Godfather (62 page)

Coppola may have the
Godfather
films to his credit, but he is still hard put to get the financing to do a project that is original. The reason is that the studios are now owned by multinational corporations who are more interested in making big bucks than in making great movies. Therefore, as Mark Caro points out, Coppola has learned to mix “the occasional pet project”—such as 1982's
One from the Heart
, which fizzled at the box office—with “bill-payers,” like 1986's
Peggy Sue Got Married
. “Coppola's experience is a cautionary tale that demonstrates the increased pressure on filmmakers to deliver commercial hits.” Yet Coppola has never downgraded the films he made as a “hired gun” (like
Peggy Sue
), simply because they were not personal projects of his own devising. He has always been quick to emphasize that
The Godfather
started out as a job-for-hire. Paramount asked him to adapt a routine crime novel for the screen, and Coppola turned it into an epic cinematic saga and a moneymaker in the bargain. “It's like, you bake this cake,” he concludes, “and sometimes it turns out to be a wonderful cake.”
⁴
Coppola, in his time, has made some wonderful cakes.

Coppola contends that the negative press that has persisted over the years about his cavalier attitude toward going over budget on his pictures is unfair.
The Outsiders, Peggy Sue Got Married, Gardens of Stone
, and
Tucker
were all pretty close to being brought in on budget and on schedule. Nevertheless, journalists prefer to dig up old news about his exceeding the budgets on
Apocalypse Now
and
One from the Heart
, both of which are exceptions that prove the rule.

At any rate, a milestone was reached in the ongoing tug-of-war between the film artist and the industry in 1998 when Warner Brothers reneged on a deal with Coppola's independent production unit, American Zoetrope, to film
Pinocchio
. Coppola's suit against Warners came to trial on June 3, 1998. His deposition declared, “This action arises from a dream of plaintiff Francis Coppola to bring the beloved children's story
Pinocchio
to the screen as a live action motion picture, and the efforts of defendant Warner Bros, first to grab Coppola's film at a bargain-basement price and then, when that failed, to ruin Coppola's efforts to bring his dream to life.”
⁵
In brief, when Warners refused to agree to pay Coppola his standard directorial fee and offered him considerably less, he understandably went shopping for a better deal elsewhere. But then the front office at Warners decreed that they were still committed to the project, to the extent that they had invested development money in commissioning a screenplay by Frank Galati; therefore, they maintained, if Coppola did not make
Pinocchio
for Warners, he could not make it at all. Coppola replied, “If they had any sentiment for movies at all, you'd think they'd never stop anyone from making a film; in the end, they'd just say, ‘Go ahead, make your film. We don't want to make it, but we're not going to prevent you because, after all, we're film people too.' They're not film people; they're ‘money and power people.'”
⁶

While detailing the scenario of
Pinocchio
on the witness stand, Coppola burst into tears. The Warners attorney dismissed Coppola's “crying jag” as a plea for sympathy from the jury. After all, we recall, Coppola pretended to have a fainting spell during a conference on
The Godfather
with Paramount's studio brass, in order to coax them into seeing things his way. Nonetheless, he contended that, in the present instance, he was not shedding crocodile tears. “I was emotional because I was describing the theme of the story, and I was very much moved by this. But it wasn't manipulative.”
⁷

In Coppola's behalf, Al Pacino recounted an episode during the filming of
The Godfather:
later one afternoon Coppola was filming the burial of Don Vito Corleone. “I see Francis sitting on a gravestone, and he's crying. ‘Francis,' I say, ‘What's the matter?' And he says, ‘They won't give me another setup.' Meaning they wouldn't let him shoot the scene again. So he's sitting on the gravestone bawling, and I thought, ‘This guy
cares
…. That's the way to live. It may be a tough ride, but something is going to come out of it.'”
⁸

At all events, while Coppola and American Zoetrope were in litigation with Warners, New Line Cinema released the live-action feature,
The Adventures of Pinocchio
. This movie garnered a cool critical response and sank without a trace, thereby making it inadvisable for Coppola to make
his
Pinocchio
movie at that time. “Another
Pinocchio
picture got made, and we lost millions,” he says laconically. The jury ordered Warners to pay Coppola $80 million in compensatory and punitive damages. No other director has ever scored such a triumph over a major studio. To that extent, Coppola's victory is shared by every filmmaker working in the industry today. The parallel with
The Rainmaker
, “which culminates with a stunning jury award in favor of a plaintiff tackling powerful business interests,” was not lost on Coppola.
⁹
For Coppola to take on giant Warner Brothers was once again, in his view, David conquering Goliath.

Moreover, Coppola saw some poetic justice in winning his suit against Warners, since he had lost a suit against the same studio in the late 1960s. At that time, we remember, the front office at Warners insisted that Coppola repay the studio the money it had advanced him as development funds for a package of ill-fated American Zoetrope projects they had rejected. After Warners won the case, it took Coppola years to pay off the debt (see
chapter 3
). Concerning the verdict in the
Pinocchio
case, Coppola gleefully commented, “Hopefully this will teach them” to treat creative people as an asset, “not as serfs.”

Still, regardless of where a filmmaker works, he must reconcile himself to the fact that he is usually going to have difficulties in securing studio backing for a project he has developed. In the present setup, a director must negotiate with movie executives who operate a given studio as part of some larger conglomerate and who are therefore wary of rocking the corporate boat by providing financing for a property that departs in varying degrees from the kind of safe, commercial subject matter they tend to favor. Yet, as Coppola tells me, “it is precisely the risky, offbeat projects that often capture a large audience,” and movies like
Apocalypse Now
and
Bram Stoker's Dracula
bear out this contention. Jonathan Rosenbaum has said of the latter film, “Still the overreacher, Coppola suffers at times from a surfeit of ideas (rather than a dearth, like most of his colleagues). But this is still one of the best vampire movies around—a visual feast with ideas, more disturbing than scary, and a rich experience in many other respects as well.”
¹⁰

“I've played the highwire act with regular studio pictures and gotten away with it,” Coppola points out. “When you think that
Bram Stoker's Dracula
is a picture financed by Columbia, a regular studio—I mean, that's a weird movie.”
¹¹
So Coppola continues to be characterized as a Hollywood maverick, forever slugging it out with the producers, just as he was when he started making movies in the 1960s. Even then he was already pictured as the champion of the individual filmmakers against the studio system.

“No American career has had such endless turmoil or says so much
about making movies in America” as the career of Francis Coppola. He revitalized the moribund gangster film genre with
The Godfather
, which “had a calm faith in narrative control that had not been current in Hollywood for twenty years. It was like a film of the 1940s in its nostalgic decor, and in Gordon Willis's bold exploration of a film noir in color.” Furthermore, it rendered an uncompromising portrayal of evil.
¹²
The gangster genre continued to enjoy a renaissance with
Godfather II
. In imagining the early life of Don Vito Corleone, it carved out a superb recreation of “a gritty, turn-of-the-century Lower East Side” populated by raffish lowlifes.
¹³

The
Godfather
trilogy inspired
The Sopranos
(1999–), a TV series about the Mafia in New Jersey, as well as the 2002 miniseries
Kingpin
, which involves a Mexican American crime family. While
The Sopranos
boasts writing, directing, and acting of a consistently high order,
Kingpin
lacks originality. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then
Kingpin
is very flattering to the
Godfather
films. Miguel Cadenas is patently based on Michael Corleone, even in name (Miguel is Spanish for Michael). Like Michael, Miguel is a college-educated member of the family who marries an outsider (recall Kay Adams) and who, though reluctant to get involved, eventually takes over the family empire. Miguel intimidates a rival by slaughtering his prize dog, echoing how the Corleones killed an opponent's prize horse to scare him. Yet the characters in
Kingpin
lack the psychological complexity of the Corleones or of the Sopranos, and therefore
Kingpin
cannot be classed with either of its forerunners.

Although perhaps not as influential, the films Coppola directed after
Godfather II
continued to set precedents and to succeed in unexpected ways.
Apocalypse Now
is one of the most colossal war movies ever made. The helicopter attack on the Vietcong village is unparalleled as one of the most astounding, graphic battle sequences ever committed to celluloid. Coppola's filmography also includes some films like
The Conversation
and
The Outsiders
, which attest to his ability to make compelling movies while working on pictures conceived on a smaller scale than his cinematic epics. They qualify as chamber pieces, rather than grand opera.

Coppola has become less prolific as the years have gone on—only three films in the 1990s. The reasons for his restricted output are not hard to find. He has come to the conclusion that it was the carefully made films that would have lasting value, not those turned out on a regular basis. In his painstaking way, Coppola not only reinvented the gangster film and the war film, but, with
Bram Stoker's Dracula
, the horror film as well.

In the 1990s Coppola's wine business really took off. He engaged the distinguished enologist André Tchelistcheff as winemaking consultant. As
one journalist put it, that is like hiring Stradivarius as a consultant for your fiddle factory. Coppola's vineyard in Rutherford, California, has become a tourist attraction. “He sits outside at a wooden table, the padrone, greeting tourists, autographing the labels of wine bottles.”
¹⁴
(For myself, I chose a bottle of dark, dry, Coppola claret. I drank the wine but kept the autographed label.)

Even though his winery has prospered, Coppola still maintains an active interest in the film business. American Zoetrope is running efficiently and has released
The Virgin Suicides
(1999), written and directed by Coppola's daughter Sofia as her first feature. The film tells sympathetically the story of four teenage daughters of overprotective, repressive parents, who kill themselves. The cast included Kathleen Turner (
Peggy Sue Got Married
) and Danny DeVito (
The Rainmaker
). American Zoetrope also released
CQ
(2002), the debut feature written and directed by Coppola's son Roman. It is the tale of an American film editor working on a French sci-fi flick in Paris and becoming infatuated with the movie's sexy leading lady. Jason Schwartzman (the son of Roman's aunt, Talia Shire) stands out in a good cast. Sofia appears in a cameo.

Eleanor Coppola shot a documentary about the making of the film for the DVD. “I seem to have become the family documentarian,” she observes at the start of her documentary. “I shot a film of my husband Francis making
Apocalypse Now
and my daughter Sofia doing her debut film, and now our son Roman is directing his first feature,
CQ
.” Francis Coppola observes in Eleanor's movie that “Roman incorporated his memories of being in a family involved in filmmaking into
CQ
”—including the incident during the making of
The Godfather
when Francis got so frustrated that he put his foot through his office door (see
chapter 4
). In Roman's film Gerárd Depardieu, as a volatile director, punches a hole in his office door. “Roman fashioned his memories into this ingenious film,” Francis concludes.

Since Coppola had directed a student production of a musical at Hofstra University before graduating in 1960, he decided to return to the stage for a month in the summer of 2000. He adapted the novel
Gidget
, about a teenaged girl who loves surfing, into a high school musical. He composed all twelve of the original songs himself. He then staged the show as a workshop production at Orange County High School for the Performing Arts in Cerritos, California, and the four-night run got raves from the locals. Coppola, as we know, was a drama counselor at a summer camp when he was in his teens. “I like to work with kids,” he says, which is obvious from
The Outsiders, Rumble Fish
, and
Jack
. “It was really a nice experience for me. And that was how I spent my summer vacation.”
¹⁵

Meanwhile Coppola has continued as a member of the board of directors of MGM-UA. Indeed, he supervised (uncredited) the final edit of
Supernova
(2000) after the director, Walter Hill, walked off the picture due to artistic squabbles with the studio brass. The movie starred James Spader, who urged Coppola to pull up a chair to the editing table and rescue the picture. So it seems that Coppola's career has come full circle. Not only did he return briefly to directing student musicals, but he also reedited a movie, just as he had reedited a Russian sci-fi film,
Battle Beyond the Run
, while he was working for Roger Corman after departing UCLA's film school in the early 1960s.