Godfather

by Gene D. Phillips

  He issued a press release that proclaimed, “The main objective of this company will be to undertake film production in several different areas by collaborating with the most gifted and talented young people, using the most contemporary and sophisticated equipment available.”16

  One of Coppola’s assistants quipped that those working at American Zoetrope felt that they were clocking in at a factory every day, “but, in any case, it was our factory.”17 In fact, Coppola and his comrades saw themselves as an autonomous guild of filmmakers, quite distant from the Hollywood studios. Coppola was really following Roger Corman’s lead in bringing together aspiring filmmakers from the UCLA and USC film schools who were eager to learn their craft. But they enjoyed much more autonomy at Zoetrope than Coppola did when he was serving his apprenticeship with Corman (see chapter 1). Coppola would give a camera to a street cleaner who was interested in Zoetrope, Lucas says wryly. Lucas was only half-joking. Always conservative in business matters, he was genuinely concerned that Coppola would allow just about anyone to handle Zoetrope’s expensive equipment, regardless of their lack of experience in filmmaking.

  For his part, Coppola envisioned Zoetrope as an alternative movie organization “where he could get a lot of young talent,” according to Lucas. They would make movies, “hope that one of them would be a hit,” and eventually build up a thriving independent film unit that way.18

  Viewing American Zoetrope as the wave of the future, Coppola was clearly the driving force behind the company. He implicitly saw American Zoetrope as a way of putting the auteur theory into practice by setting up a filmmaking operation in which moviemakers could place on each of their films, not the stamp of a Hollywood studio, but the stamp of their own cinematic style and personal vision. In short, Zoetrope reflected Coppola’s utopian vision of how movies could be made outside the traditional Hollywood factory system.

  Coppola went to Warners, which had produced three of the films he had directed, and offered them a package of seven movie projects. The studio had once again changed hands and was now owned by Steve Ross, the head of Kinney National Service. Ross had started his firm, a limousine service, by borrowing his father’s funeral parlor limousines. Kinney’s interests ranged from a chain of parking lots to a talent agency. Ted Ashley, who had been associated with the talent agency, was now studio chief. Warner Brothers was now known officially as Warner Communications Inc. Coppola employed the same bluff he had used to get Warners to back both You’re a Big Boy Now and The Rain People: he telegrammed Ashley that Zoetrope had its first project ready to go into production, and this was the studio’s only chance to get in on the ground floor.

  The film in question was THX 1138, which Lucas was to direct from his own screenplay. It was, in fact, an expanded version of a prizewinning student featurette that Lucas had submitted as his master’s thesis to USC. Part of the exclusive deal that Coppola was presenting to Warners-Seven included his proposal for The Conversation, a thriller about a surveillance expert. For good measure, he also threw in Apocalypse Now, a concept for a movie about the Vietnam War that had been hatched by Lucas and Milius.

  As Coppola had anticipated, Ashley gave the green light to THX 1138, but he saw it as a B picture and assigned it a budget under $1 million. As for the other six projects, Ashley decreed that the studio would put up $300,000 in seed money for script development for them. Ashley also agreed to lend Coppola an additional $300,000 to establish the fledgling Zoetrope company as a functioning business concern.

  But Ashley drove a hard bargain. He was not investing in American Zoetrope—he was merely loaning money to Coppola’s organization. If the scripts Coppola eventually submitted to Warners-Seven did not meet the studio’s expectations and the studio wanted out of the deal, Warners would have to be reimbursed in full for the $600,000 that Coppola had borrowed. Coppola accepted these stiff terms largely because Ashley had agreed to finance THX 1138, and Coppola was aware that, with one movie definitely set to go into production, American Zoetrope was actually in business. Besides, if only one or two of the other projects were developed into successful films, neither Coppola nor Warners-Seven would lose on the deal. To Coppola that seemed to be a safe bet.

  When Coppola enthusiastically related to Lucas the terms of the deal he had made with a major studio, Lucas was naturally glad about the prospect of getting THX made, but he resented the fact that Coppola had included Apocalypse Now, which had originated with himself and Milius, in the package deal without consulting him. But he was willing to swallow his displeasure at the time. Like Coppola, he was euphoric that American Zoetrope now seemed to be established on a firm footing. As Lucas puts it, “we young filmmakers were going to conquer the world.”19

  The future seemed bright. Coppola planned to spend a good deal of Warners’s advance funds, not only for reconstruction of the warehouse site, but also to pay for the expensive high-tech equipment he was steadily acquiring. American Zoetrope would have seven editing rooms, equipped with Keller sound editing equipment and Steenbeck film editing machines, as well as 35 mm and 16 mm cameras.

  What’s more, THX seemed a promising venture for Zoetrope’s maiden voyage into feature filmmaking. The personnel involved in the Lucas picture included some veterans of past Coppola movies. Lucas himself—whose previous directorial credit was on filmmaker, his documentary short about the making of Rain People—was directing THX as his first feature. He had co-written the screenplay with Walter Murch, the sound engineer on Rain People, who was functioning in the same capacity on THX. And Robert Duvall, who had a featured role in Rain People, had the lead in Lucas’s film.

  Everything was rosy until Coppola went to Warners several months later with the rough cut of THX and the scripts for the other six film projects Zoetrope was offering the studio. Coppola delivered to Ashley’s office a huge box containing the screenplays, each of them in a handsome black binder proudly bearing the Zoetrope imprimatur. The studio executives who viewed THX 1138 with Ashley included business manager Frank Wells, known in the industry as a tough customer. When the lights came up at the end of the screening, the executives present declared emphatically that they were appalled by the austere futuristic tale of robotlike creatures living in a society where sex is outlawed. Ashley and his cohorts found the plot hard to follow and the bleak atmosphere of the movie, with its bleached costumes and pale decor, downright depressing.

  Dale Pollack, in his book on George Lucas, states baldly that Warners-Seven rejected out of hand the group of scripts from American Zoetrope that Coppola had brought with him on the same day as the screening of the rough cut of THX. On the contrary, the documentation in the Warner Brothers archive indicates that the studio moguls were not quite as precipitous as that. Coppola left the box of proposed scripts with Ashley and scheduled a meeting to discuss them after he returned from a trip to Europe. So Coppola did not get the studio’s verdict on the scripts he had submitted to them a few hours after the screening of THX, as Pollack mistakenly asserts.

  When Ashley and Wells finally met with Coppola, they advised him that, since Warners-Seven had bankrolled the making of THX 1138, the studio was committed to releasing the picture. But Ashley was personally so thoroughly upset by Lucas’s anti-utopian saga that he consequently rejected in turn, with Wells’s firm support, each of the other six Zoetrope scripts Coppola had submitted to the studio. At this final meeting Ted Ashley told Coppola flatly that Warners-Seven was pulling the plug on their deal with American Zoetrope altogether. Adding insult to injury, he informed Coppola that Zoetrope must repay not only the $300,000 the studio had loaned Coppola for refurbishing and outfitting with equipment Zoetrope’s headquarters, but Zoetrope must also reimburse Warners-Seven for the additional $300,000 the studio had spent developing the scripts. In effect, the studio was making Coppola buy back his own scripts. “Warners not only pulled the rug out from under Francis,” Murch said later, “they tried to sell it back to him.”20

  Coppola had no choice but to capitulate. �
��They had all the marbles,” he commented afterward.21 At all events, Coppola’s final confrontation with Ashley and Wells concluded with Coppola being sent packing, along with his box of scripts, back to San Francisco. Film historian Peter Biskind reports that, as a parting shot, Coppola, sensing that he had nothing more to lose, shouted on his way out the door, “I’m an artist; you’re fucking Philistines.”

  Lucas later hazarded that the projects Coppola had presented to Warners, including his own THX, were too adventurous for their conventional tastes. In addition to THX there was a screenplay that took a controversial stance toward the Vietnam War (Apocalypse Now) and a script for an intricate, subtle psychological thriller about a neurotic wiretapper (The Conversation). Over and above the studio’s displeasure with the Zoetrope projects, Warners’ decision to cancel the deal with Zoetrope altogether was motivated to some degree by the fact that, by this time, it was abundantly clear that You’re a Big Boy Now and The Rain People—both of which had originated with Coppola, had finished their respective theatrical runs out of the money. This, of course, was a factor of which Wells, as the manager of the studio’s finances, would have been particularly aware. At any rate, the date of Coppola’s final confrontation with Warners-Seven, November 19,1970 (just one year after Zoetrope was officially inaugurated as an independent film organization), would forever after be known in Zoetrope lore as “Black Thursday”—a reference to Black Tuesday, the day that the stock market crashed in 1929.22

  When Warners released THX (with some minor cuts) in 1971, it was not a moneymaker, although it has acquired a cult following over the years. Coppola drew some consolation from the fact that once he eventually paid back the money he had borrowed from Warners-Seven he would own the rights to all of the unproduced Zoetrope scripts—including two that he would eventually direct himself, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now. But that was in the unforeseeable future.

  For now Zoetrope was bankrupt. As one of Coppola’s associates joked, Coppola’s office was down to one miniskirted secretary and a jar of instant coffee, which had replaced Coppola’s beloved espresso machine. Although Coppola’s staff was not as meager as that, Zoetrope was operating in the red. Furthermore, there had been other losses besides those incurred by the breakup with Warners. Some rookie filmmakers had, without authorization, borrowed and not returned a lot of expensive film equipment. As noted before, this was just the sort of thing that the cautious George Lucas had feared might happen when he had warned Coppola that American Zoetrope was not being run efficiently. For the record, during the first year of operation, forty thousand dollars’ worth of cameras and other equipment disappeared. “It was tremendously irresponsible” on their part to take advantage of his goodwill, Coppola complains. He had spent that whole time plus all the money he could muster setting up a film facility, “and things got stolen and Zoetrope was picked clean.” It was becoming a “fraternity house” for tyro filmmakers, a free-for-all.23

  Coppola became increasingly aware that even a small film facility needs capital to survive, and he was actually afraid at one point that the sheriff would put a chain across the front door and close the whole operation down. Things got even worse, Lucas remembers: “We were not only broke, but we were blackballed in the industry.” Warners had spread the word that he and Coppola were not responsible parties, and neither of them could get a feature picture off the ground.24

  But the resilient Coppola promptly reorganized and diversified Zoetrope in order to pay his debts. He began producing educational films, industrial documentaries, and television commercials. He also rented out Zoetrope’s first-class postproduction facilities, which boasted the latest editing equipment, to other filmmakers.25

  In the long run it was short-sighted for Ashley and company to jettison Zoetrope and all of its talent with a sweeping vote of no-confidence. Biskind goes so far as to say that it was a colossal blunder for them to alienate Coppola, who would in the not-too-distant future turn out to be an important director. In fact, both Coppola and Lucas would soon become two of the most outstanding filmmakers of the 1970s, and they would rarely work for Warner Brothers again.

  The fact remains that, as Lucas notes above, Coppola was experiencing some difficulty in launching another film project—until the release of Patton, which Coppola had co-scripted just before he made You’re a Big Boy Now (see chapter 1). He won an Academy Award for co-writing the epic World War II movie. The film was so long in incubation before it was finally produced that it was not released until 1970. Since Coppola’s stock had suddenly risen in the film industry, Paramount decided to entrust him with the direction of a gangster picture about the Mafia entitled The Godfather that they were going to make based on the bestselling novel by Mario Puzo.

  When Warners got to hear about this, one bigwig there, Frank Wells, phoned Paramount and advised the studio chief that he might as well turn over Coppola’s check directly to them. As a matter of fact, after the subsequent success of The Godfather, Coppola recalls, “I paid them the $300,000 loan,” which he had used for renovating the Folsom Street warehouse and for outfitting the film facility with production equipment. But he asked Warners-Seven to reconsider their demand for the additional $300,000 seed money that Ashley had allocated for script development for the projects Coppola had offered to Warners-Seven in his original package. Coppola countered their demand for this additional fee by emphasizing that there was simply no precedent in the movie industry for a studio to be reimbursed for money that they had spent on developing scripts that they ultimately rejected—something both Lucas and Murch had pointed out early on in discussing Black Thursday with Coppola. It is, after all, standard procedure for a studio to invest money in the development of scripts “on spec” and to absorb the development costs, whether or not the studio eventually accepts or rejects the finished products.

  Warners responded characteristically that no precedent was necessary—a deal was a deal. So Coppola and Warners had reached a stalemate. When Coppola was preparing to direct Godfather II in 1974 Warners again notified Paramount that they should turn over his salary to them. Paramount, tired of being pestered by Warners, paid up so that Coppola could get on with Godfather II, but they subsequently deducted the sum from Coppola’s earnings on that picture. But the cloud had a silver lining: “Because of the reimbursal,” Coppola concludes, “American Zoetrope had got back the script rights,” including those for The Conversation and Apocalypse Now. He had in essence been forced to buy back the scripts in question, and they now belonged unequivocally to Zoetrope. The two scripts that he himself later filmed enhanced his reputation considerably: The Conversation garnered some Oscar nominations and became a cult film; Apocalypse Now became an established cinema classic, as we shall see.26

  Coppola made The Conversation between The Godfather and Godfather II. In order to treat the Godfather trilogy as a unit in this book, it seems appropriate to deal with The Conversation at this point in order to avoid interrupting the discussion of the three Godfather films. Moreover, The Conversation, like The Rain People, was derived from an original screenplay by Coppola and, as such, deserves to be discussed in tandem with the earlier film.

  From the beginning of his career as a director, Coppola had wanted to develop projects of his own rather than merely hire himself out to various studios to direct the films they wanted him to make. You’re a Big Boy Now was a project Coppola had initiated himself, although it was not an original screenplay but was based on a novel. He took some pride in the fact that The Conversation, like Dementia 13 and The Rain People, was an original script. As novelist-screenwriter Raymond Chandler used to say, “Original screenplays are almost as rare in Hollywood as virgins.”27

  After the exhausting experience of making Finian’s Rainbow, Coppola asserted that he was thinking of pulling out of Hollywood and making cheaper movies—like The Conversation—that he would write himself: “If it means I’ve got to make $6,000 movies in San Francisco, then I guess thats what I have to do.”28 The
Conversation, of course, would cost more than $6,000, but it would still have a modest budget by studio standards, and it would be filmed in San Francisco.

  As a result of the success of The Godfather, Paramount was prepared to finance The Conversation. As George Lucas commented at the time, artistic independence comes at a price. “If you’re going to use your own resources and not rob a bank,” a director has to figure out a way to obtain financing for the personal films he wants to make. “Francis couldn’t have made The Rain People if he hadn’t made Finian’s RainbowBy the same token, he had to make The Godfather “in order to make The Conversation, his next film.”29

  The Conversation (1974)

  The phenomenal success of The Godfather gave Coppola the leverage not only to make The Conversation but also to make American Zoetrope solvent again. “I was always fighting utter bankruptcy,” says Coppola, “so the notion of having excess money was new.”30 It was around this time that Coppola joined forces with fellow directors Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show) and William Friedkin (The French Connection) to form the Directors Company, an independent film unit separate from American Zoetrope. The Directors Company was the brain child of Charles Bludhorn, chairman of Paramount’s parent company at the time, Gulf and Western. Bludhorn wanted to secure the services of these talented directors “and was willing to offer them creative autonomy,” Anita Busch and Beth Faski have written.31 Accordingly, Bludhorn empowered Frank Yablans, president of Paramount, to negotiate the deal with the trio of directors: They could make any movie they chose that cost no more than $3 million, and they also had final cut on each of their pictures.

  But soon resentment began to build among the three filmmakers. Neither Coppola nor Friedkin was happy with Bogdanovich’s choice of Daisy Miller, an old-fashioned Henry James period piece. Friedkin, in turn, thought The Conversation was likewise an unpromising project. Furthermore, Bogdanovich signed a separate three-picture agreement with Warners-Seven, and Friedkin similarly made a separate two-picture deal with Universal. None of these films would be made for the Directors Company. Nor would Godfather II, which Coppola had committed himself to before the Directors Company was formed.