Godfather

by Gene D. Phillips

  On the way back to the tenement the boys inhabit with their father, Motorcycle Boy tells Rusty-James that during his sojourn in California he located their mother, who had deserted them in childhood. She is living in Los Angeles with a movie producer. Their father is glad to see the return of the prodigal son. The squalor in which the family lives is reflected in the messy tenement flat, while the empty booze bottles in the dirty sink symbolize the disorder of their dad’s life, especially the manner in which he neglects his sons. Coppola sometimes photographs the father, who lives in an alcoholic haze, from a tilted angle, indicating that he is unsteady, off-balance.

  Because he is color-blind, Motorcycle Boy says that he perceives the universe as if he were watching a black-and-white television set. He cannot “see what is over the rainbow.” Significantly, the only color in his world he can see is that of the crimson rumble fish, which he shows to Rusty-Jones in a pet shop. In order to convey that Motorcycle Boy is color-blind, Coppola felt that Motorcycle Boy should occasionally see color for a few seconds, and then the color would disappear. Then it occurred to Coppola that “only the fish themselves—which serve as a metaphor for the story—would be in color.”35

  Motorcycle Boy calls the Siamese fighting fish “rumble fish” because they possess a fighting instinct that drives them to attack each other. Indeed, Motorcycle Boy says that if one holds a mirror up to the glass of the fish tank the rumble fish will even attack their own reflection. Motorcycle Boy senses a kinship between these hostile creatures and the rival gangs, who have rumbles to fight with each other.

  In essence, Motorcycle Boy himself represents the young urban toughs who inhabit the crooked streets and shadowy alleys of their sleazy world, for he is at odds with society and refuses to conform to its norms. He is revered by his youthful peers for his stubborn attitude, which is antiestablishment and antiauthority. Motorcycle Boy’s basic flaw, says Coppola, “is his inability to compromise, and that’s why I made him color-blind. He interprets life in black-and-white.”36

  Rusty-James, an inarticulate, confused young man, is discouraged because the other gang members, who unabashedly admire his brother, constantly remind him that he is no match for Motorcycle Boy. “He’s like royalty in exile,” one of them opines. But Motorcycle Boy no longer has any such delusions of grandeur about himself. It is a bit of a burden to be Robin Hood, Jesse James, and the Pied Piper, he confesses to Rusty-James. He sees himself as little more than “the Neighborhood novelty.”

  Motorcycle Boy comes across a tattered photograph of the two brothers in childhood in which he holds his baby brother in a protective embrace. “You follow me around like a lost puppy,” he later says to Rusty-James as they watch the rumble fish in the pet shop. “I wish I had been the big brother you always wanted.” He has the nagging feeling that he has let his younger brother down, both as a role model and as a gang leader. “If you’re gonna lead people, you’ve gotta have somewhere to go,” he reflects. He implicitly realizes that he is a lost cause. Coppola pictures Motorcycle Boy as a kind of rat who cannot find his way out of a maze. Furthermore, more than once the brothers are photographed through a fence or the metal bars of a fire escape, suggesting that they are imprisoned together in a cruel and indifferent world and must stick together for survival.

  One night Motorcycle Boy takes Rusty along with him as he breaks into the pet shop. He opens all the cages and releases the animals. This scene recalls Killer Kilgannon’s similar action in The Rain People, which Hinton says she saw before she wrote Rumble Fish (see chapter 3). Motorcycle Boy then grabs the fishbowl containing the rumble fish, his “aquatic brothers,” and tells Rusty-James that he intends to set them free in the nearby river. “They really belong in the river,” he tells Rusty-James; “I don’t think they’d rumble if they were in the river.”

  When the police arrive, Officer Patterson (William Smith), who has been convinced all along that Motorcycle Boy is a menace to society, goes after Motorcycle Boy. Patterson functions as the Angel of Death in the movie, for he has metaphorically hovered above Motorcycle Boy’s head, waiting for him to step out of line. He seizes the opportunity afforded by the pet shop break-in to shoot Motorcycle Boy dead. The lad had hoped to escape the corrosive atmosphere of the big city by flight to a more wholesome environment, but for Motorcycle Boy, brutalized by life on the street, it is already too late. He is gunned down at the climax of Rumble Fish, just as Dallas was shot in cold blood in The Outsiders, in both instances by trigger-happy cops. Society has no place for rebellious loners like Dallas and Motorcycle Boy.

  Patterson throws Rusty-James up against a police car and frisks him, and Rusty-James sees his own reflection in the car window in color—the only color image in the film besides that of the rumble fish. He smashes the window in anguish and frustration. His action of hitting his own reflection parallels a rumble fish attacking its own reflection in a mirror held up to the fish tank. Since the rumble fish are a symbol of “self-destructive teenagers trapped in urban poverty,” they represent Rusty-James’s determination to escape the narrow existence in which he feels entrapped.37

  Coppola, who had used long takes extensively in One from the Heart, employs some extended takes impressively in this movie. At this point, for example, the camera tracks slowly from Motorcycle Boy’s corpse, past the curious onlookers to Steve, Rusty-James’s loyal friend who shares his grief. Then it passes on to the brothers’ fuddled father, who turns away from his son’s dead body, downs a swig of whiskey, and stumbles away from the tragic scene. This panning shot is much more effective than a series of quick cuts to various bystanders would have been, since the solemn, slow pan underlines the funereal sadness of the occasion.

  The shooting script ends much differently than the film. The last scene as described in the shooting script concludes with Motorcycle Boy lying dead on the ground, “with the rumble fish flapping and dying around him, still too far from the river,… as the police car drives off with Rusty-James.”38 In the movie as released, Rusty James silently carries the fishbowl to the nearby river bank, then he fulfills his brother’s last wish by throwing the rumble fish into the river. Remembering his deceased brother’s advice that he should get out of town and follow the river clear to the sea, Rusty-James mounts his brother’s motorcycle and roars off into the night.

  There follows a brief epilogue that is also not in the shooting script and, therefore, like the wordless actions of Rusty James just described, must have been invented by Coppola during filming, since Hinton attests that it was he who contributed the visual imagery to the film. The movie concludes with Rusty-James in silhouette, astride the cycle on a California beach, silently watching the seagulls flit over the Pacific Ocean. He has indeed reached the sea. Moreover, he is now liberated from his hero worship of his brother and is no longer living under Motorcycle Boy’s shadow. He is now prepared to get a fresh start in life—alone.

  Coppola thought that throughout the film the underappreciated younger brother was certainly the more promising of the pair. In the end, says Coppola, Rusty-James has ceased to worship his brother as a false idol and grasped the fact that it is he who has survived, not his older brother. He has realized that “he, not his brother, is the one who is blessed.”39 Clearly, Coppola’s altered ending to the film gives it a more positive conclusion than the one in the screenplay, which concludes with Rusty-James being arrested and the rumble fish floundering on the ground.

  It is generally believed that the negative reaction to the film at the New York Film Festival sabotaged the movie’s chances to succeed with the public. If the movie failed on its original release, it is to some degree because Rumble Fish is an austere picture that is not easy to love. Several reviewers across the country subsequently condemned the movie as hopelessly obscure and pretentious. They pointed to the fantasy sequence in which Rusty-James passes out after he and his buddy Steve are pummeled by muggers. Rusty-James has a rapturous “out-of-body experience,” in which he believes he is dead. As he fl
oats above the city, he sees his comatose body stretched out on the ground below. He even imagines his own wake in a pool hall, as his grieving friends offer a toast “to Rusty-James, a real cool dude.”

  This fantasy sequence is surely relevant to the film, since it patently reflects a pathetic wish fulfillment on Rusty-James’s part: he pictures himself being esteemed by his old buddies as a legend like his older brother, which is sadly not the case. David Ehrenstein calls this “wonderfully wacky moment” just the kind of element in a Coppola film that his critics dismiss as mere “visual trickery.” One critic grudgingly complimented the movie for possessing a feverishly, partially redeeming grandeur, as evidenced in the fantasy sequence just noted. Another reviewer went so far as to state that this whimsical sequence reminds one that Coppola can be one of the most powerful filmmakers of our time. He summed up the picture by saying that Coppola has created a bleak, oppressive world, a simmering limbo of pool parlors, bars, and teen hangouts—clearly the work of an artist who refuses to surrender. Yet another critic observed that it seems that Coppola, still the maverick, simply will not behave. Prodded by the suits who run the studios to turn out another crowd-pleaser like The Outsiders, he instead followed up that picture that had captured the youth market with a baroque film, more likely to appeal to the much smaller art house set.40 A small group of Coppola well-wishers endorsed his sophisticated handling of his material in Rumble Fish, calling it a brave film from a director who stands apart from the “flavor-of-the-month” mentality in Hollywood, whereby producers try to cater to the changes in public taste.

  Rumble Fish has gained a following over the years. It is now seen as a highly inventive film that maintains an abrasive edge. The plot moves gamely along to the climax, where Motorcycle Boy’s fate is sealed. While some reviewers saw the grim, forbidding movie as an addled, disjointed tale of young drifters, it is really a thought-provoking slice of street life about some losers who are being deprived of the little they have left to lose. The austere lighting and black-and-white photography help to give the movie genuine intensity, as the camera lingers on scenes of dereliction, finding artistic beauty in foggy railroad yards and smoky cafes. In fact, Dean Tavoularis’s stark production design and Steven Burum’s black-and-white cinematography deserved more credit than they got at the time of release for the shadowy, atmospheric netherworld they helped Coppola to create.

  Coppola complained with some justification that the critics who reviewed the picture from the New York Film Festival did not even bother to acknowledge the performances in the film. Matt Dillon gives a much more shaded depiction of the misfit Rusty-James in Rumble Fish than he did in his rather perfunctory portrayal of Dallas Winston in The Outsiders. Mickey Rourke gives the performance of his career in his understated reading of Motorcycle Boy, and Vincent Spano gives an immaculate portrayal of Steve, Rusty-James’s good-hearted best friend, who has the same sort of dogged devotion for Rusty-James that Rusty-James himself has for Motorcycle Boy. All three young actors effectively project the inner turmoil of modern young people.

  Nevertheless, the movie did not find an audience at the time of its initial release and was pulled from distribution after only seven weeks, with a mere $1 million in earnings. By contrast, The Outsiders racked up a $12 million gross while it was playing first run. Still, Rumble Fish, like One from the Heart, attracted a larger audience in Europe than it did in the United States.

  The Outsiders and Rumble Fish are linked and not only because they are both based on youth-oriented novels by S. E. Hinton that examine ritual gang violence. They are further connected by Coppla’s consistent theme of family, which is quite visible in both movies. The Matt Dillon characters in The Outsiders and in Rumble Fish derive a sense of family from fellow gang members. Dallas Winston’s dysfunctional family is all but nonexistent in The Outsiders and he has no contact with them to speak of. If he cares about anyone, it is Johnny and Ponyboy. Rusty-James’s family in Rumble Fish collapsed when his mother took off for California, his father took to drink, and his brother became a restless vagabond. Rusty-James attempts to reestablish a family-like bond with Motorcycle Boy when the latter returns from California, but they never really reconnect. If anyone truly cares about Rusty-James, it is Steve, even when Rusty-James takes his friendship for granted.

  Coppola’s faith in Rumble Fish as a significant film has been vindicated, to the extent that it has over the years achieved the status of a cult film, and it is often shown in college film courses. Furthermore, film historians acknowledge in retrospect Coppola’s artistic courage in making an unrelentingly pessimistic picture about modern youth, which transcends the simplistic presentation of youngsters in more innocuous, safe teen flicks. “That film has gained some sort of underground status,” says Barry Malkin. “The black-and-white photography with splashes of color, the painted shadows of the German expressionistic cinema,” and Stewart Copeland’s music “have garnered a following.”41 Summing up Coppola’s two youth movies, Bergan perhaps says it all when he declares that “both films proved that Coppola was not content to make genre movies in a conventional way” but, instead, breathed new life into the old formulas.42

  Since Rumble Fish failed to find an audience at the time of its original release, however, Coppola found it difficult at the time to mount another production. Quite unexpectedly he was brought in at the eleventh hour to help salvage a picture entitled The Cotton Club by none other than his old nemesis from The Godfather days, Robert Evans.

  9

  Night Life

  The Cotton Club

  I don’t like crap games with barons and earls;

  Don’t go to Harlem in ermine and pearls

  .......................................................................

  That’s why the lady is a tramp.

  —Words and music by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers

  Very often performers were court jesters or troubadours for the gangsters, whether they liked it or not, because the gangsters owned the place. That’s part of the world they were in.

  —Martin Scorsese

  Robert Evans, who was production chief at Paramount when Francis Ford Coppola filmed The Godfather there, in due course left his position to become an independent producer, releasing films through Paramount. After producing successful movies like Chinatown (1974), Evans subsequently turned out some flops. To make matters worse, he was convicted of cocaine possession. By the early 1980s, Evans’s career was in dire straits, and he hoped to get back on top by making The Cotton Club.

  In 1982 Evans optioned James Haskins’s The Cotton Club, a coffee-table book that was a nonfiction picture-history of the famous Harlem nightclub that enjoyed its heyday in the Roaring Twenties, a cabaret where the drinks were cold and the jazz was hot.

  The Cotton Club was designed as a musical about the famed Harlem nightspot that flourished in the Prohibition Era, where the entertainers were black and the customers were white. Because the club was run by racketeers, the plot at times takes on the dimensions of a gangster picture, thereby recalling Coppola’s Godfather films. The concept of blending the format of the movie musical with that of the gangster movie—the two most popular film genres during the period of the early talkies—seemed like a dandy idea in theory, but it proved difficult to work out in practice.

  Evans planned to finance the picture through private investors so that all the rights to the picture would belong to him. In his familiar fashion of expressing himself in crudities, he touted the film project to prospective investors as filled with gangsters, music, and “pussy galore,” a reference to the temptress with that name in one of the James Bond movies.1 He eventually made a deal with Ed and Fred Doumani, owners of the Tropicana and El Morocco casinos in Las Vegas. The brothers were reputed to have links to the Mafia in Vegas, but Evans believed that their checkbooks were as good as anyone else’s. The Doumanis committed themselves to investing in the film, which Evans budgeted at $20 million.

  One of the project’
s drawing cards was that Evans had signed superstar Richard Gere (An Officer and a Gentleman) to appear in the movie. Gere would play one of the rare white musicians who appeared at the Cotton Club. Evans also obtained Gregory Hines, the popular black actor-hoofer whose own grandmother had danced at the Cotton Club, to play a featured role.

  Since the present film was to some extent a gangster picture, Evans commissioned Mario Puzo—who by this time had co-written the screenplays of The Godfather and Godfather II—to do the first draft of the script. But Evans was dissatisfied with the screenplay Puzo submitted in the summer of 1982. Since all Puzo had to work with was Haskins’s nonfiction account of the Cotton Club, he had to weave a plotline virtually out of whole cloth, and his scenario simply did not hold together.

  Orion Pictures was willing to distribute the picture, provided that Evans could present them with a viable script. It occurred to Evans that he should corral Francis Coppola, the experienced script doctor who had saved Patton and other screenplays over the years, to do a rewrite of Puzo’s draft.

  The producer was aware that Coppola had creditors snapping at his heels in the wake of the collapse of Zoetrope Studios in Los Angeles (see chapter 7). Indeed, Coppola was still living under the shadow of bankruptcy, and the bill collectors were already getting into his wife’s jewelry box. Although Evans and Coppola had had multiple clashes during the filming of The Godfather, Evans was confident that Coppola would be glad to make a fast buck revising Puzo’s Cotton Club screenplay.

  In March 1983 he phoned Coppola and begged him to rescue the script: “Francis, my baby is sick and needs a doctor.” He added for good measure that the trio responsible for The Godfather—Evans, Puzo, and Coppola—would then all be involved in The Cotton Club. Evans was convinced that the new picture would be “The Godfather with music,” and would prove to be another winner.2 Coppola remembers that Evans called him “in desperation with some hokey metaphor that his baby was sick and needed a doctor. I said I’d be happy to help him for a week or so, no charge.3 That week eventually stretched into a commitment on Coppola’s part that lasted well over a year, as he ultimately not only rewrote the script but directed the film as well.