The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  When it came to the second part of The Godfather, in 1974, Coppola offered a thank-you, from a movie kid to a one-time patron. He gave Roger Corman a small part in the picture.

  Born in 1926, Corman was educated at Stanford and Oxford. But he was a messenger boy at Fox in the late 1940s, and he couldn’t forget the thrill. So he went back to Hollywood and started to direct low-budget action movies—Westerns, horror, rock music, bikers, gangsters. He worked fast, cheap, with Hollywood stars on the slide, good technicians, and the new breed of film students to help out for next to nothing and the chance to see a picture being made. His movies had titles such as Swamp Women (1956), Gunslinger (1956), It Conquered the World (1956), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), Machine-Gun Kelly (1958; that was early Charles Bronson), A Bucket of Blood (1959), House of Usher (1960; that was Vincent Price in Edgar Allan Poe, the closest Corman came to respectability).

  Along the way, if he trusted a novice, he would let him make a picture if it was very, very inexpensive. The unofficial “school” he presided over had an impressive group of students: Irvin Kershner made Stakeout on Dope Street (1958), Monte Hellman did Beast from Haunted Cave (1959), Coppola directed Dementia 13 (1963), Peter Bogdanovich’s debut was Targets (1968), and Martin Scorsese made Boxcar Bertha (1972).

  If you wanted to see one of those now, it would have to be Targets. Bogdanovich was not a film-school kid, but he had trained as an actor with Stella Adler and worked in the theater while making himself a film buff in the French style. He got to know filmmakers (and he learned to imitate their talk as a way of hoping to become them) by writing about them and mounting retrospective surveys of their work in New York in the early 1960s. Targets was an odd mixture of Corman quickie and film scholarship. The producer gave him some sets, $130,000 for a budget, and a few days of Boris Karloff’s time; the veteran actor had been doing horror pictures for Corman. So Bogdanovich and Samuel Fuller threw a script together in which a young director—Bogdanovich took that part himself—is working with an aging horror star, Byron Orlok, and their story intersects that of an apparently ordinary young man who goes on a shooting rampage.

  This figure was based on Charles Whitman, who had climbed a tower on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin in 1966 and killed sixteen people with his rifle and telescopic sight—he sees the people before he shoots. But in Targets, the tower was replaced by the screen of a drive-in theater, with the killer shooting through it at audience members as the real Orlok advanced on a screen playing his own image. (The same movie included a quote from Howard Hawks’s The Criminal Code, from 1931—because Karloff had been so menacing in that film.)

  Targets’ sketch of real-life outrages provoking guilt in moviemakers was ahead of its time, and the use of the screen as a site of action was witty and very well filmed. It’s a B picture and a reminder of how inventive that subgenre could be. In addition, it suggests that in the Corman era, Bogdanovich was the most sophisticated of the kids. Of course, Targets was the same year as Bonnie and Clyde and a more foreboding assessment of gun violence than Beatty or Penn managed. The young shootist was not explained, but the empty blandness of his life and his Marine service in Vietnam seemed to have pushed him over an edge. When that character murders his own wife and mother, something beyond routine movie horror was being glimpsed. There was a disconcerting balance between the telescopic sight and the drive-in screen in the composition of his detachment from self or society.

  Bogdanovich’s next picture was The Last Picture Show (1971). It had another Hawks quote (from Red River, the last film playing in the movie house of a windswept Texas town). It came from a novel by Larry McMurtry and was shot in heartfelt, gritty black and white. For its cast it gathered relative veterans, Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman (they both won supporting Oscars), and newcomers—Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, Cybill Shepherd, Randy Quaid. There’s a French mood to this Texas, but it’s more Renoir than Godard, and it has sadness and respect for its people. It’s the first of a remarkable trio from Bogdanovich—followed by What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973)—that suggested the Hawks quotes were not just for show. Bogdanovich had a versatility and an assurance that reminded you of the classic director from thirty years earlier. For a moment it seemed that the new kids might be like their heroes.

  The Last Picture Show was a BBS film. This was a company—B for Bob Rafelson, B for Bert Schneider, S for Steve Blauner—that flourished in the early 1970s and that was set up after it had seized on Easy Rider when Roger Corman let the maverick escape. He had said he would do the Terry Southern script, though he was a little suspicious of Dennis Hopper as its director. Then a partner, Samuel Arkoff, winced at the thought of the heroes selling deadly drugs. In the hiatus, Jack Nicholson told his friend Bob Rafelson about the project. Rafelson was directing Head (1968) for Raybert Productions—it was BB before S came along—and he took the Easy Rider idea to “Bert,” Bert Schneider, who asked how much money it needed. “$350,000,” was the reply, and a deal was done.

  That farrago of drugs, motorbikes, music, sex, and the road had been one of the most successful films of the age (a world gross of $60 million), and it started a line of pictures from BBS, made for just $1 million each, to deal with an authentic America, using new actors. Their debut picture was Five Easy Pieces (1970) and it featured Jack Nicholson, who had got the role of the disaffected lawyer in Easy Rider only when Bruce Dern refused and his first substitute, Rip Torn, turned difficult.

  Taken from a script by Carole Eastman, Five Easy Pieces was another version of the double-man story, itself a model of the ordinary fellow getting up in the light of the screen: Bobby Dupea (Nicholson) seems like a rowdy, redneck oil-rigger in Bakersfield; but he’s also the talented escapee from a musical family living up in the Pacific Northwest. The film goes from one location to another, and it reveals that Bobby is emotionally dysfunctional to such an extent that when life gets too much for him he dumps his girl and his jacket and hitches a ride to Alaska at the end of the film.

  Nicholson and Rafelson were old buddies. They had met at a Los Angeles film society and written Head together, using the actor Harry Dean Stanton’s apartment when he was working and they had nowhere else to go. Nicholson had been in L.A. nearly ten years, doing whatever he could (often for Corman), but not making much impression. That he began to become a national favorite around 1970 is akin to the way perceptions of Bogart shifted in the early 1940s. The audience, the filmmakers, and even the actor himself found the deadpan sarcasm of an existential outsider who just can’t make it.

  Nicholson was the common man, working class even, and that guy hadn’t been on-screen since Cagney in the 1930s. (Both men had Irish roots.) He’s not quite a tragic victim, because much of his loss is his own fault, but Nicholson’s screen character—and it reaches from Five Easy Pieces through Jake Gittes in Chinatown to Randall McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—is that of a restless loner who becomes a fall guy. That made him more than Bogart in his successes of the 1940s. Jack was a failure, and we knew it. By implication, the most interesting American men might be failures, too. No one had admitted that in movies before, or possessed Jack’s wry, snarly humor. “Does it hurt?” he is asked in Chinatown (its script by Robert Towne) when his nose is slit (the work of a slim thug played by his director, Roman Polanski). “Only when I breathe,” replies Gittes, and there was a new fatalism. But his cool air of defeat made Jack famous and very rich—his points deal on Batman (1989) earned him $60 million.

  Five Easy Pieces took in a lot of money and it was nominated for Best Picture. It was released through Columbia, because BBS had family contacts there, but it was a picture made the way Rafelson wanted. It was followed by not just The Last Picture Show, a second success, but The King of Marvin Gardens (1972, with Nicholson and Bruce Dern as brothers, depressive and manic) and some other films that did less well. BBS lasted only a few years, because the partners got bored and wanted to move on to other things. Rafelson has adm
itted he got out of BBS when it was his turn to collect the rents in the building the company owned—he dropped out the way Bobby Dupea had done in his own film. BBS hardly noticed its own significance as a production model, because the initials wanted to make movies and live better. It’s sentimental to believe the movie brats, as they were sometimes called, had anything but their own interests at heart. And those interests were the usual ones in pictures: money, girls, and a better life. The urge to imitate Howard Hawks worked in so many ways.

  Robert Altman was more persistent, and difficult, but he was never quite a movie brat, even if M.A.S.H., the biggest hit he would ever enjoy, is a 1970 film. Altman was from Kansas City (born in 1925). He fought in the Pacific war and had a long training in the Midwest making industrial films before moving into television. He was in his forties by the time he got to M.A.S.H., fourteen years older than Bogdanovich, and never a clubbable man. But Altman had a similar urge to address the old Hawksian models. That drew him to The Long Goodbye (1973), a new version of Raymond Chandler’s world (scripted by Leigh Brackett, who had worked on the original The Big Sleep in 1946).

  But this was now the Los Angeles of the early 1970s, filmed in wide screen with an easygoing zoom photography by Vilmos Zsigmond, and a total reappraisal of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. The knowingness and the biting wit of Bogart’s private eye was replaced by Elliott Gould, untidy, hapless, perhaps a little druggy, a sucker most of the time, talking to himself, and a man who has a neurotic cat but no girl. Hawks’s fantasy had been immaculate and irresistible, but Altman saw Marlowe as a dreamy loser, falling behind the money race of L.A., inclined to trust the wrong people, but ever amiable. His single comfort in the film is the fond, mocking way the song “The Long Goodbye” (written by John Williams, lyrics by Johnny Mercer) is the only score to the picture, a refrain that keeps coming back in so many different styles and versions.

  But The Long Goodbye opens and closes with the old standard “Hooray for Hollywood,” and it concludes with a gesture toward the unyielding conclusion to The Third Man. So Altman knew his history but he distrusted it and felt sick over the white lies of the factory system. In a sour Altman touch, Sterling Hayden plays the alcoholic writer who has given up the ghost, trading on our knowledge of Hayden’s own remorse over having been a friendly witness for HUAC. No one ever accused Altman of being a gentle fellow. He had a mean streak. But its offsetting benefit was the mistrust, solitude, and breakdown in his films, and it went with a helpless sympathy in the way he looked at the oddity of people.

  This was Altman’s third coup in three years. For in 1971 he had re-drafted the Western as a melancholy love story about a fool who cannot impose his story on the world but who ends up with an epic triumph that no one notices in the falling snow and the lamenting songs of Leonard Cohen. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) had Warren Beatty as John Q. McCabe, in a beard and derby hat, a brothel-keeper of sorts in the Northwest, taken over and smitten by Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), but such a chump at handling the local syndicate that he signs his own death warrant. (It’s another film about the defeat of the individual.)

  As photographed by Zsigmond, McCabe and The Long Goodbye proposed a new way of seeing. For decades Hollywood had constructed and composed its images as framed things: they were the brickwork of stability. But Altman and Zsigmond substituted a slippery wide-screen vista where the slow zooms oozed in and out, and we were left as searching eyes. “What should I look at? What is there to see and what is hidden?” Altman often seems to film in what Gavin Lambert, referring to a part of Los Angeles, once called “the slide area.”

  That was as radical a stylistic departure as Godard’s jump-cutting, for it argues that the screen’s threshold is a place for searching, instead of somewhere we receive decisive, chosen sights. The imagery relinquishes its old assurance, but we are drawn deeper into the maze and the illusion. And the melancholy in both these pictures is part of a forlorn inquiry, wistful over the old, vanished indicators. Altman went further still. Where once sound had been skillfully miked and the final soundtrack mixed, cleaned, and clarified, for sense and meaning, these two films leave us asking ourselves, “What did he say? Did you quite hear that?” The spatial confusion was aural, too, and the players were miked separately, often with the new radio mikes, and a mix was then made that brought voices in or out and was seldom clean and not always audible. This may seem perverse, but a movie where looking and hearing are muddled or compromised may get closer to our uncertain experience of life than the emphatic precision of the golden age, when a shot or a frame did not pass without being completely informative and “correct.” “Was that take ‘okay’? If not, take it again.”

  Another facet to his style was Altman’s developing interest in groups—and that was another novelty in American film, where the hierarchy of stars, supports, bit parts, and extras had been set in stone. Altman was always close to scorning or bypassing stars—he and Beatty got on badly because of this—and he loved crowded shots and group scenes. The first destination for that approach would be Nashville (1975), a whimsical portrait of the real place, with twenty-six roles of more or less the same size. Further down the road, Short Cuts (1993), derived from stories by Raymond Carver, was a panorama of Los Angeles in which the pattern of overlapping events conveys a very fresh sensibility for real turmoil held in place, or kept calm, by the principle that no single story, person, or self-centered universe really matters enough to be the center of attention.

  That’s one explanation for how Altman was making the most innovative American films in the moment of The Godfather. By reputation, Coppola’s picture is violent. But Brando’s Vito Corleone is as adorable as he is magnificent. Think of Joe Pesci in Casino (1995), and you realize how much hideous pathology is left out of Vito. He has a kitten in his lap in that opening scene; the enchantment goes all the way to the moment he is playing with a grandson in the garden and has his heart attack. He is gracious, kind, and sad.

  If you want to confront real psychotic danger try Mark Rydell’s Marty Augustine in The Long Goodbye, a sort of stand-up comic gangster until he smashes a Coke bottle in his girlfriend’s face. That unexpected moment is something rare in violent movies: it truly conveys the hideous damage of broken life. And that was what Altman was always searching for. Show audiences today the killings in The Godfather and they follow the ritual with reverence and satisfaction. (Those final executions are intercut with a baptism service.) But show them the Coke bottle sequence in The Long Goodbye and they turn away in distress. “Why did you show me that? Because such things happen?”

  “Why should I do it?” Francis Coppola asked his father, Carmine. By chance, they had crossed paths at Burbank airport. Francis had been at the Paramount building all day. “They want me to direct this hunk of trash,” he told his father. He may have heard through the grapevine that the Mario Puzo novel The Godfather had already been turned down by Arthur Penn, Peter Yates, Costa-Gavras, Otto Preminger, Elia Kazan, Fred Zinnemann, and Franklin Schaffner. But those guys weren’t thirty-one and in debt, like Francis. He told his father he preferred to make art pictures, not lousy anti-Italian mobster stuff. But Dad said take the money and then do your own things. The money turned out to be $125,000 against 6 percent of the rentals.

  The Puzo novel had been published by Putnam in 1969 on a $5,000 advance. It sold a million copies in hardback and had a paperback advance of $410,000. With the best will in the world, critics admitted it was a piece of trash, but one the public enjoyed. Paramount, in the person of its production chief, Robert Evans, bought the book on a $12,000 option against $85,000. They hired Al Ruddy to produce it, gave him a copy of the book, and asked what sort of movie he could foresee. Ruddy replied, “An ice-blue terrifying movie about people you love.” These are the first words close to sense on the project.

  Ruddy and Paramount chose Coppola for several reasons: the kid had won an Oscar writing the screenplay for Patton; he had had his training with the UCLA film school and Roger C
orman; he had directed a few films—You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), Finian’s Rainbow (1968), and The Rain People (1969), none of which had made money—plus, everyone else they asked turned them down; Francis was of Italian descent; and they still couldn’t reckon how enormous or prestigious this venture would be. If they had known, they might have got Luchino Visconti, which shows it’s best not to know. I realize this sounds irreverent. We take it for granted The Godfather is a masterpiece, but that came later.

  Puzo had done a script no one liked, but then Coppola sat down with him on a second draft. Meanwhile, the great gamble of casting set in. Paramount had its own ideas: Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra, and Burt Lancaster had all been mentioned as Vito, but Coppola had his mind set on Marlon Brando. This outraged the studio: Brando had done a lot of bad work in the 1960s, and the legend was that he had destroyed Mutiny on the Bounty with his salary, his demands, and his delays. Puzo himself had approached Brando, and the actor had warned him that no one would make it with him. Dino de Laurentiis told Paramount that if they used Brando, the film was dead in Italy.

  But Coppola had his own casting director, Fred Roos, who had first worked on Five Easy Pieces and who was in the habit of going to small plays off Broadway and asking the advice of other actors. That’s how Roos saw John Cazale and knew immediately that he was Fredo. No one at first quite grasped the significance of the role of Michael, though the actors under consideration included Robert Redford, Ryan O’Neal, James Caan, Tommy Lee Jones, and even Robert De Niro. But Roos knew Al Pacino and believed he had the eyes for the part, even if his two films so far, Me, Natalie (1969) and The Panic in Needle Park (1971), suggested nothing like the necessary strength. Robert Duvall would be Tom Hagen, but a Roos pal, Jack Nicholson, had been a contender, too. Francis’s sister, Talia Shire, would be Connie. Diane Keaton was cast as Kay, but there were others on the possibles list, including Jill Clayburgh, Blythe Danner, Michelle Phillips, and Geneviève Bujold.