Godfather

by Gene D. Phillips

  While reworking the script, Coppola points out, “I was trying to be faithful to the book. I didn’t want to juice the film up with superfluous plot and conflict.” That explains the absence of battle scenes in the film, even when Jackie, the young hero, is shipped overseas to the front. The war is depicted solely by a series of newsreel clips shown on television back home: close-ups of the anguished faces of suffering soldiers, shots of the wounded being stowed aboard helicopters by their comrades at arms. In not foregrounding the war, Coppola admits, “you lose the benefits which such violent turbulence will give you.” He was relying instead on character development rather than gratuitous excitement to involve the audience.

  When he is reminded of the violent battle scenes in Apocalypse Now,, Coppola responds that Apocalypse Now was set in Vietnam. “It was about the spectacle of destruction, of warfare, of men on the brink,” soldiers in the war zone who were “out of control.”71 By contrast, Gardens of Stone is about the Vietnam War, but it is not set in Vietnam. He wanted to show the decent, human side of the military this time around, not the violent side.

  As usual, Coppola enlisted crew members from his previous pictures, including production designer Dean Tavoularis, editor Barry Malkin, and composer Carmine Coppola, who scored the music for the military band. Gian-Carlo “Gio” Coppola, the older of Coppola’s two sons, was again in charge of videotaping rehearsals so that the director could discuss various scenes with the actors. He was assisted by his buddy Griffin O’Neal, the troubled son of actor Ryan O’Neal, who had just finished a year in a drug rehabilitation program.

  Once again Coppola called on actors who had appeared in his other films. James Caan, cast as an old-timer, Sergeant Clell Hazard, was emerging from a five-year hiatus from films, during which he had successfully controlled his substance abuse (something O’Neal had so far failed to do, as we shall shortly see). Yet no studio would hire Caan because he was branded as a cocaine addict, until Coppola loyally insisted on casting his old college chum in Gardens of Stone. “Francis—God bless him—fought very hard for me,” says Caan.72

  Sam Bottoms and Larry Fishburne, veterans of Apocalypse Now, were again playing Vietnam vets in the present film. Additional cast members included D. B. Sweeney as Jackie Willow and Mary Stuart Masterson as Jackie’s fiancée Rachel. As a matter of fact, the young actress’s parents in the film were played by her real father and mother, Peter Masterson and Carlin Glynn. Rounding out the cast was Anjelica Huston as an antiwar activist who is also a reporter for the Washington Post. Huston said she took her role because “it’s very important to have a woman’s point of view in a movie about Vietnam. We’ve seen all these movies that have to do with the boys going over and getting killed; but women have also suffered terribly because of the war.” Echoing Coppola’s remarks on the subject, she continues, “Women conceive and bear children, and then these children are sent off to be mutilated and killed. It’s tragic.”73

  Before shooting started in May 1986, Coppola followed his customary procedure of putting his ensemble of players through two weeks of rehearsals, during which, Coppola explains, they engaged in improvisations as a means of developing their characters “and filling in any gaps in the script.” The actors rehearsed the scenes in sequence, as if the script were a theatrical play, and the rehearsals were videotaped by Gio Coppola and his video crew. The scenes were then assembled into a full-length, preliminary version of the film, as if it were an “animated storyboard.” This is what Coppola terms “the off-Broadway version of the movie,” which affords the director and the cast a preview of the finished film.

  Once filming began, Coppola had each scene recorded on videotape as it was shot so that he could have an instant replay of each take and make necessary adjustments before doing another take. “I use it as a kind of sketchpad,” he says.74

  Early in the shooting period, while the unit was on location in the Washington area, the production closed down to celebrate Memorial Day on May 26. Gio Coppola and Griffin O’Neal took a fourteen-foot speedboat for a spin on the South River on Chesapeake Bay, with O’Neal at the wheel. They had had wine at lunch and beer on board, so that O’Neal, whose alcohol consumption was well above the legal drinking limit, was in no condition to be steering the motorboat. He attempted to pass between two large craft, failing to notice that there was a taut towline linking them. When he slammed into the towline, Gio Coppola hit the deck hard and sustained massive cranial injuries. Gio, age twenty-three, was declared dead on arrival at Anne Arundel County General Hospital. His fiancée, Jacqueline de la Fontaine, was three months pregnant when Gio died, and she eventually gave birth to Francis Coppola’s first grandchild, named Gian-Carla Coppola. O’Neal, who sustained only minor bruises, was subsequently convicted of reckless endangerment and gross negligence (not manslaughter, as some news reports said). He was sentenced to 416 hours of community service, eighteen months of probation, and a paltry two-hundred-dollar fine.

  Two days after Gio’s death, a memorial service took place in the military chapel at Fort Myer, where Coppola was filming. This writer was among the countless people in the film world who sent him their condolences at the time. Coppola announced that shooting would resume. He was confident that Gio would have wished that he finish the picture, “since he had worked with me. God gave me Gio and God has taken him away.”75 Nevertheless, Coppola collapsed on the set shortly after the resumption of filming, and his physician ordered him to rest for five days, after which he proceeded with the shoot. Roman Coppola, Gio’s younger brother, took over Gio’s responsibility for videotaping the scenes as they were shot.

  Coppola kept his grief in check by working steadily. Only three weeks after Gio’s demise, Coppola was back filming scenes in the same chapel where his son’s funeral had taken place. The director mused afterward that he has often found that the movies he makes reflect a good deal of what is happening in his own life at the time. Still, he never dreamed that the making of Gardens of Stone would affect his own life so profoundly. “I had to do a movie about the burial of young men,” and suddenly he found that “my own boy would die right in the midst of it, and the funeral ceremony would be in the same chapel where we shot a similar scene in Gardens of Stone”76 In his journal he later recorded, “My son Gio is gone, but his memory is not. His laughter lives on in his daughter Gia. It is amazing how much she is like him.”77

  The eight-week shoot wrapped on August 5,1986, right on schedule and just slightly over the $13.5 million budget. After completing a number of movies, Coppola says, he understands how prolific directors like John Ford (Stagecoach) turned out so many high-quality movies in the old days. “As you get more experienced,” he observes, “I think you work faster.”78

  When Coppola moved into postproduction, he collaborated closely with editor Barry Malkin, who had worked on Apocalypse Now. Malkin agreed with Coppola that the film “was an elegy of sorts, since it was about death…. It’s brooding, purposely so. In my first cut I constructed certain sequences to exactly document the way the honor guard did their ceremonies” when burying their fallen comrades. This is because “it was impressed on me that in the end the army…would look at the cuts and make sure we had done them properly. So the first time I put the sequences together, I followed the ceremonial rites to a tee.”79

  In filming these burial rites, Coppola had been at pains to capture the grandeur and pace of the ritual, but preview audiences found these scenes tedious. “A young audience—and young audiences are pretty much what you get in these previews—saw these scenes” as just a lot of marching, he explains, “so we had to modulate these drills.”80 In the end, adds Malkin, “we were allowed” by the military advisers “to skip over parts of the ceremonies because they took too long.”81

  Gardens of Stone opens with Lieutenant Jackie Willow’s military funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, complete with a twenty-one-gun salute. The American flag is removed from the casket, folded, and presente
d to Rachel, Jackie’s young widow, who is flanked by her parents. Jackie reads his last letter home, voice-over on the sound track. It is addressed to Clell Hazard. “This may be my last letter,” he says. “You tried to tell me how it was, but I was too young.” Jackie speaks with the detached perspective of the dead. This is one of the few instances in cinema history in which a film opens with a character talking from beyond the grave. Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) is another salient example.

  In this fashion Jackie introduces the extended flashback that covers the events leading up to his funeral, and it is to his funeral that the movie returns at the film’s conclusion. Hence, Jackie’s obsequies serve as the narrative frame for the entire picture. The story proper begins in flashback a year earlier, with Jackie arriving at Fort Myer as a trainee. He soon encounters Sergeant Clell Hazard, a combat veteran who has become increasingly demoralized as he observes the Army futilely waging a war in Vietnam he is convinced is unwinnable. “I care about the U.S. Army,” he says to a friend. “That’s my family. The only one I got. And I don’t like it when my family is in trouble.” It is clear that Hazard has always defined his self-image in terms of his membership in the armed forces.

  After four years in Vietnam, Hazard is now a member of the Old Guard, a special unit that serves as the honor guard for the burials at Arlington National Cemetery (the gardens of stone) of servicemen killed in Vietnam. In practice this can involve participation in as many as fifteen funerals a day. Hazard is convinced that the experience he has gained from his tours of duty, both in Korea and in Vietnam, is being squandered. He would much prefer to train cadets for combat so that his expertise could well save some lives.

  Depressed by the continuing loss of so many young lives, Hazard sardonically tells Jackie Willow, a young recruit in the Old Guard, that burying is their business and business has never been better. Bright-eyed, impetuous Jackie insists that the war is not lost and that the right kind of soldier could make a difference. Hazard, on the other hand, thinks Jackie far too idealistic nd tells him so repeatedly. Nonetheless, the rambunctious lad is itching to plunge into the fray in order to do whatever he can to help win the war.

  Since Jackie is the son of an old comrade of Hazard’s in Korea, Hazard nurtures paternal solicitude for the young man and discourages him from volunteering for combat. To no avail. Jackie in due course is shipped overseas, where he is killed in action just a few weeks before he completes his tour of duty. During the ceremonies at graveside for Jackie, we can hear a couple of the younger members of the Old Guard muttering their favorite jingle: “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust;/Let’s get this over and get back in the bus.” Jackie no doubt recited this same impish little ditty when he was part of the ceremonial guard.

  Hazard is divorced and has lost custody of his son to his ex-wife. It is not surprising, then, that Jackie had become a surrogate son for Hazard during their time together in the Old Guard. So he feels as if he has indeed lost a son when Jackie is killed. The aging soldier remembers that Jackie had dreamed of winning the Combat Infantry Badge while he was in Vietnam but did not live long enough to receive one. Hence Hazard places his own C.I.B. on Jackie’s coffin before the interment, equivalent to a gift from father to son. Hazard also decides, in the wake of Jackie’s death, to return to the battleground in Vietnam in the hope that he can teach other young fighting men everything he knows about how to survive under fire, since he never got the chance to help Jackie in this way.

  Coppola explains that he ultimately decided to make this muted, elegiac film about the special ceremonial unit of the army because it is consistent with the theme that frequently appears in his films, the significance of family. To be precise, he valued the opportunity to present an in-depth portrayal of servicemen as a sort of family whose members are bound together by a traditional code of honor and by mutual loyalty and affection. In short, his goal in making the film was to limn military men, not as conventional movie stereotypes, but as complicated human beings. He accomplished this task quite satisfactorily, as reflected in the solid characterizations of Clell Hazard and Jackie Willow and in the subtle father-son relationship that gradually develops between them. Coppola portrays very warmly the fatherly relationship of the tough old sergeant and the enthusiastic young rookie so that we cannot help but care about them.

  Critical reaction to Gardens of Stone was very reserved indeed, with most reviewers praising individual aspects of the film, but not the whole show. For example, Jordan Cronenweth’s cinematography was lauded for giving the movie a mellow, autumnal look with its muted, pastel tints. (More than one critic pointed out that the melancholy tone of the picture could be attributed to some extent to the personal tragedy that had intervened in Coppola’s life while he was making the movie. Coppola once again demonstrated his skill in drawing the best from his actors, as with Caan’s sturdy performance as the grizzled veteran, matched by Sweeney’s smart, alert portrayal of a recruit.

  But the film as a whole was thought to rely too much on character and mood and not enough on dynamic storytelling. Coppola himself confessed that he was aware of this problem from the get-go: “I was trying to orchestrate a piece that didn’t have a strong narrative,” and it showed.82 It seemed that Coppola strained too hard to wring pathos out of the melancholy tale. For example, Jackie’s funeral, which frames the picture, appeared to be designed to squeeze every last tear from the tragedy. In the end, Gardens of Stone was judged to be no more than workmanlike moviemaking.

  Inevitably Gardens of Stone was compared to Apocalypse Now, much to the later film’s disadvantage. Referring to Jackie’s funeral, Richard Blake asked, “Why did Coppola, whose own strong Apocalypse Now presented a searing portrait of Vietnam and its corrosive effects on human values, turn to sentimentality in Gardens of Stone?.83 The film’s somber vision was to some degree responsible for its dismal performance at the box office. Coppola consoled himself with a “Certificate of Appreciation for Patriotic Civilian Service” from the Army, which endorsed the film as displaying the devotion to duty and strong leadership that characterizes the United States Army.

  Coppola concedes that he probably would not have chosen to make Gardens of Stone had it not been for the fact that the film production studio he had launched in the early 1980s had collapsed into bankruptcy. In order to pay his debts, he was compelled to become a “hired gun,” working nonstop on a variety of projects to pay his bills. The next section of this study will examine how Coppola’s dream of owning and operating his own studio as a haven for independent filmmakers turned into a nightmare.

  Part Three

  Artist in an Industry

  7

  Exiled in Eden

  One from the Heart

  There is no point in hating Hollywood. That would be like hating the Sphinx. It’s just there, and it will go on being there, whether you like it or not.

  —Ken Russell, film director

  Hollywood is still held together by palm trees, telephone wires, and hope.

  —John Schlesinger, film director

  Although both of the Godfather films were productions originated by Paramount Pictures, Coppola continued to maintain his own independent production company through which he initiated projects, such as Apocalypse Now, that he arranged to finance, shoot, and release in cooperation with various major studios. He initially named this operation, which he established in San Francisco in 1969, American Zoetrope, after the primitive mechanism that was a forerunner of the motion picture projector.

  In 1980 he purchased the old Hollywood General Studios in the heart of the film colony, which had all the elaborate technical facilities necessary for shooting a motion picture that his San Francisco setup did not have. He christened his new acquisition Zoetrope Studios and envisioned it as similar to a repertory theater company where a group of artists and technicians would collaborate in making movies together.

  He had passed the studio every day as a high school student during the period when the family
lived in Los Angeles, and now it was his. Since One from the Heart was to be the first film Coppola directed at his own studio, it is important to outline the inauguration of Zoetrope Studios at this point before discussing the film itself.

  Zoetrope Studios

  Hollywoodites talked about Coppola’s empire-building with tolerant chuckles, and one industry insider quoted the old adage about directors who started their own studios: “The lunatics are taking over the asylum.” Even George Lucas criticized his former mentor for buying a studio in Hollywood. “I thought Francis was betraying all of us in San Francisco who had been struggling to make this community a viable film alternative,” he said at the time.1 For his part, Lucas had set up Lucasfilm, his independent film company, in Mill Valley in the Bay area, a good distance from Hollywood. Coppola replied that his office complex at the Sentinel Building in San Francisco would continue to be the principal base of operations for his independent film unit, though shooting would be done at Zoetrope Studios in Hollywood.

  Coppola envisioned his high-tech studio in Hollywood as a paradise for creative production specialists, who would function independent of the suffocating Hollywood establishment. “This feeling of being a part of a family, this closeness would be stimulating to professionals,” he said.2 Among the “family members” would be Zoetrope regulars like production designer Dean Tavoularis and sound specialist Walter Murch.

  Coppola officially purchased the ten-acre movie lot on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard at Las Palmas Avenue on March 25, 1980. He embarked on his daring enterprise by putting up $7.6 million for the studio by means of some cash and several mortgages on his assets. The studio housed nine sound stages, several office suites, thirty-four editing rooms, and a special-effects shop, plus ample rehearsal space. He also used his personal fortune, which was largely derived from his share in the profits of the first two Godfather films, to renovate the studio. Built in 1919, Hollywood General was one of the oldest studios in town. It had fallen into disrepair in recent years since its glory days, when silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd made Grandma’s Boy there in 1922 and British director Michael Powell directed The Thief of Bagdad there in 1939. Coppola borrowed an additional $3 million to modernize the facility with the latest technical equipment. He hired 184 employees, including office staff and film technicians.