Godfather (3 page)

Isn't Hollywood a dump—in the human sense of the word? A hideous town, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement. This is no art, it's an industry.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

This isn't a business, it's a racket.

—Harry Cohn, producer

At 7:00
PM
on the evening of May 7, 2002, Francis Ford Coppola took his place in a special box overlooking the auditorium of Avery Fisher Hall in New York City's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The occasion was a gala tribute sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center honoring Coppola's lifetime achievement as a filmmaker. Several cinema artists associated with his career were on hand to pay tribute to him, and these same individuals will be cited throughout this book. But Coppola himself was the main attraction.

One of the reasons that Coppola's career is so fascinating is that, despite the wide diversity of genres in which he has worked, all of his films reflect in varying degrees the artistry of the director who made them all, as I shall endeavor to show in the course of this study. Coppola himself has declared that a good director does not make a group of separate films—rather
each film that he makes is a series of installments in the same film. As he puts it, “Why do we continue to think in cinema that one makes one film, then another?… I prefer to think that my films are the same film. You know, if you take all of my films from first to last, it is all the same film.”
¹

This is another way of saying that it is the director more than anyone else involved in the production of a film who leaves his personal stamp on a motion picture. Filmmaking, it is true, is a corporate effort, to which a whole host of individuals, from actors to technicians, must make their contribution. But it is the director who must create a unified work of art from all of these varied contributions.

Indeed, the premise of this book is precisely that the director alone can confer artistic unity on a motion picture. The director, after all, is the single controlling influence during the production of a motion picture. It is up to him to blend all of the varied contributions of cast and crew into a unified whole.

Only the director, then, can create a unified work of art out of the corporate effort that characterizes the making of a motion picture. In describing the central role of the director in the production of a movie, another critic has said that the director's function is that of quarterback, orchestra leader, trail boss, company commander, and, at times, lion tamer. When the role of the director is viewed in this fashion, moreover, as the guiding light of film production, it is clear that he is the true author of a film in much the same way that a writer is the author of a novel.

The auteur theory, which proposes that the director is the center of the filmmaking process, can be readily applied to European directors working in relatively small industries, such as those in Sweden or France, where they can with relative ease control every aspect of the production of a film from beginning to end. At first glance, however, it seems much less apparent that an American director like Francis Coppola, working in a much larger and more complex industry, could gain a similar artistic control over his films.

On closer examination, however, it is clear that Coppola has been able with a fair degree of consistency to give his movies the imprint of his own personal vision and style in much the same fashion as his European colleagues have done, regardless of the diversity of genres in which he has worked. Indeed, one suspects that the “factory system” in Hollywood studios presented him with a challenge to his artistic creativity that sharpened his determination to turn out a succession of films over the years that he could in a real sense call his own.

Filmmaking, it is true, involves a whole host of individuals, from actors
to technicians, who collaborate with the director on a movie. Yet genuine auteurs are directors who have nevertheless been able to impress their films with their personal trademark, regardless of the number of collaborators involved with them on a given picture, by systematically influencing every phase of the production process—from script to scoring—as Coppola has done.

Richard Schickel observes about film critics and scholars that, with few exceptions, “we are all auteurists now. The reason is self-evident: Directors are responsible for the movieness of movies. This is to say, they are in change of all the things that are unique to film as an expressive form. As the senior officer present on any picture, the director gets most of the credit or blame for its success or failure.”
²

In fact, Geoffrey Chown states in his book,
Hollywood Auteur: Francis Coppola
, that Coppola's career demonstrates that the auteur theory is still a valid approach to film criticism. As he puts it, while writing his book on Coppola he acquired “a new appreciation of the value of the auteur theory.”
³

Other commentators on Coppola's films have willingly conferred auteur status on him. Chuck Kleinhans calls Coppola one of the more celebrated examples of auteurism, given the manner in which his work has evolved from the 1970s onward. Although Coppola has worked within the commercial system, he has made a number of films that seem personally important to him “and that were highly regarded as cinematic art”—films that demonstrated both his “artistry and personal vision, from
The Godfather
to
Bram Stoker's Dracula
.”
⁴

Expatiating on this point, Coppola biographer Michael Schumacher adds that Coppola is equally adept at creating small personal films like
The Conversation
, as well as huge productions like
Dracula.
Hence, he is “as close to being an auteur as could be found in American film.”
⁵
As such, Coppola has helped to make possible the individualism and independence that are hallmarks of today's new breed of directors. Consequently, Mast and Kawin conclude in their history of film that Coppola is “the single most important film figure of his generation.”
⁶

Coppola himself personally agrees with the fundamental tenets of the auteur theory concerning the pivotal role of the director in the filmmaking process. “The auteur theory is fine,” he states, “but to exercise it you have to qualify, and the only way you can qualify is by having
earned
the right to have control.”
⁷
Coppola has certainly earned that right.

The present study is designed to provide a complete critical study of Coppola's career. Therefore, it focuses not only on his most celebrated achievements—like the
Godfather
movies, which together compose a supreme
cinematic epic, and
Apocalypse Now
, a great antiwar film—but it gives equal time to Coppola's other important pictures, which have not received the critical attention they deserve in previous studies of his work. These movies include
Peggy Sue Got Married
, a charming comedy-fantasy, and
The Rainmaker
, a superior courtroom drama. In addition, I have made an effort to reassess those Coppola films that have been accorded neither critical nor popular acceptance, such as
The Cotton Club
and
Tucker: The Man and His Dream.
Surely these neglected and underappreciated movies warrant the reconsideration offered here.

In surveying the previous books on Coppola, I am obliged to note that a number of them, like Schumacher's
Francis Ford Coppola
and Peter Cowie's
Coppola
, are biographies and thus offer relatively little critical insight into the director's movies. By the same token, books on individual films, like Harlan Lebo's
The Godfather Legacy
and Cowie's
The Apocalypse Now Book
, are mere production histories of the films in question. Moreover, the critical studies published in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Robert Johnsons
Francis Ford Coppola
and Chown's book, are obviously incomplete and out of date, since Coppola continued making movies throughout the 1990s.

My procedure has been to interview Coppola and others associated with his films, to read the screenplays and the director's production journals, and to weigh the evaluations of other commentators on his work with my own. In this manner I have sought to achieve a balanced consensus.

The present volume, then, represents an attempt to demonstrate, by analyzing all of his motion pictures, that Francis Coppola is a genuine cinematic artist who is also a popular entertainer. As a matter of fact, the very popularity of his movies is reason enough for some critics to write him off as a mere crowd pleaser rather than recognize him as an authentic artist of the cinema. That a director can be both is suggested by the fact that Coppola's finest films—for example,
The Godfather
and
Apocalypse Now
—are also among his most popular.

The following pages, in sum, pay tribute to a filmmaker who has been able through his resourcefulness to place on his films, not the stamp of the studio, but the stamp of his own directorial style. The present study is, therefore, intended not only for the cinema specialist but also for those filmgoers who have enjoyed Coppola's movies, in order to provide them with a context by which they can appreciate his work more fully.

I was convinced in the beginning that there must be some discoverable method of working in pictures, which would not be completely stultifying to whatever creative talent one might happen to possess. But like others before me, I discovered that this was a dream.

—Raymond Chandler

“Hollywood's like Egypt,” the late producer David O. Selznick once remarked, “full of crumbled pyramids. It will just keep crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands There might have been good movies if there had been no movie industry. Hollywood might have become the center of a new human expression if it hadn't been grabbed by a little group of bookkeepers and turned into a junk industry.”
¹

These are bitter words indeed to come from the man responsible for producing films like
Gone with the Wind
(1939). Nonetheless, Selznick has accurately expressed the perennial problem that has vexed motion picture makers since the movies developed from their humble beginnings into a full-scale industry: the problem of trying to make motion pictures that are personal, unified works of art a director can truly call his own despite the fact that he is working in a complicated commercial industry. Yet many a filmmaker has succeeded in this hazardous enterprise, and Francis Ford Coppola is one of them.

“The trouble with American filmmaking is that producers don't allow the risk of failure. If a good film can't risk being a failure, it won't be really good.” So said Francis Ford Coppola when he spoke with me at the Cannes Film Festival, one of the international festivals at which a movie of his had won a prize. Add to that the five Academy Awards he has received during his career and one can see that Coppola's penchant for making films that, in his words, “depart somewhat from the ordinary Hollywood fare” has often paid off. When I talked with Coppola in Cannes, I noticed that his stocky build and full beard make him an imposing figure. Yet I found him cordial and cooperative when he shared with me some of his reflections about his movies. The festival, of course, attracts film directors from around the world, but Coppola was as unmistakably American as the Queens section of New York where he grew up and went to school. As a matter of fact, he has kept his New York accent over the years despite his living most of his adult life on the West Coast. The material I gleaned from our conversation can be found throughout this book.
²

Francis Ford Coppola was born in Detroit, Michigan, on April 7, 1939, to Carmine and Italia Coppola. He received his middle name because he was born in the capital of the American automobile industry, in Henry Ford Hospital. Furthermore, his father was flautist and assistant conductor for the “Ford Sunday Evening Hour” radio concerts. He has used his full name professionally for most of his career, although he temporarily suppressed his middle name in the early 1980s when he heard that people tend to dismiss as an upstart someone who calls himself by three names. (His director's credit on
The Outsiders
reads “directed by Francis Coppola.”) But he eventually reinstated “Ford” at the behest of distributors who wanted him to keep his full name for consistency's sake.

Young Francis was raised in a second-generation Italian American family. He was the second of three offspring, with an older brother, August, and a younger sister, Talia. He attended no less than twenty-two schools, necessitated by his father's travels around the country at various times conducting the pit band for touring stage shows. But his childhood was spent mostly in Queens, and he thus has always considered his roots to be in New York.

Because his family moved around so much, Francis was all too often the new kid on the block. He was skinny and awkward and describes himself in those days as an ugly duckling, comparing himself to Ichabod Crane,
the graceless, scrawny central character in Washington Irving's
Legend of Sleepy Hollow
. (Perhaps he recalled this childhood memory when he served as executive producer on a film adaptation of
Sleepy Hollow
in 1999.)

While Francis was enrolled at New York City School P.S. 109 (the same school attended by the hero of
You're a Big Boy Now
, his first Hollywood studio film), he suffered a great misfortune. In 1949, when he was nine, there was a polio epidemic in the New York area. After a Cub Scout outing in which the troop got caught in a deluge, Francis was dispatched to Jamaica Hospital in Queens with a stiff neck. The hospital did not have room for all of the polio cases, so there were racks of youngsters billeted in the corridors, he among them. The next day he tried to get out of bed only to fall on the floor. He could no longer move his arms and legs. Francis was paralyzed for a year, which he spent in his bedroom at home.