The purchase of Hollywood General Studios implicitly represented an endeavor on Coppola’s part to put the auteur theory into practice in a significant manner by making and releasing his own pictures. The purpose of owning his own studio, Coppola explains, “was simply to own the rights to my movies.”3 He took over the bungalow on the lot that was once used by Lloyd and was still named for him.
Robert Spiotta, a fellow Hofstra alumnus with business experience as an executive of Mobil Oil, was named president of Zoetrope Studios. Lucy Fisher, a former vice president at Twentieth Century-Fox, was named vice president. Mona Skager, who had been with American Zoetrope from the beginning, continued as a production executive, and Coppola appointed himself artistic director.
The fact remained that Coppola simply could not afford to produce and distribute a film without the financial backing of one of the major studios. “He understood that his (and his studio’s) future still depended on industry financing,” says Jon Lewis in a book-length study of Coppola’s studio. He would also need to negotiate “bank loans secured against his own future film revenues.”4 The first film on the production docket that he planned to direct himself was One from the Heart, a romantic comedy with songs set in Las Vegas.
Coppola was determined to run Zoetrope Studios more efficiently than he had run American Zoetrope in its early days in the 1970s (see chapter 3). Indeed, back in the spring of 1977, he had addressed a memorandum to the staff of American Zoetrope expressing his displeasure at the lack of organization in the operation of the film unit at the headquarters in the Sentinel Building in San Francisco.
Some Coppola commentators describe the memo as paranoid. Yet it begins with a tactful introduction that hardly smacks of paranoia: “I realize that … it must be difficult for people who are working with me to understand exactly what I expect of them.” He goes on to establish the point that “we will maintain these facilities in order to better realize my own projects” exclusively. In the future, “we will not be in the service business.” His point was that when he founded American Zoetrope in 1969 as an independent production unit he planned to have a number of young directors making films there. That meant that the resources of the facility were eventually stretched thin. Furthermore, some of the aspiring filmmakers whom Coppola had taken under his wing were not experienced enough in their craft to handle expensive equipment properly, and some equipment was damaged or lost.
He added that “it is very important for me to dispel the seven-year ambience of a happy hangout around the old American Zoetrope.” Coppola thought that the atmosphere sometimes seemed to be that of a frat house rather than of a film organization: “I expect people to dress and behave as they would for any other company.” He was not, after all, running a film school for wanna-be moviemakers or sponsoring other filmmakers’ work. “The era of American Zoetrope being a Haven for young filmmakers … to find a home is really no longer in the cards.” In short, Coppola’s dream of American Zoetrope as a community of film directors had proved impractical and had finally evaporated. Gone were the days when, as George Lucas puts it, Coppola would hand a camera to any zealous young filmmaker who showed up at the front door (see chapter 3).
Occasionally, he added, he would allow an established director to make a film for American Zoetrope. Indeed, he planned to have German director Wim Wenders direct Hammett for American Zoetrope. Nevertheless, American Zoetrope would continue to be fundamentally a one-client organization, “and the sooner we are able to gear ourselves to that fact, the better the company will run.”
In reference to the criticism he had received in the press for the budget overruns on Apocalypse Now, he declared, “I know that the amounts of money I deal in seem unreal to most people—they do to me as well. But please always remember that I work with these amounts because I am willing to risk everything for my own creative work…. I am cavalier about money because I have to be, in order not to be terrified every time I make an artistic decision.” The memo concludes: “I have heard that success is as difficult to deal with as failure—perhaps more so. Euripides, the Greek playwright, said thousands of years ago: ‘Whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes successful in show business.’”5 (What Euripides really said was, “Whom Jupiter wishes to destroy, he makes crazy.”)
The memo was unfortunately leaked by a disgruntled employee to the San Francisco Chronicle and was subsequently reprinted in full in Esquire magazine. Asked about this memorandum, Coppola explains that he composed it because he was unhappy about “the infighting among the staff at American Zoetrope. I wanted to organize American Zoetrope more efficiently, and wrote this memo to make my position clear. Then it was published and a lot of people in the industry ridiculed me, because I sounded like a desperate guy trying to hold onto his company.” If he seems paranoid, he concludes, it was because he “was scared”—frightened that he might indeed lose control of his independent film company. In actual fact, Coppola had every reason to spell out his priorities for his staff. It was even more imperative that his independent film unit run efficiently now that he had his own studio and was about to put One from the Heart into production.
One from the Heart (1982)
Armyan Bernstein’s screenplay for One from the Heart was set in Chicago, but Coppola decided to move the story to Las Vegas. He viewed Las Vegas as a fabulous town that would provide a more romantic atmosphere for a love story than a midwestern metropolis like Chicago. He also decided to add songs to the film to lend the love story a more lyrical quality.
Coppola was familiar with legendary Las Vegas as an interesting setting for a film from making the first two Godfather films in which the Corleones move to Las Vegas to exploit the lucrative business enterprises available to them there. Unlike the Corleones, the central characters in One from the Heart are average middle-class types who have come to Las Vegas with more modest aspirations.
It somehow seems appropriate that a director who was willing to risk the future of his studio on an expensive production like One from the Heart should set the film in Las Vegas, the gambling capital of America. Still, Coppola was known for bringing in dark horses as winners in the past, as he had done with unpromising projects like the Godfather films and Apocalypse Now.
Coppola decided to shoot One from the Heart at Zoetrope Studios rather than on location in Las Vegas. Slogging through the mud in the Philippine jungles while making Apocalypse Now, “I realized I wanted to make films in a studio again,” he explained. He described the picture as a modest effort, like “a student film on a studio scale.”6 Coppola commissioned Tom Waits to write nine jazzy/bluesy songs for his “fable with music,” as Coppola called it. The songs, which would be sung on the sound track by the composer and country balladeer Crystal Gayle, were meant to comment on what was happening to the characters. Coppola brought in legendary movie hoofer Gene Kelly (Singin’ in the Rain) to supervise the dance numbers, which were to be choreographed by Kenny Ortega, Kelly’s protégé. Vittorio Storaro, ace cinematographer on Apocalypse Now, agreed to shoot One from the Heart.
Since Coppola was committed to shooting One from the Heart on the sound stages at Zoetrope Studios, Dean Tavoularis got going on constructing a number of mammoth sets. He employed 350 union construction workers, including 200 carpenters, to build a residential neighborhood, a section of McCarran Airport, and a desert motel. The most fabulous set that Tavoularis created was the mind-boggling replica of the Vegas Strip of casinos along Fremont Street. It encompassed miles of neon lights and a paved intersection (the neon lights alone on the expensive set cost $1 million). Tavoularis also had a detailed scale model of Las Vegas made for use in long shots. The sets covered nine sound stages in all. Without a doubt, Tavoularis’s cityscape added a touch of gloss to the movie. The overall budget of the movie, including the costumes for the Vegas nightclub shows that figure in the film, was computed to be $15 million. So much for Coppola’s “student film” on a studio scale.
Everyone agreed that the sets were spe
ctacular. Mona Skager, associate producer on the film, explained that Coppola wanted One from the Heart to be filled with elaborate sets and costumes so as to be a glamorous feast for the eye. Still, some of the staff wondered if a lightweight love story needed to be staged in such grandiose terms.
Mindful of the spiraling budget, Coppola decided to avoid paying superstars astronomical salaries—he had not forgotten Brando’s hefty salary for Apocalypse Now. Hence Coppola hired relative unknowns in the leads: Teri Garr (The Conversation) was cast as Frannie; Frederic Forrest (Apocalypse Now) as Hank, her live-in lover; Raul Julia as Ray, a lounge waiter that Frannie is enamored with; and Nastassia Kinski as Leila, a highwire artist who has run away from the circus, to whom Hank is attracted. Nevertheless, some Zoetrope staffers were concerned that the film’s principal actors might not have enough marquee value to draw the mass audience to the picture.
The simple plot of the film turns on Hank, a tough guy with a soft center, and Frannie, his tart-tongued lover, who have grown bored with one another. The story takes place on Independence Day weekend, and both seem to want to be independent of each other. Frannie, who is employed in a travel agency, fantasizes about going off to the tropics with a handsome male. Hank, who runs an auto repair shop and junkyard, daydreams about a romantic adventure with a gorgeous girl. Everyone collides, sexually and emotionally, in the course of the film, and Hank and Frannie seek to clean up the mess they have made of their relationship at the fade-out.
Coppola describes One from the Heart as a “musical parable about a couple being together, breaking apart, each having an affair, and getting back together again.” One of the reasons he was attracted to the scenario was that it dealt with the temporary breakup of a long-term relationship. He had lived through a similar experience during the making of Apocalypse Now, as we know, and it was still fresh in his mind (see chapter 6). To that extent, making the movie was a form of “therapy” for him.7
Coppola planned the production with great care. He began by having storyboard sketches made for the individual shots, amounting to five hundred drawings. Then he had the storyboards photographed on videotape and recorded actors reading the lines for each scene. In this way, the storyboards seemed to come to life. This technique gave Coppola a rough draft of the final film. The next step was to transport the cast to Las Vegas, where they spent two days doing a walk-through of the script in authentic locations. This run-through was also videotaped. Viewing the videotape afterward gave Coppola the opportunity to fix a scene that was not working satisfactorily before he actually shot it in the studio. He termed the videotaped storyboards and the videotaped run-through the “previsualization process” of the movie. He likened the technique to the dress rehearsal of a play in the theater, thereby reminding us once again that he started out at Hofstra University as a theater major.
When shooting commenced on February 2, 1981, Coppola had a silver Airstream trailer, which he christened the “Silverfish,” stationed near the set. It was filled with high-definition TV monitors, control boards, and microphones. “I’m rarely in the van during an actual take,” he explained to Lillian Ross when she visited the set, “but in the van afterward I can review each shot and know right away whether I want to … make a change in a scene.8 The system, which he dubbed “electronic cinema,” allowed Coppola to make a preliminary edit of each scene when it was filmed.
For the record, Scott Haller, who also visited the set, observed that Coppola all too often directed scenes from inside the Silverfish—more often than he had led Ross to believe. In directing a scene from the trailer, according to Haller, Coppola’s disembodied voice issued directions, which were relayed to cast members on the set “via a loud speaker, for everyone to hear.”9 Teri Garr told me (during a brief interview when she was working on another film) that some of the actors complained that they found it disturbing that the director was sequestered in an off-stage control booth. His voice was amplified over a public address system, as if he were Jupiter on Mount Olympus or the Wizard of Oz. Garr herself felt somewhat uneasy with a “remote-control” director: “We couldn’t talk back to him. We just listened and took direction. We felt like puppets.”
Coppola later countered that he was on the set to rehearse the actors before a scene was filmed and only retreated to the Silverfish when they were ready to do a take so he could watch it on the monitor. Be that as it may, as shooting progressed, this method of directing generated so much tension on the set that some of the cast whispered that “Big Brother is watching you.” Consequently, Coppola gradually tapered off from using this technique toward the end of filming.
Another departure from the conventional way of shooting a film— besides “previsualization” and “electronic cinema”—that Coppola employed was to shoot many unbroken takes, lasting up to ten minutes apiece. Coppola, collaborating with Storaro, kept the camera on the go during these extended takes, as it unobtrusively glided from one character to another, closing in at times to capture a key gesture or remark then falling back for a medium or long shot as the action and dialogue continued. In this fashion, the camera would draw the filmgoer into the scene and explore the action at close range and not simply remain a remote observer watching the action from a distance like a spectator at a stage play.
Coppola was convinced that an extended take, uninterrupted by the customary cuts to other angles, enabled his actors to give a sustained performance throughout a scene and thus build it steadily to a dramatic climax. One thinks, for example, of the quarrel scene early in the movie that peaks with Frannie walking out on Hank, which was done as a long take.
In order to capture the ambiance of Las Vegas during a festive Fourth of July celebration, Coppola and Storaro gave the film a bright look, often using saturated colors—pulsating magentas and gaudy oranges. Indeed, the film is sumptuously shot, and Coppola’s virtuosity and visual flair are never in doubt.
As filming continued, friction developed on the set between Coppola and Gene Kelly, who was lending Kenny Ortega a hand in staging the dance numbers. Kelly was distraught when Coppola called for an assortment of extras to mill around the Vegas street set during a production number. Coppola maintained that the extras added color to the scene, whereas Kelly contended that they merely got in the way of the dance chorus.
Their tempers really erupted when Coppola ordered Kelly to choreograph a dance routine for Nastassia Kinski, which was to be shot the following day. Kelly stubbornly maintained that it would take him several days to work out the number and rehearse Kinski adequately. When Coppola stuck to his guns and demanded that the number be ready the next day, Kelly stormed off the set. In fairness to Coppola, it should be noted that Tommy Tune, a dancer in Hello Dolly! (1969), the last musical Kelly himself directed, told me that Kelly gave him several weeks to learn a dance routine that he could have mastered in an afternoon. At any rate, Kelly subsequently dissociated himself from One from the Heart and eventually issued a statement that declared, “In no way does One from the Heart represent any of my choreography.10 (One recalls that Coppola had a falling out with choreographer Hermes Pan on his earlier musical, Finian’s Rainbow, which likewise ended with director and choreographer parting company.)
In early February 1981, Paramount had agreed to distribute the film. They offered an advertising budget and promised prints to theaters across the country on February 10, 1982. Armed with the Paramount distribution deal, Coppola obtained a loan from Chase Manhattan Bank to finance production. According to Lillian Ross—who charts the financing and marketing of One from the Heart with mind-numbing documentation—Chase Manhattan Bank loaned Zoetrope Studios a total of $19 million. “Then we borrowed $3 million from Jack Singer, a Canadian investor, who is primarily in the real estate business,” Robert Spiotta told Ross, “and we put up the studio as collateral.” That was enough financial backing to put the picture on forward drive.
As the production period wore on, however, the costly sets and costumes, plus the endless rehearsal ne
cessary for blocking out the complicated lengthy takes, added up to one inescapable fact: the picture was falling way behind schedule and going over budget in a way that recalled the dog days on Apocalypse Now. Assistant director Jerry Ziesmer, we remember, observed that no one wanted to say “No” to Coppola, even when the production costs of Apocalypse Now skyrocketed. Similarly, Mona Skager, associate producer of One from the Heart, states that Coppola had gathered around him a group of “yes men” who never questioned his decisions or procedures.
One day, however, Skager confronted Coppola, pointing out that “One from the Heart started at $15 million; and the way it is going, I don’t think its $15 million; I think it’s $23 million” She adds, “He really got upset with me.”11 “I was running a movie studio that had no money,” Coppola explains. “As we went along in shooting One from the Heart, we were always short of money.” As a result, “everybody at Zoetrope took a big pay cut; they were wonderful.”12 Because of the cash-flow crisis, studio employees accepted half pay. What’s more, at a critical moment, when Coppola failed to meet the weekly payroll, he held a meeting at which he explained his financial predicament and asked the employees if he could defer paying their wages for a couple of weeks. Studio workers voted against the wishes of their unions that they walk off the picture and shut down production. Someone shouted, “We’re with you!” This display of loyalty reduced Coppola to tears. It seems that the studio employees were impressed that Coppola was willing to invest his own money and personal property in the movie. It was around this time that they started sporting buttons proclaiming the credo, “I Believe in Francis C.” Coppola emphasized that “all these people were paid in full eventually,” but their attitude at the time was quite generous.13
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