Godfather

GODFATHER

GODFATHER

The Intimate
Francis Ford Coppola

Gene D. Phillips

With a Foreword by
Walter Murch

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY

Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright © 2004 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

All rights reserved.

Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008
www.kentuckypress.com

05 06 07 08 5 4 3 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Phillips, Gene D.

Godfather : the intimate Francis Ford Coppola / Gene D. Phillips.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8131-2304-6 (alk. paper)

1. Coppola, Francis Ford, 1939- I. Title.

PN1998.3.C67P48 2004

791.4302'33'092—dc22

2003024590

This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Member of the Association of American University Presses

For

Stanley Kubrick,

the ultimate

Hollywood maverick

Contents

Foreword: Collaborating with Coppola
by Walter Murch

Acknowledgments

Chronology for Francis Ford Coppola

Prologue: Artist in an Industry

Part One Hollywood Immigrant

1  Point of Departure: The Early Films and Screenplays

2  Going Hollywood:
You're a Big Boy Now
and
Finian's Rainbow

3  Nightmares at Noon:
The Rain People
and
The Conversation

Part Two The Mature Moviemaker

4  In a Savage Land:
The Godfather

5  Decline and Fall:
The Godfather Part II
and
The Godfather Part III

6  The Unknown Soldiers:
Apocalypse Now, Apocalypse Now Redux
, and
Gardens of Stone

Part Three Artist in an Industry

7  Exiled in Eden:
One from the Heart

8  Growing Pains:
The Outsiders
and
Rumble Fish

9  Night Life:
The Cotton Club

Part Four The Vintage Years

10  The Past as Present:
Peggy Sue Got Married
and “Rip Van Winkle”

11  The Disenchanted:
Tucker: The Man and His Dream
and
New York Stories

12  Fright Night:
Bram Stoker's Dracula

13  The Vanishing Hero:
The Rainmaker
and
Jack

Epilogue: The State of the Artist in the Industry Today

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Filmography

Index

Photographs follow page

It disappeared long ago, but in 1972 the Window was still there, peering through milky cataracts of dust, thirty-five feet above the floor of Samuel Goldwyn's old Stage 7.1 never would have noticed it if Richard hadn't suddenly stopped in his tracks as we were taking a shortcut on our way back from lunch.

“That… was when Sound … was King!” he said, gesturing dramatically into the upper darknesses of Stage 7.

It took me a moment, but I finally saw what he was pointing to: something near the ceiling that resembled the observation window of a 1930s dirigible, nosing its way into the stage.

Goldwyn Studios, where Richard Portman and I were working on the mix of
The Godfather
, had originally been United Artists, built for Mary Pickford when she founded U.A. with Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith in the early 1920s. By 1972, Stage 7 was functioning as an attic—stuffed with the mysterious lumbering shapes of disused equipment—but it was there that Samuel Goldwyn produced one of the earliest of his many musicals:
Whoopee
(1930), starring Eddie Cantor and choreographed by Busby Berkeley. And it was there that Goldwyn's director of sound, Gordon Sawyer, sat at the controls behind the Window, hands gliding across three Bakelite knobs, piloting his Dirigible of Sound into a new world … a world in which Sound was King.

Down below, Eddie Cantor and the All-Singing, All-Dancing Goldwyn
Girls had lived in terror of the distinguished Man Behind the Window—and not just the actors, but musicians, cameramen (Gregg Toland among them), the director, the producer (Florenz Ziegfeld), even Sam Goldwyn himself. No one could contradict it if Mr. Sawyer, dissatisfied with the quality of the sound, leaned into his microphone and pronounced dispassionately but irrevocably the word “Cut!”

By 1972, forty-five years after his exhilarating coronation, King Sound seemed to be living in considerably reduced circumstances. No longer did the Man Behind the Window survey the scene from on high. Instead, the sound recordist was usually stuck in some dark corner with his equipment cart. The very idea of his demanding “Cut!” was inconceivable. Not only did none of those on the set fear his opinion, but they hardly consulted him and were frequently impatient when he did voice an opinion. Forty-five years seemed to have turned him from king to footman.

Was Richard's nostalgia misplaced? What had befallen the Window? And were sound's misfortunes all they appeared to be?

There is something about the liquidity and all-encompassing embrace of sound that might make it more accurate to speak of her as a queen rather than a king. But was she then perhaps a queen for whom the crown was a burden and who preferred to slip on a handmaiden's bonnet and scurry incognito through the back passageways of the palace, accomplishing her tasks anonymously?

Neither Richard Portman nor I had any inkling on that afternoon when he showed me the Window that the record-breaking success of
The Godfather
several months later would trigger a revival in the fortunes of the film industry in general and of sound in particular.

Three years earlier, in 1969, I had been hired to create the sound effects for—and mix—
The Rain People
, a film written, directed, and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. He was a recent film school graduate, as was I, and we were both eager to make films professionally the way we had made them at school. Francis had felt that the sound on his previous film (
Tinian's Rainbow
) had bogged down in the bureaucratic and technical inertia at the studios, and he didn't want to repeat the experience.

He also felt that if he stayed in Los Angeles he wouldn't be able to produce the inexpensive, independent films he had in mind. So he and a fellow film student, George Lucas, and I, and our families, moved up to San Francisco to start American Zoetrope. The first item on the agenda was the mix of
The Rain People
, to be done in the unfinished basement of an old warehouse on Folsom Street.

Ten years earlier, this would have been unthinkable, but the invention
of the transistor had changed things technically and economically to such an extent that it seemed natural for the thirty-year-old Francis to go to Germany and buy—almost off the shelf—mixing and editing equipment from K.E.M. in Hamburg and to hire me, a twenty-six-year-old, to use it.

Technically, the equipment was state of the art, and yet it cost a fourth of what comparable equipment would have cost five years earlier. This halving of price and doubling of quality is familiar to everyone now, after thirty years of microchips, but at the time it was astonishing. The frontier between professional and consumer electronics began to fade away.

In fact, it faded to the extent that it now became economically and technically possible for one person to do what several had done before, and that other frontier—between the creation and mixing of sound effects—also began to disappear.

From Zoetrope's beginning, the idea was to try to avoid the departmentalism that was sometimes the by-product of sound's technical complexity and that tended too often to pit mixers (who came mostly from engineering—direct descendants of the Man Behind the Window) against the people who created the sounds. It was as if there were two directors of photography on a film, one who lighted the scene and another who photographed it, and neither could do much about countermanding the other.

We felt that there was now no reason—given the equipment that was becoming available in 1968—that the person who designed the sound track shouldn't also be able to mix it and that the director would then be able to talk to one person, the sound designer, about the sound of the film the way he was able to talk to the production designer about the look of the film.

At any rate, it was against this background that the success of
The Godfather
led directly to the green-lighting of two Zoetrope productions: George Lucas's
American Graffiti
and Francis Coppola's
Conversation
—both with very different but equally adventuresome sound tracks where we were able to put our ideas to work.

Steven Spielberg's
Jaws
soon topped the box office of
The Godfather
and introduced the world at large to the music of John Williams. The success of
American Graffiti
led to
Star Wars
(with music by the same John Williams), which in turn topped
Jaws
. The seventy-millimeter Dolby release format of
Star Wars
revived and reinvented magnetic six-track sound and helped Dolby Cinema Sound obtain a crucial foothold in film postproduction and exhibition. The success of the two
Godfather
films would allow Francis to make
Apocalypse Now
, which broke further ground in originating, at the end of the 1970s, what has now become the standard
film sound format: three channels of sound behind the screen, left and right surrounds behind the audience, and low-frequency enhancement.

The Window is long gone, and will not now return, but the autocratic temporal power that disappeared with it has been repaid a hundred—a thousand—times in creative power: the ability to freely reassociate image and sound in different contexts and combinations.

This reassociation of image and sound is the fundamental pillar upon which the creative use of sound rests and without which it would collapse. Sometimes it is done simply for convenience (walking on cornstarch, for instance, happens to record as a better footstep-in-snow than snow itself). But beyond any practical consideration, I believe this reassociation should stretch the relationship of sound to image wherever possible. It should strive to create a purposeful and fruitful tension between what is on the screen and what is kindled in the mind of the audience.