Godfather

by Gene D. Phillips

  For a cinematographer Coppola turned to a fellow alumnus of UCLA’s film school, Steven Burum, who had done second unit photography for Apocalypse Now. The Outsiders would be filmed in widescreen and color in order to recreate the world of romantic melodrama characteristic of films about juvenile delinquency from the 1950s, such as the James Dean vehicle, Rebel without a Cause (1955).

  For his part, Coppola shrewdly chose what one observer termed an honor roll of hot young actors, including Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Ralph Macchio, and Patrick Swayze. Coppola thereby launched a whole generation of young film actors with this picture. The seven-week shoot was budgeted at $10 million. Coppola brought with him to Tulsa the technical equipment that he had already bought and implemented on One from the Heart, including the Silverfish trailer, with all of its electronic facilities. So, since the equipment was already in place, there was no need to charge a considerable amount of expensive electronic equipment against the budget of the present film.

  Coppola had not yet secured a distributor for The Outsiders by the time he set up shop in Tulsa. Before leaving Hollywood for the Tulsa shoot, he had gone from studio to studio with the script under his arm, hawking what he considered to be a bankable property: the screen adaptation of a popular adolescent novel, to be made on the cheap and on the double— but he found no takers. Once he arrived in Tulsa, however, he at last succeeded in getting Warner Brothers to distribute the film and to provide some front money for production.

  Warners’ decision came as a big surprise to Hollywood insiders, since in the late 1960s that studio had turned down a package of film projects Coppola had presented to them. They even demanded that he reimburse them for the development funds the studio had spent on these projects (see chapter 3). But, as film historian Jon Lewis opines, in Hollywood it seems best to have a short memory. The studio administration apparently chose to forget that Coppola’s parting shot on that occasion was to state that he was an artist, while the suits that ran Warners were Philistines. Be that as it may, Coppola’s distribution deal with Warners enabled him to obtain further financing from Chemical Bank.

  Aware of how Coppola had gone way over schedule on Apocalypse Now and One from the Heart, Warners kept him on a short leash. He was committed to sticking to the stipulated timetable for shooting and for postproduction in order to have the movie ready for release in the fall of 1982. Coppola assembled his cast and began rehearsing with them in early March, employing the “previsualization” method he had used for One from the Heart. He converted the gym of an abandoned schoolhouse into a rehearsal hall, where he videotaped the rehearsals in order to aid the young actors in developing their characterizations. Tom Cruise remembered these “workshop” rehearsals as very beneficial to the cast, helping them not only to build up their roles but also to “learn more about acting.”10

  Coppola ultimately videotaped a dress rehearsal, with the actors in front of a blank screen. Then he superimposed images from the dress rehearsal tape onto stills of the exterior location sites in Tulsa and on shots of Tavoularis’s interior sets. By the time principal photography began, Coppola had a clear concept of how each scene would look when filmed.

  Shooting started on March 29, 1982. Coppola utilized his “electronic cinema” procedure during filming, but he placed his video monitor near the set. He was therefore on the set with the actors during each take, not locked away in the Silverfish van as he had often been while filming One from the Heart. He would watch an instant-video replay of each take after it was photographed in order to ascertain if he wanted to make any adjustments in how the scene was being played. He would later review each scene, once it was in the can, on the monitor in the trailer, noting down suggestions for film editor Ann Goursaud, who was doing a preliminary edit of the movie back in Hollywood while it was being shot.

  Because of his esteem for Hinton as a novelist, Coppola involved her in the shoot. “Once I sold the book,” she observes, “I expected to be asked to drop off the face of the earth. But that didn’t happen. I know that I had extremely rare experiences for a writer. Usually the director does not say, ‘Boys, these are important lines, so you’ve got to know them word for word,’ which is what Francis said to the actors.” In addition to monitoring the script, Miss Hinton was on the set every day, supervising haircuts and wardrobe. “The boys depended on me a lot,” she says. “I was kind of a greaser den mother, and they were always consulting me.”11

  Coppola got along famously with the young actors during filming because he treated them like adults. Thus he occasionally encouraged them to improvise a line of dialogue, and they made a considerable contribution to the movie because they spoke the same language as the characters they were playing. Emilio Estevez (the oldest son of Martin Sheen, using his father’s real surname), helped to bring his character to life as one of the greasers by devising his own ducktail hairdo, a style quite popular with teenage boys in the 1960s.

  The shooting period went smoothly and was nearly disaster-free. The only serious mishap occurred when Coppola was filming the scene when the greasers rescue some kindergarten kids from a fire in an abandoned country church. Coppola’s thirst for realism went a little too far during his staging of the scene on location in an abandoned church in a country pasture. “More fire!” he shouted to his technicians, who stoked the blaze and accidentally sent the church steeple up in flames.12 Just as the local fire department, which was standing by, was ready to intervene, a downpour suddenly started, as if on cue, and doused the fire.

  Shooting wrapped on May 15, as planned. Estevez, who had visited his father on the set of Apocalypse Now, commented that Coppola “is getting his credibility back as a director who can deliver on schedule.”13

  Coppola invited Hinton to confer with him on the editing of the film during the summer of 1982, utilizing American Zoetrope’s postproduction facilities in San Francisco. The Warners brass were dissatisfied with the rough cut, however, insisting that young people would not sit still for a teen picture that clocked in at two hours of screen time. The studio decreed that Coppola should shorten The Outsiders to ninety minutes and postponed the film’s release from the fall of 1982 to the following spring. Coppola sought to oblige the studio, and some weeks later he presented the Warner executives with a cut that ran ninety-one minutes. He followed his customary practice of scheduling a test screening of the picture, and the largely teenage audience was wowed by the movie. Warners accordingly slated the film to open on March 23, 1983, with a saturation booking of 829 screens across the country.

  “I feel The Outsiders suffered a little bit from the chaos of everybody at Warners turning yellow when they saw the rough cut of it, and that influenced it being cut shorter and shorter,” Coppola commented later. He did not understand Warners’ lack of faith in the film, since “I thought it was very much like the book,” and the novel was a bestseller.14 He regretted that in condensing the film he was forced to delete some of the scenes devoted to character development in favor of keeping mostly the plot-driven scenes.

  The movie starts with a pre-credit sequence, in which Ponyboy Curtis (C. Thomas Howell), the film’s narrator, opens a composition book and writes The Outsiders on the first page as he begins to write a composition for his teacher about some recent events in which he has figured. We hear him recount what happened, voice-over on the sound track, as the plot unfolds. The screenplay, as noted, is very faithful to its literary source, even down to having the movie begin with Ponyboy reciting the first lines of his composition while he is writing them down—lines that come straight from the novel: “When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house….” Ponyboy then starts to tell the story, in which he figures both as participant and witness.

  Ponyboy is the youngest of the three recently orphaned Curtis boys. Darrel, the oldest (Patrick Swayze), works hard to support his two younger brothers, and argues with Ponyboy, the youngest brother, about his belonging to a street gang. Sodapop, the middle
brother (Rob Lowe), plays the role of conciliator between his two brothers. Ponyboy belongs to the greasers, most of whom are orphans like himself, boys who have consequently formed a surrogate family of their own. The gang member Ponyboy looks up to as a father-figure is Dallas Winston (Matt Dillon), a street-wise young fellow who has just gotten out of jail.

  One night Ponyboy and his other chum, Johnny Cade (Ralph Macchio), are accosted by some members of the rival gang who are drunk. When the other boys attack Ponyboy, Johnny panics and pulls a knife, stabbing one of them to death. At this very moment the color red suffuses the screen, pouring downward from the top of the frame to the bottom, in much the same way as the crimson blood runs down the mortally wounded boy’s shirt. Burum’s camera then looks down from above on the chilling sight of the corpse of the dead lad, face-down, in death.

  Johnny and Ponyboy run to Dallas for help, and he advises them to hide out in an abandoned country church for the time being. The film has no shortage of visual imagery, as is evident from the scene just described. In addition, when Ponyboy and Johnny move into the ramshackle church, Coppola cuts to two bunny rabbits huddled underneath the porch—a metaphor for the two fugitive lads hiding out together. This is shortly followed by the image of two spiders crawling up a web, implying the entanglement of the two youngsters in a web of circumstances from which they find it hard to extricate themselves.

  Despite the trouble the boys are in, they experience a charmed interlude alone together. The country church becomes their sanctuary. Coppola employs shots of some incandescently beautiful sunsets in this bucolic sequence to symbolize the brevity of youth. “When you watch the sun set, you realize it is already dying,” he explains. “The same applies to youth. When youth reaches its highest level of perfection, you can already sense the forces that will destroy it.”15 Coppola’s remark becomes still more meaningful when one relates the golden sunsets pictured in the movie to a poem by Robert Frost that Ponyboy recites to Johnny in which the poet likens the innocence of childhood to gold. Johnny picks up on the poem’s theme by offering his pal this advice: “Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold.” This is Johnny’s way of encouraging Ponyboy not to lose the fundamental wholesomeness of youth as he grows older and is forced to face more and more of the grim realities of the adult world.

  Although these two adolescent males bear visible masculine traits (reflected in “the outward trappings of fist fights and interest in athletics”), Johnny and Ponyboy repeatedly express affection for one another.16 Their comradeship, says Richard Corliss, is not only familial but “unselfconsciously homoerotic. Left to their better selves, they can easily go all moony oyer sunsets, quote great swatches of Robert Frost’s verse, or fall innocently asleep in each other’s arms. Their ideal world is… a locker room; no women need apply to this dreamy brotherhood.” Another critic hazarded that the boys’ leather jackets, coupled with their male camaraderie, betoken a homosexual undertone in the film that recalls the homosexual-biker picture, Scorpio Rising (1964).17

  Those critics who have inferred a hint of homosexuality in this film misconstrue the value that Coppola places on male companionship in his movies (one thinks of the solders’ camaraderie in his two Vietnam movies). In the present instance, Ponyboy and Johnny have not yet experienced a deep relationship in their lives. Consequently, they are experiencing in their friendship a relationship that is fulfilling for them on an emotional level that has nothing to do with sex. Coppola suggests that adolescent boys must first know what true male companionship can be before they can go on to experience a meaningful relationship with a member of the opposite sex. By the same token, Dallas’s protective feelings toward Ponyboy and toward Johnny in particular imply a fatherly solicitude similar to that Darrel feels toward his two younger brothers, whom Darrel obviously sees as surrogate sons.

  Dallas comes to the hideout of Johnny and Ponyboy later on to tell them that Cherry (Diane Lane), a witness to the fatal stabbing, is willing to testify in their behalf, and they decide to give themselves up. Before they can start back to town, however, a fire breaks out in the dilapidated church, and the trio are suddenly called upon to save the lives of some children who happen to be in the old building when the blaze starts. Tragically, Johnny is severely burned during the course of the courageous rescue effort.

  Friction between the greasers and the socs finally erupts into an all-out rumble in a vacant lot at night. Coppola stages the rumble with a real flair. The flames of the bonfire in the center of the field reflect the mutual animosity of the combatants, which has been ignited by the battle. Smoke from the fire obscures the figures of the opponents as they grapple with each other, and when a storm breaks, the boys’ movements become increasingly more savage as they struggle in the mud. Dallas’s battle cry is, “Let’s win one for Johnny!” Two-Bit Matthews (Emilio Estevez) and Steve Randall (Tom Cruise) are in the forefront of the greasers’ brigade. The greasers, with Dallas leading them, triumph over the socs.

  But the victory is undercut by the remark of one of the socs to Ponyboy: “It doesn’t matter that you whip us. You’ll still be where you were before, at the bottom, and we’ll still be the lucky ones, at the top with all the breaks. Greasers will still be greasers, and socs will still be socs.” Similarly, when Johnny hears about the battle while in the hospital, he comments that gang wars are futile: “It’s useless. Fighting don’t do no good.”

  Just before he dies, Johnny “utters his lament for doomed youth.”18 He says stoically, “Sixteen years ain’t long enough. Hell! There are too damned many things that I have not yet seen or done” in this brief life. When Johnny expires, Dallas cries out bitterly, “This is what you get for helping other people!”

  Later on, Dallas, the ex-convict, lapses into his old ways, attempts to hold up a store, and is killed in a reckless scuffle with the police. He dies with Johnny’s name on his lips. Reflecting on the loss of his two best friends, Ponyboy hopes to come to terms with this double tragedy by writing down what happened in a composition for his teachers. After all, one of his brothers tells him, “Your life isn’t over because you lose someone.”

  We see on one half of the widescreen Ponyboy pick up his well-thumbed copy of Gone with the Wind, in which he finds a note that Johnny left for him. At that moment, Johnny materializes as an apparition on the other half of the screen, assuring Ponyboy that life is worth living. “There’s still lots of good in the world,” says Johnny before his image fades. This touching fantasy sequence, dated March 12, 1982, in the script, was a last-minute addition Coppola made to the shooting script, which is itself dated March 1.19 And so the movie ends where it began, with Ponyboy writing the essay that forms the content of the film’s spoken narration.

  As Coppola describes the final scene in the screenplay, “Ponyboy sits at his desk, folds back the cover of his theme book, and looks at the sunset, remembering…. He takes up his pen and starts to write, ‘When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house….’”20 Thus the movie has come full circle by repeating the opening lines.

  Among the scenes Coppola had to jettison from The Outsiders in order to edit the movie to the length stipulated by Warners, the one that would have really enhanced the picture by its inclusion comes near film’s end. There is a rap session in which the Curtis brothers, Ponyboy, Sodapop, and Darrel, reflect frankly on the life lessons they have learned from their recent shared experiences. They renew their closeness as a family as Sodapop says, “If we don’t have each other, we don’t have anything. If you don’t have anything, you end up like Dallas,” who was an unhappy loner. This scene underscores the film’s affirmation of the young people’s deep need to belong, and as such might well have been included in the movie.21

  The Outsiders was a bona fide blockbuster, despite the fact that some critics dismissed the movie as a minor melodrama unworthy of Coppola’s directorial talents. On the contrary, the picture deserves a respected place in the Coppola canon for various reasons. On the techni
cal side, Burum’s camerawork is superb. The widescreen, color photography lavishes mellow softness on burnished visuals, which are hazy with summer heat in the sequence of Johnny and Ponyboy’s sojourn in the country. There are shots of the pair silhouetted against a blood-red sunset, reminiscent of similar images in Gone with the Wind, Ponyboy’s favorite film. Moreover, Coppola stages some of the scenes featuring the greasers in a manner that recalls earlier films about teenage street gangs. “The greasers, with their sleek muscles…. display a leonine athleticism as they make their way towards a rumble, moving through vacant lots or doing a graceful, two-handed vault over a chain-link fence.”22 They thus summon images of the agile movements of the street gangs in Rebel without a Cause. Furthermore, Carmine Coppola’s highly romantic score is reminiscent of Leonard Rosenman’s music for the same film. The score for The Outsiders is imposing and yet is still basted with a little schmaltz, as Francis Coppola had requested.

  The film segues seamlessly from documentary-like portrayals of the youngsters’ shabby lives in a dead-end, poverty-trap slum to the dramatic tragedy in which Dallas, who has freaked out after Johnny’s death, becomes a dazed, ruined presence. Coppola is adept at depicting the alienation so characteristic of the youth subculture. The Outsiders in the last analysis is a downbeat, unpatronizing tale about brutalized teens, marked by inspired naturalism of both dialogue and performance.