Godfather

by Gene D. Phillips

  Coppola acknowledges the technical issues created by the director’s choices of more personal films like The Conversation. The studios were really not looking for small personal projects. Rather, they were looking for gigantic spectacles concerned with torching office towers or sinking ocean liners. In reality, Paramount was reluctant to finance the personal films that the three directors came up with. There was trouble in paradise, and the Directors Company proved to be a short-lived business venture, with the result that Coppola’s partnership with Bogdanovich and Friedkin was soon dissolved. The only contribution that Coppola made to the Directors Company was The Conversation, to which he still owns the rights. This movie once more proved Coppola’s capabilities as a first-class filmmaker, and Coppola continued his association with Paramount, if not with the Directors Company.

  In the fall of 1972 Coppola turned his full attention to The Conversation. Coppola saw The Godfather as a strictly commercial venture, a gangster flick, and he was anxious to confirm his reputation as a serious artist by filming an original screenplay of his own, as well as by writing the screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s distinguished classic novel, The Great Gatsby (see chapter 1).

  He first conceived the idea for The Conversation in the mid-1960s, while listening to director Irvin Kershner (The Flim Flam Man) discuss espionage and state-of-the art surveillance tactics, which fascinated him. He told Coppola about long-distance “shotgun” microphones that looked like rifles. They were so powerful that when they were aimed at the mouth of each speaker they could actually record a conversation between two individuals, even in the midst of a crowd. (This is precisely what happens in the opening sequence of The Conversation: the movie begins with a couple having a conversation in a public square in downtown San Francisco, which is being monitored by a wiretapper.)

  In looking back on his conversation with Kershner, Coppola was struck anew by the idea that a film about an expert wiretapper could make an interesting movie. He was especially fascinated by the concept that “bugging was a profession, not just some private detective going out and eavesdropping with primitive equipment.” Before composing a full-scale screenplay for the movie, Coppola collected information of all kinds about the technology involved in clandestine surveillance procedures and incorporated much of it into the script. He also read voraciously about expert wiretappers. The movie’s main character, Harry Caul, was based in part on Bernard Spindel, a legendary surveillance expert who was so fascinated with intrigue and espionage that he became obsessed with his craft, as does Harry Caul. Kershner had sent Coppola some documentation about surveillance wizard Hal Lipset, a native of San Francisco, early on, and Coppola in due course enlisted him as a technical consultant on The Conversation. Indeed Lipset in some ways also served as a model for Harry Caul (and is even mentioned in the film’s dialogue).

  To flesh out the personality of Harry Caul, the film’s central character, Coppola enriched Caul with elements of his own background. As mentioned in chapter 1, Coppola had been interested in gadgets from childhood, as had Harry. Coppola also embellished Harry’s background with his own bout with polio as a child and with his Catholic upbringing. (In fact, Harry goes to a priest for sacramental confession at one point.)

  As the character of Harry Caul began to take shape in his mind, Coppola saw him as someone who was considered an oddball in high school because he spent so much of his time tinkering with his gadgets. Harry was the sort of “techno-freak” who was the president of the school’s radio club. Coppola owns himself to be that type: he was president of the radio club, and his nickname in high school was “Science.” As a teenager young Francis even planted a network of hidden microphones behind the radiators in his home so he could eavesdrop on family conversations and possibly learn what gifts he was going to receive for his birthday. He recalls having a sense of power in possessing the ability to listen to private conversations without being detected.

  Coppola had actually started working on the screenplay for The Conversation toward the end of 1966, while he was finishing up postproduction on Big Boy, but he had put it aside to do Finian’s Rainbow. His approach to the material had not changed in the intervening time. He still envisioned the film, he said, as centering on a nightmarish situation that had developed in our society, “a system that employs all the sophisticated tools that are available to intrude upon our private lives.”32 Recall that a preliminary draft of the script was part of the package that Coppola had submitted to Warners in 1970. Coppola had subsequently revised the screenplay in the version on file in the Paramount Script Repository, dated November 11, 1972, just two weeks before principal photography began.

  Not surprisingly, Coppola invited the gifted Walter Murch, who had first joined Coppola’s “filmmaking family” when he served as sound engineer on The Rain People, to work on the film. Coppola needed an inventive sound technician like Murch because several scenes in the movie were sound-oriented. He desired, he said, to “free the sound from the tyranny of the image,” because The Conversation, by the very nature of its subject, was a film for which the sound track was of immense importance.33 (Coppola also got Robert Duvall—another member of Coppola’s “repertory company” of artists and who had appeared in Rain People—to do an uncredited cameo in the present film.)

  The budget Paramount provided for the picture was $1.6 million—not a king’s ransom, but considerably more than he had for his previous films (such as Rain People). At first he hired cinematographer Haskell Wexler (In the Heat of the Night) as director of photography, but the headstrong Wexler did not get along with the equally strong-minded Coppola. When the director complained that the painstaking Wexler was taking too long to set up a shot, Wexler shot back that Coppola had chosen some locations—such as the opening sequence in a crowded public square—that were well nigh impossible to light and to shoot. Coppola responded that, if Erich Von Stroheim could shoot Greed in the streets of San Francisco in 1924, he did not see why he could not shoot The Conversation in the streets of San Francisco in 1972.

  Coppola finally shut down the picture for ten days, during which he sent word to Wexler that his services were no longer required and secured another cinematographer. He eventually replaced Wexler with Bill Butler, who had done yeoman’s service in photographing You’re a Big Boy Now in the streets of New York City. At any rate, Coppola privately welcomed the ten-day hiatus because it gave him one last opportunity to fine-tune the screenplay.

  One can understand Wexler’s problems with the sequence that took place in Union Square at high noon. When principal photography commenced there on November 26, 1972, Coppola and Wexler had to photograph the two lovers, Ann (Cindy Williams) and Mark (Frederic Forrest), while they walk around Union Square surrounded not only by extras but by innumerable passersby on their lunch break. This sequence required six cameras, plus a battery of long-distance microphones. Coppola instructed the cameramen to keep their cameras trained at all times on the two principals, lest the pair get lost in the crowd.

  Like the participants in the Chattanooga parade in Rain People, the pedestrians in Union Square were not aware that a movie was being shot. Indeed, the police were not always sure what exactly was going on, even though they knew that Coppola and company were shooting a scene. A couple of sound men stationed on different rooftops overlooking the square with shotgun mikes resembling rifles were arrested as snipers, suspected of attempting to assassinate Coppola. Meanwhile, although Coppola and Wexler endeavored to keep the cameramen in the square out of sight, occasionally one cameraman walked into the camera range of another. “Half of our crew were in the shots” filmed in the square, jokes Coppola, “cameras photographing cameras.”34 After filming was completed in Union Square, with its elaborate multicamera setup, Wexler became increasingly disgruntled with Coppola’s choice of locations around town, until Coppola finally gave him his walking papers.

  Still the opening scene was worth all the trouble. It starts out with a slow, three-minute overhead zoom
shot that gradually moves in on the milling crowds in Union Square then finally zeroes in on Ann and Mark, who are conversing about Ann’s husband, the wealthy director of a corporation (Robert Duvall). Ann fears the Director (as he is referred to throughout the movie) will find out about her adulterous relationship with Mark.

  Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), who has supervised the surveillance operation, takes the tapes of Ann and Mark’s conversation back to his workshop, a loft in an otherwise empty warehouse. As a matter of fact, the warehouse used in the film was conveniently located only five blocks away from the warehouse where American Zoetrope was situated for some years. Harry ascends to his quarters in a cagelike elevator, which reflects how he, himself, is shut in his own private world. Coppola states in his commentary on the DVD of The Conversation (released in 2000) that “the warehouse where Harry does his work is like a citadel, with fence like partitions separating the high security areas where he keeps his personally designed technological devices locked away from the rest of the workshop,” so that no one, not even his assistant, Stan (John Cazale), can enter there.

  Harry labors assiduously to clean up the sound of the crucial conversation on the tapes in order to produce a clean, audible master tape for the Director. When Harry delivers the tape to the Director’s offices in San Francisco’s huge Embarcadero Center, Martin Stett (Harrison Ford), the Director’s enigmatic assistant, attempts to intercept the package. Harry suspects foul play and accordingly refuses to relinquish the tape to Stett, who warns him not to meddle in this affair. But Harry remains adamant and returns to his lair to scrutinize all of the tapes of the conversation more carefully.

  Harry obsessively replays and refines all of the tapes, systematically filtering out the background noise, until he is ultimately able to make audible a segment of the conversation that was previously inaudible: Mark is overheard to say, “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” Harry finds this revelation very disturbing.

  Since Harry is a Catholic, he heads for his parish church, where he goes to Confession, a religious ritual whereby a Catholic tells his sins to a priest in order to obtain spiritual nourishment. He confesses to the priest that he still feels some lingering moral guilt about an earlier case in which two people were murdered as a result of his disclosures to his client, even though he was not legally responsible for their deaths. Now he feels that he should intervene in his present case in order to save two young people from being murdered and, thus, atone for the previous deaths. It is evident that Harry is ambivalent about the morality of spying on people.

  On the one hand, Harry strives to see himself as an unobtrusive observer who remains detached from the people he eavesdrops on, claiming that his work is morally neutral. On the other hand, he knows by experience that the result of the work he does can bring harm to others. So, as a Catholic, Harry feels the need for sacramental confession and absolution. Coppola comments that Harry’s practicing a profession about which he has misgivings “seemed very Catholic to me, to do one thing and yet believe another.”35

  Coppola comments on the DVD that Harry’s confessing his sins to the priest “is another form of surveillance”: Harry expresses his feelings to the priest who is “eavesdropping on Harry’s life,” though, of course, with Harry’s knowledge. The Catholic ritual of Confession “is an age-old way of learning someone’s private thoughts.”

  Harry attends a convention for surveillance experts and invites some of them back to his loft for a party. Meredith, a call girl, also comes along and lingers after everyone else is gone. Harry and Meredith inevitably bed down together. After he falls asleep Harry dreams that he meets Ann in a foggy park and attempts to explain himself to her, even describing some painful youthful experiences of his to her. When he awakens, Meredith and the tapes are gone.

  Back in his apartment, Harry gets a phone call from Stett, who admits that he had the tapes stolen because he feared that Harry might destroy them. Harry then remembers that on the tape Ann and Mark make reference to a rendezvous at 3 PM in room 773 of the Jack Tar Hotel on the following Sunday. On that day, Harry—intent on protecting them from the wrath of Ann’s husband, who may show up to confront them—occupies the room next to the one where their meeting is to take place.

  As resourceful as ever, Harry drills a hole in the wall between the two rooms and inserts a bug, thereby penetrating the fateful meeting that is taking place in the adjoining room. He overhears a quarrel between Ann, Mark, and the Director, which escalates into a shouting match. Finally, when it is apparent that a violent struggle is in progress in the adjacent room, Harry leaps into bed, pulls the blankets over his head, and claps his hands over his ears in a futile attempt to insulate himself from the mayhem taking place next door that he feels powerless to stop.

  Harry eventually summons the courage to break into the room, which on the surface seems neat and clean. Still Harry is suspicious because the room seems to have been tidied up too carefully, as if to sweep the sordid facts about what has transpired there under the rug. While examining the bathroom, he flushes the toilet—only to have it disgorge bloody rags and paper towels, which spill out all over the floor.

  As mentioned, Coppola made use of his own boyhood memories in building the character of Harry Caul. But this particular incident in the movie was suggested to him by Walter Murch, who drew on an episode from his own youth. “When I was a kid, I got some porno magazines,” Murch recalls in his commentary on the DVD of The Conversation. “When my parents came home unexpectedly, I tried to flush them down the toilet, but the toilet blocked up, and the porno magazines came gurgling up out of the toilet when my father flushed it. So in this scene in The Conversation, the toilet likewise regurgitates the evidence of guilt. It slowly overflows with blood. The guilty pair had tried to force the evidence of the murder down the toilet in order to clean up the hotel room, but it came flooding back up like an accusing finger.” Coppola adds that this scene is a homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) in which Norman Bates enters the bloody bathroom where a brutal stabbing has taken place and cleans up the mess in order to destroy the evidence of what has transpired.

  After the toilet in The Conversation has vomited blood all over the bathroom, Harry hastens to the Director’s office complex. He is startled when outside the building he spies a newspaper headline declaring that the Director has been killed in an auto accident. In a flash he realizes that he totally misinterpreted the conversation on the tapes. He assumed that the Director had been plotting to kill Ann and Mark when in reality it is Ann and Mark who have murdered the Director. It seems that the Director, when he learned from the master tape of their rendezvous at the Jack Tar Hotel, decided to surprise them in order to have a showdown with his unfaithful wife and her inamorato. Stett, who was in cahoots with her and Mark all along, prepared them for this eventuality. They had counted on the Director invading their hotel room once he had heard the tape. They arranged to slay him and to disguise his death as a traffic accident so that they could possess his wealth and power.

  Too late Harry realizes that he had misunderstood Mark’s statement on the tape, “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” He now understands that Mark had really said, “He’d kill us if he got the chance”—meaning that they would murder the Director before he got the opportunity to slay them.

  Completely shattered by this revelation, Harry withdraws to his apartment and seeks solace in playing his saxophone. He receives one last telephone call from Stett, who warns Harry, “We know that you know, and we are watching you.” Aware that his own living quarters have now been bugged, Harry frantically dismantles the whole apartment, futilely looking for the wiretapping device. Always the conscientious Catholic, Harry hesitates to smash the plaster statue of Mary, the mother of Christ, but finally does. Still, he dismembers his apartment to no avail.

  The film ends with Harry in despair, playing a mournful melody on his sax. Harry, an intensely private and lonely man, retreats from his profession as a wiretapper to his hobb
y as a musician—from being someone preoccupied with recording devices to someone absorbed in the music of his own tenor sax. Coppola’s rotating camera slowly encircles Harry, as if the camera itself were a surveillance device. He is imprisoned in his own apartment and is being monitored by the conspirators who liquidated the Director. Furthermore, Foster Hirsch observes, “Harry is trapped from within by the coils of his own unravelling psyche.”36

  Coppola observes on the DVD that he has often been asked where the bug was planted in Harry’s apartment. “I always imagined that it was in the strap of his saxophone, which was hanging around his neck and was fastened with a clasp to his sax. Harry often forgot to take the strap off after he finished playing,” so he absentmindedly wore it around his neck like a necklace that he was unaware of.

  Another question that Coppola has sometimes been asked is how Harry Caul got his rather odd last name. “I dictated the script into a tape recorder and a secretary transcribed it. I called him Harry Call, but she had typed Caul. When I saw what she had typed, I decided to keep the spelling, since I knew what a caul is.” It is the membrane that surrounds a fetus until it is born. Through most of the movie, Coppola continues, Harry wears a translucent plastic raincoat, a visual symbol that he is still insulated inside a caul. At one point “Harry lies down on the bed next to his mistress Amy [Teri Garr] without removing his transparent raincoat,” says Coppola. “When she asks him personal questions about himself, he bristles. She equivalently wants to look through the transparent raincoat at the man underneath,” and he accuses her of prying.