Like the shoppers in Macy’s department store, where Coppola shot the climax of You’re a Big Boy Now, neither the spectators nor the band members had any idea that a movie was being shot. So they were baffled by this stranger intruding on the parade. All in all, it was a touching scene, all the more noteworthy since it was written to order on the spot. In short, there was nothing haphazard about the use of improvisation to revise the screenplay. The rewrites were not scribbled on the back of an envelope with no concern for narrative coherence, as a wag back at Warners-Seven had opined.
As filming continued and the script was further developed, it became evident to Coppola that Natalie’s attitude toward Jimmy was coming more clearly into focus. For her part, Natalie is touched by Jimmy’s disarming vulnerability, but she is also wary of his growing emotional dependence on her and wants to break off their burgeoning relationship. She consequently secures him a job on an animal farm they happen to come across during their trip in order to be able to move on without him. Jimmy obviously does not want her to leave him behind. When the proprietor of the farm asks him sarcastically, “Is she your mother?” He responds, “She’s my best friend.”
But the childlike Jimmy spoils everything by releasing all the animals from their cages, because he simply cannot stand to see them penned up. Jimmy is fired, of course, and Natalie is enraged at him for continuing to be attached to her. She accordingly abandons him on the road and forthwith takes up with Gordon, a state highway patrolman (Robert Duvall). Gordon, whose wife is dead, invites her back to the trailer park where he lives with his young daughter, Rosalie.
Jimmy surreptitiously follows Natalie to Gordon’s trailer and furiously bursts in on them in order to save her from Gordon’s advances. Rosalie also shows up unexpectedly. When she sees the hulking “Killer” Kilgannon attacking her father, she frantically grabs his patrolman’s pistol and shoots Jimmy. The movie ends abruptly, with Natalie sobbing inconsolably as she cradles the mortally wounded Jimmy in her arms, futilely promising to care for him from now on. “I’ll take you home and we’ll be family,” she murmurs as Jimmy expires.
The screenplay, which is on file in the Script Repository at Warner Brothers, contains an epilogue that follows the death of Jimmy Kilgannon. Natalie meets Vinny at the airport (he has flown out to meet her and escort her back home). They are reunited at the fade-out. Coppola wisely opted to end the film instead with Jimmy’s demise. Following that dramatically powerful scene with the reunion of Natalie and Vinny would have been nothing short of an anticlimax.
Throughout the shooting period Coppola had to cope with his increasing disagreements with Shirley Knight. She stated in conversation that she preferred to work in the more structured environment of a studio and grew weary of the vagabond existence on the road. Moreover, she found Coppola’s improvisational technique of working out scenes tedious and trying.
To make matters worse, Coppola was not satisfied with how Shirley Knight was interpreting the role of Natalie as filming continued. They clashed often while he was rehearsing various scenes with her and the rest of the cast. The character of Natalie, as he had conceived it, is a headstrong, reckless individual, he explains. But she also has “a tremendously compassionate side.” On the one hand, Natalie becomes fed up with Jimmy’s emotional dependence on her. On the other hand, she is aware that she is a mother figure for Jimmy. “I didn’t feel I was getting that from Shirley. I would get the high-strung, nervous intensity” more than anything else—she was too abrasive.
Coppola saw Natalie as a young woman driven to panic and despair at the prospect of having a child and frustrated by her attempts to cope with the mentally retarded Jimmy, who becomes increasingly possessive in making demands on her—he is not as passive as he at first appeared. He even rips out the telephone wires when Natalie endeavors to phone her husband, in an obvious demonstration of childish jealousy. At such times Coppola wants the audience to sympathize with her plight. Yet he sensed that Knight too often portrayed Natalie as self-centered and almost cruel, thereby making it hard for filmgoers to feel sorry for her. For example, after Jimmy breaks the phone connection between Natalie and her husband, Natalie scratches his face vindictively. Coppola remarks, “I don’t know how much I liked that character,” as Knight played her, “whereas I liked the character I had written.”9
The tensions between director and star are on display in one segment of filmmaker, wherein Coppola and Knight bicker about whether or not Natalie should carry a purse in an upcoming scene. If Coppola comes across as somewhat controlling, Knight seems equally intransigent. Despite her creative differences with the director, however, Knight gives a compelling performance as Natalie.
To be fair to Knight, there was some merit in her complaints that Coppola’s rewriting of the script while they were shooting the film made inroads on the screenplay’s continuity. Because the script for The Rain People was developed in this piecemeal fashion, the story does not hang together as coherently as one would like. As a matter of fact, Coppola is the first to concede that the killing that climaxes the movie is a kind of deus ex machina he concocted in order to resolve the movie’s plot. The lack of a tightly constructed plotline made for a slow-moving film, and, therefore, The Rain People did not win over the critics or the mass audience.
Still there are some fine things in the film—for example, the key scene in which Jimmy liberates the animals from their captivity is a symbolic reminder that Natalie at this point still feels cooped up by circumstances and likewise yearns to be set free from the emotional entanglements in her life. A similar point is made in the scene in which she phones her husband for the first time, from a phone booth on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Natalie seems trapped in a cage as she is photographed through the glass of the telephone booth, desperately confessing to Vinny that she is not sure she knows what it means to be a wife, much less a mother. This image of entrapment is ironic: although Natalie embarked on this journey to regain her freedom, she still remains shut in with her unresolved emotional conflicts.
Another neat Coppola touch is having Gordon live in a mobile home, an indication of the transient nature of his life since he lost his wife and, by the same token, a foreshadowing of the sort of rootless existence Natalie is opening herself to if she opts to forsake her husband for good. Indeed, the desolate small towns, the bleak, endless turnpikes, the seedy motels, and shabby roadside diners visually underscore this point. It is a world in which a woman with a past can encounter a man with no future in the depressing atmosphere of a tawdry trailer park.
Significantly, Coppola’s overriding theme, which centers on the importance of the role of a family spirit in people’s lives, is clearly delineated in this film. Thus, as Robert Johnson notes in his book on Coppola, Natalie takes to the open road to escape the responsibilities of family life, only to find that she has taken them with her. This fact is strikingly brought home to her when she reflects that her unborn child, the very emblem of her marriage, is always with her, accompanying her wherever she goes. And this reflection in turn ultimately leads her by the end of the picture to reconcile herself to her responsibilities as a wife and mother, for she realizes that in trying to escape the obligations of family life she has brought nothing but misery to herself and others. Hence the movie ends, Coppola emphasizes, with an implicit “plea to have a family.”10
Coppola finished the film on schedule and for $740,000, slightly under budget. When the convoy got back to Los Angeles in the fall of 1968, George Lucas suggested Walter Murch, a fellow film student of his at USC, as sound engineer to mix the sound track of the film. Murch was aware that Coppola had gone to film school at UCLA, across town from its rival film school, USC. Like Lucas, Murch very much wanted to work with Coppola, who was already making an impact on the industry while still in his late twenties.
Coppola accepted Murch on Lucas’s recommendation, and Murch viewed the rough cut of Rain People with Coppola only once. Then Coppola installed Murch in the cellar of a warehous
e on Folsom Street in San Francisco, where Coppola had a Nagra sound recorder and the Steenbeck editing machine set up. And so Murch mixed the sound track for the film far removed from the watchful eyes of the studio authorities in Hollywood.
Furthermore, Murch had to work away from the studio not only to forestall any meddling on the part of studio officials but because—like many recent film school graduates—he was not yet a member of a union. “I was frightened that it would be found out that somebody non-union was editing the sound, and I’d lose this chance to work on a feature,” Murch explains.11 He was even afraid to visit the studio to make use of the sound library, which housed endless shelves of prerecorded sound effects. So he had to create all of the sound effects himself.
Murch, who up to this point had only worked on short films, was pleased with the trust Coppola placed in him to do his job properly. Like Bill Butler, who is cited above, he believes that Coppola gives to each of his collaborators authority to operate with a great deal of freedom in their own domain. “It’s paradoxical; by giving so much freedom and authority to you, you feel much more beholden to him” and want to do the best job possible, Murch says.12 Murch would continue to work with Coppola on subsequent films, as is clear from his foreword to this book.
Moreover, Coppola was building a small band of collaborators with whom he would continue to work in the future. He found that one way of placing his personal stamp as an auteur on his films was precisely to assemble a production team that went from picture to picture with him. As time went on, creative collaborators like Barry Malkin and Walter Murch could almost intuit what Coppola wanted from each of them as a picture was being shot.
Although The Rain People, like You’re a Big Boy Now, drew mixed reviews, some of the favorable notices were enthusiastic, noting how impressive acting and direction had triumphed over a weak script. Indeed, the positive reviews affirmed that the director displayed an eye for detail keen enough to compensate for the deficiencies of the material. This is not, after all, an independent film cobbled together with secondhand furniture and secondhand talent. It has expert cinematography and the glossy look of a film made in a Hollywood studio rather than by an itinerant band of filmmakers filming all over the country, as was actually the case.
Pauline Kael heaped both praise and blame on Coppola for Rain People, as she had done on Finian’s Rainbow. “There’s a prodigious amount of talent in Francis Ford Coppola’s unusual, little-seen film,” she writes, “but the writer-director applies his craftsmanship with undue solemnity to material that suggests a gifted college student’s imitation of early Tennessee Williams.”13 Interestingly enough, Coppola has said that he did have in mind Williams’s brand of Southern Gothic melodrama when penning his early screenplays, especially Pilma, Pilma, the unproduced script that won him the Goldwyn Award while he was still at UCLA. Furthermore, in retrospect, he thought that the bloody finale of Rain People did recall Williams’s more lurid melodramas.
Shirley Knight was applauded for presenting Natalie as a complicated human being attempting to navigate her way through a serious emotional crisis. It is worth noting that one of her last films was Antonio Tibaldi’s Little Boy Blue (1997) in which she took to the road yet again. This time she played a character moving from one motel to another in the South as she searched for her kidnapped son. So, in making another “road movie,” Knight’s career had come full circle.
James Caan was recognized by some critics as playing Jimmy not merely as a pathetic simpleton but as a mentally handicapped individual trying desperately to relate to others. Caan gives an off-kilter, on-target performance as a mental retardate. Up to this point in his career he had, quite frankly, been in more turkeys than Stove Top dressing, as the saying goes. Therefore Rain People added some depth to his resumé.
Moreover, Coppola could take some solace in the fact that the picture captured both the Grand Prize and the best director award at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Nevertheless, the critical consensus on Rain People was fairly negative, and the picture died at the box office. It finally found on network TV and in its release on videocassette the audience it deserved. What’s more, the reputation of the film has improved over the years, possibly because of its exposure on television and on videotape. It is now seen as an early feminist film portraying in unsentimental terms a picture of a young woman seeking to find liberation from a marriage that she fears is stifling her. In this regard Coppola states, “I sensed that there must be married women who were expected to accomplish something, and who were in fact dying inside. I thought it would be an interesting affirmation for one of them to simply get up and leave.”14 As a feminist film, then, the movie is now recognized as being years ahead of its time. More than one feminist critic has singled out Rain People as one of the first films to come out of Hollywood that addressed the constricting role of the housewife in modern society. Furthermore, Rain People is now viewed as one of the deepest examinations of the conflict between independence and responsibility that American cinema has given us.
American Zoetrope
Francis Coppola’s experience working out of a production office in Ogallala, Nebraska, during the last two months of filming Rain People convinced him that he did not have to be based in the Hollywood film colony to make movies. When he and George Lucas drove back to Los Angeles from Nebraska in the fall of 1968, they passed through San Francisco, where they encountered filmmaker John Korty, who was finishing his third independent feature, Riverrun (1970), in a garage at Stinson Beach. Coppola was much impressed. He said, in effect, to Korty, “If you can do it, I can do it too!” At that moment, according to Lucas, Coppola crystallized his determination to lift his filmmaking operation out of Hollywood.
“We wanted a little studio where we could mix and edit our films,” Lucas recalls. They wanted a base of operations where they could function as they did in that makeshift production office in Ogallala. Looking around San Francisco, Coppola considered it to be a beautiful place to live, with a bohemian artistic tradition congenial to young independent filmmakers. Standing in the lobby of the Mark Hopkins Hotel, Coppola exclaimed, “This is great; let’s move!”15
Another advantage of San Francisco was that it was close enough to Los Angeles to allow Coppola to draw talent from there. Coppola points out that the motion picture industry at the time was “a closed shop, employing men in their fifties who had worked in the studio system.”
Lucas gleefully decided to join Coppola in San Francisco and shortly afterward inquired if Walter Murch, who had originally signed on only as sound engineer on The Rain People, wanted to be part of their new independent film unit. Murch replied that he thought it was a great idea—he did not plan to spend the rest of his life in Hollywood under any circumstances. So in April 1969 “we all decamped,” says Murch, who drove a van filled with the technical equipment Coppola had acquired so far from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Coppola had by this time taken a long-term lease on the three-story warehouse at 827 Folsom Street in an industrial area of downtown San Francisco—the same place where Murch had mixed the sound track of Rain People. There were disused warehouses in the district that were now empty, Murch explains, and Coppola and company were able to lease one fairly inexpensively.
Coppola went to a film trade fair in Cologne, Germany, around this time and promptly invested in another eighty thousand dollars’ worth of new state-of-the-art, high-tech editing equipment, which he did not have the funds to pay for at the moment. He then had it installed in the dingy warehouse that was being renovated to serve as a filmmaking facility.
Coppola’s new independent producing unit, born in a warehouse loft, was christened American Zoetrope. The zoetrope, a viewer invented in the nineteenth century by William Horner, was a harbinger of the cinema. It was a cylinder circumscribed with images. When the drum on which the images were drawn was rotated rapidly, it gave the illusion of motion from still images. Coppola named his company after the zoetrope because it was a tradition
al symbol for the cinema. He had received one as a gift, and he liked to point out that the Greek root of zoetrope means “the movement of life,” a reference in his mind to the dynamic young filmmakers who had started the new film organization. Besides Lucas and Murch, other film school alumni were enlisting in Coppola’s little band of moviemakers, including directors-to-be John Milius and Martin Scorsese. Lucas, who was five years Coppola’s junior, said that they all saw Coppola as the great white knight who gave them hope that they could make films far from the Hollywood factory system.
The Rain People was the first film to be released under the banner of American Zoetrope, although technically the new producing company was only a gleam in Coppola’s eye when that film was being made in 1968. American Zoetrope was officially incorporated as a film organization in San Francisco on November 14, 1969, with Coppola as its president and sole stockholder, Lucas as vice president, and Mona Skager, production manager on Rain People, as secretary-treasurer. On December 13,1969, Coppola held a full-dress press conference with the mayor present to announce the formation of American Zoetrope. At the press conference he declared that he was gratified to have created a film facility in San Francisco. In Los Angeles, he observed, filmmakers talk about making deals, in San Francisco they talk about making films.
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