Coppola returned his entire operation to the American Zoetrope offices in the Sentinel Building in San Francisco, which he continued to run as an independent production unit, producing films in partnership with major Hollywood studios. But he no longer owned his own studio. Not surprisingly, Singer changed the name of the studio in Hollywood to Singer Studios, and he rented its facilities to independent producers to make films there—but he produced no films of his own.
Wim Wenders’s Hammett (1983)
The other picture that hastened the demise of Zoetrope Studios was Hammett, a Zoetrope production directed by the respected German filmmaker Wim Wenders. It was originally slated to be Zoetrope Studio’s first release, but, as things turned out, it was not released until after One from the Heart. The script was based on a novel set in 1928 in which Dashiell Hammett, the famed author of hardboiled detective fiction like The Maltese Falcon, solves a real-life mystery involving a missing Chinese prostitute.
Wenders collaborated on the script with a string of screenwriters, who complained that he insisted on departing substantially from the original story line. Finally Coppola ordered him to stop the multiple rewrites of the script and to commence principal photography. On February 4, 1980, Wenders began filming, with Frederic Forrest in the title role. But Wenders continued revising the script nonstop throughout the production period. Coppola ultimately decided that Wenders had reworked the screenplay to the point where it involved an impenetrable mystery that was not adequately solved at the end. Wenders had not been shooting the approved screenplay, Coppola explains, “and I could not dissuade Wim from this path…. So I stopped production” and postponed the remainder of filming indefinitely.28
During the hiatus Coppola had the screenplay totally overhauled by still another scriptwriter, who attempted to steer the story back to the original plotline and provide a coherent ending. The new script entailed the reshooting of eighty percent of the picture. Michael Powell, whom Coppola had appointed Senior Director in Residence, urged him to shelve the picture rather than throw good money after bad. Coppola summoned Wenders back to finish the shoot in the fall of 1981, after Coppola had himself completed the filming of One from the Heart. Wenders finished filming in a record twenty-three days. Coppola monitored the reshoot by regularly viewing the retakes done by Wenders and offering him suggestions. But Coppola did not reshoot any scenes himself, as Leonard Maltin mistakenly asserts.29
Recalling the troubled production period of Hammett, Gregory Solmon observes, “Just ask Wim Wenders, who worked for Coppola, the executive producer on Hammett, how little the latter values a director’s artistic freedom—unless he happens to be the director.”30 This statement is severely unfair to Coppola when one considers that he had to scrap much of what Wenders originally shot because it departed significantly from the official script—at a considerable financial loss to Coppola. In the end Hammett wound up costing $10 million, considerably over schedule and over budget.
Hammett, which was to be distributed by Warner Brothers, had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on June 6, 1982, where it received a poor press. Many of the press corps complained that Hammett’s convoluted plot yielded only a murky solution to the mystery about the missing Chinese call girl. She turned out to be embroiled in a complex conspiracy to blackmail some corrupt city officials, which was never adequately explained. In sum, the film was dismissed as an undistinguished detective yarn, mere “private eye-wash.” Warners accordingly gave the film a token release and then shelved the picture.
Seeing the film on videocassette today, one notices an effective performance by Forrest as Dashiell Hammett. And the picture is further enhanced by Philip Lathrop’s mood cinematography. With all its shortcomings, Hammett is a treat for mystery fans.
During the time that shooting on Hammett was suspended, Wenders returned to Europe and made The State of Things (1983), a movie about a hapless German director named Friedrich (clearly modeled on Wenders), who is making a picture for an eccentric American producer who is short of funds. Gordon, the producer, who is played by Allen Garfield (The Conversation, One from the Heart), seems to be based on Coppola. Adding credence to this theory that is widely held in film circles is the fact that, like Coppola, Garfield has a stocky build. In addition, there are parallels between the movie that Friedrich is making for Gordon and Hammett, the picture that Wenders was making for Coppola. When Friedrich’s film goes over budget, Gordon shuts down the production. “I never thought Gordon had it in him to leave us stranded,” Friedrich moans.
Friedrich confronts Gordon about abandoning the production in the producer’s mobile home, which obviously recalls Coppola’s Airstream trailer, the Silverfish. While arguing with Friedrich, Gordon exclaims in exasperation, “I never thought I’d see the day when I’d be working with a German director!” He then explains that the investors would not put up more funds to keep the picture afloat because the script was too muddled—precisely Coppola’s complaint about Wenders’s much-rewritten screenplay for Hammett.
Wenders maintains that the producer in The State of Things “is really not Francis Coppola. I don’t think you can find any traces of Hammett or Coppola in The State of Things.”31 On the contrary, given the many references in The State of Things to Coppola’s dealings with Wenders on Hammett, enumerated above, it seems slightly disingenuous for Wenders to maintain that he did not have Coppola in mind when he created the character of Gordon. After all, when Wenders made The State of Things Coppola had suspended filming on Hammett, and Wenders had no guarantee that it would ever be finished.
In any case, Zoetrope Studios collapsed into bankruptcy under the combined failures of One from the Heart and Hammett. Coppola’s debt was estimated to be between $40 and $50 million. “That was a kamikaze attack,” he says. “I went down in flames by myself.”32 Still, he never regretted gambling on running his own studio. “Why was it so bad that I wanted a little studio to turn out films?” he mused.33 “If you don’t bet,” he told me, “you don’t have a chance to win. You can’t be an artist and play it safe.”
History has a way of repeating itself in Hollywood. Coppola’s experience with Zoetrope Studios recalls that of silent filmmaker D. W. Griffith (The Birth of a Nation), who opened his own studio at Mamaroneck, New York, in the early 1920s. As an independent producer, Griffith had to handle the overhead expenses of maintaining the Mamaroneck facility, which included meeting the weekly payroll. Unfortunately, Griffith was no more of a businessman than Coppola proved to be. He lacked the business acumen to budget a production in a way that would make possible a reasonable return on the financial investment that had been made in the picture. Similarly, Coppola lacked the know-how to manage a motion picture studio on a profit-making basis. When Griffith’s movies did not make money, he inevitably lost his studio, just as Coppola did half-a-century later. In conversation with Griffith’s second wife, Evelyn Griffith Kuze, it became clear to me that Griffith’s decline was ultimately the result of his failure to reckon with the fact that the movie business was just that—a business. That was a lesson Coppola likewise had to learn. After Zoetrope Studios closed down, Coppola became what he termed “a cinematic hired gun,” steadily directing pictures to shore up his faltering bank account and pay his debts.34
In fact, by the time One from the Heart and Hammett had tanked, he was totally immersed in the production of The Outsiders, a movie about juvenile delinquents to be shot entirely on location in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “I decided I would work continuously until I paid off my debt,” Coppola stated stoically. “I sure put in the hours.”35 The Los Angeles Times declared at the time that, despite all the guff Coppola had taken for the failure of Zoetrope Studios, “Francis Coppola is, without question, one of the giants of the American cinema.”36 Coppola’s efforts to operate his own studio added to his image as a Hollywood maverick in the minds of younger filmmakers. They respected him for risking his own capital on One from the Heart. He was not reckless with other people’s money. More
over, if Coppola could produce a flop like One from the Heart, George Lucas, his contemporary, was just as capable of producing a turkey like More American Graffiti (1979). As a matter of fact, The Outsiders would prove a box-office bonanza for Coppola, which would put him on the road to financial recovery.
8
Growing Pains
The Outsiders and Rumble Fish
You learned too much in those days before you came of age. This savage knowledge ought to come slowly, the gradual fruit of experience.
—Graham Greene
You should be prepared for experience, knowledge, knowing: not bludgeoned unaware in the dark as by a highwayman or a footpad.
—William Faulkner
In the fall of 1980 Coppola received a joint letter from the librarian of Lone Star High School in Fresno, California, Ellen Misakian, writing on behalf of several of the students who also signed the letter. After the release of Apocalypse Now Coppola had served as executive producer on The Black Stallion (1980), which was made under the banner of American Zoetrope in San Francisco and directed by Carroll Ballard, who had attended film school with him at UCLA. The Black Stallion, a touching story of a boy and his beloved horse, became a hit with the youth market. The librarian accordingly urged Coppola to bring another teenage story, The Outsiders, to the screen. “I feel our students are representative of the youth of America,” she wrote. “Everyone who has read the book, regardless of ethnic or economic background, has enthusiastically endorsed the project.”1
Coppola was struck by the fact that the novel had been turned into a bestseller by its devoted teenage readers. The book, which was required reading in some high schools, had sold four million copies since its publication in 1970. The novel’s huge teenage following guaranteed a pre-sold audience for the movie, and Coppola saw the project shaping up to be the box-office success he needed to keep up his payments to his creditors in the wake of the demise of Zoetrope Studios in Hollywood (see chapter 7).
The author of The Outsiders, S. E. (Susan Eloise) Hinton, was only sixteen when she wrote the book. She had disguised the fact that the novel was written by a girl by using a pen name, because she feared that her young readers might question the authenticity of her books about teenage boys if they were aware that the author was a female. As a matter of fact, her readership never guessed that the author was a girl, probably because when she was growing up most of Susie Hinton’s close friends were the group of boys that she regularly hung out with.
Coppola was convinced that The Outsiders was written with the authentic voice of a youngster, as she told the story of three brothers who endeavor to maintain themselves as a family after both their parents have died in an auto accident. “As I was reading the book, I realized that I wanted to make a film about young people, and about belonging,” says Coppola, “belonging to a peer group with whom one can identify and for whom one feels real love. Even though the boys are poor and to a certain extent insignificant, the story gives them a kind of beauty and nobility”2
Furthermore, the novel made him feel nostalgic for his own youth when he was growing up in Queens and saw youth-oriented movies like Beach Blanket Bingo. Moreover, Coppola belonged to a street gang known as the Bay Rats when he was fifteen and going to high school on Long Island. He decided not only to produce the movie but to direct it himself and to dedicate it to the librarian and students of Lone Star School in a citation in the film’s end credits because they had inspired the film.
The Outsiders (1983)
Making The Outsiders appealed to Coppola for a variety of reasons. He was aware, in the wake of Apocalypse Now and One from the Heart, that he was no longer viewed by studio executives as a director who could be counted on to deliver a picture on time and on budget. Coppola realized that he could easily design a film about teenagers on a much smaller scale than the big-budget movies he had made during the previous decade. He could thus prove to the money men that he was still quite capable of making a picture quickly and for a reasonable budget. After all, there would be no million-dollar sets for the movie, since The Outsiders would be shot on location in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Hinton’s hometown, where the story is set. In addition, he would cast promising young actors in the picture who did not yet command big salaries.
He thus hoped to put behind him the imbroglio that surrounded the production and release of One from the Heart—which he referred to ruefully as “chaos incorporated”—while he was working in Tulsa. Rather than hang around Hollywood and “be whipped for having committed the sin of making a film that I wanted to make,” he explains, “I escaped with a lot of young people to Tulsa.” He adds, “I used to be a great camp counselor, and the idea of being with half-a-dozen kids making a movie seemed like being a camp counselor again. It would be a breath of fresh air.”3
American Zoetrope was so strapped for capital that Coppola could offer Hinton a measly five hundred dollars to option her novel, plus a percentage of the profits. The young novelist accepted the offer. Kathleen Rowell, another young writer, was commissioned to adapt the book for film. The story involves the ongoing feud between two gangs of teenage boys living in Tulsa in the 1960s. One group is made up of underprivileged lads known as greasers, who are from the shabby north side of the city. The other group is made up of upper-class youngsters known as socs (soc rhymes with gauche and is short for socialite), who live on the prosperous south side of town. “All of the greasers were orphans, all outsiders,” says Coppola, “but together they formed a family.” Hence, the film touches on the common theme of family in Coppola’s work.4
Coppola was disappointed in Rowell’s adaptations of the novel. The two drafts of the screenplay she had done had meandered further and further away from the book. Conscious that Hinton’s readers would resent a movie that diverged too much from the novel, Coppola decided to do a wholesale rewrite of her screenplay, sticking as closely as possible to the literary source. He respected Hinton as a serious writer.
“When I met Susie,” Coppola says, “it was confirmed to me that she was not just a young people’s novelist, but a real American novelist. For me the primary thing about her books is that the characters come across as very real. Her dialogue is memorable, and her prose is striking. Often a paragraph of her descriptive prose sums up something essential and stays with you.”5
Lillian Ross, in her exhaustive essay on Coppola, reports that he was busy rewriting the script for The Outsiders in the early spring of 1982, just three weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin in March. His own version of the script went through several drafts until he finished the final shooting script, dated March 1, 1982, which is on file in the Script Repository at Warner Brothers, the film’s distributor.
When one examines the script, it is evident that Coppola’s version is extremely faithful to the source material, even incorporating actual dialogue from the book at times. What’s more, Coppola continued to revise the final shooting script before filming began at the end of March, and these additional rewrites were incorporated into the screenplay on pages dated March 12 through March 19. (Additional pages of last-minute revisions that are inserted into a shooting script are customarily dated in order to indicate that they supersede earlier versions of the same material.)
Because of the substantial work he did in completely overhauling the script, Coppola petitioned the Screen Writers Guild to award him an official screen credit as sole author of the screenplay for The Outsiders. Normally, a claimant submits a scene-by-scene analysis of the script to the Guild in order to demonstrate that they composed the bulk of the script in question (i.e., more than 50 percent). But Coppola was so confident that he had right on his side that he merely sent the Guild a copy of the script with a short letter, stating that he understood the need for arbitration in these matters, “but this script is totally my writing.”6
Because he supplied no detailed analysis of the screenplay to support his petition, the Guild awarded sole screen credit to Katherine Rowell, who had done two drafts of t
he script before he took over. It is worth noting that the screen credit Rowell received for The Outsiders did not serve to advance her career as a screenwriter, since she was never listed as author of a major motion picture again.
Coppola claims that he lost the arbitration battle because of the Writers Guild’s “antiquated procedures.” The Guild’s decisions, he explains, always weigh heavily in favor of the first writer to do an adaptation of a literary work for film because they establish the characters and the basic plot for the screenplay, “even if it isn’t a particularly effective or do-able script.” The burden of proof lies with the writer who revises the original script. He concluded, “Even though I sat down and wrote the script that I used, the Guild gave her all the credit. Yet that woman simply did not write the script of the film that I made.”7
Coppola brought together a number of production associates he was accustomed to working with, including composer Carmine Coppola and production designer Dean Tavoularis. Tavoularis chose abandoned, deserted areas of Tulsa for location sites in order to convey the greasers’ sense of being outcasts. “The book was a kind of Gone with the Wind for kids, an epic classic struggle between the greasers and the socs, i.e., the poor and the rich, during the 1960s,” Coppola explains. Indeed, the dog-eared paperback copy of Gone with the Wind that the young hero carries around with him almost amounts to a talisman. “The Outsiders takes place in an enchanted moment in time in the lives of all these boys. I wanted to catch that moment; I wanted to take these street rats and give them heroic proportions.”8
Coppola told his father, Carmine Coppola, that, since The Outsiders was a Gone with the Wind for teens, he wanted “a kind of schmaltzy classical score,” similar to the one Max Steiner had written for the 1939 movie of Gone with the Wind. The score is the key to The Outsiders, Coppola explains. That is to say, the fact that the music is composed in a romantic style “indicates that I wanted a movie told in sumptuous terms, very honestly and carefully taken from the book without changing it a lot.” Hence, he envisioned the movie to be like Gone with the Wind, not so much in content as in style. He was “putting the emphasis on that kind of Gone with the Wind lyricism which was so important to Susie Hinton when she wrote it.… It appealed to me that kids could see Outsiders as a lavish, big-feeling epic about kids.”9
Godfather Page 29