Godfather (42 page)

You learned too much in those days before you came of age. This savage knowledge ought to come slowly, the gradual fruit of experience.

—Graham Greene

You should be prepared for experience, knowledge, knowing: not bludgeoned unaware in the dark as by a highwayman or a footpad.

—William Faulkner

In the fall of 1980 Coppola received a joint letter from the librarian of Lone Star High School in Fresno, California, Ellen Misakian, writing on behalf of several of the students who also signed the letter. After the release of
Apocalypse Now
Coppola had served as executive producer on
The Black Stallion
(1980), which was made under the banner of American Zoetrope in San Francisco and directed by Carroll Ballard, who had attended film school with him at UCLA.
The Black Stallion
, a touching story of a boy and his beloved horse, became a hit with the youth market. The librarian accordingly urged Coppola to bring another teenage story,
The Outsiders
, to the screen. “I feel our students are representative of the youth of America,” she wrote. “Everyone who has read the book, regardless
of ethnic or economic background, has enthusiastically endorsed the project.”
¹

Coppola was struck by the fact that the novel had been turned into a bestseller by its devoted teenage readers. The book, which was required reading in some high schools, had sold four million copies since its publication in 1970. The novel's huge teenage following guaranteed a pre-sold audience for the movie, and Coppola saw the project shaping up to be the box-office success he needed to keep up his payments to his creditors in the wake of the demise of Zoetrope Studios in Hollywood (see
chapter 7
).

The author of
The Outsiders
, S. E. (Susan Eloise) Hinton, was only sixteen when she wrote the book. She had disguised the fact that the novel was written by a girl by using a pen name, because she feared that her young readers might question the authenticity of her books about teenage boys if they were aware that the author was a female. As a matter of fact, her readership never guessed that the author was a girl, probably because when she was growing up most of Susie Hinton's close friends were the group of boys that she regularly hung out with.

Coppola was convinced that
The Outsiders
was written with the authentic voice of a youngster, as she told the story of three brothers who endeavor to maintain themselves as a family after both their parents have died in an auto accident. “As I was reading the book, I realized that I wanted to make a film about young people, and about belonging,” says Coppola, “belonging to a peer group with whom one can identify and for whom one feels real love. Even though the boys are poor and to a certain extent insignificant, the story gives them a kind of beauty and nobility”
²

Furthermore, the novel made him feel nostalgic for his own youth when he was growing up in Queens and saw youth-oriented movies like
Beach Blanket Bingo
. Moreover, Coppola belonged to a street gang known as the Bay Rats when he was fifteen and going to high school on Long Island. He decided not only to produce the movie but to direct it himself and to dedicate it to the librarian and students of Lone Star School in a citation in the film's end credits because they had inspired the film.

Making
The Outsiders
appealed to Coppola for a variety of reasons. He was aware, in the wake of
Apocalypse Now
and
One from the Heart
, that he was no longer viewed by studio executives as a director who could be counted on to deliver a picture on time and on budget. Coppola realized that he could easily design a film about teenagers on a much smaller scale than the
big-budget movies he had made during the previous decade. He could thus prove to the money men that he was still quite capable of making a picture quickly and for a reasonable budget. After all, there would be no million-dollar sets for the movie, since
The Outsiders
would be shot on location in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Hinton's hometown, where the story is set. In addition, he would cast promising young actors in the picture who did not yet command big salaries.

He thus hoped to put behind him the imbroglio that surrounded the production and release of
One from the Heart
—which he referred to ruefully as “chaos incorporated”—while he was working in Tulsa. Rather than hang around Hollywood and “be whipped for having committed the sin of making a film that I wanted to make,” he explains, “I escaped with a lot of young people to Tulsa.” He adds, “I used to be a great camp counselor, and the idea of being with half-a-dozen kids making a movie seemed like being a camp counselor again. It would be a breath of fresh air.”
³

American Zoetrope was so strapped for capital that Coppola could offer Hinton a measly five hundred dollars to option her novel, plus a percentage of the profits. The young novelist accepted the offer. Kathleen Rowell, another young writer, was commissioned to adapt the book for film. The story involves the ongoing feud between two gangs of teenage boys living in Tulsa in the 1960s. One group is made up of underprivileged lads known as greasers, who are from the shabby north side of the city. The other group is made up of upper-class youngsters known as socs (
soc
rhymes with
gauche
and is short for
socialite
), who live on the prosperous south side of town. “All of the greasers were orphans, all outsiders,” says Coppola, “but together they formed a family.” Hence, the film touches on the common theme of family in Coppola's work.
⁴

Coppola was disappointed in Rowell's adaptations of the novel. The two drafts of the screenplay she had done had meandered further and further away from the book. Conscious that Hinton's readers would resent a movie that diverged too much from the novel, Coppola decided to do a wholesale rewrite of her screenplay, sticking as closely as possible to the literary source. He respected Hinton as a serious writer.

“When I met Susie,” Coppola says, “it was confirmed to me that she was not just a young people's novelist, but a real American novelist. For me the primary thing about her books is that the characters come across as very real. Her dialogue is memorable, and her prose is striking. Often a paragraph of her descriptive prose sums up something essential and stays with you.”
⁵

Lillian Ross, in her exhaustive essay on Coppola, reports that he was
busy rewriting the script for
The Outsiders
in the early spring of 1982, just three weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin in March. His own version of the script went through several drafts until he finished the final shooting script, dated March 1, 1982, which is on file in the Script Repository at Warner Brothers, the film's distributor.

When one examines the script, it is evident that Coppola's version is extremely faithful to the source material, even incorporating actual dialogue from the book at times. What's more, Coppola continued to revise the final shooting script before filming began at the end of March, and these additional rewrites were incorporated into the screenplay on pages dated March 12 through March 19. (Additional pages of last-minute revisions that are inserted into a shooting script are customarily dated in order to indicate that they supersede earlier versions of the same material.)

Because of the substantial work he did in completely overhauling the script, Coppola petitioned the Screen Writers Guild to award him an official screen credit as sole author of the screenplay for
The Outsiders
. Normally, a claimant submits a scene-by-scene analysis of the script to the Guild in order to demonstrate that they composed the bulk of the script in question (i.e., more than 50 percent). But Coppola was so confident that he had right on his side that he merely sent the Guild a copy of the script with a short letter, stating that he understood the need for arbitration in these matters, “but this script is totally my writing.”
⁶

Because he supplied no detailed analysis of the screenplay to support his petition, the Guild awarded sole screen credit to Katherine Rowell, who had done two drafts of the script before he took over. It is worth noting that the screen credit Rowell received for
The Outsiders
did not serve to advance her career as a screenwriter, since she was never listed as author of a major motion picture again.

Coppola claims that he lost the arbitration battle because of the Writers Guild's “antiquated procedures.” The Guild's decisions, he explains, always weigh heavily in favor of the first writer to do an adaptation of a literary work for film because they establish the characters and the basic plot for the screenplay, “even if it isn't a particularly effective or do-able script.” The burden of proof lies with the writer who revises the original script. He concluded, “Even though I sat down and wrote the script that I used, the Guild gave her
all
the credit. Yet that woman simply did not write the script of the film that I made.”
⁷

Coppola brought together a number of production associates he was accustomed to working with, including composer Carmine Coppola and production designer Dean Tavoularis. Tavoularis chose abandoned, deserted
areas of Tulsa for location sites in order to convey the greasers' sense of being outcasts. “The book was a kind of
Gone with the Wind
for kids, an epic classic struggle between the greasers and the socs, i.e., the poor and the rich, during the 1960s,” Coppola explains. Indeed, the dog-eared paperback copy of
Gone with the Wind
that the young hero carries around with him almost amounts to a talisman. “
The Outsiders
takes place in an enchanted moment in time in the lives of all these boys. I wanted to catch that moment; I wanted to take these street rats and give them heroic proportions.”
⁸

Coppola told his father, Carmine Coppola, that, since
The Outsiders
was a
Gone with the Wind
for teens, he wanted “a kind of schmaltzy classical score,” similar to the one Max Steiner had written for the 1939 movie of
Gone with the Wind
. The score is the key to
The Outsiders
, Coppola explains. That is to say, the fact that the music is composed in a romantic style “indicates that I wanted a movie told in sumptuous terms, very honestly and carefully taken from the book without changing it a lot.” Hence, he envisioned the movie to be like
Gone with the Wind
, not so much in content as in style. He was “putting the emphasis on that kind of
Gone with the Wind
lyricism which was so important to Susie Hinton when she wrote it.… It appealed to me that kids could see
Outsiders
as a lavish, big-feeling epic about kids.”
⁹

For a cinematographer Coppola turned to a fellow alumnus of UCLA's film school, Steven Burum, who had done second unit photography for
Apocalypse Now
.
The Outsiders
would be filmed in widescreen and color in order to recreate the world of romantic melodrama characteristic of films about juvenile delinquency from the 1950s, such as the James Dean vehicle,
Rebel without a Cause
(1955).

For his part, Coppola shrewdly chose what one observer termed an honor roll of hot young actors, including Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Ralph Macchio, and Patrick Swayze. Coppola thereby launched a whole generation of young film actors with this picture. The seven-week shoot was budgeted at $10 million. Coppola brought with him to Tulsa the technical equipment that he had already bought and implemented on
One from the Heart
, including the Silverfish trailer, with all of its electronic facilities. So, since the equipment was already in place, there was no need to charge a considerable amount of expensive electronic equipment against the budget of the present film.

Coppola had not yet secured a distributor for
The Outsiders
by the time he set up shop in Tulsa. Before leaving Hollywood for the Tulsa shoot, he had gone from studio to studio with the script under his arm, hawking what he considered to be a bankable property: the screen adaptation of a
popular adolescent novel, to be made on the cheap and on the double— but he found no takers. Once he arrived in Tulsa, however, he at last succeeded in getting Warner Brothers to distribute the film and to provide some front money for production.

Warners' decision came as a big surprise to Hollywood insiders, since in the late 1960s that studio had turned down a package of film projects Coppola had presented to them. They even demanded that he reimburse them for the development funds the studio had spent on these projects (see
chapter 3
). But, as film historian Jon Lewis opines, in Hollywood it seems best to have a short memory. The studio administration apparently chose to forget that Coppola's parting shot on that occasion was to state that he was an artist, while the suits that ran Warners were Philistines. Be that as it may, Coppola's distribution deal with Warners enabled him to obtain further financing from Chemical Bank.

Aware of how Coppola had gone way over schedule on
Apocalypse Now
and
One from the Heart
, Warners kept him on a short leash. He was committed to sticking to the stipulated timetable for shooting and for postproduction in order to have the movie ready for release in the fall of 1982. Coppola assembled his cast and began rehearsing with them in early March, employing the “previsualization” method he had used for
One from the Heart
. He converted the gym of an abandoned schoolhouse into a rehearsal hall, where he videotaped the rehearsals in order to aid the young actors in developing their characterizations. Tom Cruise remembered these “workshop” rehearsals as very beneficial to the cast, helping them not only to build up their roles but also to “learn more about acting.”
¹⁰