Godfather (56 page)

When her father returns from his travels, Zoe proudly explains what she has done. She obviously wants to impress her dad favorably. He is indeed
relieved that the precious earring has been returned to the princess—since Charlotte might have otherwise thought that the gift of the earring betokened that there was something between Claudio and the princess. “This is the wrong time for a misunderstanding between your mother and me” he tells Zoe, who he knows wants her parents to reconcile. “Little Miss Fixit” eventually decides to cement the reconciliation between her parents by arranging to fly to Greece with Charlotte to attend Claudio's concert at the Acropolis in Athens. So the little film ends with a family reunion.

Editor Barry Malkin characterizes “Life without Zoe” as a “contemporary fairy tale,” a kind of fable out of the Arabian Nights, in which the Arab princess is a damsel in distress saved by the timely intervention of an imaginative young girl. But Malkin was dissatisfied with the way the segment turned out. At the behest of the Disney organization, the parent company of Touchstone, “we abbreviated the episode and removed some material from the film. I feel we rendered the story less faithfully and hurt it,” he maintains. “I was sorry that a number of things wound up on the cutting room floor. And I know Francis feels that way too.”
⁴⁰

Indeed he does. Coppola emphasizes that the script had more character development, especially in terms of Zoe's relationship with her father. She finds it burdensome to cope with a famous father who is emotionally unavailable to her. The Disney executives liked the “Eloise at the Plaza” dimension of the story, he says, but during editing the studio asked that some of the material about Zoe's troubled relationship with her father be jettisoned. Disney wanted the episode to be a lightweight anecdote, not a character study about a little girl trying to relate to a remote father who pretty much ignores her. “In an attempt to make the story delightful and charming,” Coppola concludes, this material was largely eliminated.
⁴¹

It is not surprising, therefore, that when
New York Stories
was released on February 26, 1989, some reviewers found “Life without Zoe” woefully rushed and bursting with loose ends and unfulfilled promises. The episode admittedly teeters on the brink of mawkishness in the sentimental family reconciliation. Yet it is still a visually arresting, engaging rite-of-passage comedy, particularly since Don Novello brings some snap to the role of Hector, the benevolent butler who caters to Zoe when her parents are on the road.

Looking back on Coppola's career in the 1980s, one can say that he made two features (
The Outsiders
and
Peggy Sue Got Married
) and one short film (“Rip Van Winkle”) that were hugely successful. But he also made resounding flops like
Tucker
and “Life without Zoe.” He once told me that he tends to see the movies he has directed in the past as providing him with
the sort of experience that would help him to make better films in the future. “So the only thing a filmmaker can do,” he concludes, “is just to keep going.” Down the road he would regain the favor of the critics and of the public when he reached back to the nineteenth century to film Bram Stoker's classic horror novel,
Dracula
.

A man digs his own grave and should, presumably, lie in it.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

For me the past is forever.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

Because Winona Ryder had had to bow out of
Godfather III
because of illness, she was anxious to work with Coppola in another film. When she read James Hart's screen adaptation of
Dracula
, based on Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, she not only wanted to play the heroine in the film, but she also asked Coppola to direct it. She passed the script on to him, and Coppola was immediately interested. What especially impressed him about Hart's screenplay was that it followed the novel so closely, for all of the previous movie adaptations had tossed out large sections of the book.

Abraham Stoker (1847–1912) was born in Dublin, but he eventually moved to London, where he managed the Lyceum Theater for the famed actor Sir Henry Irving. But he still found time to write novels. There was a vogue in England at the time for the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, and a number of Gothic horror novels enjoyed great popularity. So Stoker decided to cash in on the craze for Gothic fiction and composed
Dracula
. Although a few horror novels about legendary vampires had already been published in
the nineteenth century, Stoker was the first to give his tale a historical foundation by grounding his main character in the bloodthirsty fifteenth-century prince Vlad Tepes, who was born in Transylvania, a province of Romania. The manner in which Stoker merges authentic history with folklore distinguishes his
Dracula
from the stories about vampires that preceded it, writes literary historian Leonard Wolf. Moreover, says Wolf, “Stoker's achievement is that he created an adventure story whose chief image—an undead creature who drinks the blood of attractive young women—shimmers with erotic meaning.” Dracula, as Stoker conceived him, at first seems to be elderly and therefore an embodiment of ancient evil. Then, as he is nourished by his victims' blood, he is transformed into a dashing young seducer.

In addition to eroticism, Wolf continues, Stoker's novel possesses a religious component, for the vampire, after all, has lost his soul. In turn, “the vampire, taking the blood of his victim,” is a threat to the soul of the victim, who may likewise become one of the undead. The story, as Stoker tells it, therefore takes on “the larger meaning of a fight between the cohorts of God and those of Satan.”
¹
That is why the vampire hunters, who are on the side of the angels, employ as defenses against the fiendish vampires such sacramental objects of Catholic ritual as crucifixes and blessed holy water. Since Stoker was a Dublin-born Irishman, it was not surprising that his novel would be infused with elements of his Catholic religion. In brief, Stoker's novel is a tale for the ages, portraying the struggle between the forces of good and evil, light and darkness, day and night. Indeed, Dracula represents the dark side of our own natures—which is why we want to see him vanquished.

Stoker cast the novel in the epistolary format, a narrative form dating back to Samuel Richardson's
Pamela
(1741). In
Dracula
, the narrator, an English gentleman, employs letters and diary entries as documentation in order to lend credibility to his bizarre account of preternatural horror.

The great German filmmaker F. W. Murnau made the first film adaptation of Stoker's book in 1922, ten years after the novelist's death. Murnau had been denied permission to film
Dracula
by the Stoker estate because Stoker's widow deemed the silent cinema a primitive art form, less dignified than the theater. Undeterred, Murnau went ahead with the film. He changed the title of the movie to
Nosferatu
, an archaic Slavonic term used in the novel to refer to the undead. In addition, he altered Dracula's name to Count Orlok and transferred the setting from Dracula's native Transylvania to Bremen, Germany. Moreover, Murnau omitted some incidents from the book and added others. Thus, in the film the vampire (Max
Schreck), a cadaverous creature with a batlike visage, unleashes a plague of rodents on Bremen, an episode not in the book. “It's a free retelling of the story,” says Coppola, “with many plot elements that differ from the novel.”
²
Nevertheless, despite the various departures from the novel, the film was recognizable as an adaptation of Stoker's book, and the Stoker estate sued the film's producers for making an unauthorized film of the book. The estate's legal action limited the movie's initial release, but it eventually became widely available in the 1990s.

Stoker's widow approved a stage dramatization by Hamilton Deane, since she respected the theater as a legitimate art form. Deane simplified the action by eliminating the historical prologue involving Vlad Tepes and the closing scene in Dracula's castle in Transylvania in which Dracula is confronted by the vampire hunters. He kept only the central section of the novel, which is set in London, where Dracula pursues fresh victims. The play opened in February 1927 in London and was successful enough to warrant a New York production. John Balderston reworked Deane's play for the Broadway premiere, which took place in October. The New York production ran for thirty-three weeks and made a star of Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi (who was actually born in Transylvania). Unlike Max Schreck's grotesque vampire in
Nosferatu
, Lugosi came across as suave and cultured, impeccably attired in evening clothes, a tuxedo, and cape. He thus conveyed the fatal attraction of evil. Lugosi was asked by Universal Pictures to repeat the role in Tod Browning's 1931 film version.

It is important to note that Browning's film was derived for the most part from the Deane-Balderston play and not directly from Stoker's novel. The same can be said of the subsequent movie versions of Stoker's story. Indeed, one of the things in Hart's screenplay that most appealed to Coppola was the fact that Hart had gone back to the original novel as the source of his script and did not use the stage play. Indeed, Coppola noted approvingly that Hart had even worked into the screenplay the collection of letters and journal entries by which the story is told in the book.

Coppola had been a fan of horror movies since childhood, and he had enjoyed going to horror flicks with his older brother August when he was a youngster. “When I was a boy,
Dracula
was one of my favorite scary movies,” he remarks. He was enthralled by this weird creature who sucked his victim's blood. “Because I was so obsessed with how scary Dracula was, I looked him up in the
Encyclopedia Britannica
that our family had, and I was very struck that Dracula was based on a real person, that he once lived, an historical figure: Vlad Tepes, the champion of the Romanians against the invasion of the infidel Turks.”

Although Vlad Tepes was born in Transylvania, a region in Romania, he actually reigned in southern Romania, in the principality of Wallachia on the banks of the Danube. Nevertheless, Stoker consistently referred to Dracula as a native of Transylvania, and to this day it is Transylvania that is associated with the Dracula legend. This fierce leader of the Romanian crusaders protected Romania, which was the gateway to Christian Europe, against the invasion of the Turkish sultan's Muslim hordes. He earned the epithet Vlad the Impaler from impaling slaughtered enemy warriors on stakes and displaying them in full view of the advancing Turkish army. Even in that barbarous era, Vlad the Impaler's blood lust was thought to be excessive. His enemies called him Vlad
Dracul
—which means “devil.”

Still, young Francis Coppola was fascinated by Vlad: “I was maybe twelve when I read about him, but I remember that Vlad had impaled a lot of people on stakes and the invading Turks saw this and just turned around and left rather than tangle with this guy.” He still thinks that historians have judged Vlad too harshly. As a ruler, Coppola explains, “Vlad Dracula was an enlightened despot.” He was evenhanded in the way he meted out justice: “he impaled and tortured even some of his own people, regardless of their standing in the community.” Stoker employed the real historical figure of Vlad Dracula in his novel, “and then invented the idea of this person becoming a vampire.”

Dracula's first wife was Princess Elisabeta, who, because of a Turkish ruse, was falsely informed that Vlad had been killed in battle. The grief-stricken young woman jumped off the tower of Castle Dracula and drowned in the river below. “So the seeds of the story of the beloved woman, Dracula's long-lost love, also lie in actual history,” Coppola points out. And Stoker worked her into the novel as well.
³

For the record, the historical Vlad Dracula was slain in battle outside the city of Bucharest some years later, in 1476, at the age of forty-five. He was decapitated and his head was sent by his Turkish foes to the sultan in Constantinople as evidence that the ferocious Vlad Dracula had finally bitten the dust. It was Stoker's genius to turn this historical figure into a vampire.

In the novel, however, Dracula renounces God and embraces Satan in the wake of his wife's suicide. He becomes Dracula the vampire, and, as one of the undead, he searches through the centuries for his beloved Elisabeta. She turns up four hundred years later, reincarnated as Mina, an English girl, and he vows to make Mina his vampire bride.

Coppola was first exposed to Stoker's novel when he was in his teens. “When I was thirteen or fourteen,” he recalls, “I was a drama counselor at a camp in upstate New York; I would read aloud to the kids at night, and
one summer we read the entire original version of Bram Stoker's
Dracula
The boys found it a chilling experience. It was around this time that Coppola saw the Browning version of the Stoker story with Bela Lugosi: “I loved Lugosi,” he recalls, but he was disappointed that the Lugosi picture, like all of the other previous adaptations of Stoker's story that depended on the stage play, were so different from the original book.
⁴

“I was amazed how much they held back from what was written in Stoker's novel,” he recalls in his production journal. The whole last section of the novel, “when the vampire killers pursue Dracula back to his castle in Transylvania, and the whole thing climaxes in an enormous John Ford shootout—no one had ever portrayed that” in a Dracula movie.
⁵
“I knew enough about the authentic
Dracula
to realize that it had never been made as a movie,” he concludes.
⁶

With
Dracula
, Coppola returned to the horror genre for the first time since
Dementia 13
, his very first feature. Soon after Coppola examined James Hart's screenplay, he issued a press release, announcing that he would film
Dracula
for American Zoetrope, his independent production unit, and that the picture would be financed and distributed by Columbia Pictures. Coppola had pitched the property to Columbia not only as a horror flick but as “an erotic dream” in which he planned to star several attractive young actors. He thereby convinced Columbia that the project was marketable, and they gave it the go-ahead.