Godfather (37 page)

The U.S. Army promised full cooperation with the production so long as certain adjustments were made in the script, such as limiting the amount of foul language spoken by the officers and men. Also, two brief scenes were to be excised from the screenplay. One had to do with an incident that Proffitt had himself witnessed while he was in the Old Guard: a young widow drunkenly spit on her deceased husband's grave, bellowing, “At least now I know where you are spending your nights.” Another scene depicted an irritated sergeant smacking a serviceman around for failing a routine barracks inspection.

When Coppola revised the script in tandem with Bass, he complied with the army's demands. For example, Coppola altered the barracks scene so that when the sergeant raises his hand to strike the recruit Jackie intervenes and stops him. In return, Lieutenant Colonel John Meyers, who was appointed principal military adviser on the movie, provided access to Arlington National Cemetery, as well as Fort Myer in Virginia. He also supplied the U.S. Army Marching Band, six hundred enlisted men to serve as extras, plus several helicopters and other military equipment—all for reasonable fees. One journalist joked that the Army had provided Coppola with sufficient troops and material to invade a small country. Coppola freely admits that he had to compromise in order to get army cooperation on the film. Filmmaking is the art of compromise, he explains: obviously
Gardens of Stone
is more conservative in tone than
Apocalypse Now
because it was made in collaboration with the army, whereas
Apocalypse Now
was not.

While reworking the script, Coppola points out, “I was trying to be faithful to the book. I didn't want to juice the film up with superfluous plot and conflict.” That explains the absence of battle scenes in the film, even when Jackie, the young hero, is shipped overseas to the front. The war is depicted solely by a series of newsreel clips shown on television back home: close-ups of the anguished faces of suffering soldiers, shots of the wounded being stowed aboard helicopters by their comrades at arms. In not foregrounding the war, Coppola admits, “you lose the benefits which such violent turbulence will give you.” He was relying instead on character development rather than gratuitous excitement to involve the audience.

When he is reminded of the violent battle scenes in
Apocalypse Now
,, Coppola responds that
Apocalypse Now
was
set
in Vietnam. “It was about the spectacle of destruction, of warfare, of men on the brink,” soldiers in the war zone who were “out of control.”
⁷¹
By contrast,
Gardens of Stone
is
about
the Vietnam War, but it is not
set
in Vietnam. He wanted to show the decent, human side of the military this time around, not the violent side.

As usual, Coppola enlisted crew members from his previous pictures,
including production designer Dean Tavoularis, editor Barry Malkin, and composer Carmine Coppola, who scored the music for the military band. Gian-Carlo “Gio” Coppola, the older of Coppola's two sons, was again in charge of videotaping rehearsals so that the director could discuss various scenes with the actors. He was assisted by his buddy Griffin O'Neal, the troubled son of actor Ryan O'Neal, who had just finished a year in a drug rehabilitation program.

Once again Coppola called on actors who had appeared in his other films. James Caan, cast as an old-timer, Sergeant Clell Hazard, was emerging from a five-year hiatus from films, during which he had successfully controlled his substance abuse (something O'Neal had so far failed to do, as we shall shortly see). Yet no studio would hire Caan because he was branded as a cocaine addict, until Coppola loyally insisted on casting his old college chum in
Gardens of Stone
. “Francis—God bless him—fought very hard for me,” says Caan.
⁷²

Sam Bottoms and Larry Fishburne, veterans of
Apocalypse Now
, were again playing Vietnam vets in the present film. Additional cast members included D. B. Sweeney as Jackie Willow and Mary Stuart Masterson as Jackie's fiancée Rachel. As a matter of fact, the young actress's parents in the film were played by her real father and mother, Peter Masterson and Carlin Glynn. Rounding out the cast was Anjelica Huston as an antiwar activist who is also a reporter for the
Washington Post
. Huston said she took her role because “it's very important to have a woman's point of view in a movie about Vietnam. We've seen all these movies that have to do with the boys going over and getting killed; but women have also suffered terribly because of the war.” Echoing Coppola's remarks on the subject, she continues, “Women conceive and bear children, and then these children are sent off to be mutilated and killed. It's tragic.”
⁷³

Before shooting started in May 1986, Coppola followed his customary procedure of putting his ensemble of players through two weeks of rehearsals, during which, Coppola explains, they engaged in improvisations as a means of developing their characters “and filling in any gaps in the script.” The actors rehearsed the scenes in sequence, as if the script were a theatrical play, and the rehearsals were videotaped by Gio Coppola and his video crew. The scenes were then assembled into a full-length, preliminary version of the film, as if it were an “animated storyboard.” This is what Coppola terms “the off-Broadway version of the movie,” which affords the director and the cast a preview of the finished film.

Once filming began, Coppola had each scene recorded on videotape as it was shot so that he could have an instant replay of each take and make
necessary adjustments before doing another take. “I use it as a kind of sketchpad,” he says.
⁷⁴

Early in the shooting period, while the unit was on location in the Washington area, the production closed down to celebrate Memorial Day on May 26. Gio Coppola and Griffin O'Neal took a fourteen-foot speedboat for a spin on the South River on Chesapeake Bay, with O'Neal at the wheel. They had had wine at lunch and beer on board, so that O'Neal, whose alcohol consumption was well above the legal drinking limit, was in no condition to be steering the motorboat. He attempted to pass between two large craft, failing to notice that there was a taut towline linking them. When he slammed into the towline, Gio Coppola hit the deck hard and sustained massive cranial injuries. Gio, age twenty-three, was declared dead on arrival at Anne Arundel County General Hospital. His fiancée, Jacqueline de la Fontaine, was three months pregnant when Gio died, and she eventually gave birth to Francis Coppola's first grandchild, named Gian-Carla Coppola. O'Neal, who sustained only minor bruises, was subsequently convicted of reckless endangerment and gross negligence (not manslaughter, as some news reports said). He was sentenced to 416 hours of community service, eighteen months of probation, and a paltry two-hundred-dollar fine.

Two days after Gio's death, a memorial service took place in the military chapel at Fort Myer, where Coppola was filming. This writer was among the countless people in the film world who sent him their condolences at the time. Coppola announced that shooting would resume. He was confident that Gio would have wished that he finish the picture, “since he had worked with me. God gave me Gio and God has taken him away.”
⁷⁵
Nevertheless, Coppola collapsed on the set shortly after the resumption of filming, and his physician ordered him to rest for five days, after which he proceeded with the shoot. Roman Coppola, Gio's younger brother, took over Gio's responsibility for videotaping the scenes as they were shot.

Coppola kept his grief in check by working steadily. Only three weeks after Gio's demise, Coppola was back filming scenes in the same chapel where his son's funeral had taken place. The director mused afterward that he has often found that the movies he makes reflect a good deal of what is happening in his own life at the time. Still, he never dreamed that the making of
Gardens of Stone
would affect his own life so profoundly. “I had to do a movie about the burial of young men,” and suddenly he found that “my own boy would die right in the midst of it, and the funeral ceremony would be in the same chapel where we shot a similar scene in
Gardens of Stone”
⁷⁶
In his journal he later recorded, “My son Gio is gone, but his memory is not. His laughter lives on in his daughter Gia. It is amazing how much she is like him.”
⁷⁷

The eight-week shoot wrapped on August 5,1986, right on schedule and just slightly over the $13.5 million budget. After completing a number of movies, Coppola says, he understands how prolific directors like John Ford (
Stagecoach
) turned out so many high-quality movies in the old days. “As you get more experienced,” he observes, “I think you work faster.”
⁷⁸

When Coppola moved into postproduction, he collaborated closely with editor Barry Malkin, who had worked on
Apocalypse Now
. Malkin agreed with Coppola that the film “was an elegy of sorts, since it was about death…. It's brooding, purposely so. In my first cut I constructed certain sequences to exactly document the way the honor guard did their ceremonies” when burying their fallen comrades. This is because “it was impressed on me that in the end the army…would look at the cuts and make sure we had done them properly. So the first time I put the sequences together, I followed the ceremonial rites to a tee.”
⁷⁹

In filming these burial rites, Coppola had been at pains to capture the grandeur and pace of the ritual, but preview audiences found these scenes tedious. “A young audience—and young audiences are pretty much what you get in these previews—saw these scenes” as just a lot of marching, he explains, “so we had to modulate these drills.”
⁸⁰
In the end, adds Malkin, “we were allowed” by the military advisers “to skip over parts of the ceremonies because they took too long.”
⁸¹

Gardens of Stone
opens with Lieutenant Jackie Willow's military funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, complete with a twenty-one-gun salute. The American flag is removed from the casket, folded, and presented to Rachel, Jackie's young widow, who is flanked by her parents. Jackie reads his last letter home, voice-over on the sound track. It is addressed to Clell Hazard. “This may be my last letter,” he says. “You tried to tell me how it was, but I was too young.” Jackie speaks with the detached perspective of the dead. This is one of the few instances in cinema history in which a film opens with a character talking from beyond the grave. Billy Wilder's
Sunset Boulevard
(1950) is another salient example.