Godfather
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The actual filming, which began on February 2, 1981, stopped on March 31. But then Coppola began to rethink and redesign certain key scenes and resumed filming after three weeks, adding thirty-two days to the shooting schedule. Filming was finally finished on June 29. The making of One from the Heart involved seventy-nine days of rehearsals and seventy-two days of shooting.
“After that the film went into postproduction.” In all, two hundred thousand feet of film had been shot, which Coppola had to pare down during postproduction to ten thousand feet for a final cut. “We were over budget by $4 million,” notes Spiotta. Consequently, “Chase Manhattan had to provide further funds in the form of personal loans guaranteed by Mr. Coppola,… utilizing as collateral just about everything he has,” including his 1,700-acre estate in the Napa Valley.”14 Because Coppola had over the years sunk most of his funds into real estate, he had little ready cash—an accountant would say that he had a shortage of liquid funds. “My home telephone has been shut off,” he declared, “because I haven’t been able to pay my bill.”15 The first time that happened was when he was an impoverished graduate student at UCLA two decades before.
When he was asked why he did not turn to George Lucas, his erstwhile protégé, for financial backing, Coppola replied, “My friendship with George is such that… he would help me in other ways. George is a friend, not in a money-lending way, but more in the way of giving me a lift to the airport when I needed it.” Lucas, who was made rich by Star Wars, responded that, “if Francis needed help, he only had to ask for it. He never did,” even when Lucas offered him an “interest-free loan.”16 Possibly Coppola did not want to trade on his friendship with Lucas.
Veteran editor Rudi Fehr worked on the film during postproduction. When Coppola made Finian’s Rainbow and The Rain People for Warners, Fehr was in charge of postproduction there, “and Mr. Coppola and I hit it off very well.”17 After Fehr retired from Warners, Coppola asked him to supervise the edit of One from the Heart, working with two other editors in order to meet the deadline for finishing postproduction.
Coppola decided to take a print of the still-unfinished film to Seattle for a sneak preview in the spring of 1981. Fehr strongly advised him against previewing the film when optical effects like dissolves and fades had yet to be achieved and some of the songs were still missing from the sound track. He pointed out that Jack Warner believed that a picture should not be previewed “until you can put your best foot forward, when you have everything ready. If you and I don’t know what’s wrong with the picture,… you can’t ask an amateur audience to tell you what’s wrong with it.”18
But Coppola was adamant about the preview since he wanted some preliminary feedback from an audience. He chose Seattle for the sneak because he wished to avoid previewing the film in the Los Angeles area, where a local newspaper critic might see it and write a premature review in a major metropolitan daily (something that had happened when he test- screened Apocalypse Now in Los Angeles, much to Coppola’s chagrin at the time). As it happened, Richard Jameson, a local Seattle critic, caught the sneak preview of the movie and wrote a review for Film Comment, a film journal, but at least his remarks were not published in a big L.A. daily.
Before the Seattle screening Coppola asked the audience to make allowances for the fact that the film still needed some finishing touches. Then he invited them “to participate in a revolutionary experience—to play an actual part in the making of a major motion picture” by giving him their comments on preview cards.
Jameson’s own remarks in Film Comment foreshadowed the critical reaction to the picture at the time of its official release: that Coppola was unduly interested in the technical side of filmmaking, that the elaborate long takes, large-scale sets and fancy costumes dwarfed the small-scale love story. The film’s title is ironic, wrote Jameson, since Coppola has “heart trouble.” “The heart this movie proceeds from is cold” in that “the film suggests very little caring about the real-life dilemmas of its amorous searchers.”19 Moreover, Jameson reported, lobby comments on the part of some of the filmgoers afterward coincided with his own reaction to the picture. The lukewarm reaction to the test screening of the film unquestionably influenced Coppola’s decision, mentioned already, to resume shooting in April.
When Coppola was finishing postproduction on New Year’s Eve, 1981, he decided to hold a final public screening of the movie at Manhattan’s cavernous Radio City Music Hall, known as “the showplace of the nation.” He wanted to draw attention to the film and had employed a similar tactic when he showed Apocalypse Now in Cannes. As was the case with Apocalypse Now, he was worried that One from the Heart was being prejudged in the press, that reports about escalating budgets and extended shooting schedules might hurt the picture. “I just wanted a chance to show One from the Heart clean to an audience one time before it went into the funnel” of distribution, he said.20 Nevertheless, Paramount was dismayed by Coppola’s snap decision to personally schedule a public preview of the movie without even consulting them—just as United Artists had been against the Cannes screening of Apocalypse Now (see chapter 6). Furthermore, Paramount was already annoyed with Coppola because of the multiple delays in delivering the picture to them.
Coppola scheduled two evening screenings of the picture on January 14, 1982, which were attended by six thousand people who were anxious to see what Coppola had wrought. After the first screening Coppola held a press conference in a backstage rehearsal studio, attended by major movie critics and journalists from several cities. Coppola “took the first question square in the face and bled as if it had been a brick.” A radio reporter said that he had not interviewed anyone after the screening who had liked the picture. Coppola replied that “there weren’t many walkouts” and that “a lot of people who spoke to me told me it was an unusual and beautiful picture.” And so it went. He concluded the press conference with an exhortation to the press to support filmmakers in their efforts to make quality pictures. “Why don’t we all cheer the filmmakers on?”21 Coppola reflected after the press conference that, given the negative tone of some of the questions, it was evident that many of the journalists present “had already formulated their opinion, even before we had the preview.”22
Paramount, as mentioned, was no longer on good terms with Coppola, and he announced at the press conference that he had terminated his distribution agreement with the studio. On January 29, he declared that Columbia Pictures would distribute One from the Heart. Columbia took over the advertising campaign for the picture and agreed to supply twenty-five prints of the film, which would be booked into forty-one theaters in eight major cities, including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. It would open on schedule on February 10, 1982.
After a brief release on videotape in 1983, the film disappeared. One from the Heart was not available on TV or home video for two decades, until it was released on DVD in 2004. Since the movie was out of circulation for so long, it is appropriate to summarize the scenario in some detail. The picture opens with a blue theater curtain parting—a stage convention that suggests that the film goes all out for artifice. A paper moon is seen floating in the sky with the film’s title superimposed on it. The opening credits are presented most inventively; they appear on the neon signs outside the Vegas casinos.
We soon meet Frannie, a plain Jane who works in the Paradise Travel Agency and fantasizes about going to Tahiti. Hank, her equally unattractive live-in lover, runs an auto repair shop and junkyard called Reality Wreckers and dreams of making a success of the business. It is the eve of the anniversary of their meeting on the Fourth of July weekend five years before.
In one of the extended takes that Coppola employs throughout the film, Storaro’s camera starts out at a high angle above a residential street, then gradually cranes downward to follow Frannie from her car to the shabby bungalow she inhabits with Hank. Along the way the groceries she is carrying fall out of the bags onto the sidewalk. The camera then tracks behind her as she trudges through the messy
dining room and kitchen, while Crystal Gayle sings on the sound track, “I’m sick and tired of picking up after you.” Hank arrives home shortly afterward.
They begin to bicker, as Frannie complains that Hank has gained weight, and Hank retorts that she no longer shaves her legs—they both have neglected their physical appearance. Clearly, they take each other for granted and their life together has grown stale. “Life has to be more than this,” Frannie says laconically, “if this is it, it’s not enough.”
As they continue to exchange mutual recriminations, Frannie finally says that she is going to leave Hank. He replies disconsolately, “My folks were always fighting, but they knew they loved each other, and they were together. But nowadays you just move on. Ain’t nobody committed to nothing but having a good time.” Hank and Frannie represent the sort of touching losers and dreamers who live on the fringe of any big city. They are the typical outsiders who yearn to be insiders but lack the talent and initiative to realize their dreams. Hence they remain on the outside looking in, jealous of the big-time spenders they see in downtown Las Vegas and dissatisfied with a monotonous existence they have grown tired of. For them the American Dream is tarnished.
Their domestic argument ends with Frannie stomping out of the house to stay overnight with her friend Maggie (Lainie Kazan), while Hank spends the night in the flat of his friend Moe (Harry Dean Stanton). While Moe commiserates with Hank in Moe’s living room, the wall behind them is suddenly revealed to be a gauze scrim. It becomes transparent as the lights come up on Frannie and Maggie, who become visible through the scrim as they discuss her breakup with Hank. Coppola utilized the scrim effect in order to glide smoothly from a scene with Hank to a scene with Frannie, but some critics complained that the device calls attention to itself, rather than to the characters.
The following evening Frannie and Hank are back home, dressing to go out on a date—but not with each other. The gloomy atmosphere of the scene is underscored by Tom Waits vocalizing on the sound track, “I’m just a scarecrow without you / Baby please don’t disappear.” Frannie has an assignation with Ray (Raul Julia), a suave Latino who is a singing waiter in a piano bar, while Hank plans to pair up with Leila (Nastassia Kinski), a glamorous circus acrobat. Ray dances with Frannie and sings her a sultry ballad in the Tropical Club where he works, then they dance a tango down the glittering, sizzling Vegas strip, with passersby joining in as a dance chorus. This is, of course, the film’s big production number. Meanwhile, Hank takes Leila to his junkyard, where she performs for him. She begins her specialty number by tap dancing atop the hood of his convertible and then soars above him as she does her highwire act.
At sunrise Leila vanishes “like spit on a griddle,” as she puts it. He realizes that he misses Frannie and, accordingly, rousts her out of Ray’s motel room. As he drags her back to the bungalow, she tells him that she is drawn to Ray because he sings to her instead of yelling at her as Hank does. “If I could sing for you, I would,” Hank answers sheepishly.
Frannie decides to use two airline tickets to Bora Bora, which she had purchased to celebrate her fifth anniversary with Hank, to have Ray accompany her on the trip. She and Ray head for McCarran Airport, where Hank catches up with them at the departure gate. Desperate, Hank plaintively sings “You Are My Sunshine” to Frannie in a broken, off-key voice, which comes straight from the heart. But Frannie stubbornly boards the plane with Ray anyway.
Back home, Hank sits sullenly in the dimly lit living room and melts into tears, mirroring the downpour outside (perhaps an implicit reference to The Rain People, in which a character says, “people made of rain cry themselves away.”) But “Hank is forgetting that the sun follows the storm.” Assuming that Frannie will never come back to him, he begins burning her belongings.23 A cab stops outside. Frannie has returned. Suddenly the whole house is aglow with light, as if by magic. Frannie and Hank wait on their balcony for the dawn, which promises a new day and a fresh start for them. After each of them has experienced a brief fling with a fantasy lover, they are convinced that they belong together. Sometimes, the film implies, a couple must break up before they can truly come together.
Coppola’s point, writes Richard Corliss, is that “Hank and Frannie, prosaic souls in a neon paradise, may be seduced by their surroundings into a one-night stand with advertised ecstasy, but that real life must proceed in equal doses of pleasure and accommodation.”24 Hopefully, in harmony with Coppola’s theme, they will regain the family-like sense of community they had lost. At any rate, the paper moon reappears in the night sky and the blue theater curtain swings across the scene to end the movie.
Some of the notices that followed the unveiling of the film at Radio City Music Hall echoed Jameson’s judgment from the Seattle sneak preview: Coppola was more preoccupied with style than with substance in the picture. Consequently, the personal saga of Hank and Frannie was overwhelmed by the razzle-dazzle of the Vegas setting and the stunning cinematic techniques already described. As a result, these critics believe that by film’s end the filmgoer has been treated to such a visual display of impressive cinematic techniques that that is all they can remember. In essence, the picture seemed an elaborate frame surrounding an empty canvas. In other words, the lackluster script did not justify a production with a $27 million price tag. As Pauline Kael writes, “This movie isn’t from the heart; it’s from the lab. It’s all tricked out with dissolves and scrim effects…. In interviews Coppola talked about directing the movie from inside a trailer while watching the set on video equipment. This movie feels like something directed from a trailer. It’s cold and mechanized; it is a remove from the action.”25
The minority report was filed by critics who found the movie funny and tuneful and engaging. They paid court to the extraordinary achievements of Tavoularis’s production design and Storaro’s eye-filling lensing. Jerome Ozer cites Sheila Benson’s rave review in the Los Angeles Times, which called the movie “a work of constant astonishment…. Its easy to love One from the Heart; you just let yourself relax and float away with it.” She did not even mind the “silhouette-thinness” of the characters. Musicals have been far more bereft of emotion than this one, she remarked, “and very few have dared this greatly.” A few critics saw the film as a pleasant, old-fashioned romance, set in a richly colored Las Vegas wrapped in neon, palm trees, and bungalow courts and punctuated with torchy barroom ballads on the sound track.26 Nevertheless, there were not enough positive reviews to save the picture.
Admittedly, One from the Heart is more noteworthy for its sophisticated cinematography and elegant sets than for its routine story line. But even an off-form Coppola film deserves to be seen, and it is a great pity that One from the Heart was out of circulation for twenty years. (I saw the film when it opened in Chicago in 1982 and later viewed a tape of the picture owned by a private collector of Coppola memorabilia, but the DVD release in 2004 came too late for me to see it again in preparation for this book.) After all, the cast performs credibly, and Waits’s songs are amiable, even if they do not always illuminate story or character to any great degree. Seen today, now that the fuss and fury have long since died down, it is a charming comedy, poetic and funny; and that is all it ever was. The apotheosis of the film would come in July 2003, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would sponsor a screening of the film with Coppola present to lead a discussion. But that was far in the future.
At all events, the picture opened on February 11, 1982, on forty-one screens just in time for Valentine’s Day, because Coppola thought of the picture as a musical Valentine. By April 1, it was still playing in only one theater, the tiny Guild Theater next door to Radio City Music Hall, the site of its gala preview showing months before. The next day Columbia withdrew the picture from distribution with Coppola’s consent. “I must admit that when One from the Heart was removed from release, I was very hurt. I thought I had done good work,” says Coppola. “With the benefit of hindsight, I realize that having unknown actors in a film th
at was so unusual was a handicap.”27 He also felt, in retrospect, that the movie was overshadowed in the minds of the public by press coverage of the money troubles that plagued the production, as he had feared it would be. During its release, the film earned a meager $1.2 million in gross box-office receipts. Coppola could see the handwriting on the wall and decided to sell the studio.
On April 20, 1982, Coppola announced that Zoetrope Studios (the actual property) was up for auction since he was committed to paying back the loans he had secured from Chase Manhattan Bank, Jack Singer, and others to renovate the studio and to make One from the Heart. Spiotta in due course resigned as president of Zoetrope Studios, and Coppola resumed full control of American Zoetrope. Negotiations for the sale of the studio to potential buyers dragged on for two years. It became obvious that Jack Singer was the only individual willing to make a serious bid for the property. Coppola’s creditors threatened foreclosure on Zoetrope Studios, so on February 10, 1984, Coppola sold the studio to Singer for $12.3 million—a bid considerably below Coppola’s asking price of $17 million, the appraised value of the property—in order to pay some of his debts.