“You got to get on the phone and call Henry.”
“Henry?”
“Kissinger. Get ahold of my secretary, Mary Ellen, and she’ll give you his number in D.C.” The next day, he got his luggage. But this was only the beginning of Evans’s problems. In May, on the set of Popeye, Evans was informed he would be indicted on fifteen felony counts for a coke buy (about five ounces) that his brother Charlie had made weeks earlier. When the word got out, Polanski called Sylbert, said, “Deek, Deek, thirty-five pounds! What was he trying to do, make a line from New York to Paris?”
On July 31, 1980, while Popeye was still in post, Evans pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of cocaine possession. Needless to say, Disney was not happy with all the bad publicity swirling around the producer. “Popeye was the first time the Walt Disney Company opened their arms to an outside partner, and I was arrested for cocaine!” continues Evans. “There was a headline every other day, ‘Bob “Cocaine” Evans.’ Can you imagine Walt Disney turning over in his grave, just thinking about opening his doors to do business with a Jew—and then this?”
Altman had his own troubles with Disney and supported Evans throughout his. “There’s one scene when Popeye jumps into the water and he goes, ‘Oh, shit!’ An executive called me, just reamed me out, saying, ‘No Disney film has ever had the word ‘shit’ in it, and no Disney film is going to have it as long as I am here.’”
It was on Popeye that Scottie Bushnell finally consolidated her power. “After Scottie came on the scene, you could never again have a meeting with Bob that wasn’t shaded and jaded,” says Tommy Thompson. “Anything anyone was trying to do, she would undermine. She’d be curled up on the sofa, somebody’d come in to talk about something, and when they’d leave, she’d nail ’em. ‘Well, I wonder what that was all about.’ ‘Whaddya mean? He wants to take a vacation.’ ‘Sure he does.’ Bob loved that, ate that up. He wouldn’t get rid of her. Scottie was the personification of evil, a witch who just nourished his blackness, that terrible, terrible black hole that’s in Bob that would come out when he drank.” Joan Tewkesbury, who wrote Nashville, and was later fired by Altman, says, “She was a real pain in the ass. She was a facilitator for Bob, but she was not a facilitator for some of the rest of us, and a lot of us were let go. McCabe, Thieves, Nashville, were actively collaborative. Everybody had something to give. That atmosphere changed, and I hated to see it happen.” Although many people laid Altman’s post-Nashville decline to Bushnell’s influence, Altman empowered Bushnell for his own reasons. It was not an accident, and may have been his version of the syndrome that afflicted other directors: if he was indeed a genius, as everyone said he was, collaboration was unnecessary.
Says Altman, “A lot of people hated Scottie. She had an abrasive manner. But she took a big load off my shouders, and she was very good at casting, she was very good with wardrobe. I used her as a way to deal with things that I didn’t want to deal with. But it went on too long. That relationship was starting to hurt the pictures, the talent, but I didn’t know what to do with her.”
When Popeye opened at the end of 1980, it didn’t do as well as expected, and was widely regarded as a failure. Says Altman, “The picture got an odor because it wasn’t Superman, and that’s what they were looking for.” This was Altman’s last studio film. He was slated to do Ragtime for Dino De Laurentiis, but De Laurentiis, insisting he wanted Redford to star, kicked him off. Altman’s world was turning to sand, sifting through his fingers. Says longtime collaborator Allan Nicholls, “Bob always had this studio pyromania, burning studios right and left, and finally, it became, Who do you go to?” (Years later, Altman wrote a song entitled “I’m Swimming Through the Ashes of the Bridges I’ve Burned.”)
FRANCIS AND ELEANOR went to New York. They ate dinner at Elaine’s, where they ran into a number of movie folk. Bernardo Bertolucci was at the next table, looking grim. Bob Fosse, haggard and ill, was at another, with one of his dancers. Eleanor thought, What is happening to all these directors?
In December, Coppola endured the indignity of seeing Cimino’s Vietnam picture, now disrespectfully dubbed Apocalypse First by the waggish press, beat his own film to the screen. He attended a screening in New York, was elaborately courteous to Cimino, only to have the upstart make not-so-veiled digs at Apocalypse in his interviews. It would get worse. Although Superman dominated the Christmas 1978 box office (ironically, it was written by David Newman, the co-writer of Bonnie and Clyde, and co-starred Margot Kidder, the siren of Nicholas Beach), The Deer Hunter was greeted with the kind of ecstatic reviews Coppola coveted for his own movie, punctuated by some sharp and angry dissent from what remained of the New Left, for its distortion of the facts.
The Deer Hunter was nominated for nine Oscars, and on April 9, 1979, it won five, including Best Film and Best Director, beating Coming Home, Heaven Can Wait, Midnight Express, and An Unmarried Woman. Coppola, in a moment freighted with drama, handed Cimino his award, and John Wayne, in his last public appearance before his death, handed out the Oscar for Best Picture. The writers of Coming Home picked up awards for Best Original Screenplay, as did Jane Fonda, for Best Actress. Backstage, Fonda lit into Cimino for making a “racist, Pentagon version of the war.” Vietnam Veterans Against the War picketed outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Coppola could do little but watch.
Rumors were rife that Apocalypse was unreleasable. The Black Stallion too was a year behind. UA tested Black Stallion in Seattle, at a screening attended by the filmmakers, Coppola, and David Field, UA’s new head of West Coast production. It was not a great success. The movie was too long and there was no ending. Afterward, they all went out to eat. Field reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulled out a piece of paper, and said, “Francis, I have some notes on the picture.” Director Carroll Ballard steeled himself for a fight, but before Field could finish another sentence, Francis raised his hand, said, “David, wait a second. You’ve got to understand that if this is the way Carroll wants this movie to go out, this is the way the movie’s going to go out.” Without another word, Field folded up the paper and stuffed it into his pocket. This was the way it was supposed to be, Coppola using his power to produce his friends’ movies and shield them from the clumsy hand of the studios. Says director Bob Dalva, who was there, “Francis protected Carroll. He protected me when I directed The Black Stallion Returns. He protected Caleb Deschanel on The Escape Artist. He used his power, and he stood up for his friends.”
But other things happened too that were not the way they were supposed to be. Coppola sent the BAC III to Paris to buy copper cookware for his kitchen. He became diverted by the prospect of buying UA, now limping along with its well-intentioned, but inexperienced production executives. He started making calls, trying to round up a group of filmmaker-investors. He called Beatty, who wasn’t interested. Undeterred, Coppola went on and on about the new digital technology, about creating a digital studio. “You know, Warren,” he said, “I’m telling you that when the cinema becomes electronic, actors can play more than one part. Sets can be made out of nothing.” Beatty remained noncommittal. Coppola called again, and again. Every time his mood was different. He was up, he was down. Francis recalls, “The next thing I know I was in this speeding car—it wasn’t an ambulance, but it felt like that—with my wife going to some doctor that Warren had told her about, and they’re suddenly shoving lithium down my throat. Warren had told my wife, ‘Your husband is in serious trouble. He could really be irreparably damaged.’ Like, I’m the crazy guy that Warren isn’t.” Sometime later, Beatty ran into Ellie at a Hollywood function. She thanked him for saving her husband’s life.
To those around him, it was evident that Coppola was in the grip of a full-blown, clinical case of manic depression. One day in 1979, near the end of post on Apocalypse, he virtually held a roomful of editors prisoner for several hours, haranguing them with a machine-gun fusillade of wild ideas. Word processors had just come out, and he described them as the key to a new way of ma
king movies. He wanted to do a ten-hour film version of Goethe’s Elective Affinities, in 3D, which people attributed to Melissa’s influence. He began negotiating to buy Hollywood General Studios in L.A., and started to talk about taking over Hollywood, building an empire. When the mania ebbed, he became depressed and paranoid, convinced that everyone was out to get him.
Coppola took lithium for about four years. It calmed him down, but he didn’t like it; it made him nauseous. He always said, “I don’t want lead in my body. What do I need this for?” The doctors told him, “You’ll be depressed.” He replied, “Well, I’ll be depressed.” They said, “Just don’t shoot yourself.”
Francis turned forty on April 7, 1979. A week later, he threw a Coppola-sized party, where the guests, who included Lucas, De Niro, and Hopper, chanted, “We will rule Hollywood! We will rule Hollywood!” while cheerleaders chanted, “Francis has the power!”
Coppola began to complain that he couldn’t satisfy Melissa, that she was insatiable. Eventually, it became clear to Coppola that he was not going to leave Ellie. “I have wept over the impossible question of dual loyalties,” he said. ‘“You feel loyal to your wife and your family, but you feel loyal to another person whom you have singled out for mutual confidence.... That’s probably the most destructive thing I’ve ever been through. But also, as I look back, I don’t think I was so much in love.... I think it was all about the project and needing that kind of muse to get myself together.... I realized you could change wives every ten years and be in the same situation. That it’s better to just have one wife. That marriage is best in the long term.” He took to introducing Ellie as “my first wife.” He said he meant it as a compliment; everyone they knew was divorced and they were still married, but the implied threat was evident. Melissa, meanwhile, started seeing Harrison Ford.
Coppola took the “work-in-progress” to Cannes in May, winning the Palme d’Or for an unprecedented second time. He held a press conference in which he excoriated rapt journalists packed into the two-thousand-seat Grand Salle theater, blaming them for the picture’s problems. At a dinner of some twenty or thirty people, including the editing crew, an attractive young woman flagrantly flirted with Francis, who did nothing to discourage her. Reaching the end of her rope, Ellie threw a glass of wine at her, initiating a wine-tossing melee.
When Milius first saw Apocalypse, he was so upset that Coppola had ruined his script that he reportedly put his fist through a door. Nor did Lucas like the picture, complaining he’d invested six years of his life in it, “only to see [my] original concept distorted by Coppola’s fervid imagination.” Apocalypse was not the smash that the first Godfather was, nor even Godfather II. The reviews were decidedly mixed. Critics were stunned by the hallucinatory first two thirds of the film, but the consensus was that the turgid and inconclusive last third did not work. Tavoularis’s corpse-strewn, skull-ornamented Kurtz compound was arresting, as was the mysterioso image of Brando’s ovoid, hairless head, but Coppola had indeed lost his way. The pressure he felt to live up to his (self-imposed) reputation simply deprived him of his voice. The picture was sensational in places, but it worked only intemittently. As Towne put it, “It was Apocalypse Now and Then.”
Once again, like Star Wars, The Godfather, and Taxi Driver, Apocalypse revolved around the issue of parricide. The New Hollywood directors were created in the crucible of generational conflict, and the highly charged relationship between fathers and sons became their core theme. Like the other Vietnam films, Apocalypse was less an attempt to grapple with the war in any realistic way than an occasion to hold up a mirror to the home-front struggles it provoked. Brando, of course, was the ur-father of this generation, the actor whose performances and rebellious example inspired its best work, yet who now stood a colossus astride the road to greatness, an obstacle Coppola—who long enjoyed a complicated love-hate relationship with the actor—had to overcome. Kurtz, lurking in shadow, clad in black, at once model and caution, became his Darth Vader, another incarnation of Charlie Manson, the scourge figure who had gone native and now, unchallenged, ruled over his family. The compound was his Spahn ranch. From another angle, Kurtz was one more incarnation of Coppola himself, or at least the monster of self-indulgence he had become.
Violating the boundaries between life and art to make their material their own was a dangerous way for these filmmakers to work. It was successful for a while, enriching both the life and the art, but as the two became more extravagant and interchangeable, New Hollywood directors lost the detachment of artists, and their lives and art sank into quicksand, joined in a fatal embrace. It was no wonder Coppola could not figure out what to do with Kurtz. He existed at the intersection of too many issues that were deeply personal. To kill him would be to indict himself, commit suicide, metaphorically speaking. To let him live would be to capitulate to the dark side. Coppola’s inability to resolve this dilemma prevented Apocalypse from becoming the masterpiece it might have been.
When all was said and done, Apocalypse, originally budgeted at $12 million, had cost well over $30 million, very likely over $40 million. It made a big splash when it finally landed but, as Bogdanovich puts it, the suits were not “thrilled about Apocalypse, let’s face it, ‘cause it cost a fortune. It made its money back, but that wasn’t what they wanted.” From this point forward, Coppola would be regarded in many quarters as damaged goods.
Still, he was pleased. He had become the poet of the imperfect. “Filmmaking is like winemaking,” he says. “You got all these grapes, some of them are burnt, some of them are not quite ripe, some of them the sugar isn’t right, and with the winemaker’s sweat, you make great wine.” He personally cleared $10 to $15 million from the picture, enough to take the next and fatal step on the road to disaster that had started with his modest establishment on Folsom Street in November 1969.
Coppola had moved to San Francisco in the first place to get away from the studios and the stultifying, movie-obsessed atmosphere of L.A. Ironically, he had internalized Hollywood, carried the studio system inside him—like Rosemary’s baby. But it grew too large. The Bay Area wasn’t enough. Nothing was ever enough. Always ambivalent, torn between being a filmmaker and a mogul, Coppola characteristically tried to do both, and resolved to carry the battle to the enemy. He expanded his operation to Hollywood.
Thirteen:
The Eve of Destruction
1079-80
• How Scorsese redeemed the movie brats with Raging Bull, while a blanket of coke descended on Beverly Hills, Bogdanovich tumbled into tabloid hell, and Heaven’s Gate buried the New Hollywood.
“We poured all of ourselves into one movie, and if it didn’t hit, our whole career went down with it. There are directors who, after certain titles, didn’t have anything more left, any more fight.”
—MARTIN SCORSESE
By the late ’70s, there was a hard white snow falling on Hollywood. Coke was so widespread that people wore small gold spoons around their necks as jewelry. Drug connections became intimates, friends, and boyfriends. You went out to eat, you’d leave a line of coke on the table for the waitress as a tip. Scorsese, exhausted, in poor health, and fueled by a perpetual coke high, tried to do everything. He promiscuously took on several projects at once. Then, toward the end of New York, New York, producer Jonathan Taplin called. The Band was going to break up, and he asked Scorsese to shoot a documentary about the group’s final concert on Thanksgiving Day 1976, which would become The Last Waltz. Without giving it a second thought, Scorsese agreed. “He never could resist Robbie Robertson and the Band,” says Irwin Winkler, who produced New York, New York. In the frame of mind he was in, he figured he could cut the film at night while he edited the feature during the day. Adds Taplin, “Marty was just so wired he could show up at any hour of the day or night, go into the editing room, do a sequence, and go on to the next thing.”
After Julia Cameron moved out in January 1977, Robertson left his family to move into Scorsese’s Mulholland Drive house. He had
delusions about becoming a movie star, and Marty was his ticket. “We were the odd couple—looking for trouble,” says Robertson. Reflects Sandy Weintraub, “It was a shame that Marty wasn’t gay. The best relationship he ever had was probably with Robbie.”
The Mulholland house was barely furnished, and notable for a seventeenth-century wooden crucifix concealing a dagger that hung over Marty’s bed. His friends puzzled over the symbolism. The house looked like a hotel for transients, filled with the groupies, visiting filmmakers, musicians, and druggies who made up Scorsese’s circle. The regulars, Steve Prince, Mardik Martin, Jay Cocks, and assorted hangers-on, used to gather in Scorsese’s projection room in the garage—which doubled as Robertson’s bedroom—and watch four or five movies a night. “Marty’s house was blacked out with blinds,” says Robertson, “soundproofed, and he installed an air system so you could breathe without opening the windows. We only had two problems: the light and the birds.”
“We were like vampires,” recalls Martin. “It was like, ‘Oh no, the sun is coming up.’ We never got to sleep before seven, eight A.M., for six months.” Marty had also put in an elaborate security system, which invariably malfunctioned, bringing unwelcome visits from rent-a-cops. Outside of watching movies and doing drugs, Marty’s only relaxation was playing with his collection of toy soldiers.
Marty had been taking pills since he was three, so by this time it was second nature to him. He took drugs like aspirin. He was still going up and down in weight. Coke depresses the appetite, but after going without food for two or three days, there was a lot of binge eating, a lot of junk food, anything that was at hand. Moreover, he and his friends needed booze to come down, so they knocked back a couple bottles of wine or vodka just to get to sleep. According to Taplin, “They would call the editor of The Last Waltz, Yeu-Bun Yee, in the middle of the night with ideas. They were so stoked they thought everyone else was up all night too.”
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 56