Godfather (14 page)

Pauline Kael heaped both praise and blame on Coppola for
Rain People
, as she had done on
Finian's Rainbow
. “There's a prodigious amount of talent in Francis Ford Coppola's unusual, little-seen film,” she writes, “but the writer-director applies his craftsmanship with undue solemnity to material that suggests a gifted college student's imitation of early Tennessee Williams.”
¹³
Interestingly enough, Coppola has said that he did have in mind Williams's brand of Southern Gothic melodrama when penning his early screenplays, especially
Pilma, Pilma
, the unproduced script that won him the Goldwyn Award while he was still at UCLA. Furthermore, in retrospect, he thought that the bloody finale of
Rain People
did recall Williams's more lurid melodramas.

Shirley Knight was applauded for presenting Natalie as a complicated human being attempting to navigate her way through a serious emotional crisis. It is worth noting that one of her last films was Antonio Tibaldi's
Little Boy Blue
(1997) in which she took to the road yet again. This time she played a character moving from one motel to another in the South as she searched for her kidnapped son. So, in making another “road movie,” Knight's career had come full circle.

James Caan was recognized by some critics as playing Jimmy not merely as a pathetic simpleton but as a mentally handicapped individual trying desperately to relate to others. Caan gives an off-kilter, on-target performance as a mental retardate. Up to this point in his career he had, quite frankly, been in more turkeys than Stove Top dressing, as the saying goes. Therefore
Rain People
added some depth to his resumé.

Moreover, Coppola could take some solace in the fact that the picture captured both the Grand Prize and the best director award at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Nevertheless, the critical consensus on
Rain People
was fairly negative, and the picture died at the box office. It finally found on network TV and in its release on videocassette the audience it deserved. What's more, the reputation of the film has improved over the years, possibly because of its exposure on television and on videotape. It is now seen as an early feminist film portraying in unsentimental terms a picture of a young woman seeking to find liberation from a marriage that she fears is stifling her. In this regard Coppola states, “I sensed that there must be married women who were expected to accomplish something, and who were in fact dying inside. I thought it would be an interesting affirmation for one of them to simply get up and leave.”
¹⁴
As a feminist film, then, the movie is now recognized as being years ahead of its time. More than one feminist critic has singled out
Rain People
as one of the first films to come out of Hollywood that addressed the constricting role of the housewife in modern society. Furthermore,
Rain People
is now viewed as one of the deepest examinations of the conflict between independence and responsibility that American cinema has given us.

Francis Coppola's experience working out of a production office in Ogallala, Nebraska, during the last two months of filming
Rain People
convinced him that he did not have to be based in the Hollywood film colony to make movies. When he and George Lucas drove back to Los Angeles from Nebraska in the fall of 1968, they passed through San Francisco, where they encountered filmmaker John Korty, who was finishing his third independent feature,
Riverrun
(1970), in a garage at Stinson Beach. Coppola was much impressed. He said, in effect, to Korty, “If you can do it, I can do it too!” At that moment, according to Lucas, Coppola crystallized his determination to lift his filmmaking operation out of Hollywood.

“We wanted a little studio where we could mix and edit our films,” Lucas recalls. They wanted a base of operations where they could function as they did in that makeshift production office in Ogallala. Looking around San Francisco, Coppola considered it to be a beautiful place to live, with a bohemian artistic tradition congenial to young independent filmmakers. Standing in the lobby of the Mark Hopkins Hotel, Coppola exclaimed, “This is great; let's move!”
¹⁵

Another advantage of San Francisco was that it was close enough to
Los Angeles to allow Coppola to draw talent from there. Coppola points out that the motion picture industry at the time was “a closed shop, employing men in their fifties who had worked in the studio system.”

Lucas gleefully decided to join Coppola in San Francisco and shortly afterward inquired if Walter Murch, who had originally signed on only as sound engineer on
The Rain People
, wanted to be part of their new independent film unit. Murch replied that he thought it was a great idea—he did not plan to spend the rest of his life in Hollywood under any circumstances. So in April 1969 “we all decamped,” says Murch, who drove a van filled with the technical equipment Coppola had acquired so far from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Coppola had by this time taken a long-term lease on the three-story warehouse at 827 Folsom Street in an industrial area of downtown San Francisco—the same place where Murch had mixed the sound track of
Rain People
. There were disused warehouses in the district that were now empty, Murch explains, and Coppola and company were able to lease one fairly inexpensively.

Coppola went to a film trade fair in Cologne, Germany, around this time and promptly invested in another eighty thousand dollars' worth of new state-of-the-art, high-tech editing equipment, which he did not have the funds to pay for at the moment. He then had it installed in the dingy warehouse that was being renovated to serve as a filmmaking facility.

Coppola's new independent producing unit, born in a warehouse loft, was christened American Zoetrope. The zoetrope, a viewer invented in the nineteenth century by William Horner, was a harbinger of the cinema. It was a cylinder circumscribed with images. When the drum on which the images were drawn was rotated rapidly, it gave the illusion of motion from still images. Coppola named his company after the zoetrope because it was a traditional symbol for the cinema. He had received one as a gift, and he liked to point out that the Greek root of zoetrope means “the movement of life,” a reference in his mind to the dynamic young filmmakers who had started the new film organization. Besides Lucas and Murch, other film school alumni were enlisting in Coppola's little band of moviemakers, including directors-to-be John Milius and Martin Scorsese. Lucas, who was five years Coppola's junior, said that they all saw Coppola as the great white knight who gave them hope that they could make films far from the Hollywood factory system.

The Rain People
was the first film to be released under the banner of American Zoetrope, although technically the new producing company was only a gleam in Coppola's eye when that film was being made in 1968. American Zoetrope was officially incorporated as a film organization in San Francisco
on November 14, 1969, with Coppola as its president and sole stockholder, Lucas as vice president, and Mona Skager, production manager on
Rain People
, as secretary-treasurer. On December 13,1969, Coppola held a full-dress press conference with the mayor present to announce the formation of American Zoetrope. At the press conference he declared that he was gratified to have created a film facility in San Francisco. In Los Angeles, he observed, filmmakers talk about making deals, in San Francisco they talk about making films.

He issued a press release that proclaimed, “The main objective of this company will be to undertake film production in several different areas by collaborating with the most gifted and talented young people, using the most contemporary and sophisticated equipment available.”
¹⁶

One of Coppola's assistants quipped that those working at American Zoetrope felt that they were clocking in at a factory every day, “but, in any case, it was our factory.”
¹⁷
In fact, Coppola and his comrades saw themselves as an autonomous guild of filmmakers, quite distant from the Hollywood studios. Coppola was really following Roger Corman's lead in bringing together aspiring filmmakers from the UCLA and USC film schools who were eager to learn their craft. But they enjoyed much more autonomy at Zoetrope than Coppola did when he was serving his apprenticeship with Corman (see
chapter 1
). Coppola would give a camera to a street cleaner who was interested in Zoetrope, Lucas says wryly. Lucas was only half-joking. Always conservative in business matters, he was genuinely concerned that Coppola would allow just about anyone to handle Zoetrope's expensive equipment, regardless of their lack of experience in filmmaking.

For his part, Coppola envisioned Zoetrope as an alternative movie organization “where he could get a lot of young talent,” according to Lucas. They would make movies, “hope that one of them would be a hit,” and eventually build up a thriving independent film unit that way.
¹⁸

Viewing American Zoetrope as the wave of the future, Coppola was clearly the driving force behind the company. He implicitly saw American Zoetrope as a way of putting the auteur theory into practice by setting up a filmmaking operation in which moviemakers could place on each of their films, not the stamp of a Hollywood studio, but the stamp of their own cinematic style and personal vision. In short, Zoetrope reflected Coppola's utopian vision of how movies could be made outside the traditional Hollywood factory system.

Coppola went to Warners, which had produced three of the films he had directed, and offered them a package of seven movie projects. The studio had once again changed hands and was now owned by Steve Ross, the
head of Kinney National Service. Ross had started his firm, a limousine service, by borrowing his father's funeral parlor limousines. Kinney's interests ranged from a chain of parking lots to a talent agency. Ted Ashley, who had been associated with the talent agency, was now studio chief. Warner Brothers was now known officially as Warner Communications Inc. Coppola employed the same bluff he had used to get Warners to back both
You're a Big Boy Now
and
The Rain People
: he telegrammed Ashley that Zoetrope had its first project ready to go into production, and this was the studio's only chance to get in on the ground floor.

The film in question was
THX 1138
, which Lucas was to direct from his own screenplay. It was, in fact, an expanded version of a prizewinning student featurette that Lucas had submitted as his master's thesis to USC. Part of the exclusive deal that Coppola was presenting to Warners-Seven included his proposal for
The Conversation
, a thriller about a surveillance expert. For good measure, he also threw in
Apocalypse Now
, a concept for a movie about the Vietnam War that had been hatched by Lucas and Milius.

As Coppola had anticipated, Ashley gave the green light to
THX 1138
, but he saw it as a B picture and assigned it a budget under $1 million. As for the other six projects, Ashley decreed that the studio would put up $300,000 in seed money for script development for them. Ashley also agreed to lend Coppola an additional $300,000 to establish the fledgling Zoetrope company as a functioning business concern.

But Ashley drove a hard bargain. He was not investing in American Zoetrope—he was merely loaning money to Coppola's organization. If the scripts Coppola eventually submitted to Warners-Seven did not meet the studio's expectations and the studio wanted out of the deal, Warners would have to be reimbursed in full for the $600,000 that Coppola had borrowed. Coppola accepted these stiff terms largely because Ashley had agreed to finance
THX 1138
, and Coppola was aware that, with one movie definitely set to go into production, American Zoetrope was actually in business. Besides, if only one or two of the other projects were developed into successful films, neither Coppola nor Warners-Seven would lose on the deal. To Coppola that seemed to be a safe bet.

When Coppola enthusiastically related to Lucas the terms of the deal he had made with a major studio, Lucas was naturally glad about the prospect of getting
THX
made, but he resented the fact that Coppola had included
Apocalypse Now
, which had originated with himself and Milius, in the package deal without consulting him. But he was willing to swallow his displeasure at the time. Like Coppola, he was euphoric that American Zoetrope
now seemed to be established on a firm footing. As Lucas puts it, “we young filmmakers were going to conquer the world.”
¹⁹

The future seemed bright. Coppola planned to spend a good deal of Warners's advance funds, not only for reconstruction of the warehouse site, but also to pay for the expensive high-tech equipment he was steadily acquiring. American Zoetrope would have seven editing rooms, equipped with Keller sound editing equipment and Steenbeck film editing machines, as well as 35 mm and 16 mm cameras.

What's more,
THX
seemed a promising venture for Zoetrope's maiden voyage into feature filmmaking. The personnel involved in the Lucas picture included some veterans of past Coppola movies. Lucas himself—whose previous directorial credit was on
filmmaker
, his documentary short about the making of
Rain People
—was directing
THX
as his first feature. He had co-written the screenplay with Walter Murch, the sound engineer on
Rain People
, who was functioning in the same capacity on
THX
. And Robert Duvall, who had a featured role in
Rain People
, had the lead in Lucas's film.

Everything was rosy until Coppola went to Warners several months later with the rough cut of
THX
and the scripts for the other six film projects Zoetrope was offering the studio. Coppola delivered to Ashley's office a huge box containing the screenplays, each of them in a handsome black binder proudly bearing the Zoetrope imprimatur. The studio executives who viewed
THX 1138
with Ashley included business manager Frank Wells, known in the industry as a tough customer. When the lights came up at the end of the screening, the executives present declared emphatically that they were appalled by the austere futuristic tale of robotlike creatures living in a society where sex is outlawed. Ashley and his cohorts found the plot hard to follow and the bleak atmosphere of the movie, with its bleached costumes and pale decor, downright depressing.