best Director to Bob Fosse. Now he worried that The Conversation would split the Coppola vote, throwing the Oscar to Polanski, his main competition. He thought Godfather II, with its convoluted flashback structure, was too innovative and demanding to win Best Picture. When the ceremony came around on April 8, Coppola swept the awards. He won three Oscars himself. Godfather II won six, including one for De Niro, Best Supporting Actor. Burstyn took Best Actress. Chinatown had to make do with one, Towne’s, for Best Original Screenplay. This would mark the high point of Towne’s career. He wrote like an angel, but he wasn’t satisfied; he wanted to direct.
Francis thanked everyone on earth, except Evans. Evans went over to congratulate him, and he said, “Jesus, Bob, I’m so sorry, I can’t believe what an idiot I am, I forgot to thank you again.” For Coppola, the icing on the cake was the Oscar for Carmine, who won (with Nino Rota) for Best Original Score. “After I’d spent a lifetime with a frustrated and often unemployed man who hated anybody who was successful, to see him get an Oscar, it added twenty years to his lifetime,” Coppola said. On his way back to his seat, Carmine dropped the Oscar, and it shattered.
Despite his personal triumph, Francis was upstaged by Bert Schneider. Hearts and Minds won Best Documentary, capping the producer’s career in film. When he walked up to the podium to accept, resplendent in an immaculate white tux, he
stunned the glittering array of celebrities and millions of TV viewers by conveying “greetings of friendship to all American people” from Ambassador Dinh Ba Thi, chief of the Provisional Revolutionary Government delegation to the Paris peace talks. There was a moment of shocked silence, then a burst of applause, punctuated by scattered hisses. Coppola, who was still contemplating a picture about Vietnam, Apocalypse Now, seconded Schneider’s gesture. He said, “Imagine, in 1975, getting a telegram from a so-called enemy extending friendship to the American people. After what we did to the Vietnamese people, you’d think they wouldn’t forgive us for 300 years! Getting this positive, human, optimistic message was such a beautiful idea to me—it was overwhelming. Sinatra and Hope are too old to understand a message like that.” Three weeks later, on the morning of April 29, with Saigon surrounded by North Vietnamese troops, South Vietnamese general Duong Van “Big” Minh surrendered. That day the last American was airlifted by helicopter off the roof of the American embassy. The war was over.
AFTER THE DEMISE of the Directors Company and the Daisy Miller disaster, Bogdanovich set up At Long Last Love (named after a Cole Porter song), at Fox. Mengers got him $600,000 to write, direct, and produce, plus 25 percent of the profits. The picture cost $5.5 million, and starred Cybill, Burt Reynolds, Madeline Kahn, and Eileen Brennan, not a bad cast. It was a period piece set in the ’30s, about two couples who keep falling in love with the wrong people. “This movie was a fantasy of my divorce,” said Bogdanovich. “Everyone ends up best friends,” which was hardly the case in real life. It was a musical, with a dozen or so Porter songs. The only problem was, nobody in the cast could sing.
Mengers was with Peter at an out-of-town preview. “The audience was silent,” she recalls. “Afterward, we went up to Peter’s suite, and everyone was telling him how well it went. He said, ‘Yeah, did you hear them laughing?’ It was like the emperor’s new clothes. I said, ‘Peter, that audience was not laughing.’ He became really angry at me, so angry that I left. By that point, Peter didn’t want to hear the truth. You couldn’t talk to him, he was beyond communicating, he was in a world where he only wanted to talk to people who agreed with him and told him how great he was. As with all really talented successful people, there weren’t many who said to him, ‘You’re wrong.’” Says Bogdanovich, “It was just the opposite. We fucked it up by listening to everybody.”
At Long Last Love premiered on March 1, 1975. “It was the most disastrous premiere, and the best party ever,” says Ronda Gomez, who had left Paramount for an executive job at Fox. “People walked out of the theater onto a red carpet leading to the soundstage decorated like the ’70s. But nobody said a word about the movie. Complete silence. They were shell-shocked.”
“People loathed Peter,” says writer David Newman. “His ego was just so monstrous. He was the great I Am, the Second Coming. This screening was a disaster, a cataclysm.” The word on the street was that Platt had been the power behind the throne, and without her, he was nothing. He suspected her of abetting this spin. “She wanted to create the impression that she had invented me,” he says. “That worked for a lot of people who were annoyed that I was doing so well, and helped her in her career.” But he didn’t need Platt to sabotage his reputation. He was so universally detested that Billy Wilder is supposed to have said that after news of the screening spread, you could hear the champagne corks popping all over town. Complained Bogdanovich, “It was treated as if we had committed one of the most heinous crimes ever, including child-murdering and rape.” Thereafter, Bogdanovich and Shepherd archly referred to the film as “the debacle.”
Mengers told Shepherd that she had to work with other directors. “Because whenever there might be a possibility of a movie, Peter would always say, ‘No, no, no, I’m getting ready to start mine next week.’ Not that there was a big demand for her. She probably wouldn’t have done Taxi Driver three years earlier. Peter and Cybill were rude, cavalier toward people, insulted them. People take anything when you’re hot; when you stop being hot, they pay you back.”
Platt took the girls to see the picture in one of those grand old theaters on Hollywood Boulevard. They got there early, before the previous show ended, and they could hear the Porter tunes swelling in volume as the picture ended. “Then the ushers flung open the doors, with the red-leather padding, and not one person came out,” she recalls. “We sat down, ten minutes later the movie started, and we were the only people there. The theater was empty. I felt so badly for Peter, I thought I was going to die.”
WHEN SPIELBERG RETURNED from Martha’s Vineyard to L.A., he knew he was in trouble. He had run 300 percent over budget, and had precious little to show for it. The first cut was a mess. None of the shots matched. Recalls producer Rob Cohen, “There would be a shot in the sun, a shot with rain, a shot with clouds, a shot with gray sky, blue sky. It was very hard to watch.” Worse, the shark looked ridiculous. In Cohen’s words, it “resembled a big phony rubber thing.” The decision was made to downplay the shark, in effect, to edit around it, to postpone the first revealing of the shark until the third act. According to Cohen, this was Fields’s idea. “Verna was the key figure in what happened in post,” he says. He says Spielberg was going to remedy the failure of the mechanical sharks by interpolating documentary shark footage. But “she began to realize that what you could imagine was worse than what you could see,” continues Cohen. “She did a clip job on it, threw out all the shark stuff, and just showed the results, the reactions. It was much more electric.” But Spielberg later claimed that he realized this would be necessary when he was still in production. “The effects didn’t work, so I had to think fast and make a movie that didn’t rely on the effects to tell the story,” he says. “I threw out most of my storyboards and just suggested the shark. My movie went from William Castle to Alfred Hitchcock.” Gottlieb agrees. “That decision was collaborative, with Steven leading the way. Early on, one of our models was The Thing, a great horror picture where you didn’t see the creature until the last reel. We said, ‘Let’s do that.’” Adds Michael Chapman, who was the camera operator on Jaws, “It was definitely Steven’s film. He’s an idiot savant, and the savant part is absolutely as real as the idiot part. He was a master of laying out shots that told a story elegantly and efficiently. I knew I could learn something just by watching his setups.”
Jaws began to preview in spring 1975. Spielberg took Valium to get through the screenings. It sneaked in Dallas on March 26, at the Medallion Theater, after Towering Inferno. Spielberg was standing in the back, by the door, nervously flicking his eyes between the screen and the audience. The scene in the beginning when the boy on the raft is killed had just gone by when a man in the front row got up and broke into a run, heading toward the director. Alarmed, Spielberg thought to himself, My walk-out has become a run-out! He must really hate it. The man reached the lobby, and threw up all over the carpet, went to the bathroom, and returned to his seat! Said the director, “That’s when I knew we had a hit.”
TV advertising was in its infancy; television was still regarded as a rival medium, not an adjunct to movie promotion. Back in 1973, Lester Persky, who had a background in advertising, had convinced Columbia to do TV spots in a local market for a B movie called The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and it worked. Two years later, Persky and Columbia found themselves with another potential disaster, a Charles Bronson prison picture called Breakout, and they tried television advertising again, this time nationally, over the networks. The effect was dramatic. Breakout made its costs back in its first few weeks. The other studios were monitoring Columbia’s experiment, and when Jaws came along shortly afterward, Universal applied the same strategy. The studio spent over $700,000—a staggering amount at the time—for half-minute spots in prime-time shows. If there were any doubt left about the effectiveness of TV advertising, the movie’s success dispelled it.
Really wide breaks of several hundred theaters or more were reserved for stinkers, enabling studios to recoup their expenses b
efore the picture died. But Universal opened Jaws in 409 theaters, about the same number as The Godfather, on June 20. “My secretary handed me this piece of paper... and said ‘Here’s the opening figures.’ And I just stared at this number,” recalled Spielberg. “Then I kept waiting for the next weekend to drop off and it didn’t, it went up and it went up.” Before they played out, The Godfather had racked up $86 million in rentals and The Exorcist $89 million. Jaws beat them both with $129 million, a record that stood for two years, until Star Wars. Spielberg had a tiny slice of the net, two and a half points, worth about $4 million, nothing compared to the forty-odd points shared by Brown and Zanuck. The latter said he earned more off Jaws than his father, Darryl, had made in his whole career.
Jaws changed the business forever, as the studios discovered the value of wide breaks—the number of theaters would rise to one thousand, two thousand, and more by the next decade—and massive TV advertising, both of which increased the costs of marketing and distribution, diminishing the importance of print reviews, making it virtually impossible for a film to build slowly, finding its audience by dint of mere quality. As costs mounted, the willingness to take risks diminished proportionately. Moreover, Jaws whet corporate appetites for big profits quickly, which is to say, studios wanted every film to be Jaws.
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 41