As things turned out, nobody liked Jack but the public. When it opened across the United States on August 9, 1996, it quickly put $11 million in the Disney coffers on the first weekend, thereby becoming the top-grossing picture in the country. It obviously reached its target audience of youngsters. By the end of the year it was one of the top box-office attractions of 1996, with $60 million as a domestic gross.
The Rainmaker, the other film treated in this chapter, would likewise turn a handsome profit. But, unlike Jack, it would also enhance Coppola’s reputation as one of the finest filmmakers of his generation. Although Rainmaker was never really undervalued as a major Coppola picture, its reputation has continued to grow over the years, and it has finally been recognized as one of Coppola’s warmest and richest films.
Sometimes a film comes off, like The Rainmaker, and sometimes it does not, like Jack. A director cannot always predict the outcome when he makes a film. So every moviemaker’s career is marked by peaks and valleys. Still a director like Coppola cannot be faulted for taking risks in his films just because the risks do not always pay off. A moviemaker who does not take risks in creating his films will surely fall by the wayside, whereas a venturesome director whose reach sometimes exceeds his grasp continues to be of interest. Critics and audiences alike too often are impatient with an artist’s need to ripen and develop his talent gradually. A serious artist needs and deserves some degree of tolerance and patience on the part of critics and audiences while he refines his methods and style. In the upcoming epilogue, then, I shall make some concluding remarks about how Coppola has progressed throughout his career.
Epilogue
The State of the Artist in the Industry Today
Some good pictures come from Hollywood. God knows how, but they do.
—William Faulkner
You’re stepping off a cliff when you start to make a film.
—Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola learned during his career that a director not only has to work hard to achieve the kind of artistic independence that qualifies him to be an auteur, but also that the director has to work just as hard to keep it. For example, although a director like Coppola has often been looked upon as a maverick who makes films perhaps more subjective and personal than those of many of the other Hollywood directors, it is important to realize that his motion pictures have often been financed by some of the oldest and largest of Hollywood studios: Paramount, Columbia, and Warners. That these companies have been willing to allow him such a great degree of artistic freedom is yet another indication that the big Hollywood studios are well aware that they must make an effort to present contemporary audiences with fresh material and not just a rehash of the old commercial formulas long since overfamiliar to moviegoers.
On the other hand, a canny director like Coppola realizes that a filmmaker must cooperate with the studio that has invested in his film if he expects to get backing in the future. In other words, the cooperation must be on both sides. And Coppola does not mind meeting company demands, as long as he can meet them in his own way. Thus he has it stipulated in his contracts that any cuts the studio wants to make in a film of his are to be made under his supervision.
The relationship of artist and industry will always be a difficult one, since the director is primarily concerned with preserving his artistic integrity, while the industry is primarily interested in safeguarding its investment. This conflict of interest will inevitably lead to compromise, but, as has been seen in the films covered in this book, the compromise can often be one enabling the director to produce a film that is recognizably his own and, yet, one from which the studio can expect a return on its investment.
“I feel that I’m not reckless or crazy,” says Coppola. “It’s just that I’m primarily interested in making films more than in amassing money, which is just a tool” needed to make films.1 Without the safety net provided by a Hollywood studio, not even bravery and determination can keep an independent filmmaker’s dream alive—hence, the effort of going it alone and having to solicit studio backing for each film that he makes is considerable. The “Flavor of the Month” mentality of many producers—whereby they try to gauge changes in public taste—is difficult for a director to cope with. Movie executives, Coppola tells me, “can see the artist coming, cap in hand, with a project he wants to do,” and they will say, “Well, he wants to do it very badly, so he’s going to have to make a sacrifice because it’s not a project that has been instigated by us.” By contrast, if it is a project that the studio is initiating, it is possible to obtain immense amounts of money to do the film.
“I’ve done so much for the studios,” he adds elsewhere, “and yet they resent even putting me in a position where I don’t have to go to one of them with my hat in my hand and have them tell me what movies I can or cannot make.”2 As television becomes to an ever increasing degree the medium that claims the largest segment of the mass audience in the way the cinema once did, motion pictures are being thought of more and more in the same category as the legitimate theater: a medium that can afford to appeal to a more discriminating audience that wants fare a bit more challenging than what they can usually find on the tube. As this happens, film directors are more frequently being given a freer hand in making films that are more inventive and personal than has usually been the case in the past.
After all, the major studios began to extend artistic freedom to independent filmmakers in the first place because studio executives realized that they were losing touch with the moviegoing public’s taste. The great virtue of a director like Coppola is that he has for the most part been able to make films his own way while at the same time remaining aware of what would appeal to his audience. He has, in short, shown his respect for the creative freedom he has achieved by working so hard to win it and by using it so well.
“There are two kinds of movies you make,” Coppola explains. “There’s your dream project that you are basically trying to figure out how you are going to get financing for” (like Apocalypse Now), “and then there’s the job that’s brought to you.” Although Peggy Sue Got Married was more of a job than a dream movie in Coppola’s view, he was gratified by the way that it turned out. Still Coppola admits to accepting from studios at times assignments he did not find particularly attractive in order to afford to make films of his own choosing. “The thing that unites young, inexperienced directors and older, experienced directors” is that neither type of filmmaker often gets the opportunity “to do their personal work,” he says.3
Coppola may have the Godfather films to his credit, but he is still hard put to get the financing to do a project that is original. The reason is that the studios are now owned by multinational corporations who are more interested in making big bucks than in making great movies. Therefore, as Mark Caro points out, Coppola has learned to mix “the occasional pet project”—such as 1982’s One from the Heart, which fizzled at the box office—with “bill-payers,” like 1986’s Peggy Sue Got Married. “Coppola’s experience is a cautionary tale that demonstrates the increased pressure on filmmakers to deliver commercial hits.” Yet Coppola has never downgraded the films he made as a “hired gun” (like Peggy Sue), simply because they were not personal projects of his own devising. He has always been quick to emphasize that The Godfather started out as a job-for-hire. Paramount asked him to adapt a routine crime novel for the screen, and Coppola turned it into an epic cinematic saga and a moneymaker in the bargain. “It’s like, you bake this cake,” he concludes, “and sometimes it turns out to be a wonderful cake.”4 Coppola, in his time, has made some wonderful cakes.
Coppola contends that the negative press that has persisted over the years about his cavalier attitude toward going over budget on his pictures is unfair. The Outsiders, Peggy Sue Got Married, Gardens of Stone, and Tucker were all pretty close to being brought in on budget and on schedule. Nevertheless, journalists prefer to dig up old news about his exceeding the budgets on Apocalypse Now and One from the Heart,
both of which are exceptions that prove the rule.
At any rate, a milestone was reached in the ongoing tug-of-war between the film artist and the industry in 1998 when Warner Brothers reneged on a deal with Coppola’s independent production unit, American Zoetrope, to film Pinocchio. Coppola’s suit against Warners came to trial on June 3, 1998. His deposition declared, “This action arises from a dream of plaintiff Francis Coppola to bring the beloved children’s story Pinocchio to the screen as a live action motion picture, and the efforts of defendant Warner Bros, first to grab Coppola’s film at a bargain-basement price and then, when that failed, to ruin Coppola’s efforts to bring his dream to life.”5 In brief, when Warners refused to agree to pay Coppola his standard directorial fee and offered him considerably less, he understandably went shopping for a better deal elsewhere. But then the front office at Warners decreed that they were still committed to the project, to the extent that they had invested development money in commissioning a screenplay by Frank Galati; therefore, they maintained, if Coppola did not make Pinocchio for Warners, he could not make it at all. Coppola replied, “If they had any sentiment for movies at all, you’d think they’d never stop anyone from making a film; in the end, they’d just say, ‘Go ahead, make your film. We don’t want to make it, but we’re not going to prevent you because, after all, we’re film people too.’ They’re not film people; they’re ‘money and power people.’”6
While detailing the scenario of Pinocchio on the witness stand, Coppola burst into tears. The Warners attorney dismissed Coppola’s “crying jag” as a plea for sympathy from the jury. After all, we recall, Coppola pretended to have a fainting spell during a conference on The Godfather with Paramount’s studio brass, in order to coax them into seeing things his way. Nonetheless, he contended that, in the present instance, he was not shedding crocodile tears. “I was emotional because I was describing the theme of the story, and I was very much moved by this. But it wasn’t manipulative.”7
In Coppola’s behalf, Al Pacino recounted an episode during the filming of The Godfather: later one afternoon Coppola was filming the burial of Don Vito Corleone. “I see Francis sitting on a gravestone, and he’s crying. ‘Francis,’ I say, ‘What’s the matter?’ And he says, ‘They won’t give me another setup.’ Meaning they wouldn’t let him shoot the scene again. So he’s sitting on the gravestone bawling, and I thought, ‘This guy cares…. That’s the way to live. It may be a tough ride, but something is going to come out of it.’”8
At all events, while Coppola and American Zoetrope were in litigation with Warners, New Line Cinema released the live-action feature, The Adventures of Pinocchio. This movie garnered a cool critical response and sank without a trace, thereby making it inadvisable for Coppola to make his Pinocchio movie at that time. “Another Pinocchio picture got made, and we lost millions,” he says laconically. The jury ordered Warners to pay Coppola $80 million in compensatory and punitive damages. No other director has ever scored such a triumph over a major studio. To that extent, Coppola’s victory is shared by every filmmaker working in the industry today. The parallel with The Rainmaker, “which culminates with a stunning jury award in favor of a plaintiff tackling powerful business interests,” was not lost on Coppola.9 For Coppola to take on giant Warner Brothers was once again, in his view, David conquering Goliath.
Moreover, Coppola saw some poetic justice in winning his suit against Warners, since he had lost a suit against the same studio in the late 1960s. At that time, we remember, the front office at Warners insisted that Coppola repay the studio the money it had advanced him as development funds for a package of ill-fated American Zoetrope projects they had rejected. After Warners won the case, it took Coppola years to pay off the debt (see chapter 3). Concerning the verdict in the Pinocchio case, Coppola gleefully commented, “Hopefully this will teach them” to treat creative people as an asset, “not as serfs.”
Still, regardless of where a filmmaker works, he must reconcile himself to the fact that he is usually going to have difficulties in securing studio backing for a project he has developed. In the present setup, a director must negotiate with movie executives who operate a given studio as part of some larger conglomerate and who are therefore wary of rocking the corporate boat by providing financing for a property that departs in varying degrees from the kind of safe, commercial subject matter they tend to favor. Yet, as Coppola tells me, “it is precisely the risky, offbeat projects that often capture a large audience,” and movies like Apocalypse Now and Bram Stoker’s Dracula bear out this contention. Jonathan Rosenbaum has said of the latter film, “Still the overreacher, Coppola suffers at times from a surfeit of ideas (rather than a dearth, like most of his colleagues). But this is still one of the best vampire movies around—a visual feast with ideas, more disturbing than scary, and a rich experience in many other respects as well.”10
“I’ve played the highwire act with regular studio pictures and gotten away with it,” Coppola points out. “When you think that Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a picture financed by Columbia, a regular studio—I mean, that’s a weird movie.”11 So Coppola continues to be characterized as a Hollywood maverick, forever slugging it out with the producers, just as he was when he started making movies in the 1960s. Even then he was already pictured as the champion of the individual filmmakers against the studio system.
“No American career has had such endless turmoil or says so much about making movies in America” as the career of Francis Coppola. He revitalized the moribund gangster film genre with The Godfather, which “had a calm faith in narrative control that had not been current in Hollywood for twenty years. It was like a film of the 1940s in its nostalgic decor, and in Gordon Willis’s bold exploration of a film noir in color.” Furthermore, it rendered an uncompromising portrayal of evil.12 The gangster genre continued to enjoy a renaissance with Godfather II. In imagining the early life of Don Vito Corleone, it carved out a superb recreation of “a gritty, turn-of-the-century Lower East Side” populated by raffish lowlifes.13
The Godfather trilogy inspired The Sopranos (1999–), a TV series about the Mafia in New Jersey, as well as the 2002 miniseries Kingpin, which involves a Mexican American crime family. While The Sopranos boasts writing, directing, and acting of a consistently high order, Kingpin lacks originality. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Kingpin is very flattering to the Godfather films. Miguel Cadenas is patently based on Michael Corleone, even in name (Miguel is Spanish for Michael). Like Michael, Miguel is a college-educated member of the family who marries an outsider (recall Kay Adams) and who, though reluctant to get involved, eventually takes over the family empire. Miguel intimidates a rival by slaughtering his prize dog, echoing how the Corleones killed an opponent’s prize horse to scare him. Yet the characters in Kingpin lack the psychological complexity of the Corleones or of the Sopranos, and therefore Kingpin cannot be classed with either of its forerunners.
Although perhaps not as influential, the films Coppola directed after Godfather II continued to set precedents and to succeed in unexpected ways. Apocalypse Now is one of the most colossal war movies ever made. The helicopter attack on the Vietcong village is unparalleled as one of the most astounding, graphic battle sequences ever committed to celluloid. Coppola’s filmography also includes some films like The Conversation and The Outsiders, which attest to his ability to make compelling movies while working on pictures conceived on a smaller scale than his cinematic epics. They qualify as chamber pieces, rather than grand opera.
Coppola has become less prolific as the years have gone on—only three films in the 1990s. The reasons for his restricted output are not hard to find. He has come to the conclusion that it was the carefully made films that would have lasting value, not those turned out on a regular basis. In his painstaking way, Coppola not only reinvented the gangster film and the war film, but, with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the horror film as well.
In the 1990s Coppola’s wine business really took off. He engaged the
distinguished enologist André Tchelistcheff as winemaking consultant. As one journalist put it, that is like hiring Stradivarius as a consultant for your fiddle factory. Coppola’s vineyard in Rutherford, California, has become a tourist attraction. “He sits outside at a wooden table, the padrone, greeting tourists, autographing the labels of wine bottles.”14 (For myself, I chose a bottle of dark, dry, Coppola claret. I drank the wine but kept the autographed label.)
Even though his winery has prospered, Coppola still maintains an active interest in the film business. American Zoetrope is running efficiently and has released The Virgin Suicides (1999), written and directed by Coppola’s daughter Sofia as her first feature. The film tells sympathetically the story of four teenage daughters of overprotective, repressive parents, who kill themselves. The cast included Kathleen Turner (Peggy Sue Got Married) and Danny DeVito (The Rainmaker). American Zoetrope also released CQ (2002), the debut feature written and directed by Coppola’s son Roman. It is the tale of an American film editor working on a French sci-fi flick in Paris and becoming infatuated with the movie’s sexy leading lady. Jason Schwartzman (the son of Roman’s aunt, Talia Shire) stands out in a good cast. Sofia appears in a cameo.
Eleanor Coppola shot a documentary about the making of the film for the DVD. “I seem to have become the family documentarian,” she observes at the start of her documentary. “I shot a film of my husband Francis making Apocalypse Now and my daughter Sofia doing her debut film, and now our son Roman is directing his first feature, CQ.” Francis Coppola observes in Eleanor’s movie that “Roman incorporated his memories of being in a family involved in filmmaking into CQ”—including the incident during the making of The Godfather when Francis got so frustrated that he put his foot through his office door (see chapter 4). In Roman’s film Gerárd Depardieu, as a volatile director, punches a hole in his office door. “Roman fashioned his memories into this ingenious film,” Francis concludes.
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