GODFATHER
GODFATHER
The Intimate
Francis Ford Coppola
Gene D. Phillips
With a Foreword by
Walter Murch
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY
Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 2004 by The University Press of Kentucky
Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.
All rights reserved.
Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 www.kentuckypress.com
05 06 07 08 5 4 3 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phillips, Gene D.
Godfather : the intimate Francis Ford Coppola / Gene D. Phillips.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8131-2304-6 (alk. paper)
1. Coppola, Francis Ford, 1939- I. Title.
PN1998.3.C67P48 2004
791.4302’33’092—dc22
2003024590
This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Member of the Association of
American University Presses
For
Stanley Kubrick,
the ultimate
Hollywood maverick
Contents
Foreword: Collaborating with Coppola by Walter Murch
Acknowledgments
Chronology for Francis Ford Coppola
Prologue: Artist in an Industry
Part One Hollywood Immigrant
1 Point of Departure: The Early Films and Screenplays
2 Going Hollywood: You’re a Big Boy Now and Finian’s Rainbow
3 Nightmares at Noon: The Rain People and The Conversation
Part Two The Mature Moviemaker
4 In a Savage Land: The Godfather
5 Decline and Fall: The Godfather Part II and The Godfather Part III
6 The Unknown Soldiers: Apocalypse Now, Apocalypse Now Redux, and Gardens of Stone
Part Three Artist in an Industry
7 Exiled in Eden: One from the Heart
8 Growing Pains: The Outsiders and Rumble Fish
9 Night Life: The Cotton Club
Part Four The Vintage Years
10 The Past as Present: Peggy Sue Got Married and “Rip Van Winkle”
11 The Disenchanted: Tucker: The Man and His Dream and New York Stories
12 Fright Night: Bram Stoker’s Dracula
13 The Vanishing Hero: The Rainmaker and Jack
Epilogue: The State of the Artist in the Industry Today
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Filmography
Index
Photographs follow page
Foreword
Collaborating with Coppola
Walter Murch,
film and sound editor
It disappeared long ago, but in 1972 the Window was still there, peering through milky cataracts of dust, thirty-five feet above the floor of Samuel Goldwyn’s old Stage 7.1 never would have noticed it if Richard hadn’t suddenly stopped in his tracks as we were taking a shortcut on our way back from lunch.
“That… was when Sound … was King!” he said, gesturing dramatically into the upper darknesses of Stage 7.
It took me a moment, but I finally saw what he was pointing to: something near the ceiling that resembled the observation window of a 1930s dirigible, nosing its way into the stage.
Goldwyn Studios, where Richard Portman and I were working on the mix of The Godfather, had originally been United Artists, built for Mary Pickford when she founded U.A. with Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith in the early 1920s. By 1972, Stage 7 was functioning as an attic—stuffed with the mysterious lumbering shapes of disused equipment—but it was there that Samuel Goldwyn produced one of the earliest of his many musicals: Whoopee (1930), starring Eddie Cantor and choreographed by Busby Berkeley. And it was there that Goldwyn’s director of sound, Gordon Sawyer, sat at the controls behind the Window, hands gliding across three Bakelite knobs, piloting his Dirigible of Sound into a new world … a world in which Sound was King.
Down below, Eddie Cantor and the All-Singing, All-Dancing Goldwyn Girls had lived in terror of the distinguished Man Behind the Window—and not just the actors, but musicians, cameramen (Gregg Toland among them), the director, the producer (Florenz Ziegfeld), even Sam Goldwyn himself. No one could contradict it if Mr. Sawyer, dissatisfied with the quality of the sound, leaned into his microphone and pronounced dispassionately but irrevocably the word “Cut!”
By 1972, forty-five years after his exhilarating coronation, King Sound seemed to be living in considerably reduced circumstances. No longer did the Man Behind the Window survey the scene from on high. Instead, the sound recordist was usually stuck in some dark corner with his equipment cart. The very idea of his demanding “Cut!” was inconceivable. Not only did none of those on the set fear his opinion, but they hardly consulted him and were frequently impatient when he did voice an opinion. Forty-five years seemed to have turned him from king to footman.
Was Richard’s nostalgia misplaced? What had befallen the Window? And were sound’s misfortunes all they appeared to be?
There is something about the liquidity and all-encompassing embrace of sound that might make it more accurate to speak of her as a queen rather than a king. But was she then perhaps a queen for whom the crown was a burden and who preferred to slip on a handmaiden’s bonnet and scurry incognito through the back passageways of the palace, accomplishing her tasks anonymously?
Neither Richard Portman nor I had any inkling on that afternoon when he showed me the Window that the record-breaking success of The Godfather several months later would trigger a revival in the fortunes of the film industry in general and of sound in particular.
Three years earlier, in 1969, I had been hired to create the sound effects for—and mix—The Rain People, a film written, directed, and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. He was a recent film school graduate, as was I, and we were both eager to make films professionally the way we had made them at school. Francis had felt that the sound on his previous film (Tinian’s Rainbow) had bogged down in the bureaucratic and technical inertia at the studios, and he didn’t want to repeat the experience.
He also felt that if he stayed in Los Angeles he wouldn’t be able to produce the inexpensive, independent films he had in mind. So he and a fellow film student, George Lucas, and I, and our families, moved up to San Francisco to start American Zoetrope. The first item on the agenda was the mix of The Rain People, to be done in the unfinished basement of an old warehouse on Folsom Street.
Ten years earlier, this would have been unthinkable, but the invention of the transistor had changed things technically and economically to such an extent that it seemed natural for the thirty-year-old Francis to go to Germany and buy—almost off the shelf—mixing and editing equipment from K.E.M. in Hamburg and to hire me, a twenty-six-year-old, to use it.
Technically, the equipment was state of the art, and yet it cost a fourth of what comparable equipment would have cost five ye
ars earlier. This halving of price and doubling of quality is familiar to everyone now, after thirty years of microchips, but at the time it was astonishing. The frontier between professional and consumer electronics began to fade away.
In fact, it faded to the extent that it now became economically and technically possible for one person to do what several had done before, and that other frontier—between the creation and mixing of sound effects—also began to disappear.
From Zoetrope’s beginning, the idea was to try to avoid the departmentalism that was sometimes the by-product of sound’s technical complexity and that tended too often to pit mixers (who came mostly from engineering—direct descendants of the Man Behind the Window) against the people who created the sounds. It was as if there were two directors of photography on a film, one who lighted the scene and another who photographed it, and neither could do much about countermanding the other.
We felt that there was now no reason—given the equipment that was becoming available in 1968—that the person who designed the sound track shouldn’t also be able to mix it and that the director would then be able to talk to one person, the sound designer, about the sound of the film the way he was able to talk to the production designer about the look of the film.
At any rate, it was against this background that the success of The Godfather led directly to the green-lighting of two Zoetrope productions: George Lucas’s American Graffiti and Francis Coppola’s Conversation—both with very different but equally adventuresome sound tracks where we were able to put our ideas to work.
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws soon topped the box office of The Godfather and introduced the world at large to the music of John Williams. The success of American Graffiti led to Star Wars (with music by the same John Williams), which in turn topped Jaws. The seventy-millimeter Dolby release format of Star Wars revived and reinvented magnetic six-track sound and helped Dolby Cinema Sound obtain a crucial foothold in film postproduction and exhibition. The success of the two Godfather films would allow Francis to make Apocalypse Now, which broke further ground in originating, at the end of the 1970s, what has now become the standard film sound format: three channels of sound behind the screen, left and right surrounds behind the audience, and low-frequency enhancement.
The Window is long gone, and will not now return, but the autocratic temporal power that disappeared with it has been repaid a hundred—a thousand—times in creative power: the ability to freely reassociate image and sound in different contexts and combinations.
This reassociation of image and sound is the fundamental pillar upon which the creative use of sound rests and without which it would collapse. Sometimes it is done simply for convenience (walking on cornstarch, for instance, happens to record as a better footstep-in-snow than snow itself). But beyond any practical consideration, I believe this reassociation should stretch the relationship of sound to image wherever possible. It should strive to create a purposeful and fruitful tension between what is on the screen and what is kindled in the mind of the audience.
This metaphoric distance between the images of a film and the accompanying sounds is—and should be—continuously changing and flexible, and it often takes a fraction of a second (sometimes even several seconds) for the brain to make the right connections. For instance, the image of a light being turned on accompanied by a simple click is a basic association that is fused almost instantly and produces a relatively flat mental image.
Still fairly flat, but a level up in dimensionality is the image of a door closing accompanied by the right “slam”—this can indicate not only the material of the door and the space around it but also the emotional state of the person closing it. The sound for the door at the end of The Godfather, for instance, needed to give the audience more than the correct physical cues about the door. It was even more important to get a firm, irrevocable closing that resonated with and underscored Michael’s final line: “Never ask me about my business, Kay.”
That door sound was related to a specific image, and, as a result, it was “fused” by the audience fairly quickly. Sounds, however, that do not relate to the visuals in a direct way function at an even higher level of dimensionality and take proportionately longer to resolve. The rumbling and piercing metallic scream just before Michael Corleone kills Solozzo and McCluskey in a restaurant in The Godfather is not linked directly to anything seen on screen, and so the audience is made to wonder—at least momentarily, if perhaps only subconsciously—”What is this?” The screech is from an elevated train rounding a sharp turn, so it is presumably coming from somewhere in the neighborhood (the scene takes place in the Bronx).
But precisely because it is so detached from the image, the metallic scream works as a clue to the state of Michael’s mind at the moment—the critical moment before he commits his first murder and his life turns an irrevocable corner. It is all the more effective because Michael’s face appears so calm and the sound is played so abnormally loud. This broadening tension between what we see and what we hear is brought to an abrupt end with the pistol shots that kill Solozzo and McCluskey: the distance between what we see and what we hear is suddenly collapsed at the moment that Michael’s destiny is fixed.
This moment is mirrored and inverted at the end of Godfather III. Instead of a calm face with a scream, we see a screaming face in silence. When Michael realizes that his daughter Mary has been shot, he tries several times to scream—but no sound comes out. In fact, Al Pacino was actually screaming, but the sound was removed in the editing. We are dealing here with an absence of sound, yet a fertile tension is created between what we see and what we would expect to hear, given the image. Finally, the scream bursts through, the tension is released, and the film—and the trilogy—is over.
The elevated train in The Godfather was at least somewhere in the vicinity of the restaurant, even though it could not be seen. In the opening reel of Apocalypse Now, the jungle sounds that fill Willard’s hotel room come from nowhere on screen or in the “neighborhood,” and the only way to resolve the great disparity between what we are seeing and hearing is to imagine that these sounds are in Willard’s mind: that his body is in a hotel room in Saigon, but his mind is off in the jungle, where he dreams of returning. If the audience members can be brought to a point where they will bridge with their own imagination such an extreme distance between picture and sound, they will be rewarded with a correspondingly greater dimensionality of experience.
The risk, of course, is that the conceptual thread that connects image and sound can be stretched too far, and the dimensionality will collapse: the moment of greatest dimension is always the moment of greatest tension.
The question remains in all of this, why we generally perceive the product of the fusion of image and sound in terms of the image. Why does sound usually enhance the image and not the other way around? In other words, why does King Sight still sit on his throne and Queen Sound haunt the corridors of the palace?
In his book AudioVision, Michael Chion describes an effect that he calls the acousmêtre, which depends on delaying the fusion of sound and image to the extreme by supplying only the sound—most frequently a voice—and withholding the revelation of the sound’s true source until nearly the end of the film. Only then, when the audience has used its imagination to the fullest, is the identity of the source revealed. The Wizard in The Wizard of Oz is one of a number of examples, along with the mother in Psycho and Hal in 2001 (and although Chion didn’t mention it, Wolfman Jack in American Graffiti and Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now). The acousmêtre is—for various reasons having to do with our perceptions—a uniquely cinematic device: the disembodied voice seems to come from everywhere and therefore to have no clearly defined limits to its power.
And yet … there is an echo here of our earliest experience of the world: the revelation at birth that the song that sang to us from the very dawn of consciousness in the womb—a song that seemed to come from everywhere and to be part of us before we had any conception of what
“us” meant—that this song is the voice of another and that she is now separate from us and we from her. We regret the loss of former unity—some say that our lives are a ceaseless quest to retrieve it—and yet we delight in seeing the face of our mother: the one is the price to be paid for the other.
This earliest, most powerful fusion of sound and image sets the tone for all that are to come.
Acknowledgments
First of all, I am grateful to Francis Ford Coppola, who was willing to talk with me at the Cannes International Film Festival, for reading the précis from which this book was developed and for reading through all of his published interviews to check for factual errors. In addition, I would also like to single out the following among those who have given me their assistance in the course of the long period in which I was engaged in remote preparation for this study: Tennessee Williams, for sharing his thoughts with me about This Property Is Condemned, a film that Coppola co-scripted; film director Fred Zinnemann for discussing with me the parallels between the Johnny Fontane character in The Godfather and Frank Sinatra in his film From Here to Eternity. Actors Shirley Knight (The Rain People), Terri Garr (The Conversation, One From the Heart), the late Elizabeth Hartman (You’re a Big Boy Now), and the late Richard Conte (The Godfather); and producer Albert Ruddy (The Godfather) for speaking with me about working with Coppola.
Many institutions and individuals provided research materials. I would like to specifically mention: the staff of the Motion Picture Section of the Library of Congress and the staff of the Film Study Center of the Museum of Modern Art. Research materials were also provided by the Paramount Collection of the Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Research Library of the University of California at Los Angeles; the Warner Brothers Collection in the Archive of the Library of the University of Southern California; the Script Repositories of Warner Brothers, Paramount, Universal, and United Artists; Musette Buckely, Vice-President of Production Resources, Warner Brothers; Vincent LoBrutto, research professor of the School of Visual Arts, New York City; Lieutenant Robert Clarke, U.S.M., for discussing Coppola’s two Vietnam films with me; film expert Edin Dzafic, who helped track down Coppola’s amateur films; and Raymond Baumhart, S.J., Professor of Management in the Loyola University School of Business Administration, for discussing Tucker: The Man and His Dream with me.
Godfather Page 1