Moreover, in Ireland Coppola met a British producer, Raymond Stross (The Fox). Coppola recalls that Stross was mightily impressed with the young director’s description of his movie as a slasher-type picture, which was obviously designed to cash in on Hitchcock’s highly successful Psycho, “with a lot of people getting killed with axes, and so forth.”28 Stross matched Corman’s $20,000 with another $20,000 of production capital in exchange for the British distribution rights to the picture. Corman got to hear how Coppola by some adroit wheeling and dealing had managed to swell his own bank account with $40,000 of production money and was accountable to no one as to how he spent it. The producer accordingly wanted to withdraw his half of the money from the production—to no avail, since the entire amount was in Coppola’s own account.
Coppola then settled down to write a screenplay, working virtually non-stop for three frantic days and nights. He developed his original concept into a full-length script, which he typed directly onto mimeograph stencils for immediate distribution to cast and crew. He had initially intended to call the movie Dementia, but Corman soon discovered that that title had been preempted by an hour-long 1955 film that depicted the Freudian fantasies of a troubled woman. So Coppola added the legendary unlucky number to his title and came up with Dementia 13.
To shoot the picture, Coppola was allowed to use the facilities of Ardmore Studios in Dublin for free, since Raymond Stross was part owner of the studio. Coppola, with his minimal crew of nine, shot for nine days at Ardmore—which was the length of time decreed by Corman for principal photography. In addition, Coppola did some additional location work in the country for a couple of days, thereby going over-schedule slightly. He still completed principal photography in record time, but he did not shoot the picture in three days as some commentators on the film have asserted.
Once production was underway, Corman sent Coppola frequent telegrams urging him to include generous helpings of sex and violence in the picture to satisfy Corman’s drive-in following, and Coppola did his best to comply. He had, after all, observed how some young filmmakers would try to straddle the fence between making an art house film and an exploitation film and would end up with some sort of hybrid “that wasn’t good enough for an art film or funky enough as an exploitation film.”29 In short, Coppola had no illusions about what sort of movie Corman expected him to make and attempted to meet his producer’s expectations.
A group of Coppola’s fellow students from the UCLA film school came over to Dublin at their own expense to help out with the production. John Vicario, the camera operator, was accompanied by his girlfriend, Eleanor Neil, who had a degree from UCLA’s Art Department. When she arrived at the farmhouse that was Coppola’s production headquarters on location, she found Coppola, who had been up all night, shirtless and disheveled, pounding out some pages of the script on mimeo masters. She was impressed with his dedication. Eleanor Neil assisted the art director, Albert Locatelli, and eventually earned a screen credit as a set decorator. Meanwhile, her relationship with Vicario cooled as she and Coppola became an item. They eventually married after the picture was completed, in Las Vegas on February 2, 1963.
The cast of Dementia 13 not only included some of the actors from The Young Racers, such as William Campbell and Patrick Magee, but also some of the members of Dublin’s distinguished Abbey Theater, such as Eithne Dunn, whom Coppola coaxed into playing character parts.
The plot that Coppola conjured up for Dementia 13 initially centers on John Haloran and his wife Louise. While John rows Louise, a brassy blonde, on a pitch-dark lake they argue about his mother’s will, which stipulates that Louise will profit from Lady Haloran’s will only as long as John, who has a weak heart, remains alive. John, exhausted from the strain of rowing as well as from the quarrel, abruptly succumbs to a heart attack before they return to shore. The cruel Louise, after watching her husband expire, actually slaps his face in irritation at the thought of his jeopardizing her claim to part of his mother’s estate by his ill-timed death. The scheming Louise pushes John’s corpse overboard in order to hide his death and subsequently informs Lady Haloran (Eithne Dunn) and her other two sons, Richard (William Campbell), a sculptor, and Billy (Bart Patton), that John has flown to New York on business.
Lady Haloran, who presides over Castle Haloran, continues to mourn morbidly for her deceased daughter Kathleen, seven years dead, who perished in the lake as a child. Louise plots to drive Lady Haloran mad so that she can break the aging woman’s will in the event that John’s body is eventually discovered. In pursuing her plan, she ties some of Kathleen’s nursery dolls together and dives into the lake, leaving them at the bottom of the lake, with a view to their eventually surfacing as an eerie reminder to Lady Haloran of Kathleen’s death. While under water, Louise spies a life-sized replica of Kathleen’s body lying next to a gravestone on the lake’s floor. When Louise rises to the lake’s surface close to the shore, she is bludgeoned to death by an unseen attacker. This episode, of course, is a revised version of the scene that Coppola originally pitched to Corman as the basis of his film.
Lady Haloran pays a visit to Kathleen’s dollhouse, which she has turned into a musty shrine to her dead daughter. There she discovers the effigy of Kathleen—it apparently floated to the surface of the lake, was retrieved by the psycho loose on the estate, and was placed in Kathleen’s playhouse. Just then the ax-wielder appears and savagely smashes the dollhouse to pieces. Lady Haloran flees the premises and narrowly escapes being murdered.
Richard’s fiancée Kane (Mary Mitchel) endeavors to convince him to leave the doom-ridden estate, particularly after Simon (Karl Schanzer), an old friend of the Halorans, is dispatched by an ax after he discovers Louise’s corpse hidden in the woods. Justin Caleb, the family doctor (Patrick Magee), then devises a scheme to smoke out the killer.
Dr. Caleb orders the lake to be drained, and a gravestone turns up, bearing the inscription “Forgive me, Kathleen dear.” Caleb recalls that Billy has been suffering from nightmares ever since Kathleen’s death, so the doctor strongly suspects that Billy knows more about Kathleen’s death than he has ever divulged. Accordingly, at the wedding reception for Richard and Kane on the lawn of the estate, Caleb confronts Billy with the ubiquitous wax figure of Kathleen’s corpse, which had turned up in the dollhouse earlier.
He forces Billy to admit that he accidentally pushed Kathleen into the pond when they were scuffling about, playing a children’s game on the shore. In fact, the effigy of Kathleen is really a wax doll Billy made to “relieve his guilt for her death,” as the doctor puts it. With that, Billy goes berserk and is thereby revealed to be a homicidal maniac whose obsession with death has led him to murder Louise and others. Just as he is about to attack Kane with an ax lying conveniently on the lawn, Dr. Caleb shoots him dead. Caleb then melodramatically buries Billy’s hatchet in the skull of the effigy, to dramatize the fact that the curse on the Haloran family has been shattered at last.
It is easy to pick flaws in Dementia 13. For one thing, Dr. Caleb’s explanation of Billy’s psychosis is “cookbook Freud,” a bizarre elaboration on Freud’s theory of neurotic guilt. The screenplay has an interesting premise, but the ending is too abrupt and hence unsatisfactory. For another thing, the performances are uneven: while some of the cast underact, Patrick Magee gives an unbridled performance and well nigh chews up the scenery. In addition, Karl Schanzer turns in a performance as Simon that is just as amateurish as the one he gave as the Peeping Tom in Tonight for Sure.
On the other hand, veteran actress Eithne Dunn as the disturbed matriarch steals nearly every scene she is in. Another point on the positive side is that the limited budget and short shooting schedule inspired Coppola to improvise practical solutions to production limitations in a rather inventive manner. For example, because most of the scenes took place at night or in murky interiors, Coppola photographed many scenes in deep, jarring shadows. He was therefore able to get away with simple, sparsely furnished settings because they were
shrouded in shadows and, in this fashion, to conceal the film’s meager production values. More importantly, the murky, darkened sets were perfectly attuned to the grim atmosphere of a horror picture. Another plus for the film is that the pace never lags, since the suspenseful story is punctuated with not only scenes of violence but smatterings of piquant sex. At one point Richard and Kane are shown embracing passionately on the grounds of the estate while the camera pulls back to reveal Lady Haloran spying on them from her window.
Nevertheless, Corman was not satisfied with Coppola’s rough cut. When the director showed it to him back in Hollywood, Corman lambasted the picture immediately after the screening. He criticized the shallow, inept script, which presented a pinwheeling series of murders without enough transitional material to link them together into a coherent narrative. After a stormy shouting match, Coppola convinced Corman that he could film some additional material along with some voice-over narration by various characters on the sound track in order to plug up the holes in the plot. He then shot some additional footage, with Griffith Park in Los Angeles standing in for the Irish countryside.
But Coppola drew the line when Corman insisted on another ax murder to bolster the picture’s commercial potential for the drive-in trade. When Coppola adamantly refused to oblige him, Corman commissioned Jack Hill, who had worked on Tonight for Sure with Coppola, to write and film a couple of additional scenes to accommodate him. “Roger wanted some more violence, which he got—though not from me,” Coppola states laconically.30 Corman expressed his gratitude to Hill by giving him a screen credit that reads, “Second unit written and directed by Jack Hill.”
Not yet finished tinkering with the movie, Corman saddled the picture with a five-minute prologue called the “D-13 Test,” in which an actor impersonating a psychiatrist tested filmgoers to ascertain if they were emotionally stable enough to view the movie. The questions he asked the viewers to consider included: “Are you afraid of death by drowning? … Have you ever attempted suicide?” This opening, which was presumably part of Hill’s second unit work, was used only for the movie’s original theatrical release and was jettisoned when Dementia 13 was released on TV and on videocassette. Finally, in an effort to beef up the film’s ad campaign, the sensational posters warned, “Do not see this film alone, or if you have a weak heart.”
The majority of film critics ignored Dementia 13 when it opened in New York in September 1963. Even Variety, which normally reviewed lesser Corman efforts like The Young Racers, overlooked it. The few reviewers who did notice it dismissed the picture as the sort of teen-oriented “axploitation movie” that was typical of the Corman film factory, made on a microbudget with a shooting schedule to match. One critic opined that the characters were mostly cardboard cutouts and that the plot was drowned in blood. Another reviewer quipped that he was not interested in learning about the fate of the first twelve demented lunatics referred to in the movie’s title—number thirteen was quite enough. He added that the wooden dialogue at times seemed muffled and that that, after all, might be a blessing.
Be that as it may, Dementia 13 did show a modest profit and has been judged more benignly by film historians who have reassessed it over the years. Thus, after it was released to video, American Film commented in 1990 that Coppola’s skill in portraying cinematic violence in The Godfather was already operative in Dementia 13, “in which the finest scenes are decidedly the bloodiest”—for example, the “tabloid-lit” scene in which the murderer slaughters Louise, “who should have known better than to take a mid-picture swim in her underwear.”31
In addition, Cowie sees the picture as a bellwether of Coppola’s future career and astutely observes that Dementia 13 prefigures Coppola’s later work by introducing his interest in the family as a source of strife and tragedy—from the neurotic Lady Haloran’s endless mourning for her dead daughter Kathleen to her criminally insane son Billy’s multiple homicides. Looking back on the movie, Coppola seems satisfied with it. “I think it showed promise; it was imaginative,” he comments, appraising it as more than a mere accumulation of clichés. “In many ways it has some of the nicest visuals I have ever done.”32 He may well have in mind the convincing atmosphere of dread created by the shots of the forbidding castle with its shadowy passageways, which is effectively employed to suggest a disquieting atmosphere of fear and foreboding. It is worth noting that there is a homage of sorts to the film in an episode of The Sopranos (2001), a TV series about the Mafia. In it the daughter of a Mafia don and her date attend a screening of Dementia 13 at a New York revival house and are appropriately frightened.
Shortly after Coppola finished his chores on Dementia 13, he decided to sever his relationship with Corman. He appreciated the firsthand experience he had obtained as a tyro filmmaker while working under Corman’s tutelage, but he was still disgruntled about the additional scenes Corman had insisted that Hill add to the picture. So, in the early winter of 1963, when Coppola was offered a job as screenwriter at $375 a week by Seven Arts, an independent producing organization that later amalgamated with Warner Brothers, he took it. Seven Arts had expressed interest in Coppola on the basis of his winning the 1962 Samuel Goldwyn screenwriting award, a coup that Corman had publicized in the trades while Coppola was in his employ.
Coppola was still a graduate student at UCLA at this point, and he recalls that “the day I got my first job as a screenwriter, there was a big sign on the film school’s bulletin board saying, ‘Sell out!”‘Although some of his fellow students encouraged him to work in the film industry and even came over to Ireland to help him make Dementia 13, others treated him with a resentment grounded in jealousy. “I was making money,” he explains. “I was already doing what everybody was just talking about.”33
The Early Screenplays
Seven Arts was in the business of packaging film productions: preparing a first-draft script, obtaining commitments from stars and a director, and then selling the production package to a major studio, which would then finance and produce the movie in question. In 1963 Seven Arts had an option on Carson McCullers’s controversial novella, Reflections in a Golden Eye, an exercise in Southern Gothic dealing with homosexuality, nymphomania, and other lurid topics. No screenwriter had as yet been able to come up with a viable script from this shocking material. With the option on the book running out, the front office decided to let Coppola, their newest acquisition, take a crack at it. Seven Arts was pleased with the decent screen adaptation of the novella that Coppola was able to turn out in six weeks, and so was John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), who was set to direct. But Huston’s previous commitments forced him to postpone the venture, and when he finally made the picture he ultimately used a screenplay by Chapman Mortimer and Gladys Hill. The film as finally released endeavors to conjure up some dark melodrama, only to wind up chasing its own tail amid a slew of unlikely plot twists. So Coppola was fortunate not to have his name associated with the final product.
Meanwhile, Seven Arts was still impressed with his version of the script, for his screenplay for Reflections showed that he could tackle a job on order and for hire and do it well. So they raised his salary to five hundred dollars a week for the next three years. Coppola eventually worked on eleven scripts, but he only received an official screen credit on three of them, and it is those three films that will be highlighted at this point. To begin with, Coppola received a screen credit as co-writer on two 1966 films on which he worked for Seven Arts: This Property Is Condemned and Is Paris Burning?
This Property Is Condemned is a one-act play by Tennessee Williams that can be acted on the stage in about twenty minutes. Coppola was familiar with the play, since he had directed it on the stage at Hofstra. The play simply presents a thirteen-year-old girl named Willie Starr who has been deserted by her parents. Willie recounts for a lad named Tom the sad story of her sister Alva, who took care of her until Alva’s untimely death from lung cancer. And so it is Alva whom Willie idolizes and wants to imitate. Unfortunately, since Alv
a was a prostitute in her mother’s boarding house/brothel for railroad men, Willie naively but firmly believes that the kind of life Alva led is the only truly glamorous existence for any girl. Consequently, there is little doubt by play’s end that Willie is condemned to take up her sister’s sordid way of life.
An enormous amount of expansion was imposed on the play’s slender plot to bloat it into nearly two hours of screen time, which is fairly obvious when one views the movie, directed by Sydney Pollack (Out of Africa). The three principal authors of the 1966 film version—Fred Coe, Edith Sommer, and Coppola—elaborated Williams’s slender little tale far beyond his original conception. The basic format the screenwriters hit upon was to make Williams’s play the framing device for the picture. Accordingly, they broke the one-act play roughly in half, presenting the first portion as a prologue to the film and the remaining segment as an epilogue. In this way they utilized almost all of the play’s original dialogue in their screenplay. In the prologue of the film, Willie, played by Mary Badham (To Kill a Mockingbird), describes her family and present situation to the boy Tom, and in the epilogue she wraps things up by telling Tom what happened to each of them. The scriptwriters then had to devise a full-blown story told in flashback to fit between the prologue and the epilogue. Several of the characters in the picture are derived from people to whom Willie refers in the one-act play.
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