Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  Simply put, the success of Star Wars, coupled with the failure of New York, New York, meant that the kind of movies Scorsese made were replaced by the kind of movies Lucas (and Spielberg) made. Says Scorsese, “Star Wars was in. Spielberg was in. We were finished.” And Milius, “When I was at USC, people were flocking to Blow-Up, not going to the theaters to be jolted by a cheap amusement park ride. But [Lucas and Spielberg] showed there was twice as much money out there, and the studios couldn’t resist that. No one had any idea you could get as rich as this, like ancient Rome. You can clearly blame them.” And Friedkin, “Star Wars swept all the chips off the table. What happened with Star Wars was like when McDonald’s got a foothold, the taste for good food just disappeared. Now we’re in a period of devolution. Everything has gone backward toward a big sucking hole.”

  Naturally enough, Lucas rejects the idea that Star Wars ruined American movies, and puts a Reagan-era trickle-down spin on the situation, arguing, somewhat contradictorily, that movies are better than ever. “Star Wars didn’t kill the film industry, or infantilize it,” he says. “Popcorn pictures have always ruled. Why do people go see these popcorn pictures when they’re not good? Why is the public so stupid? That’s not my fault. I just understood what people liked to go see, and Steven has too, and we go for that.” Blockbusters subsidize serious smaller films, much the way Star Wars allowed Ladd to make a home for Altman. “People forget that there’s an ecology, a loop of symbiotic relationships that exists in the film business where you need movies that make a lot of money in order to finance the ones that don’t make money,” Lucas continues. “Of the billion and a half dollars that Star Wars made, half of it, $700 million of it, went to the theater owners. And what did the theater owners do with that? They built multiplexes. Once they had all these screens, they had to book them with something, which meant that the art films that were being shown in tiny places in the middle of nowhere, suddenly were playing in mainstream cinemas, and started making money. And once they started making money, you got Miramax and Fine Line, and the studios got interested, and so now you have this really thriving American art film industry that didn’t exist twenty years ago. So in a way, I did destroy the Hollywood film industry, only I destroyed it by making films more intelligent, not by making films infantile.”

  Scorsese and Altman take a darker view. “They’re not subsidizing everything else,” says Scorsese. “They are it. That’s all. The person who has something to say in a movie has got to make a picture for $50. They’re smothering everything.” And Altman, “Last summer trying to find a picture to see, I went to the two multiplexes in Beverly Hills. Every single screen was playing Lost World, Con Air, My Best Friend’s Wedding, and Face/Off. There wasn’t one picture that an intelligent person could say, ‘Oh, I want to see this.’ It’s just become one big amusement park. It’s the death of film.”

  Marcia Lucas concurs. “Right now, I’m just disgusted by the American film industry. There are so few good films, and part of me thinks Star Wars is partly responsible for the direction the industry has gone in, and I feel badly about that.”

  Twelve:

  Coming Apart

  1979

  • How Coppola returned from his heart of darkness with Apocalypse Now, nearly leaving his sanity behind, while Ashby came home and Beatty finally seduced Kael.

  “Everyone was against me. I was doing something on a subject no one dared touch with my own money, and I was getting all this flak. I collapsed”

  —FRANCIS COPPOLA

  Francis Coppola was not altogether impressed by Lucas’s space opera. He disliked the script, disliked the rough cut, said the gunplay was boring. His pal from the UCLA days, Dennis Jakob, coined the phrase “twerp cinema” for the movies of Lucas and Spielberg. During a car ride a few days after Francis and his friends saw Star Wars, someone scoffed, “‘The Force be with you.’ what a crock.” Francis was in the throes of Apocalypse Now, a film that seemed as far from Lucas’s picture as you could get, a film about the Vietnam War, a subject that was still too sensitive for Hollywood to touch. Jakob turned to Francis and said, over and over, “Francis, it’s all up to you now, you’re the only one.” It was as if Coppola, the last man standing, had inherited the historical obligation of the New Hollywood—to make cinematic art of the seminal event of their generation. Never one to shrug off the hand of history, Francis willingly embraced this destiny, for if not he, who? After all, he had shown the way; his entire career had been no more than a preamble to this project, combining, as it did, his talents as a showman, a producer, an artist. Still, it was a heavy burden. Francis struggled with it, faltered under it, and although he produced a masterpiece, albeit flawed, he was never the same.

  •

  ON MARCH 1, 1976, Coppola, accompanied by his family, finally left for the Philippines for what was expected to be a fourteen-week shoot. Dean Tavoularis had picked out locations all over the jungle island of Luzon, and the idea was that they would simply hop from location to location. This required the production to rely on air transportation, assumed that the Philippines had a modern, efficient airline system like that of the United States. But such was not the case, and the mountains were dangerous for helicopters. Moreover, the rivers were so treacherous that the boatmen who ferried around the location scouts wore T-shirts with numbers on the back to make it easier to identify them if they drowned. During the scout, one crew member told Coppola, “Don’t come here, it’s dangerous. Go to Australia, go to Thailand, go to Stockton! You’re talking about building a $20 million set. This is November. On May 15, the first typhoon’s gonna hit, and it’s gonna rain until October 15. The water rises fifty feet. The sets are going to be washed out to sea.” Coppola said, “What’re you, a fuckin’ weatherman?” He simply didn’t want to hear it.

  It was a hellish shoot, the difficulties compounded by Coppola’s arrogance. The logistics were impossible, and he went through assistant directors like Kleenex. The first were Italians, hired for their ability to communicate with DP Vittorio Storaro’s crew, but they fell behind immediately. Coppola fired them, and sent for David Lean’s first AD on The Bridge on the River Kwai. In the meantime, he improvised. Jonathan Reynolds, a writer pal there maybe to write a “making of” book, had rarely, if ever, been on a set before. Francis made him first AD of this enormous production. When Lean’s guy finally arrived, it turned out he was too old to do the job. (Kwai was made in 1957.) As actor Fred Forrest, who played Chef, put it, “In the movie, when Martin Sheen walks up to that guy in the trench and says, ‘Who’s the commanding officer here?’ And the guy says, ‘Ain’t you?’—that was the essence of Apocalypse Now. We didn’t know who was in charge, man.”

  The conditions were so bad that the cast and crew partied like it was their last day on earth. The Philippines had long been the home of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, headquartered at Subic Bay, so that hookers, drugs, and booze were easy to come by, almost as cheap as air. When actor Sam Bottoms arrived at the building that housed the production office in Manila, he noticed a massage parlor on the first floor. “You could go in there and get jerked off for five bucks,” he recalls.

  Coppola treated himself like a potentate, replicating America’s intervention in the Third World in more ways than one. He enjoyed the finest of creature comforts: the best wine, Lalique crystal, stereo equipment, cooking utensils, and shoes. Not all of this was entirely his fault. He was convinced, with some reason, that Apocalypse Now was a major artistic event, and he surrounded himself with true believers whose job it was to serve Francis and his vision. Money was no object. If Francis made an offhand remark about champagne glasses from Tiffany, they were sure to arrive in the next shipment from San Francisco. No one wanted to incur Coppola’s wrath. The practice on the set was, when in doubt, buy it!

  On the eighth of April, one day after his thirty-seventh birthday, he had a party on the beach near the location. Three hundred Americans, Filipinos, and Vietnamese extras were invited to consume hundreds of poun
ds of hamburgers and hot dogs flown in from San Francisco. The cake was six by eight feet, decorated with mountains, a river, an ocean with waves of icing, palm trees, and so on. The shipping and duty alone for the food came to $8,000.

  No sooner did Coppola finally sort out the AD situation than he decided to fire his lead actor, Harvey Keitel, just before Easter, and replace him with Martin Sheen. Sheen arrived at the Philippine location on April 24, to find chaos. All the Keitel footage had to be reshot.

  Francis was rewriting the script as he went along. As he had often done in the past, he was finding the film as he was making it. This was all very well with the inexpensive Rain People, but courting disaster with a $20 million production in the jungle. Perhaps taking a cue from the laborers who were carving out a swimming pool at his temporary home in Manila with their bare hands, Coppola was digging a very deep hole for himself—aided by all the technology at his disposal. Storaro was a laid-back guy who went with the flow. Without the gravitational pull exercised by a strong personality like Willis, Francis just spun off into space.

  KEITEL SEGUED into Fingers for Jim Toback, and then Blue Collar, for Paul Schrader. Schrader was still trying to figure out how to move from writing to directing. The studios were not lining up to give him a directing gig, and he felt burned out. Once again, it was his brother, Leonard, who came up with the idea, and he drew on their shared childhood in Grand Rapids. They grew up around Polish autoworkers whom Leonard had always wanted to write about. “I saw how to do this story, the same as The Yakuza, two guys, one black, one white, from different traditions, but both stuck in blue-collar autoworker jobs,” recalls Leonard. But he couldn’t come up with a plot. “Then one day I came across the Lordstown, Ohio, strike, the Chevy Vega plant,” he continues. “All the autoworkers were under twenty-five, they were not interested in what the union had done for dad and grandpa. What it had done for them was nothing. They called their own strike, and the union told them they better get back to work. ‘Yes, we hate management, but you know who we hate worse? Our union. It betrays us.’ Never seen a movie about that before.”

  According to Leonard, Paul couldn’t have cared less about autoworkers. It was more, “You mean I can get money for this?” There was no way Steve McQueen was going to work for him, but nobody had been able to find a script for Richard Pryor, who was very hot as a standup comic. The Schraders set to work. Leonard wrote and Paul polished. They had a hard time raising money, with two black leads and one white. Recalls Leonard, “All the investors said, ‘You’ve made a mistake, there’s supposed to be two white and one black, this is America.’ We said, ‘No, no...’ It almost never got made for that reason.”

  Once again, Leonard got much less than Paul. They split the script fee, $100,000 or so, but Paul got approximately $200,000 for directing, so he ended up with $250,000 to Leonard’s $50,000. And once again, the name of the game was sacrifice in the interest of Paul’s directing career. This made perfect sense to Paul, who still had a hard time regarding Leonard as an equal. “I broke the structure down, and I described the scenes to him,” Paul recalls. “I would say, ‘Write this scene, he says this, she says this, blah, blah... in four or five pages and bring it back tomorrow.’ In a word, I was using him as an employee.” Once the shooting started, Paul didn’t want Leonard on the set. The experience further alienated the two brothers.

  Schrader had hired Harold Schneider to line-produce. Harold put a vial of white powder on Schrader’s desk, saying, “Try this, it’ll make you work better.” Schrader, who would become a major cokehead a few years later, was shocked.

  The set was a powder keg, with homicidal competition between Pryor and co-star Yaphet Kotto, the two of them arrayed against the other lead, Keitel, and all of them sparking with Paul. Coming from the writing end, this man who could barely communicate with his friends had no idea how to handle actors. “There’s a kind of anger I have which tends to create a tense environment,” he says. “My psychiatrist pointed this out to me years ago. He said, ‘Just the way you speak creates tension. The way you withhold words. The way you spit words. You unrelax people.”

  To get them to commit, Paul had assured each actor he was the star of the movie. Once the shooting started, each one thought he was playing second fiddle to the others and concluded he had been lied to—not far from the truth. According to Schrader, “Richard was starting to coke up again. He was in this whole mode of, I’m gonna be the sidekick to Terry Malloy, you set me up to be the funny nigger, while Harvey’s take on it was just the opposite: I’m gonna be Ed McMahon to his Johnny Carson. So they wouldn’t talk to each other. Right after you said, ‘Cut,’ a fight would start.” Continues Paul, “After about three weeks in, all of a sudden I started crying, and I just couldn’t stop. Richard looked at me and said, ‘You pussy—are you gonna be a man or not?”

  In the fall, his down-and-dirty Blue Collar was nearly finished. Says editorial assistant Janice Hampton, “I always thought Paul was trying to be Marty. He had the asthma, the ’ludes, the coke.” With only the credits remaining to be shot, according to Toback, Schrader, drunk, confided to him at a party, ‘Ya know, I could actually fuck my brother out of a credit on this, and I was thinking about it, but then I thought, If you fuck your brother, who won’t you fuck.’ He was like waiting to be patted on the back because he wasn’t gonna fuck his brother.” Universal effectively dumped the picture, but Paul got plenty of good reviews. And indeed, the picture was raw and powerful, one of the few unsparing and politically sophisticated portrayals of blue-collar life in America. Schrader was a director.

  COPPOLA HAD ONCE TOLD LUCAS that the shock of sudden success “is no different from the shock of death, and when you come out of it, you’re a different person.” Recalls Nancy Tonery, the script supervisor who had been with Coppola since the first Godfather, “His personality had changed. Something happened to him either before or during the filming in the Philippines. He was no longer bound by any normal conventions. Francis would tread on anyone he could tread on. Anytime anybody had his belly full or annoyed Francis, he or she would be fired. There was a constant parade of people coming and going. Each time anybody left, the next person wouldn’t come for any less than twice as much as his predecessor had been making.”

  Ellie was alarmed that her husband was identifying with the demonic Kurtz, rather than with the relatively benign Willard. Coppola always had a nasty temper, and nothing inhibited him from publicly humiliating those closest to him, cursing, yelling, tearing doors off hinges. Fred Roos had been the whipping boy on Godfather II, and with the pressure of Apocalypse, this kind of behavior got worse. One day Coppola threw a two-by-four at Gray Frederickson, one of the producers. Says Godfather producer Al Ruddy, who was a good friend of Frederickson’s, “Francis didn’t pay anyone anything. And he treated these guys—Gray and Fred Roos—like they were like fuckin’ slaves. But, hey, if you buy into ‘he’s the emperor and he can do what the hell he wants,’ then you gotta take it.”

  Muslim rebels were battling Ferdinand Marcos in the south, and the Philippine strongman was convinced that they were going to bomb Manila airport at night, when it was lit up, so he closed it down every day at sundown. Consequently, aircraft were not allowed to fly after dark. One evening, the sun had set, and Francis’s pilot refused to take off in his Mitsubishi. Francis went ballistic. The pilot just shrugged, said, “It’s your plane, you fly it.” Francis took his brand-new, state-of-the-art miniature Nagra NSN tape recorder that he had purchased in Hong Kong, threw it to the ground and stomped on it with his heel. Then, regarding it mournfully, he said, “I’m sorry, I’ve killed my little Nagra.”

  Coppola was a raw wound, and the insecurities he harbored about himself as an artist, which he had papered over with the phenomenal success of the last few years, leaked out like the juice of a bruised mango. He worried that he was a better adapter of other people’s work than a creator of original material. He worried that he was making a pompous film on an important subjec
t. One evening, after the day’s shooting was over, he recalled a humiliating incident that occurred during the production of The Godfather. He was in the men’s room, sitting on the toilet, when two members of the crew came through the door. They were talking about “how the film was a load of shit and the asshole director didn’t know what he was doing.” Coppola lifted up his feet so that they wouldn’t recognize his shoes. Now he feared that everybody was thinking the same thing, Apocalypse was a load of shit and the director was an asshole. But it was too late to lift up his feet.

  Morale was at a low ebb. Despite Coppola’s determination to do it differently, he operated like any studio, lavishing money on himself and the talent, while nickel-and-diming everyone else. Storaro and the Italian camera crew were treated like royalty, had pasta flown in from Italy every week. On the other hand, Coppola stopped paying the rest of the crew their per diems, provoking a near mutiny. Things got so bad that when cast and crew scrambled onto a transport plane destined for Manila on their day off so they could bathe, make calls, and get milk products, a guy with a submachine gun prevented people from forcing their way on. “It was a state of siege,” says Tonery. “It was like the people clinging to the landing struts of a helicopter trying to get out of Saigon.”

  Then, as if conditions were not bad enough already, at the beginning of the third week in May, as predicted, a typhoon slammed into the island like a fist. It rained and rained, an endless torrent of water drumming on buildings, eight days, nine days, ten days straight. The typhoon scored a direct hit on one of the locations, turning it into an island, burying the sets in mud, dumping a speed-boat on top of a helicopter pad. Small clusters of people were stranded everywhere, without food, drinkable water, or toilet facilities. There was no electricity, and the beds were soaking wet because the roofs had blown off. Then the vodka ran out.