Godfather (13 page)

At other times in the course of the documentary Coppola confesses to his colleagues his doubts about reaching journey's end successfully, as when he frantically rewrites a portion of the screenplay to work in the Armed Forces Day parade in Chattanooga. Late in the documentary, when the going gets especially rough at one point, Coppola confesses, still on camera, “I am tired of being the anchor when I see my world crumbling.”

Lucas remembers the whole production experience as the best of times and the worst of times. He affirms that the cast and crew shared some good times during the trip. “It was difficult, but for the young clowns that we were, it was fun.” By contrast, the twenty people involved in the expedition spent countless nights in cheap motels in the middle of nowhere, and “that was nervewracking.”
⁷

One of the difficulties posed by shooting the film entirely on location was that the director of photography, Bill Butler, had to make do with the minimum of lighting equipment that had been brought along in the minibus. Butler came from Chicago TV and was shooting his first Hollywood feature. He was in his forties, making him the oldest member of Coppola's production unit on the picture. His experience in making TV documentaries had taught him how to shoot quickly and efficiently with a small crew. “I told Coppola I could shoot just about any kind of scene that he could dream up,” Butler says. Coppola followed the same procedure on the present film as he had on
You're a Big Boy Now
, filming the location scenes as much as possible with the natural light available at the location site.

Gordon, the motorcycle policeman to whom Natalie is sexually attracted, lives in a trailer park, and Butler had to light a night sequence there. For an interior scene in the trailer, he simply screwed photoflood lamps into the lighting fixtures already available in the trailer in order to provide sufficient lighting for shooting the scene. For exterior shots, as the characters walked around the trailer park at night, Butler hid lights behind bushes on the grounds in order to provide illumination for shooting. “It's a real challenge when you have a minimum number of lights to work with,” he comments. “You really have to be inventive.” He liked working with Coppola on this film and on
The Conversation
because “he gives you a lot of freedom. He lets your creativity work for him.”
⁸

The screenplay, we know, was not in final form when Coppola's caravan hit the road to begin filming. Consequently, Coppola was constantly revising the script, changing any dialogue that no longer fit the flow of the shooting as it progressed. He was carefully modifying the dialogue by improvising with the actors during rehearsals in order to make the dialogue fit the action of the scene satisfactorily. Coppola found shooting the film on location to be stimulating. In the controlled environment of the studio, he told me, “you lose the random, unpredictable things that can energize a scene.” A case in point is the Armed Forces Day parade in Chattanooga. In the scene Jimmy, temporarily separated from Natalie, wanders dazed and confused among the spectators and the youngsters in the high school bands as they march down the street, as if he were a little boy who has lost his mother.

Like the shoppers in Macy's department store, where Coppola shot the climax of
You're a Big Boy Now
, neither the spectators nor the band members had any idea that a movie was being shot. So they were baffled by this stranger intruding on the parade. All in all, it was a touching scene, all the more noteworthy since it was written to order on the spot. In short, there was nothing haphazard about the use of improvisation to revise the screenplay. The rewrites were not scribbled on the back of an envelope with no concern for narrative coherence, as a wag back at Warners-Seven had opined.

As filming continued and the script was further developed, it became evident to Coppola that Natalie's attitude toward Jimmy was coming more clearly into focus. For her part, Natalie is touched by Jimmy's disarming vulnerability, but she is also wary of his growing emotional dependence on her and wants to break off their burgeoning relationship. She consequently secures him a job on an animal farm they happen to come across during their trip in order to be able to move on without him. Jimmy obviously does not want her to leave him behind. When the proprietor of the farm asks him sarcastically, “Is she your mother?” He responds, “She's my best friend.”

But the childlike Jimmy spoils everything by releasing all the animals from their cages, because he simply cannot stand to see them penned up. Jimmy is fired, of course, and Natalie is enraged at him for continuing to be attached to her. She accordingly abandons him on the road and forthwith takes up with Gordon, a state highway patrolman (Robert Duvall). Gordon, whose wife is dead, invites her back to the trailer park where he lives with his young daughter, Rosalie.

Jimmy surreptitiously follows Natalie to Gordon's trailer and furiously
bursts in on them in order to save her from Gordon's advances. Rosalie also shows up unexpectedly. When she sees the hulking “Killer” Kilgannon attacking her father, she frantically grabs his patrolman's pistol and shoots Jimmy. The movie ends abruptly, with Natalie sobbing inconsolably as she cradles the mortally wounded Jimmy in her arms, futilely promising to care for him from now on. “I'll take you home and we'll be family,” she murmurs as Jimmy expires.

The screenplay, which is on file in the Script Repository at Warner Brothers, contains an epilogue that follows the death of Jimmy Kilgannon. Natalie meets Vinny at the airport (he has flown out to meet her and escort her back home). They are reunited at the fade-out. Coppola wisely opted to end the film instead with Jimmy's demise. Following that dramatically powerful scene with the reunion of Natalie and Vinny would have been nothing short of an anticlimax.

Throughout the shooting period Coppola had to cope with his increasing disagreements with Shirley Knight. She stated in conversation that she preferred to work in the more structured environment of a studio and grew weary of the vagabond existence on the road. Moreover, she found Coppola's improvisational technique of working out scenes tedious and trying.

To make matters worse, Coppola was not satisfied with how Shirley Knight was interpreting the role of Natalie as filming continued. They clashed often while he was rehearsing various scenes with her and the rest of the cast. The character of Natalie, as he had conceived it, is a headstrong, reckless individual, he explains. But she also has “a tremendously compassionate side.” On the one hand, Natalie becomes fed up with Jimmy's emotional dependence on her. On the other hand, she is aware that she is a mother figure for Jimmy. “I didn't feel I was getting that from Shirley. I would get the high-strung, nervous intensity” more than anything else—she was too abrasive.

Coppola saw Natalie as a young woman driven to panic and despair at the prospect of having a child and frustrated by her attempts to cope with the mentally retarded Jimmy, who becomes increasingly possessive in making demands on her—he is not as passive as he at first appeared. He even rips out the telephone wires when Natalie endeavors to phone her husband, in an obvious demonstration of childish jealousy. At such times Coppola wants the audience to sympathize with her plight. Yet he sensed that Knight too often portrayed Natalie as self-centered and almost cruel, thereby making it hard for filmgoers to feel sorry for her. For example, after Jimmy breaks the phone connection between Natalie and her husband,
Natalie scratches his face vindictively. Coppola remarks, “I don't know how much I liked that character,” as Knight played her, “whereas I liked the character I had written.”
⁹

The tensions between director and star are on display in one segment of
filmmaker
, wherein Coppola and Knight bicker about whether or not Natalie should carry a purse in an upcoming scene. If Coppola comes across as somewhat controlling, Knight seems equally intransigent. Despite her creative differences with the director, however, Knight gives a compelling performance as Natalie.

To be fair to Knight, there was some merit in her complaints that Coppola's rewriting of the script while they were shooting the film made inroads on the screenplay's continuity. Because the script for
The Rain People
was developed in this piecemeal fashion, the story does not hang together as coherently as one would like. As a matter of fact, Coppola is the first to concede that the killing that climaxes the movie is a kind of
deus ex machina
he concocted in order to resolve the movie's plot. The lack of a tightly constructed plotline made for a slow-moving film, and, therefore,
The Rain People
did not win over the critics or the mass audience.

Still there are some fine things in the film—for example, the key scene in which Jimmy liberates the animals from their captivity is a symbolic reminder that Natalie at this point still feels cooped up by circumstances and likewise yearns to be set free from the emotional entanglements in her life. A similar point is made in the scene in which she phones her husband for the first time, from a phone booth on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Natalie seems trapped in a cage as she is photographed through the glass of the telephone booth, desperately confessing to Vinny that she is not sure she knows what it means to be a wife, much less a mother. This image of entrapment is ironic: although Natalie embarked on this journey to regain her freedom, she still remains shut in with her unresolved emotional conflicts.

Another neat Coppola touch is having Gordon live in a mobile home, an indication of the transient nature of his life since he lost his wife and, by the same token, a foreshadowing of the sort of rootless existence Natalie is opening herself to if she opts to forsake her husband for good. Indeed, the desolate small towns, the bleak, endless turnpikes, the seedy motels, and shabby roadside diners visually underscore this point. It is a world in which a woman with a past can encounter a man with no future in the depressing atmosphere of a tawdry trailer park.

Significantly, Coppola's overriding theme, which centers on the importance of the role of a family spirit in people's lives, is clearly delineated
in this film. Thus, as Robert Johnson notes in his book on Coppola, Natalie takes to the open road to escape the responsibilities of family life, only to find that she has taken them with her. This fact is strikingly brought home to her when she reflects that her unborn child, the very emblem of her marriage, is always with her, accompanying her wherever she goes. And this reflection in turn ultimately leads her by the end of the picture to reconcile herself to her responsibilities as a wife and mother, for she realizes that in trying to escape the obligations of family life she has brought nothing but misery to herself and others. Hence the movie ends, Coppola emphasizes, with an implicit “plea to have a family.”
¹⁰

Coppola finished the film on schedule and for $740,000, slightly under budget. When the convoy got back to Los Angeles in the fall of 1968, George Lucas suggested Walter Murch, a fellow film student of his at USC, as sound engineer to mix the sound track of the film. Murch was aware that Coppola had gone to film school at UCLA, across town from its rival film school, USC. Like Lucas, Murch very much wanted to work with Coppola, who was already making an impact on the industry while still in his late twenties.

Coppola accepted Murch on Lucas's recommendation, and Murch viewed the rough cut of
Rain People
with Coppola only once. Then Coppola installed Murch in the cellar of a warehouse on Folsom Street in San Francisco, where Coppola had a Nagra sound recorder and the Steenbeck editing machine set up. And so Murch mixed the sound track for the film far removed from the watchful eyes of the studio authorities in Hollywood.

Furthermore, Murch had to work away from the studio not only to forestall any meddling on the part of studio officials but because—like many recent film school graduates—he was not yet a member of a union. “I was frightened that it would be found out that somebody non-union was editing the sound, and I'd lose this chance to work on a feature,” Murch explains.
¹¹
He was even afraid to visit the studio to make use of the sound library, which housed endless shelves of prerecorded sound effects. So he had to create all of the sound effects himself.

Murch, who up to this point had only worked on short films, was pleased with the trust Coppola placed in him to do his job properly. Like Bill Butler, who is cited above, he believes that Coppola gives to each of his collaborators authority to operate with a great deal of freedom in their own domain. “It's paradoxical; by giving so much freedom and authority to you, you feel much more beholden to him” and want to do the best job possible, Murch says.
¹²
Murch would continue to work with Coppola on subsequent films, as is clear from his foreword to this book.

Moreover, Coppola was building a small band of collaborators with whom he would continue to work in the future. He found that one way of placing his personal stamp as an auteur on his films was precisely to assemble a production team that went from picture to picture with him. As time went on, creative collaborators like Barry Malkin and Walter Murch could almost intuit what Coppola wanted from each of them as a picture was being shot.

Although
The Rain People
, like
You're a Big Boy Now
, drew mixed reviews, some of the favorable notices were enthusiastic, noting how impressive acting and direction had triumphed over a weak script. Indeed, the positive reviews affirmed that the director displayed an eye for detail keen enough to compensate for the deficiencies of the material. This is not, after all, an independent film cobbled together with secondhand furniture and secondhand talent. It has expert cinematography and the glossy look of a film made in a Hollywood studio rather than by an itinerant band of filmmakers filming all over the country, as was actually the case.