Godfather (15 page)

Dale Pollack, in his book on George Lucas, states baldly that Warners-Seven rejected out of hand the group of scripts from American Zoetrope that Coppola had brought with him on the same day as the screening of the rough cut of
THX
. On the contrary, the documentation in the Warner Brothers archive indicates that the studio moguls were not quite as precipitous as that. Coppola left the box of proposed scripts with Ashley and scheduled a meeting to discuss them after he returned from a trip to Europe. So Coppola did not get the studio's verdict on the scripts he had submitted to them a few hours after the screening of
THX
, as Pollack mistakenly asserts.

When Ashley and Wells finally met with Coppola, they advised him that, since Warners-Seven had bankrolled the making of
THX 1138
, the studio was committed to releasing the picture. But Ashley was personally
so thoroughly upset by Lucas's anti-utopian saga that he consequently rejected in turn, with Wells's firm support, each of the other six Zoetrope scripts Coppola had submitted to the studio. At this final meeting Ted Ashley told Coppola flatly that Warners-Seven was pulling the plug on their deal with American Zoetrope altogether. Adding insult to injury, he informed Coppola that Zoetrope must repay not only the $300,000 the studio had loaned Coppola for refurbishing and outfitting with equipment Zoetrope's headquarters, but Zoetrope must also reimburse Warners-Seven for the additional $300,000 the studio had spent developing the scripts. In effect, the studio was making Coppola buy back his own scripts. “Warners not only pulled the rug out from under Francis,” Murch said later, “they tried to sell it back to him.”
²⁰

Coppola had no choice but to capitulate. “They had all the marbles,” he commented afterward.
²¹
At all events, Coppola's final confrontation with Ashley and Wells concluded with Coppola being sent packing, along with his box of scripts, back to San Francisco. Film historian Peter Biskind reports that, as a parting shot, Coppola, sensing that he had nothing more to lose, shouted on his way out the door, “I'm an artist; you're fucking Philistines.”

Lucas later hazarded that the projects Coppola had presented to Warners, including his own THX, were too adventurous for their conventional tastes. In addition to
THX
there was a screenplay that took a controversial stance toward the Vietnam War (
Apocalypse Now
) and a script for an intricate, subtle psychological thriller about a neurotic wiretapper (
The Conversation
). Over and above the studio's displeasure with the Zoetrope projects, Warners' decision to cancel the deal with Zoetrope altogether was motivated to some degree by the fact that, by this time, it was abundantly clear that
You're a Big Boy Now
and
The Rain People
—both of which had originated with Coppola, had finished their respective theatrical runs out of the money. This, of course, was a factor of which Wells, as the manager of the studio's finances, would have been particularly aware. At any rate, the date of Coppola's final confrontation with Warners-Seven, November 19,1970 (just one year after Zoetrope was officially inaugurated as an independent film organization), would forever after be known in Zoetrope lore as “Black Thursday”—a reference to Black Tuesday, the day that the stock market crashed in 1929.
²²

When Warners released
THX
(with some minor cuts) in 1971, it was not a moneymaker, although it has acquired a cult following over the years. Coppola drew some consolation from the fact that once he eventually paid back the money he had borrowed from Warners-Seven he would own the rights to all of the unproduced Zoetrope scripts—including two that he
would eventually direct himself,
The Conversation
and
Apocalypse Now
. But that was in the unforeseeable future.

For now Zoetrope was bankrupt. As one of Coppola's associates joked, Coppola's office was down to one miniskirted secretary and a jar of instant coffee, which had replaced Coppola's beloved espresso machine. Although Coppola's staff was not as meager as that, Zoetrope was operating in the red. Furthermore, there had been other losses besides those incurred by the breakup with Warners. Some rookie filmmakers had, without authorization, borrowed and not returned a lot of expensive film equipment. As noted before, this was just the sort of thing that the cautious George Lucas had feared might happen when he had warned Coppola that American Zoetrope was not being run efficiently. For the record, during the first year of operation, forty thousand dollars' worth of cameras and other equipment disappeared. “It was tremendously irresponsible” on their part to take advantage of his goodwill, Coppola complains. He had spent that whole time plus all the money he could muster setting up a film facility, “and things got stolen and Zoetrope was picked clean.” It was becoming a “fraternity house” for tyro filmmakers, a free-for-all.
²³

Coppola became increasingly aware that even a small film facility needs capital to survive, and he was actually afraid at one point that the sheriff would put a chain across the front door and close the whole operation down. Things got even worse, Lucas remembers: “We were not only broke, but we were blackballed in the industry.” Warners had spread the word that he and Coppola were not responsible parties, and neither of them could get a feature picture off the ground.
²⁴

But the resilient Coppola promptly reorganized and diversified Zoetrope in order to pay his debts. He began producing educational films, industrial documentaries, and television commercials. He also rented out Zoetrope's first-class postproduction facilities, which boasted the latest editing equipment, to other filmmakers.
²⁵

In the long run it was short-sighted for Ashley and company to jettison Zoetrope and all of its talent with a sweeping vote of no-confidence. Biskind goes so far as to say that it was a colossal blunder for them to alienate Coppola, who would in the not-too-distant future turn out to be an important director. In fact, both Coppola and Lucas would soon become two of the most outstanding filmmakers of the 1970s, and they would rarely work for Warner Brothers again.

The fact remains that, as Lucas notes above, Coppola was experiencing some difficulty in launching another film project—until the release of
Patton
, which Coppola had co-scripted just before he made
You're a Big Boy
Now
(see
chapter 1
). He won an Academy Award for co-writing the epic World War II movie. The film was so long in incubation before it was finally produced that it was not released until 1970. Since Coppola's stock had suddenly risen in the film industry, Paramount decided to entrust him with the direction of a gangster picture about the Mafia entitled
The Godfather
that they were going to make based on the bestselling novel by Mario Puzo.

When Warners got to hear about this, one bigwig there, Frank Wells, phoned Paramount and advised the studio chief that he might as well turn over Coppola's check directly to them. As a matter of fact, after the subsequent success of
The Godfather
, Coppola recalls, “I paid them the $300,000 loan,” which he had used for renovating the Folsom Street warehouse and for outfitting the film facility with production equipment. But he asked Warners-Seven to reconsider their demand for the additional $300,000 seed money that Ashley had allocated for script development for the projects Coppola had offered to Warners-Seven in his original package. Coppola countered their demand for this additional fee by emphasizing that there was simply no precedent in the movie industry for a studio to be reimbursed for money that they had spent on developing scripts that they ultimately rejected—something both Lucas and Murch had pointed out early on in discussing Black Thursday with Coppola. It is, after all, standard procedure for a studio to invest money in the development of scripts “on spec” and to absorb the development costs, whether or not the studio eventually accepts or rejects the finished products.

Warners responded characteristically that no precedent was necessary—a deal was a deal. So Coppola and Warners had reached a stalemate. When Coppola was preparing to direct
Godfather II
in 1974 Warners again notified Paramount that they should turn over his salary to them. Paramount, tired of being pestered by Warners, paid up so that Coppola could get on with
Godfather II
, but they subsequently deducted the sum from Coppola's earnings on that picture. But the cloud had a silver lining: “Because of the reimbursal,” Coppola concludes, “American Zoetrope had got back the script rights,” including those for
The Conversation
and
Apocalypse Now
. He had in essence been forced to buy back the scripts in question, and they now belonged unequivocally to Zoetrope. The two scripts that he himself later filmed enhanced his reputation considerably:
The Conversation
garnered some Oscar nominations and became a cult film;
Apocalypse Now
became an established cinema classic, as we shall see.
²⁶

Coppola made
The Conversation
between
The Godfather
and
Godfather II
. In order to treat the
Godfather
trilogy as a unit in this book, it seems
appropriate to deal with
The Conversation
at this point in order to avoid interrupting the discussion of the three
Godfather
films. Moreover,
The Conversation
, like
The Rain People
, was derived from an original screenplay by Coppola and, as such, deserves to be discussed in tandem with the earlier film.

From the beginning of his career as a director, Coppola had wanted to develop projects of his own rather than merely hire himself out to various studios to direct the films they wanted him to make.
You're a Big Boy Now
was a project Coppola had initiated himself, although it was not an original screenplay but was based on a novel. He took some pride in the fact that
The Conversation
, like
Dementia 13
and
The Rain People
, was an original script. As novelist-screenwriter Raymond Chandler used to say, “Original screenplays are almost as rare in Hollywood as virgins.”
²⁷

After the exhausting experience of making
Finian's Rainbow
, Coppola asserted that he was thinking of pulling out of Hollywood and making cheaper movies—like
The Conversation
—that he would write himself: “If it means I've got to make $6,000 movies in San Francisco, then I guess thats what I have to do.”
²⁸
The Conversation
, of course, would cost more than $6,000, but it would still have a modest budget by studio standards, and it would be filmed in San Francisco.

As a result of the success of
The Godfather
, Paramount was prepared to finance
The Conversation
. As George Lucas commented at the time, artistic independence comes at a price. “If you're going to use your own resources and not rob a bank,” a director has to figure out a way to obtain financing for the personal films he wants to make. “Francis couldn't have made
The Rain People
if he hadn't made
Finian's Rainbow
By the same token, he had to make
The Godfather
“in order to make
The Conversation
, his next film.”
²⁹

The phenomenal success of
The Godfather
gave Coppola the leverage not only to make
The Conversation
but also to make American Zoetrope solvent again. “I was always fighting utter bankruptcy,” says Coppola, “so the notion of having excess money was new.”
³⁰
It was around this time that Coppola joined forces with fellow directors Peter Bogdanovich (
The Last Picture Show
) and William Friedkin (
The French Connection
) to form the Directors Company, an independent film unit separate from American Zoetrope. The Directors Company was the brain child of Charles Bludhorn, chairman of Paramount's parent company at the time, Gulf and Western.
Bludhorn wanted to secure the services of these talented directors “and was willing to offer them creative autonomy,” Anita Busch and Beth Faski have written.
³¹
Accordingly, Bludhorn empowered Frank Yablans, president of Paramount, to negotiate the deal with the trio of directors: They could make any movie they chose that cost no more than $3 million, and they also had final cut on each of their pictures.

But soon resentment began to build among the three filmmakers. Neither Coppola nor Friedkin was happy with Bogdanovich's choice of
Daisy Miller
, an old-fashioned Henry James period piece. Friedkin, in turn, thought
The Conversation
was likewise an unpromising project. Furthermore, Bogdanovich signed a separate three-picture agreement with Warners-Seven, and Friedkin similarly made a separate two-picture deal with Universal. None of these films would be made for the Directors Company. Nor would
Godfather II
, which Coppola had committed himself to before the Directors Company was formed.

Coppola acknowledges the technical issues created by the director's choices of more personal films like
The Conversation
. The studios were really not looking for small personal projects. Rather, they were looking for gigantic spectacles concerned with torching office towers or sinking ocean liners. In reality, Paramount was reluctant to finance the personal films that the three directors came up with. There was trouble in paradise, and the Directors Company proved to be a short-lived business venture, with the result that Coppola's partnership with Bogdanovich and Friedkin was soon dissolved. The only contribution that Coppola made to the Directors Company was
The Conversation
, to which he still owns the rights. This movie once more proved Coppola's capabilities as a first-class filmmaker, and Coppola continued his association with Paramount, if not with the Directors Company.