Godfather

by Gene D. Phillips

  “The studio sent me a list of possible replacements,” including Madonna and Julia Roberts, but they were all too old for the role. “I wanted an eighteen-year-old girl for the part. Granted Sofia was not an experienced actress, but it was Sofia that I had in mind when I created the character of Mary, the apple of her father’s eye,” a girl who is “sweet and kind.”

  Admittedly, Sofia Coppola was a movie actress who lacked the credentials for such a key role in an important picture. Still Coppola did not want to endure the costly delay involved in waiting for the studio to send over a replacement for Winona Ryder from Hollywood. He had been promised autonomy over the production, including casting, “so I exercised my rights and decided on Sofia. My decision was vilified by some critics, but I never regretted it. I was thrilled to have her play the part… because I saw her as just like the vulnerable kid Mary was supposed to be.” Eleanor Coppola adds that her husband believed that the criticism leveled at Sofia “was meant for him, and that Sofia received the criticism the way Mary Corleone got the bullet intended for Michael.”55

  Talia Shire defended her brother’s decision to cast her niece as Mary. “Had Sofia not jumped in, the picture would have been closed down,” at least for a couple of weeks, which would have hurt the budget and the schedule. “I was concerned because I didn’t want to see her get trashed by the critics, which is what happened…. Sofia was kind of heroic.”56

  My own judgment is that Sofia Coppola is certainly adequate as the young, awkward daughter of a powerful man. At times she is touching, as in her love scenes with Andy Garcia, who is quite tender with her. The release prints of the film run 161 minutes, while the version available on videocassette and DVD is 170 minutes. The additional nine minutes are accounted for by scenes that mostly feature Sofia Coppola. Apparently Francis Coppola wanted to restore scenes with Sofia that he had been prevailed upon to delete from the original version. For example, there is a scene reinstated on cassette and DVD in which Mary asks her father to reassure her that the Vito Corleone Foundation is genuinely legitimate. Michael assures her that it is not the money-laundering operation it is rumored to be, while he comforts her with the patronizing affection one would give a small child. While not a crucial addition to the picture, this scene does demonstrate that Michael is as adept at manipulating others, even those closest to him, as he always was.

  Harlan Lebo quotes Michael Wilmington’s balanced assessment of Godfather III Wilmington grants that the movie has “grand moments to match either of its predecessors,” but adds, “the complex financial conspiracy that underlies the story never becomes clear…. And yet, it is a wonderful movie.”57 To say that Godfather III is not in a class with masterpieces like its two predecessors is merely to recognize that it suffers only by comparison with the standard Coppola had set for himself by his previous achievements.

  It is indeed a richly textured movie that proved to be the solid followup to its predecessors that Coppola hoped it would be. Despite the brittle elegance of the settings and the formality of some of the language, Godfather III is a film of deep feeling. The action sequences are directed in an appropriately hard-hitting style. Furthermore, Andy Garcia brings an angry intensity to his part as the implacable and indestructible Vinnie, who wreaks vengeance on the Corleones’ enemies at film’s end. As a matter of fact, the movie seems, in its detached way, to be trying to get at the quintessence of revenge films.

  Moreover, the three Godfather films, taken together, qualify as one of the truly great epic sagas in all cinema and have earned $1 billion worldwide and still counting. Yet Coppola seems unimpressed by his achievement. He concedes that he enjoyed portraying his Italian heritage on screen, “but I always sort of resented that the trilogy took up so much of my life, and that it’s about shooting people.”58

  On the contrary, the trilogy covers a span of some seventy years, from the childhood of Vito Corleone to the adult life of his son Michael, and explores large American themes—family, personal achievement, immigration. In sum, the Godfather trilogy, in its scope and majesty, stands as an enduring colossus of American cinema. Indeed, Sight and Sound’s international poll of film directors and film critics in 2002 rated The Godfather and The Godfather Part II among the ten greatest film’s of all time.

  Although the Godfather film’s were productions originated by Paramount Pictures, Coppola continued to maintain his own independent production company, American Zoetrope, through which he initiated projects that he arranged to finance, shoot, and release in cooperation with various major studios. After finishing the first two Godfather films, he decided to turn to a project that had been on the back burner at Zoetrope since the late 1960s, a film about the Vietnam War entitled Apocalypse Now. If Coppola had reinvented the genre of the gangster film with The Godfather and Godfather II, he was now about to reinvent the genre of the war movie with Apocalypse Now.

  6

  The Unknown Soldiers

  Apocalypse Now, Apocalypse Now Redux, and Gardens of Stone

  Nothing comes free. One way or another, you pay for what you are.

  —John Garfield as Paul Boray in the film Humoresque

  Life is a trail you follow in an unknown jungle. There is always uncharted territory ahead.

  —Francis Ford Coppola

  Apocalypse Now was originally conceived by George Lucas and John Milius as a film about the Vietnam War when Francis Coppola was just starting American Zoetrope. In early 1970 Coppola presented to Warner Brothers a package of seven projects that Zoetrope had in the works, among them a proposal for Apocalypse Now. Several months later, in November 1970, Warners summarily rejected six of the seven projects—Lucas’s THX 1138 was the only one that Warners produced—and the rest were shelved (see chapter 3).

  After Coppola repaid Warners for the development money the studio had spent on the other six proposals, he owned the rights to all of these Zoetrope projects. The Conversation, one of the projects, was, as we know, directed by Coppola as a Paramount release. It was not until Coppola finished making Godfather II, however, that he decided to revive Apocalypse Now.

  Lucas and Milius had begun discussing the possibility of a Vietnam War movie in 1968, while they were still film students at USC. Milius had heard numerous harrowing stories from friends who had been in Vietnam, which he planned to string together in the scenario. He wanted to call the movie Apocalypse Now “because of all those hippies at the time who had these buttons that said, ‘Nirvana Now,’” which was a drug-related slogan of the hippy peace movement. “I loved the idea of a guy having a button with a mushroom cloud on it that said, ‘Apocalypse Now,’” suggesting the idea of dropping the bomb and ending the war.1

  Lucas and Milius collaborated on a preliminary treatment about Captain Willard, an American CIA intelligence officer, who must track down Colonel Kurtz, a rogue Green Beret Special Services commander operating along the Cambodian border who has “gone native,” and liquidate him. Lucas suggested that they frame the story as a boat ride upriver, as the intelligence officer seeks out the Green Beret commander.

  After they completed the prose treatment, Milius was to turn it into a screenplay. In discussing the script with Milius, Coppola recalled Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, “Heart of Darkness,” about a European ivory trader who disappears into the Congo jungle. He suggested that Milius use the search for a mysterious ivory trader named Kurtz, which provides the fundamental structure of “Heart of Darkness,” as the basis of the screenplay. Milius agreed that “it would be interesting to transplant Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ to Vietnam,” and he proceeded to write a screenplay loosely based on Conrad’s novella. While Milius was working on the script, news reports began to circulate about the case of Col. Robert Rheault, commanding officer of the U.S. Army Special Forces in Vietnam. Rheault was court-martialed in 1969 for the murder of a Vietnamese guide he suspected of being a double agent. The international press called the investigation “the Green Beret murder case.” The news coverage pointed out
that the Green Berets were involved in guerrilla warfare and espionage activities involving links to the CIA—facts that were not previously known by the general public. Rheault’s lawyer contended that liquidating enemy agents was standard procedure in wartime and that Rheault’s suspicions were well-founded. The charges against Rheault were finally dropped, but his career was in ruins. Unquestionably, Rheault was the inspiration for Colonel Kurtz in Milius’s scenario, for Kurtz is accused of executing no less than four alleged enemy agents in Apocalypse Now.

  Milius transcribed material about the Rheault case into his screenplay directly from the newspaper headlines of the day. “I remember in 1969 when the story came out about Rheault,” he says. “[T]he idea was that the U.S. troops were out there committing their own foreign policy.” Indeed, Kurtz is described by an officer as operating well beyond official military policy for the conduct of the war. Moreover, Rheault’s killing of the suspected Vietcong agent was described in official documents as “termination with extreme prejudice”—a phrase that would find its way into Milius’s script and into the finished film.2 Milius’s script went through six drafts, with the final one dated December 5, 1969.

  After finishing American Graffiti in 1973, Lucas proceeded with Apocalypse Now as his next film. He was convinced that it could be made cheaply by filming it in black and white in the style of a documentary (with 16 mm cameras) in the Philippines, employing a cast of unknowns and integrating newsreel footage with the fictional material. The original plan was that Lucas would direct and Coppola would produce.

  In the summer of 1974 Lucas went to Coppola, who owned the rights to Milius’s script, which had been rejected by Warners in 1970. Coppola proposed to produce the film for a greater share of the profits than Lucas would receive for directing it. Lucas turned Coppola down and turned his attention to making Star Wars. With that, Lucas ended his five-year partnership with Coppola in American Zoetrope. He says that “it was as if we were married and we got divorced. It’s as close a relationship as I’ve had with anybody.”3 Coppola offered Milius the same financial arrangement to direct the movie, and Milius likewise rejected it. Moreover, Milius was incensed when he learned that Coppola planned to rewrite his screenplay and then direct it himself. He later referred to Coppola as “the Bay Area Mussolini.”4

  The press made much of Coppola’s falling out with his “protégé” George Lucas over Apocalypse Now, but Coppola insists that they parted amicably. “There was no falling out between George Lucas and myself over Apocalypse Now,” he says. “I had financed it and owned the script, but George was busy with Star Wars, and John Milius was also busy; and so it fell to me to direct the project.”5 Coppola managed to slip a reference to Lucas into the film as a private joke: Harrison Ford has a cameo in the movie as Colonel G. Lucas.

  As for Milius, he later conceded that, in retrospect, he appreciated how Coppola had subsidized him while he wrote the original draft of the script and recalled that Coppola’s Zoetrope had given a boost to many budding filmmakers (see chapter 3). Furthermore, Milius said that he admired Coppola as a director, concluding, “There was no doubt, from the moment he stepped in to direct it, that he would make a much better picture than either George or I would have.”6

  Apocalypse Now (1979)

  In the fall of 1975, when Coppola undertook to make the film, he substantially reshaped Milius’s screenplay according to his own conception of the story. After examining Milius’s first-draft script for Apocalypse Now, film scholar Brooks Riley points out that Coppola stuck very close to Milius’s original scenario when he revised it for production six years later. If the revised script “strayed from the first draft,” she writes, it was not so much away from Milius’s conception of the plot “as toward Milius’s source, the Conrad novella.”7 At one point Coppola had seriously considered changing the film’s title to that of the novella, so “Heart of Darkness” is the spine of Apocalypse Now.

  In the novella Charles Marlow, the narrator, is charged with the task of tracking down Kurtz, an ivory trader who has disappeared into the interior of the African jungle. Marlow in due course discovers that when Kurtz first went to the Congo he saw himself as a kind of missionary who wanted to civilize the natives he dealt with at his trading post in the jungle. In essence, the jungle is depicted in “Heart of Darkness” as a metaphor for the heart of darkness in each of us, that is, the inclination to evil that lurks within each of us. In Kurtz’s case, once he was on his own in the jungle, he gradually became a ruthless, greedy despot who exploited the natives shamelessly.

  In rewriting the screenplay, Coppola planned “to take John Milius’s script and mate it with ‘Heart of Darkness.’ Consequently, my script is based on ‘Heart of Darkness’ to an even greater extent than the original screenplay.”8 Thus Coppola derived the character of the flipped-out freelance photojournalist in his screenplay from the young Russian sailor who is a disciple of Kurtz in “Heart of Darkness.” Coppola even gives the photographer some of the Russian’s dialogue verbatim from the book. For example, the photo journalist says to Willard, the Marlow character in the film, that Kurtz “has enlarged my mind; you don’t judge him as you would an ordinary man.” In brief, Coppola made the photojournalist “the equivalent of the harlequin Russian sailor … from Conrad.”9

  Brooks Riley notes two major alterations Coppola made in Milius’s version of the script that are particularly significant. One change concerned the very beginning of the script. Milius begins his script, which is in the Research Library at UCLA, with a scene set in Kurtz’s stronghold in the jungle, from which his rebel band makes its forays into “the deep tangled jungle” against the Vietcong, and in this scene there is a glimpse of Kurtz himself, exhorting his disciples.10 By contrast, Coppola chose to follow Conrad in this matter by withholding our first sight of Kurtz until Willard finally tracks him down late in the film. Kurtz’s absence from the film throughout most of its running time steadily builds suspense in the viewer, who continually wonders what this strange and mysterious individual will really be like once he finally makes his appearance. “To have shown Kurtz first, only to have abandoned him for the next two-thirds of the film,” would have proved to be “a dilution of the film’s carefully planned unveiling of the man.”11

  The other crucial revision Coppola made in Milius’s screenplay concerned the film’s conclusion. In Milius’s conception of the film’s finale, Willard is so mesmerized by the overpowering personality of Colonel Kurtz that he succumbs to the corrupting influence of this barbarous warlord. That is, Willard decides to join the native Cambodian tribesmen and the runaway American soldiers who make up Kurtz’s army. Shortly afterward, the Vietcong attack Kurtz’s compound, and Kurtz and Willard fight side by side until Kurtz is killed in battle. American helicopters, which are coming to rescue Willard, then appear in the sky over the compound, and Willard shoots wildly at them, as the film comes to an end.

  Coppola was thoroughly dissatisfied with Milius’s ending for the film. As Coppola describes this ending, Kurtz, “a battle-mad commander,” wearing two bands of machine gun bullets across his chest, takes Willard by the hand and leads him into battle against the North Vietnamese.12 Elsewhere he adds that, thus, “Willard converts to Kurtz’s side; in the end he’s firing up at the helicopters that are coming to get him, crying out crazily.” Coppola dismissed Milius’s ending as too macho and gung-ho, a “political comic strip.”13

  Needless to say, this finale of the film, as conceived by Milius, departs to a greater degree from Conrad’s ending to the story than Coppola’s ending for the film does. In Coppola’s film Willard recoils from Kurtz’s savage practices in the same manner that Marlow does in the book. Hence neither Marlow nor the film’s Willard fall under Kurtz’s sway as does Milius’s Willard, who becomes another Kurtz.

  For the record, “Heart of Darkness” does not appear in the screen credits of Apocalypse Now as the literary source of the film. As a matter of fact, a reference to Conrad’s novella was original
ly listed in the screen credits, but Milius complained to the Screen Writers’ Guild, and the reference to the book was removed. I asked Coppola if Milius vetoed the presence of Conrad’s novella in the film’s credits because he felt that citing Conrad’s book as the source of the movie would minimize the importance of the material contributed to the screenplay by the scriptwriters, and Coppola declined to answer.

  At any rate, years later Milius felt differently about the matter. He freely conceded that “Heart of Darkness” is indeed the source story for the film. “It was my favorite Conrad book,” he said, and hence he wanted very much to bring it to the screen.14 Significantly, the Academy Award nomination for the film’s screenplay was in the category of best screenplay based on material from another medium—the only official acknowledgment that “Heart of Darkness” was the movie’s literary source.

  On the surface it seems that Conrad’s novella is very different from Coppola’s film. For instance, Conrad’s story takes place in the Belgian Congo in the 1890s and focuses on Charles Marlow, a British sailor employed by a European trading firm as a captain of one of their steamboats. By contract, Coppola’s film is set in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and centers on Benjamin Willard, an American Army officer. Yet, as film scholar Linda Cahir points out, although the settings and backgrounds of novella and film are quite different, the manner in which the story is narrated in each instance is “splendidly similar.” For example, “each tale-proper begins with the protagonist’s explanation of how he got the appointment which necessitated his excursion up river,” Cahir points out. Marlow is dispatched to steam up the Congo in order to find Mr. Kurtz, an ivory trader who disappeared into the interior and never returned. Willard is mandated to journey up the Mekong River in a navy patrol boat to find Colonel Kurtz, who has recruited his own renegade army to fight the Vietcong. In addition, while Marlow and Willard each travel up a primeval river to fulfill their respective assignments, each speculates about the character of the man he is seeking, with the help of the information each has pieced together about him. Furthermore, the last stop for both Marlow and Willard, concludes Cahir, “is the soul-altering confrontation with the mysterious Kurtz.”15