Godfather

by Gene D. Phillips

  Not the least of the movie’s virtues is the host of consistently excellent performances that Coppola drew from his appealing young cast, who graduated into starring roles in a number of youth-oriented pictures: Tom Cruise (Risky Business), Patrick Swayze (Dirty Dancing), Emilio Estevez (The Breakfast Club), Matt Dillon (Drugstore Cowboy), C. Thomas Howell (RedDawn), and Ralph Macchio (The Karate Kid).

  After the overwhelming problems Coppola encountered in financing and marketing One from the Heart, some critics found it refreshing to encounter a Coppola film that, bless it, was only a conventional genre picture about teenage rebellion. What’s more, the youth audience took the picture to their hearts. The film earned $12 million in its first two weeks in release and eventually reaped $100 million in profits, which helped to put some cash in the coffers at Zoetrope. The Outsiders generated just enough money “to help me at a time when I needed some big bucks,” says Coppola.23

  The Outsiders subsequently spawned a TV miniseries in the spring of 1991. It premiered with a ninety-minute pilot that picked up where the 1983 movie left off. The pilot opens with footage from Coppola’s movie of Dallas being shot by the police, followed by Dallas’s funeral. Afterward, a welfare worker warns Ponyboy (Jay Ferguson) and Sodapop (Rodney Harvey) that if they participate in any more rumbles between the greasers and the socs they will be taken away from the custody of their older brother Darrel and placed in foster homes. The pilot was followed by seven weekly installments. Coppola supervised the series, but he did not direct any of the episodes.

  After finishing the feature film of The Outsiders, Coppola followed it immediately with the screen adaptation of another Hinton novel. While he was shooting The Outsiders in Tulsa, Coppola got the idea that he would like to employ the same crew and locations for a second teen movie. As Hinton tells it, “Halfway through The Outsiders, Francis looked up at me one day and said, ‘Susie, we get along great. Have you written anything else I can film?’ I told him about Rumble Fish, and he read the book and loved it. He said, ‘I know what we can do. On our Sundays off, let’s write a screenplay, and then as soon as we can wrap The Outsiders, we’ll take a two-week break and start filming Rumble Fish.’ I said ‘Sure, Francis, we’re working 16 hours a day, and you want to spend Sundays writing another screenplay?’ But that’s what we did.”24

  In the novel, Rusty-James, a disadvantaged teenager from a broken home, looks up to his older brother, who is known only as Motorcycle Boy, the leader of a local gang. The relationship of the two brothers struck a chord in Coppola. His brother August, who is five years his senior, included young Francis in his activities and provided a strong role model for him when they were growing up. August Coppola “was my idol,” Francis Coppola says, “just took me everywhere when he went out with the guys because he was the leader of the gang,” which was called the Wild Deuces. “He always looked out for me.”25 A dedication to August Coppola, who eventually became a college professor, appears in the end credits of Rumble Fish: “To August Coppola, my first and best teacher.” As it happened, Coppola hired August’s son Nicolas to play a gang member named Smokey in Rumble Fish, but Nicolas Coppola took the professional name of Nicolas Cage in order to obscure the family connection with the director of the film. Still, in the movie Nicolas Cage wore a copy of his father’s own jacket from high school days, with Wild Deuces displayed on the back.

  Coppola planned to go from one film right into the other. The piggybacked production of the two Hinton movie adaptations recalled the circumstances of his shooting Dementia 13 twenty years before. After Roger Corman finished shooting The Young Racers in Europe, Coppola convinced Corman to let him make Dementia 13 back-to-back with the racing picture, since the expenses involved in transporting the crew and technical equipment to Europe had already been accounted for (see chapter 1). Similarly, Coppola reasoned that he could make Rumble Fish with the same production team and equipment he had assembled in Tulsa for The Outsiders.

  Rumble Fish (1983)

  Never one to repeat himself, Coppola took a radically different approach to Rumble Fish than he had employed on The Outsiders. The latter film was romantic melodrama along the lines of The Godfather, while he envisioned Rumble Fish as an art film, designed more in the direction of Apocalypse Now. Susie Hinton wrote the book five years after The Outsiders, when she was more mature, and, consequently, “it had tremendously impressive vision and dialogue and characters,” says Coppola.26 Stephen Farber records, “Coppola actually co-wrote the screenplay. Mr. Coppola concentrated on structure and visual imagery, while Miss Hinton wrote all the dialogue. She found to her surprise that she had certain talents for screenwriting.”27

  Hinton begins the novel in the present and then has Rusty-James narrate the story in flashback, a device she had likewise utilized in The Outsiders. Coppola rejected the flashback structure—which he had employed in his film of The Outsiders—for the movie version of Rumble Fish, presumably because he wanted to take a different approach to the material than he had taken in his previous Hinton film. Otherwise, the shooting script for Rumble Fish follows the novel quite faithfully. The screenplay, which is on file in the Script Repository of Universal Studios, the distributor of the film, is dated May 4, 1982.

  Hinton mentions that every time she got a letter from a youngster who said Rumble Fish was his favorite novel the return address was invariably a reformatory. This is understandable, since the novel portrays youthful angst and rebellion even more frankly than The Outsiders. Rumble Fish has a darker, grittier quality than The Outsiders. Hence, Coppola chose to shoot it in black-and-white.

  In concert with production designer Dean Tavoularis, Coppola chose location sites in Tulsa that were grimmer and grimier than those used in The Outsiders. He wanted locations marked by dampness and humidity in order to create the ambience of a desolate wasteland sweltering in the heat of high summer. Coppola asked Tavoularis, in his designing of the sets, to adapt at times the techniques of Expressionism from the Golden Age of German silent cinema. It is not my purpose to dwell in detail on the influence of expressionism on Rumble Fish, but the following observations are in order.

  Expressionism sets itself against naturalism, with its mania for recording reality exactly as it is. Instead, the expressionistic artist seeks the symbolic meaning that underlies the facts. Foster Hirsch describes expressionism in film in the following terms: “German Expressionistic films were set in claustrophobic studio-created environments, where physical reality was distorted.” To be precise, expressionism exaggerated surface reality in order to make a symbolic point.28 Coppola employed one of the techniques of the old-time German expressionistic filmmakers by having Tavoularis paint forbidding shadows on the walls of the dark alleys in the tawdry slums in order to make them look more menacing. Thus, this is a tortured, moody motion picture, filled with fog and shadows.

  Cinematographer Burum, working in concert with Coppola, made full use in Rumble Fish of expressionistic lighting, which lends itself so readily to the moody atmosphere. Thus a sinister atmosphere was created in certain interiors by infusing them with menacing shadows looming on walls and ceilings, which gave a Gothic quality to faces. All in all, the black-and- white cinematography, with its night-shrouded streets and alleys, ominous corridors, and dark archways, gave this modestly budgeted feature a rich texture.

  Nonetheless, Coppola insisted that expressionism be employed in the picture in only a few key scenes. After all, excessive use of expressionistic techniques in a commercial Hollywood movie would have seemed heavy-handed.

  Motorcycle Boy, Rusty-James’s burned-out older brother, is color-blind, due to the brain damage he has suffered in numerous fist fights and rumbles. His color-blindness is also a symbol of the disillusioned young man’s view of the somber world in which he lives. This confirms Coppola’s decision to shoot the movie in black-and-white, with a few judiciously chosen color overlays, as in the shots of the Siamese fighting fish that give the film its title. The rumble fish therefore serve as
a metaphor for Motorcycle Boy, a colorful individual who is caught in drab, black-and-white surroundings.

  Motorcycle Boy’s vision of life permeates the film, and that clearly justifies the black-and-white photography. The contrast between the color cinematography of The Outsiders and the black-and-white photography of Rumble Fish brings into relief how different Coppola intended his two teen gang movies to be in style and concept. It was crucial for him, he declares, to draw a clear distinction between the two films since he was employing the same production crew and same location for both movies. The Outsiders was a blueprint in color of a story about juvenile delinquents, while Rumble Fish was its negative in stark black-and-white, a film about deeply disaffected and alienated youngsters.

  Although the production team included Coppola regulars like Tavoularis and editor Barry Malkin, Francis Coppola did not call once more upon Carmine Coppola to compose the score for the present film. The director instead opted to have a background score that relied heavily on percussion and so commissioned Stewart Copeland, the American drummer for the British rock band the Police, to provide the score. Copeland did principally use percussion for the background music for the film, but he also recorded Tulsa street sounds—such as traffic noises, police and ambulance sirens—and wove them into his score, which included not only drums but a piano and a xylophone. Coppola believes that percussion instruments are exciting in themselves, so he encouraged Copeland to use percussion alone in certain scenes. The rumble at the beginning of the movie seemed to be a perfect place for a percussion solo, which, in the context of the scene, sounds very sinister and ominous. Copeland’s spare percussive score was as far removed as it could be from the saccharinity that sometimes marked Carmine Coppola’s music for The Outsiders.

  After demonstrating that he could make a mainstream Hollywood commercial film like The Outsiders, Coppola set out to confirm his status as a Hollywood maverick by conceiving Rumble Fish as a picture that audaciously departed from the conventions of a routine genre picture. Shooting the film in grainy black-and-white, with an avant-garde score, set Rumble Fish apart from the usual Hollywood output.

  Two of the lead actors in The Outsiders reappear in Rumble Fish: Matt Dillon was signed to play Rusty-Jones and Diane Lane (who played Cherry, the girl with whom the Matt Dillon character had a brief flirtation in The Outsiders) would be Patty, Rusty-James’s girl in Rumble Fish. Mickey Rourke, who had auditioned for The Outsiders, was selected to play Motorcycle Boy. From Apocalypse Now, Coppola re-called Dennis Hopper as the drunken father of Rusty-James and Motorcycle Boy and Larry Fishburne as a member of a rival gang, called Midget because he is so tall. Finally, Vincent Spano took the part of Steve, Rusty-James’s naive but likeable sidekick. The swarthy actor peroxided his hair in order to lose the darkly handsome look he had as a teenage heartthrob in previous teen films.

  Coppola spent two weeks videotaping rehearsals for Rumble Fish in the school gym where he had rehearsed the cast of The Outsiders. He encouraged the young actors at times to improvise dialogue containing the profanity that lower-class boys ordinarily employed. Once again he taped a final run-through of the whole script, which served as a “previsualization” of the film. He then screened it for the cast and crew to get their reactions.

  Principal photography could not begin until Coppola had secured a distributor who would put up some front money for Rumble Fish. Warner Brothers bowed out because they were not interested in releasing a second youth picture on the heels of The Outsiders that might compete with it. By the end of June, Coppola had cut a distribution deal with Universal, with release set for the fall of 1983. Filming accordingly started on July 12,1982, only a few weeks after the production phase of The Outsiders was finished.

  Steven Burum, in consultation with Coppola, often employed flat, harsh lighting to give the movie a stark and brutal look. He photographed some scenes with an unsteady hand-held camera: “We wanted,” he said, “to give people a feeling of uneasiness,” that there is something off-kilter in the unstable world in which the kids live.29

  What’s more, Tavoularis’s seedy sets encompassed thick coats of dust, peeling paint, cracks in the walls, and creaking stairways in the slum dwellings where the gang members live. As the camera explores the cramped living quarters Rusty-James shares with his father and brother, the viewer gets a sense of the confinement the boys who live there must endure.

  During filming Hinton was herself impressed with her ability to rewrite material under the gun. “Working with Francis,” she recalls, “I could never tell when he was going to turn to me and say, ‘Susie, we’ll need a new scene here to make this play.’ I could have it for him in three minutes, and it was pretty good, too.”30 This sort of emergency writing on the set yielded some memorable bits of dialogue. Some of the nifty lines one hears spoken from the screen are not in the final shooting script and, therefore, must have been supplied by Hinton on the set, perhaps with the help of the cast during improvisations. For example, Motorcycle Boy expresses his fatherly concern for his troubled younger brother in terms that remind one of Darrel dealing with his surrogate son Ponyboy in The Outsiders. (As a matter of fact, Motorcycle Boy has one confab with Rusty-James in the same Rexall drugstore in Tulsa that Dallas robbed in The Outsiders. Coppola thereby makes a subtle cross-reference from one film to the other.)

  In one conversation Motorcycle Boy asks Rusty-James why he is so messed up, and Rusty-James replies laconically, “I’m alright.” But big brother is not to be put off with a dodge. “Talk to me,” he insists. “Why are you fucked up all the time one way or another, huh?” Rusty-James can only grunt, “I don’t know,” in reply. Motorcycle Boy’s crude language belies the genuine caring he nurtures for the welfare of Rusty-James, for whom he subconsciously feels something of a father-figure. In short, Motorcycle Boy does not want his brother to follow him down the road to ruin.

  During shooting Dennis Hopper saw the advantage of Coppola replaying each scene on the TV monitor in the Silverfish in order to make modifications in each scene as it was filmed and to make notes to pass on to editor Barry Malkin. “Francis’s genius is really in his technology,” says Hopper.31

  The filming of Rumble Fish went off as efficiently as the shooting of The Outsiders, and production finished in October. Once more Coppola was on schedule and on budget. The endless shooting schedules and exorbitant budgets of Apocalypse Now and One from the Heart seemed at this point to belong to the distant past.

  Coppola collaborated closely with Barry Malkin on the edit of the movie. Malkin particularly enjoyed cutting together the rumble scene that occurs near the beginning of the movie when Rusty-James takes on the leader of an opposing gang. The fight comprised eighty-one shots in two minutes of screen time. “It’s generally easier to cut… a flashy, razzle-dazzle action sequence,” explains Malkin, “than it is to edit a dialogue sequence with a lot of characters sitting around a table,” which can seem quite static and boring to the viewer.32

  After postproduction was completed, the premiere of Rumble Fish was delayed until the fall of 1983 so that the release of Rumble Fish did not follow too closely on the first-run showings of The Outsiders, which came out in the spring of 1983. Since Rumble Fish was thought to be an art film, it was considered too sophisticated to attract the same wide, youth audience that saw The Outsiders. So Coppola decided to premiere the movie at the New York Film Festival on October 7, 1983, in order to bring it to the attention of a more mature audience. The critics who saw the picture at the Festival screening, however, were by and large unresponsive to the movie, just as the reviewers had been to One from the Heart when it premiered at Radio City Music Hall. Coppola tells me that the snobbish New York critics had been lining up against him since Godfather II. “They won’t even throw me a bone,” he laments.

  Rumble Fish begins with clouds hurtling across a darkening sky (by means of Burum’s speeded-up photography). The swiftly moving clouds, coupled with the frequent images of clocks—including one huge cl
ock without hands—are meant to express a feeling of urgency, of the unstoppable passage of time—a fact of life Coppola says young people find hard to grasp. He particularly wished to heighten the effect of time running out for the disenchanted and self-destructive Motorcycle Boy, whose hour of doom may be approaching.

  There is a sign spray-painted on a brick wall, “The Motorcycle Boy Reigns.” It reminds Rusty-James how much he misses his older brother, Motorcycle Boy, who had been the leader of the street gang Rusty-James belongs to until he left town a couple of months earlier. Rusty-James is challenged to fight with Biff Wilcox, the leader of another gang. Members of both gangs show up for the rumble. The fight takes place near a freight yard in a steaming, wet alley, which almost makes the summer heat palpable.

  “It is a dance of violence”—designed by choreographer Michael Smuin of the San Francisco Ballet—in which “the gangs form a male corps de ballet,” with the movements of the fighters “lit by flashes from the windows of a passing train.”33 The balletic movements of the youths recall the staging of the rumble in the musical West Side Story (1961). During the slugfest, Biff, who is high on drugs, pulls a knife on his opponent. Rusty-James, in turn, swings from a waterpipe to avoid being cut, and the waterpipe bursts. Then he hurls Biff through the window of a deserted building.

  Suddenly Motorcycle Boy appears out of nowhere, astride his bike. Rusty-James is momentarily distracted by his brother’s unexpected appearance, and Biff slashes Rusty-James with a jagged piece of glass from the broken window. The blood gushing from Rusty-James’s wound has been prefigured by the water rushing from the waterpipe. Motorcycle Boy retaliates by unleashing his riderless bike at full throttle on Biff, who is totally flattened by it. The image of Motorcycle Boy astride his cycle, which recurs in the film, evokes Marlon Brando as the biker in The Wild One (1954). Motorcycle Boy is likewise a bored and aimless nonconformist, “the quintessential teen anti-hero,” determined to beat the system or die trying.34