One solution was to pre-shoot the shot, record it on the EVS, and then use it during the performance with the scene playing live. This worked fine. During the performance I could cut between the live cameras, which were labeled by number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., and use the EVS for any specials that were needed, those being labeled A, B, C, D, E, and so on. In live television, nomenclature is important because you’re making choices quickly and you don’t want to confuse what’s live and what’s pre-recorded. If you said EVS 3, it might be mistaken for 3, which is a live camera.
What happens if your story requires scenes at the beach or other locations that cannot be faked either by stagecraft magic, Translights, digital motion-control, or green screen? Even in Hollywood during its own Golden Age, one tried to shoot as much as possible at the studio, on sets, exterior or interior. Each studio maintained extensive picture libraries so they could research and recreate any period from anywhere in the world. It was thought that what they couldn’t build at the studio, they’d cover with a few days or weeks of second unit, shooting at the actual location. The studios had giant backlots, following the tradition that began with D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, and the backlots continued to be used throughout the ’40s and ’50s. The Hollywood formula for filmmaking was simple and effective: you built sets either in the studio or on the backlot, so the great majority of shooting could be done there, certainly when the expensive principal actors were being scheduled and under conditions you could control. The few scenes that really required a unit to shoot in a distant location were done there, second unit, sometimes with doubles wearing the stars’ wardrobe. Often this could be accomplished in a few weeks and with very few people—none of them with big salaries. The Hollywood formula is one way Live Cinema can be approached. But now, with nearly instantaneous communication across the globe, other solutions are possible. For example, productions can originate from a distant location, or two or three such locations, with the director and his team in the control room yet somewhere else. No doubt other technological solutions will emerge. Really, in a digital medium anything is possible, depending on the concept and the budget.
In 1964 I had the great privilege of being driven around the 20th Century Fox backlot before it was destroyed to make way for Century City. It was thrilling; I passed large settings for The Song of Bernadette, and The Robe, and other films. Throughout all of Hollywood, one could find similar amazing edifices on the backlots. And the sets built inside the studio soundstages were often as impressive. Although I must admit I was as a twenty-five-year-old filmmaker most disgruntled when Warner Bros., due to a tiny budget, turned down my request to film Finian’s Rainbow on real tobacco-growing locations in Kentucky, despite the presence of the great Fred Astaire as well as Petula Clark and Tommy Steele. As a result, I was forced to shoot on the reclaimed interior and exterior settings of Camelot.
The answer to this question of how to deal with expensive or exotic locations is simple: if you have sufficient budget to shoot on location, you can do so; or you can pre-shoot shots with live integration and editing at a later time, even making the location shots available via satellite, or in conjunction with other scenes being produced live in the studio. Whether you make Live Cinema or traditional cinema, the issue of studio versus location remains the same.
*Christopher Innes, Edward Gordon Craig, Directors in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1983.
6
THE SHAME OF THINGS TO COME: MADISON, WISCONSIN
Someone I consider a friend is California Governor Jerry Brown, who was also a friend and colleague of my brother, August Floyd Coppola. I stress my brother’s entire name, because my own really was a copy of his. I always loved how my brother’s name looked all together, and so I used “Francis Ford Coppola” in imitation of him. At any rate, we were friendly with Governor Brown, and on that basis, when he asked me if I would film a sort of commercial for his 1980 run for President, I said I would—but I thought it ought to be a live event. This turned out to be the most embarrassing and disastrous experience of my career—though it says much about my feelings about television, and live television in particular.
The Shape of Things to Come was an early attempt at a live political presentation. The idea was to show Jerry Brown appearing live in front of the state capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, giving a speech on live television and underscoring that with images that portrayed the goals and dreams of America as he spoke. We were faced, of course, with a limited budget, and I had never done anything like this before. A television company was contacted in Madison, and arrangements were made to rent a video truck that could handle the five or six cameras we were able to rent, along with the operators and staff necessary to operate them. I worked with Jerry on his remarks. I had him dress in a trench coat against the weather (it was March), and then sourced a number of supplemental sources, including films like The Plow That Broke the Plains (a 1936 short documentary film by Pare Lorentz with vivid imagery showing American farmland) so that occasionally I’d be able to switch between this footage and the cameras showing Jerry in front of the large crowds the event would attract.
As usual, I made the whole project as difficult as I could, with ideas to enable live television not only to illustrate what the candidate was saying with stirring images, but to use chroma key (there was a screen behind Jerry) as well to superimpose him over the images that would intensify the optimistic notions he was presenting. I prepared the source materials, brought them with me to Wisconsin, and loaded them into the facility of the rented TV truck. A helicopter with camera was engaged to shoot this impressive scene: the illuminated building with a rostrum before it seemed ideal, making it appear as if Jerry was already President, speaking to an excited gathered crowd. Governor Brown stepped out in front of the Wisconsin State Capitol, looking “presidential.” So did the building, which houses both chambers of the Wisconsin legislature along with the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the Office of the Governor. The edifice exudes power and could be a stand-in for the highest halls of power in Washington, DC. Governor Brown approached a platform with bunting fluttering, in frigid weather, wearing his trench coat. It was my intention to make full use of the fact that it was cold outdoors, as live political statements were rare at that time.
One thing I tend to do is bring a concept as close to the brink of failure as I can, and by doing so learn what can and cannot be done. It was no different in this exercise in using live television for political purpose: I wanted to see how far I could push it. And indeed, I pushed it beyond my capabilities.
Inside the truck, horror struck me as we prepared to go live: the images before me on the preview screens were live with the rented cameras, but the images were all the same. Each showed a view of a man’s legs and feet aimed toward the ground. Frantically I addressed the cameramen through the intercom to lift those cameras and find the angles I had already discussed with them. But the intercom didn’t work. The operator of the truck tried to turn it on, but the images persisted on the screens of only the cameramen’s feet. The clock ticked on and we were live.
I switched to the aerial view of enormous crowds as the candidate stepped forward to the speaking platform, but there were no other shots to cut to. Finally, I saw that one cameraman had focused on his shot despite the lack of intercom communication; the others oddly just had their cameras aimed at their own shoes. The speech began, and I was frantically trying to reach the ears of the cameramen to give me shots to choose from. But there were none. So I rolled The Plow That Broke the Plains, with its stirring images of America, and for lack of other shots, decided to ask the truck to composite the Governor’s image over these images. The result looked as if it were coming from Mars, with the chroma key distorting and providing bizarre and unusual effects over Governor Brown. The intercom never gained functionality, and I did the best I could with what I had, but the result was probably the weirdest political speech ever given. As it all concluded, I remember swearing that if
I ever attempted live television again, I would have a truck that was fail-safe, and above all, an intercom system that worked.
Mind you, Jerry Brown was most generous when it was all over; perhaps he hadn’t realized what a mess it was. He was most kind, and in fact, years later when he ran for Governor of California in 2010, he and his gifted wife Anne Gust came to me to ask if I’d assist in making his political messages. I did, and he was elected. But I was always grateful that he didn’t hold the poor results of that first live television ad against me.
When the original experience was over, I decided later on to shoot One from the Heart as a form of live television, but my memory of the rental truck and crew’s failure prompted me to build a video truck of my own to use at my new Zoetrope Studios. I chose a self-propelled custom version of the Airstream trailer, one of two they built, the other being for NASA.
I recall the thrill of seeing the completely outfitted unit (eventually named “The Silverfish” by the boys from the 1983 film The Outsiders) being driven into my new studio blaring “Ride of the Valkyries,” that triumphant music from Act 3 of Wagner’s Die Walküre (and Apocalypse Now).
7
ONE FROM THE HEART: ITS LESSONS
The story behind the intention and making of One from the Heart is interesting, and a single decision I made as we approached the beginning of production remains one of the few regrets I have in my long life. But there is something that I learned from that decision which influenced me later on during the two experimental workshops conducted at OCCC and UCLA.
Around the time that I began thinking about the film in the early 1980s, Apocalypse Now was in the theaters, and had received what I thought was an undecipherable reception from critics. Frank Rich of Time magazine had greeted it with a review in which he called it “This decade’s most extraordinary Hollywood folly.” The film opened at the Pacific Dome Theater in Hollywood, where George Lucas and I had marched down the aisle prepared to be knocked out by Lawrence of Arabia, and despite the mixed-to-negative reviews, audiences in good numbers were going. The film received two significant technical Academy Awards in 1980 (for cinematography and sound),* but was outdone for Best Picture by Kramer vs. Kramer. Since I was the principal backer of Apocalypse Now, which had gone over budget by costing about $32 million, at a time when interest rates had gone as high as 21%, it seemed to me that in time I would be financially wiped out. Moreover, I felt I would be discredited artistically, after a run of projects that were deemed immense successes: Patton, The Godfather, The Conversation, American Graffiti, and The Godfather Part II.
No one had wanted to finance Apocalypse Now, and none of the actors I had discovered and worked with in those previous pictures wanted to be in it, until finally, Marlon Brando agreed to do it for $1 million per week and 11.5% of the gross. I remember driving to Malibu and having some interesting conversations with Steve McQueen, but in the end he sadly told me he couldn’t leave his family for so long and dropped out.
It’s helpful to understand my feelings about Apocalypse Now, which was probably the most daunting and terrifying experience, both artistically and financially, I have ever had. It was clear that I had flown, like Icarus, too close to the sun, and it was only a matter of time, whether months or years, when I would experience a great and final fall. With that in mind, I felt perhaps I could quickly put together another kind of film, something surefire that would be so entertaining and popular that when the final devastating failure of Apocalypse Now arrived, this new film would save me. With that I began to think about a comedy, even a musical comedy, a form which was not looked upon favorably in those years.
A nice-looking young man, tall and dark-haired, by the name of Armyan Bernstein, approached me one day at LAX airport, asking if I would read his script. This is something that happened to me often, and as I more than anything wanted to consider myself a writer, I was never interested.
His script was called One from the Heart. It was set in Chicago and told more or less his own story about the relationship with the girl he loved and lost. I liked the idea of doing a love story, especially one that was a comedy, but I really wanted to do a musical. I felt the time was right for that once-wonderful Hollywood form, which, like the Western, was impossible to even talk about to the studios, who were always looking for something like the last hit. Everything else was usually verboten.
In those days I lived in San Francisco with my young family. I had a beautiful penthouse office on top of the historic Sentinel Building in North Beach, and had collected ownership of a number of buildings in the area, including the wonderful Little Fox Theater. I owned a weekly magazine, City Magazine, which was draining what funds I had left, and I had recently bought a radio station, KMPX. It was a dream of sorts to do creative work that spanned all these mediums: stories could be published in the magazine, performed live at the theater, and subsequently broadcast on radio. I don’t know exactly what I was thinking, but it was an exciting time for me.
I knew, however, that the debt from Apocalypse Now was looming and would become my own financial apocalypse, and I was scared. So I did what I always do when I am frightened, which is to pose some newer, bigger, more daring and exciting project to leap into. I had another idea that was infectious: I could have a studio within a city, right there in North Beach. One building would be the story department, another would be the acting department, yet another across the street would be a cafe, and to the left of the theater would be the film and sound laboratory. All of this in a real neighborhood with a Bohemian tradition and peppered with good restaurants, cafes, hangouts, bars, and possibly even girls. It was what I always wanted: la bohème.
I saw Apocalypse Now revenues trickle in, but felt it was as close to the failure I dreaded as could be. I didn’t yet have a script of my own, but the one I had in mind, which I called Elective Affinities, had been conceived as a cycle of films, a quartet about love, suggested by Johann von Goethe’s timeless novel of 1809. Each of the four films would be a season—spring, summer, fall, and winter—and each film was to portray an aspect of the love proposition as an element in a chemical reaction: the man, the woman, the other man, the other woman. One from the Heart, the script the young man gave me, had something of an aspect of this plot, and I began to think perhaps that the script could be a musical. Maybe instead of Chicago, I could set it in Las Vegas, as the story was about the greatest gambling any of us would ever do, finding and keeping a beloved. Little by little I convinced myself that an urgently needed shortcut to my goal might be to grasp Armyan’s script, integrate it somehow into the Elective Affinities scenario, and make a commercial musical comedy that would save me from the inevitable Apocalypse Now avalanche that was coming down on me. No doubt I was crazy to think this way, but that is my recollection of how I was thinking.
Meanwhile, my effort to pull together the idea of a San Francisco studio was frustrated by what I felt was a hard-nosed resistance; landlords wouldn’t sell or lease adjoining properties and wouldn’t cooperate with my imagined studio within a city. I became frustrated. The inevitable fallout coming from my perceived failure of Apocalypse Now would soon be upon me.
To make things more complicated, MGM, the studio that owned the rights to One from the Heart and was willing to produce and finance it, had certain limits. The budget was modest, and they didn’t particularly see the need to make it a musical or in fact to make any musical at the time. And they didn’t understand why I wanted to set it in Las Vegas. I’m not sure Armyan Bernstein did either, but he was so glad that his pitch to me in the airport had worked that he went along with the idea.
That’s when I did a complete reversal: Why not give up the idea of a city-studio and buy a real Hollywood studio? There were a few on the market. I’d be located in L.A., where all the resources were, as well as the acting talent. For the money I had invested in the various San Francisco buildings, I could buy the Hollywood General Studios—where some of the final scenes of my favorite film, The Thief of Ba
gdad, had been shot at the beginning of World War II, where in my imagination Sabu, the young Indian-American star, had ridden tigers. It was arranged that I see the studio. I went through the gates, the same gates I had peered through longingly as a thirteen-year-old student at nearby Bancroft Junior High. I walked to the end of the lot, passed nine stages, and out the gates. I had decided. It would become Zoetrope Studios.
Then my imagination went into overdrive. In Apocalypse Now, everything we did was done the old-fashioned way, helicopter by helicopter, explosion by explosion. Now a new era began to dawn that would take the cinema to an entirely new place: the digital revolution. Movies would become electronic after all, just as I had always imagined. My new Zoetrope Studios could be the studio of the future, with a network of Xerox Star computers stringing all the departments together. The idea of a network never had been possible, but thanks to the extraordinary work of Xerox PARC, which George Lucas and I had visited, it was possible now. I explained to my colleagues that the network would be like a long clothesline that went into the windows of the story department and then out and in through the art department and so forth, until it passed through every department: casting, sound, effects. One could clip a story title and idea with a clothespin and yank the clothesline so it went into the story department. I could only afford two of the Xerox Star computers, and they were later repossessed, but at least I bought from Xerox rather than “borrow” from them as did both Apple and Microsoft. When Steve Jobs accused Bill Gates of stealing from Apple, Gates replied, “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”†
Live Cinema and Its Techniques Page 6