Godfather (12 page)

They sensed that they were kindred souls from the outset. Lucas recalls, “We were the only two people on the set who were under forty or fifty and who had beards” and who had both gone to film school.
²³
Adds Coppola, “I was very grateful to have someone of my own generation around to discuss what I was trying to do as opposed to what I was able to do.”
²⁴
He told Lucas, “Look, kid, you come up with one good idea a day and you can actually do stuff for me.” Coppola made Lucas his administrative assistant on the picture. One of his tasks was to take Polaroid snapshots of the sets in
order to check the lighting. Later on, Coppola invited Lucas to kibitz in the editing room.

“We became very close friends,” Lucas remembers, “because in every single way we're opposite, two halves of a whole. Coppola's very Italian and compulsive,” whereas Lucas is Scandinavian, “conservative and plodding.”
²⁵
Lucas was a fledgling filmmaker and Coppola was his mentor, and this relationship would continue on Coppola's next film,
The Rain People
. “We respect each other,” Lucas has said, “but at the same time we are totally different personalities. He says he's too crazy and I'm not crazy enough. Francis spends every day jumping off a cliff and hoping he's going to land okay. My main interest is security…. But the goals we have in mind are the same. We want to make movies free from the yoke of the studios.”
²⁶

Things have a way of turning out so badly.

—Tennessee Williams

Warners-Seven Arts was satisfied with Coppola's direction of
Finian's Rainbow
; particularly his filming of the musical numbers. What's more, although the picture was not a box-office bonanza, it earned $5.5 million in its initial run, and Coppola had brought the picture in on a budget of $3.5 million. The front office was therefore interested in the movie he wanted to make next, a modest production based on an original scenario of his own entitled
The Rain People
. Production chief Kenny Hyman was continuing to pursue his policy of encouraging young directorial talent at Warners-Seven, and with good reason.

As noted before, Hollywood was faced with the rise of television. Instead of trying to upgrade the quality of their films, the studios first turned to technical innovations as a possible way of saving their audience. Thus Hollywood seemed convinced that a wider screen with the old traditional plots acted out on it would do the trick. That was certainly the studio's thinking behind the making of
Finian's Rainbow
. But movie audiences continued to defect to television, as they all too often found the average Hollywood product stuck in familiar grooves. The studios began turning to the new breed of young directors who wanted to depart from the conventional formulas of past Hollywood movies. Francis Coppola was one of the crop
of budding auteurs who wanted to get away from Hollywood and make movies his own way. So he invested some of the money he had earned for directing
Finian's Rainbow
in eighty thousand dollars' worth of state-of-the-art technical equipment. He purchased, among other things, a German-made Steenbeck editing machine, which was a significant improvement over the clumsier Moviolas still in general use in Hollywood. His fellow film school alumni, Coppola remembers, said that he should “take the money and run.” That is, a young director should make one studio film “and then make a personal film; but when they get the money, they're too terrified to do it. If you're not prepared to risk some money when you're young, you'll never risk it.”
¹
Coppola, as we shall see, never hesitated to gamble his bank account on a pet film project.

His own savings, of course, were not enough to float even a low-budget film version of
The Rain People
. Hence, he got Warners-Seven to provide financial backing to the tune of $750,000. The scenario had its antecedents in 1960, says Coppola: “I had started to write a long screenplay entitled
The Gray Stationwagon
; I eventually changed the title to
Echoes
.” It dealt with three women, all of whom decide to leave their respective husbands. He soon realized that it was far too ambitious an undertaking for a twenty-one-year-old aspiring filmmaker. “I never finished it,” he told me in Cannes.

Nearly a decade later, when he wanted to make another personal film based on a script he had written himself (which is what
You're a Big Boy Now
was), he turned again to that old manuscript. “I decided to do the story of just one of these women.” And that was the genesis of
The Rain People
.

When Coppola took
You're a Big Boy Now
to the Cannes International Film Festival, he met Shirley Knight, the star of
Dutchman
(from the Le Roi Jones play), which was also entered in the festival. In
Dutchman
, Knight plays a racist prostitute who humiliates a black man on a subway train and finally stabs him. Knight was crying because some journalist had spoken rudely to her. Asked about this episode, Shirley Knight told me that one of the international press corps quite gratuitously assumed that the actress shared the racist attitude of the harlot she played in the film and berated her for it. She recalls that Coppola, who had always wanted to write a film tailored to a particular actor, said to her, “Don't cry. I'm going to write a film for you.” Knight was delighted at the prospect of someone writing a part especially for her. “Oh, really?” she replied. “That's nice.”

The original idea of
Rain People
was suggested to Coppola by an episode from his childhood. His mother Italia, after a horrendous quarrel with her husband Carmine, disappeared for three days. Coppola later learned that she took refuge with her sister, “but at the time she told me that she had stayed in a motel,” he says. “It just clicked with me, the idea of a woman just leaving and staying in a motel.”
²

The plot of this tragic drama concerns Natalie Ravenna (Shirley Knight), a depressed young housewife with a child on the way who impulsively decides to walk out on her husband one rainy morning and to make a cross-country trek in her station wagon. She takes this rash course of action in the hope of getting some perspective on her life. Natalie at this juncture feels stifled by the responsibilities of married life, epitomized by the prospect of having a child. “She gets married and suddenly starts feeling her personality being eroded, because marriage restricts her personality,” Coppola explains, “and she's pregnant—that's the final straw.”

As she drives along the highway, she occasionally thinks of happier times, as when we see flashbacks to her Italian wedding, foreshadowing the opening wedding scene of
The Godfather
. In the course of her journey she picks up a hitchhiker, an ex-football player named Jimmy “Killer” Kilgannon (James Caan), who turns out to be mentally retarded as a result of a head injury he suffered in his final game. In effect, Natalie now has yet another “child” on her hands, and, almost in spite of herself, she gradually comes to care for him more and more as they travel along together.

“So it's a story of a human being becoming more and more responsible toward another human being. It's like a woman sitting next to the kid she's going to have.”
³
In brief, Jimmy becomes the surrogate for the child Natalie is carrying.

In a sense both Natalie and Jimmy qualify to be numbered among the rain people of the film's title. The rain people are tender, vulnerable types who, as Jimmy himself describes them at one point, are “people made of rain; when they cry they disappear, because they cry themselves away.” Like the rain people, Natalie and Jimmy are easily hurt, and, sadly, they will both end up wounding each other deeply. The rain glistening on the deserted sidewalks in the opening credits takes on new meaning when Jimmy tells Natalie about the rain people.

Coppola actually had gotten the ball rolling for the picture in late 1967, when he took his production assistant George Lucas, coproducer Bart Patton (who played the slasher in
Dementia 13
), and James Caan (a fellow Hofstra alumnus) to the Hofstra campus over the Thanksgiving weekend to film some footage at a football game that would serve for flashbacks to
Kilgannon's days as a college football star. This was even before Coppola had struck a deal with Warners-Seven, and he used these sequences to convince Kenny Hyman to back the movie.

When the studio was considering the project, Coppola presented the movie to the executives as a
fait accompli
—he affirmed that the film was ready to go into production, as evidenced by the fact that he already had the football game footage in the can. He simply told them on Friday, “Look, I'm starting to shoot in earnest on Monday, and I need money; and if you don't give it to me, I'll get it from someone else.” This, we remember, is precisely the approach he had employed to get Warners-Seven to finance
You're a Big Boy Now
, and it worked again. The studio officials anted up the money, “and I never showed them the script.”
⁴
Lucas, admiring Coppola's method of bluffing studio bosses, quipped that Coppola could sell ice to the Eskimos. After meeting with Coppola, Hyman was really convinced that seventy-five thousand dollars was not a huge risk for a director of Coppola's talents.

Barry Malkin was selected by Coppola as editor for the movie. He was a boyhood acquaintance of the director's from Queens. “We lived in the same neighborhood as teenagers,” says Malkin, but they had not seen each other for years. Malkin visited fellow editor Aram Avakian while the latter was working on
You're a Big Boy Now
, and he noted that the screenplay bore the name of Francis Ford Coppola. “I used to have a friend when I was a kid named Coppola,” he exclaimed. “I wonder if it's the same guy.”

When Avakian got around to inquiring if Coppola knew Malkin, he answered, “I knew a guy named Blackie Malkin,” which was Malkin's nickname as a youngster. Coppola eventually asked Malkin to edit
Rain People
. “It was my opportunity to edit a class feature film,” Malkin states, after working on a forgettable programmer called
Fat Spy
(1966).
Rain People
was being released by a major studio. Coppola and Malkin went on to collaborate on several features thereafter, because Malkin found Coppola an easy director to work with: “For starters, we don't have discussions about which take to use; our tastes are similar, and there is a mutual trust.”
⁵

In the spring of 1968 Coppola assembled a hand-picked cast and crew to make the movie, which he planned to shoot entirely on location. Together they formed a caravan consisting of five cars, as well as a Dodge Travco minibus that had been remodeled to carry their technical equipment. Making the film while traveling cross-country reminded Coppola of his experience of working on Roger Corman's
Young Racers
, which was shot while the crew were migrating across Europe in a minibus (see
chapter 1
).

They traveled for four months through eighteen states, filming as they
went. Coppola did not set out with a finished screenplay in hand. He took with him a draft dated February 7, 1968, but he continued filling it out as shooting progressed. When he spied a setting that appealed to him along the way, the group would stop, and he would work out a scene for the actors to play. Thus, while in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Coppola heard tell of an Armed Forces Day parade and incorporated it into a sequence.

George Lucas went along as production manager. Coppola wangled some money from Warners-Seven to enable Lucas to shoot a documentary about the making of
Rain People
, entitled
filmmaker: a diary by George Lucas
. The crew also numbered cinematographer Bill Butler, administrative assistant Mona Skager, and editor Barry Malkin—the film was edited en route on the Steenbeck, which was on board the Dodge minibus. In addition to Shirley Knight and James Caan, Robert Duval came along to play the key role of Gordon, a motorcycle cop with whom Natalie gets involved. In all, there were twenty actors and crew members in Coppola's entourage.

The footage shot each day was regularly sent to a New York laboratory for processing and returned within three days. Malkin edited the footage in the Dodge minibus, as noted before. He taped a sign on the outside of the Dodge, christening their mobile movie unit “The Magical Mystery Tour.” The Steenbeck at which he worked, he recalls, was wedged into the original kitchenette space of the mobile home, which also doubled as the dressing room.

The last two months of shooting were in Nebraska, so Coppola took over an abandoned shoe shop in Ogallala and transformed it into his command post. The production team occupied an empty store, says Malkin, and flew in additional editing equipment from the Warners-Seven stockpile. He started a full-scale editing of the footage into a preliminary rough cut at this point. Coppola was convinced that making
Rain People
15,500 miles away from the Hollywood studio “shark pool” was the prototype of how he would like to make movies in the future. If he could operate out of a store front in a one-horse town in Nebraska, there was no reason why he should have to live and work in the Hollywood film colony thereafter.

George Lucas thought of his half-hour documentary
filmmaker
as a cinematic journal that “offers a personal viewpoint on the daily tension and stress occurring during a film production.”
⁶
The documentary records the odyssey of Coppola and his convoy of actors and technicians, living out of suitcases as they traveled through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and, ultimately, Nebraska. Coppola, of course, had to keep in touch with the studio brass back at Warners-Seven.
Filmmaker
includes a shot of Coppola pacing back and forth during a heated
discussion over the long-distance wire with a studio executive who fears that Coppola is drifting further and further out of studio control as he continues his cross-country trek. Coppola finally loses patience and issues a sweeping condemnation of the hidebound studio system. “The system,” he barks into the phone, “will fall by its own weight!” adding that he is determined to finish the picture on time and on budget—and on his own terms.