Another metaphor in the movie also came about by chance. The scenes in the apartment house where Harry lived in the film were shot on location in a neighborhood that was being torn down for redevelopment. “Through Harry’s window we see a building across the way being demolished,” Coppola says on the DVD. “The notion of tearing down the walls that protect the people inside from the view of others is thematically related to a film about surveillance. The lives of the inhabitants of the building are being exposed to the light of day” and to the gaze of others.
As quoted earlier, Walter Murch notes that Coppola gives his collaborators a great deal of leeway in performing their functions on a film. This was particularly true of Murch’s work in making the final cut for the present film. Since Coppola had to begin preproduction on Godfather II immediately after he finished shooting The Conversation, he appointed Murch as both film editor and sound engineer on The Conversation and left Murch to supervise postproduction on his own. This meant that the director was not around on a daily basis to confer with him as a director normally does with an editor during postproduction.
Murch was really “a full collaborator on the film,” says Coppola. He edited the picture, assisted by Richard Chew, and mixed the sound track. Although Murch had already served as sound engineer on other movies, this was his first assignment as a film editor on a feature motion picture. “Essentially Francis left me on my own,” says Murch. About once a month Murch would invite Coppola to come by the editing room for a progress report.37 Murch would screen the rough cut for Coppola, who would make suggestions, which Murch then would implement.
Naturally, Murch found the task of sifting through the mountains of footage daunting. Postproduction took nearly a year. “In the process Murch invented some new plot connections and rediscovered others that had been temporarily overlooked,” Goodwin and Wise write.38
One narrative link that Murch made during editing concerned Meredith, the call girl, and the theft of the tapes. In the screenplay “Meredith slept with Harry and simply disappeared the next morning,” Murch comments on the DVD. In a separate scene Harry discovered that the tapes had been snatched by some minion of Stett, the Director’s chief assistant. “I thought that, if we insinuated that Meredith took the tapes, it would make things hang together better.” It would be more interesting to identify the thief as the call girl, rather than make the thief some anonymous henchman of Stett’s. Hence Murch combined the two incidents, so that it is evident that Meredith seduced Harry in order to steal the tapes for Stett. “But that tie-up was constructed during editing,” Murch concludes. “That was not in the script.”
Another modification of the scenario that Murch made during editing centers on the dream sequence in which Harry imagines that he sees Ann in a park engulfed in a misty fog and attempts to talk to her. In the screenplay this incident is not a dream at all. Harry follows Ann into the park and tries to explain himself to her. He says he had polio as a child and almost drowned in the bathtub when his mother was not around. “I was disappointed that I survived,” he explains. “You see, I’m not afraid of death, but I am afraid of murder.” He urgently calls after her as she recoils from him and disappears in the swirling fog. “He’ll kill you if he gets the chance.” After Coppola had filmed this scene, he was inclined to scrap it, since he did not think it held up. “It remained for Walter Murch’s creativity in the editing room,” Coppola says on the DVD, to employ the scene as a dream sequence that shows Harry’s anxiety for Ann, whom he still sees at this point as someone he wants to save from danger.
Murch made an even more significant contribution to the film while he was mixing the sound track. He discovered a crucial bit of tape that he had previously overlooked: it was an alternate reading of the line in the opening sequence in which Frederic Forrest as Mark altered the emphasis from “He’d kill us if he got the chance” to “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” Murch decided to employ both readings of the line in the film at different points—the more innocuous one in the first scene, and the more sinister one when Harry later hears the remark again late in the movie. Coppola completely agreed with Murch when the latter pointed out that it was the only way to clench the idea for the audience that Harry had finally uncovered the truth (i.e., that Mark and Ann were planning to murder her husband, and not vice versa). Murch explains that he wanted to clarify for the audience that the first time Harry hears Mark’s statement, Harry thinks of Mark and Ann as two potential victims who need his protection. But when Murch employed the second reading of the line with a different inflection, which emphasizes us rather than kill, he wanted to indicate to the filmgoer that the phrase now takes on a new emphasis for Harry. As Murch puts it, “Harry hears the line in his mind as it must have been all along”: “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” This implies: If he is going to kill them, they should kill him first. At last Murch dug out the old recording of Forrest’s reading of the line that he had disregarded months before and used it.39
In the course of mixing the sound track Murch noticed the significance of Coppola arranging to have a single piano to provide the underscore for the film. The background music was composed and played by David Shire, who at that time was married to Coppola’s sister Talia Shire. The Conversation is one of the few mainstream Hollywood films to have a background score played by a solo instrument (the zither accompaniment for Carol Reed’s The Third Man [1949] also comes to mind). Because the background music was scored for piano alone, the music has a lonely and haunting sound: “a single instrument for a film about a single, lonely man,” says Murch on the DVD.
Although Gene Hackman turned in a superb performance as Harry Caul, Coppola has described the actor as feeling miserable inside Harry’s emotional straightjacket. “He was really a constipated character,” comments Hackman. It was a difficult role to play because it was so low key.40 Harry’s bruised professionalism and sense of weary detachment as he leads his shadowy existence are evidence of a complex personality. He believes emotions are a nuisance during business hours, and all his hours are business hours. Many critics still consider Harry Caul to be Hackman’s most virtuoso performance.
The Conversation is sometimes compared to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), which is about a photographer who thinks he spies evidence of a murder in the background of one of his photos, but the evidence mysteriously disappears from his studio. On the contrary, Coppola probes the mind of his hermetic, guilt-ridden hero much more deeply than Antonioni does in his film. The characterization of the photographer in Blow-Up is superficial by comparison to the in-depth portrait of the surveillance expert Hackman played in Coppola’s picture.
Asked to name his favorite among his films, Coppola indicated to me that it was The Conversation, because “it is a personal film based on my own original screenplay.” Recently he confirmed that The Conversation remains his best movie in his opinion, since “it represented a personal direction where I wanted to take my career” (i.e., he always preferred to create his own story material, rather than make films derived from literary sources).41 Coppola’s predilection for the film is understandable, for the movie is rarely less than accomplished, its every frame polished and gleaming in the director’s best manner. In summary, it is a masterwork.
The Conversation proved to be a prestige picture for Paramount. It won the Palme d’Or, the grand prize, at the Cannes International Film Festival. It also copped two major Academy Award nominations, for best picture of the year and for best original screenplay. Nonetheless, audiences did not show up for the movie, either here or abroad, since it was generally considered to be too slow-moving and cerebral for a thriller. Although the picture had gotten into the black by 1975, it was still considered a flop as far as its initial theatrical run was concerned.
You’re a Big Boy Now met the same fate in 1966. At that time Coppola made a trade-off with Warners-Seven. He directed Finian’s Rainbow in exchange for the studio financing The Rain People, a film that eventually also f
ailed commercially. So Coppola decided that he must be very careful about what he did next after The Rain People. As a result of his winning an Oscar for co-scripting Patton, Paramount offered him what looked like a formula gangster picture based on a pulp novel about the Mafia. As such, it did not seem to him a very promising venture at all.
Part Two
The Mature Moviemaker
4
In a Savage Land
The Godfather
You can get a lot more done with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.
—Al Capone
I’ve never made a movie as good as The Godfather, and I don’t have the ambition to try.
—Steven Spielberg
When Francis Coppola first considered filming Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, he perused the book and found it a rather sensational, sleazy crime novel. But, then, Puzo was not aspiring to create a work of literature. When he conceived it, as he confesses in The Godfather Papers, he had already published two novels that did have literary pretensions, but they went largely unread. He decided to write a novel about the Mafia because this time around he was determined to turn out a bestseller. And that accounts for the liberal doses of sex and violence in the book, which are precisely what turned Coppola off. Deeply in debt, Puzo decided that “it was time to grow up and sell out, as Lenny Bruce advised.”1
Progress was slow because Puzo had no direct links with the underworld; therefore, his knowledge of the Mafia was derived totally from research. In the spring of 1968 he met with Robert Evans, production chief at Paramount, and offered him the screen rights for his as yet unfinished opus. “From a rumpled envelope he took out fifty or sixty even more rumpled pages,” Evans remembers. Puzo explained that his novel, tentatively titled Mafia, was going to give the inside story on organized crime. An inveterate gambler, Puzo confided to Evans that he had a $10,000 gambling debt that he had to pay off pronto, and hence he would consider any reasonable advance that Evans proposed. “I’ve just optioned Mafia for $12,500,” Evans immediately replied. He did not know it then, Evans adds, but for that paltry sum, he now owned the rights “to the Hope diamond of literature.”
Evans’s high hopes for the project were not shared by others at Paramount. “Sicilian mobster films don’t play,” the head of distribution told him. He pointed to The Brotherhood (1968), a Kirk Douglas vehicle that fizzled.2 Evans figured that The Brotherhood failed because almost none of the creative personnel connected with the picture were of Italian descent. The director, Martin Ritt, and the star, Douglas, were both Jewish. Bernard Dick writes that, like Douglas, most of the cast were Sicilian “in make-up only.” It was an ordinary crime movie “with a few Italian touches thrown in for good measure.”3
Despite the misfire with The Brotherhood, Evans thought that interest in the Mafia was growing in the United States. To begin with, Senator Estes Kefauver’s Committee on Organized Crime was convened in 1950. The hearings were televised and acquainted the nation with mafiosi like Frank Costello, who testified before the Committee. In addition, in the fall of 1963 Senator John McClellan’s committee investigating organized crime likewise received nationwide attention. The country was ready for a Mafia movie, Evans reasoned.
The Godfather, as the book was finally titled, appeared in April 1969. After briefly considering non-Italian directors like Elia Kazan (A Streetcar Named Desire) to direct the picture, Evans became increasingly convinced that only an Italian American director could supply the creative tissue to make a Mafia movie work. “It must be ethnic to the core,” he said. “[Y]ou must smell the spaghetti. That’s what brought the magic to the novel—it was written by an Italian.”4
Peter Bart, a Paramount vice president and Evans’s chief assistant, suggested Francis Coppola as a director of Italian ancestry who could fill the bill. Evans recalled the flashbacks in Rain People to the heroine’s Italian wedding and decided to go for Coppola. “He knew the way these men ate their food, kissed each other, talked. He knew the grit.”5 Coppola could, for example, get across to the mass audience the Mafia’s unswerving allegiance to the Sicilian code of silence (omertà) about the inner workings of the organization, which dictates that a member pay with his life for violating it. That is why most members prefer to call the organization La Cosa Nostra (our affair), signifying that the family business is not to be shared with outsiders.
Furthermore, Evans deplored earlier attempts to portray Italian gangsters on the American screen, which had merely resulted in stereotypical portrayals of Italian immigrant-criminals. In this regard filmmaker Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets) singled out Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932), in which Paul Muni plays a mobster modeled on Al Capone. Muni’s mugging for the camera and his phony Italian accent were embarrassing, says Scorsese. His performance exemplified the “Mama Mia” school of acting. “No one talks that way.”6 (As a matter of fact, Coppola affirms that mafiosi born in New York and not in the old country have New York accents, not Italian accents.) It would be up to Coppola, Evans concluded, to show the Italian American community in an authentic manner—how they treated their families and celebrated their rituals.
But Coppola was not hired just because he was Italian American, he points out, but because he had recently made a flop for Warners, The Rain People. Coppola guessed that Paramount thought that he was young enough and chastened enough by his recent box-office failure to be pushed around by the studio officials. On the credit side of the ledger, Bart was impressed that Coppola made Rain People on a meager budget and that he had the reputation of a director who could make a film economically. And, more important, he knew that Coppola had coauthored the Academy Award–winning screenplay for Patton (1970) (see chapter 1).
When Coppola was invited to make The Godfather, he got around to reading the book for the first time, but he never got past page 50. He dismissed it as “pretty cheap stuff.” He was offended by some sensational subplots, which Puzo admittedly concocted to boost sales (e.g., Sonny Corleone’s tempestuous affair with Lucy Mancini). Moreover, Coppola thought the book read like a lurid potboiler by the likes of Irving Wallace (The Chapman Report)—books that he considered below the belt and beneath discussion. Besides, Coppola wanted to avoid doing formula pictures. He believed that he had taken a left turn when he had agreed to make a commercial picture like Finian’s Rainbow (see chapter 2). He did not want to make another big studio project, this time a gangster movie.
A few weeks later Bart decided to phone Coppola again and tracked him down at George Lucas’s home in Mill Valley, where Lucas was editing the final cut of THX 1138. Lucas remembers that Coppola covered the receiver with his hand and asked, “George, should I make this gangster movie?” Lucas reminded Coppola that American Zoetrope was foundering (see chapter 3). “Francis, we’re in debt,” he said; “you need a job. I think you should do it. Survival is the key thing here.”7 So Coppola took Paramount up on its offer and went back to reading The Godfather through to the end.
When he got further into the book, Coppola saw that it was “the story of a family, this father and his sons; and I thought it was a terrific story, if you could cut out all the other stuff.” So, once he had scraped away the dispensable subplots, he concluded that “it wasn’t a piece of trash.”8 His father, Carmine, confirmed his decision to make the movie, pointing out that making a successful commercial film would enable him to finance his more personal projects. Coppola accordingly informed Bart that he would make the movie so long as it was not merely a film about an organization of gangsters but a family chronicle.
The Godfather (1972)
When the film’s producer, Albert Ruddy, gave Puzo the news about Coppola, Puzo was working on a draft of the screenplay. Ruddy advised him that Coppola would be collaborating on the script as well as directing, and Puzo suggested to Coppola that they work together. “Francis looked me right in the eye and said no. That’s when I knew he was really a director.”9
Coppola spent his mornings working on the screenplay at a s
ecluded table in the Café Trieste in San Francisco, while Puzo toiled in an office in Los Angeles. Coppola says in the documentary that accompanies the DVD of the Godfather Trilogy (released 2001), “I did my own version of the screenplay, then I contacted Mario and we collaborated.” Puzo adds in the same documentary, “We wrote separately. I sent my stuff to him, and he sent his stuff to me. Then he made the final decision as to what would be in the shooting script.”10 Coppola was able to whittle Puzo’s gargantuan novel down to a screenplay of 163 pages for a film of about three hours.
Before getting down to work on the screenplay, Coppola went through a preliminary procedure that would ensure that all of the key events of the novel would find their way into the script. He began by tearing the pages from a copy of Puzo’s novel and pasting each page into a large stage director’s notebook. He then summarized the action with handwritten notes in the margin of each page. Coppola explains in the documentary, “I would indicate what the core of each scene was. This became the master document that I would work from while directing the film. I would refer to it in addition to the script while filming. This was for me a multi-layered road map to direct the picture.”
Coppola never backed off from indicating in the script that the mobsters were of Italian descent. He wished to show the Italian American community with understanding and candor, to indicate that Don Corleone, the godfather of the title, was convinced that organized crime was the passport to the American dream for downtrodden immigrants. In order to give some historical perspective on the way organized crime developed in the United States, the movie would suggest that the lack of career opportunities open to unskilled immigrants from Italy, Ireland, and other European countries made racketeering, in their view, one of the few lucrative avenues of opportunity open to immigrants. The mobs gained power through patronage of corrupt politicians and thereby made more inroads on legitimacy. In short, the Mafia grew out of the anarchy in the inner city itself, in the face of social injustice.
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