Godfather (8 page)

One project that certainly fit that description of his talents was the war film
Is Paris Burning
?, a joint American-French coproduction to be directed by French director René Clément (
Purple Noon
) and released by Paramount. In early 1965 Stark sent Coppola to Paris to collaborate with
the ailing screenwriter Anthony Veiller (
The Night of the Iguana
). Stark saw Coppola as Seven Arts' insurance policy—in the event of the aging Veiller's demise, Coppola was to take over for him. “I was to take the pencil from his hand when it fell out,” Coppola states.
³⁵
Veiller was not aware of Coppola's private arrangement with Stark. He saw Coppola as a mere neophyte screenwriter who was to learn his trade from Veiller. “For five weeks, I would go to him every morning at his hotel, and he would mock my work,” Coppola recalls.
³⁶
Finally, just as Coppola got fed up with bickering with Veiller, the elderly screenwriter did expire, and Coppola found himself saddled with a mammoth project—a bewildering, multistoried account of the liberation of Paris in 1944, a bloated war epic with an all-star cast, including Charles Boyer, Orson Welles, and Kirk Douglas.

Screenwriter Gore Vidal (
Suddenly Last Summer
) was brought in to help Coppola finish the script, since it was clear that it was too much for a young writer to cope with alone. Like Veiller, Vidal saw their collaboration as a junior-senior relationship, Coppola remembers, but Vidal was much more gracious than Veiller. He would have him work out a scene and then they would go over it.

The film's French producer, Paul Graetz, had made an agreement with the city officials in Paris that the historical events would be depicted in the screenplay in a manner that pictured General Charles de Gaulle as a gallant French leader. In return, they would allow the film unit to shoot on location all over Paris. At this juncture de Gaulle, as president of France, was still a world figure. Therefore, to ensure that he would not be offended in any way by the movie, some French screenwriters, including Claude Boulé, Jean Aurenche, and Pierre Bost, were appointed to kibitz on the script at the behest of government bureaucrats. (Aurenche and Bost had co-scripted Graetz's most celebrated film,
The Devil in the Flesh
[1947].)

As it happened, Clément's contract did not give him control over the script, and so, with Graetz's support, the French writers usually overruled Clément's ideas about improving the screenplay. The script conferences inevitably deteriorated into shouting matches. The whole affair, in Coppola's view, had degenerated into what he termed an insane mess. He ultimately realized that it was hopeless to endeavor to pacify the Gaullist writers on the film, who staunchly maintained that every Frenchman was a hero. In the end no less than ten screenwriters worked on the screenplay. The intransigence of the French writers contributed in no small way to the fact that the script of
Is Paris Burning?
turned out to be fragmented and lacking in continuity. The final shooting script was principally a collation of the work of Coppola, Vidal, Brulé, Aurenche, and Bost. The Screenwriters Guild
in Hollywood, however, awarded sole screen credit to Coppla and Vidal. As a result, several critics blamed Coppola and Vidal because the script bulldozed the complexities of the historical events the movie presented.

Veiller was not the only casualty during the period the film was being made. Producer Graetz, worn out from all of the infighting, suffered a heart attack and died during the final days of shooting. As for Coppola, he and Seven Arts decided to part company in the wake of the debacle that was
Is Paris Burning?
Coppola recounts that he both quit and was fired at the same time.

Kirk Douglas did a cameo in
Is Paris Burning?
as General George S. Patton, who was involved in the liberation of Paris. This proved to be a harbinger of Coppola's next major assignment as a scriptwriter. In May of 1965, Twentieth Century-Fox offered him fifty thousand dollars to write a script for a full-scale screen biography of the legendary General Patton, whose men had named him “Blood and Guts.”

Producer Frank McCarthy had rejected several script drafts submitted by other writers and decided to infuse the project with some new blood by hiring Coppola, who would hopefully bring some fresh ideas to the project. Moreover, given the months he labored on
Is Paris Burning?
, Coppola explains in Johnson's book, he was seen by the studio moguls as “a Second World War specialist.” (Obviously the failure of that film was not laid at his door by industry insiders.) However, since his military experience in actual fact consisted of a stint in military school, Coppola devoted himself to researching the life of the controversial general.
³⁷

Coppola gradually realized that “Patton was obviously out of his mind.” On the one hand, if he wrote a script glorifying Patton as a great American hero, as some of the previous scriptwriters had done, it would be laughed at. On the other hand, if he wrote a script that condemned Patton as a heartless martinet, the screenplay would be rejected out of hand. Consequently, Coppola opted to combine both approaches and focus on the duality of Patton's character—to show him as a medieval knight living in the wrong century, “a man out of touch with his time, a pathetic hero, a Don Quixote figure.” The people who disapproved of Patton could say, “He was crazy; he loved war,” while the people who believed him to be a hero could say, “We need a man like that now.” Coppola concludes, “And that is precisely the effect the movie [
Patton
] had, which is why it was successful.”
³⁸

The most celebrated scene in the entire film, which was directed by
Franklin Schaffner (
The Best Man)
, is the opening, in which Patton, standing before an enormous American flag, addresses an unseen gathering of troops. Coppola comments that he was experimenting with the concept that if a character just stands in front of the audience and talks for five minutes “the audience would know more about him than if you went into his past and told about his family life.” In one memorable line, the outspoken Patton warns his men, “You do not prove your patriotism by dying for your country; you make the other poor bastard die for his country” Coppola composed this monologue by quoting from three of Patton's speeches and later opined that “it was the best scene in my script.”

After devoting six months to the screenplay, which is dated December 27, 1965, Coppola moved on to other projects. In typical Hollywood fashion, his screenplay was passed on to other writers who altered it substantially. When the title role was offered to George C. Scott, he remembered having read Coppola's screenplay earlier. He stated flatly that he would accept the part only if they used Coppola's script. “Scott is the one who resurrected my version,” says Coppola.
³⁹
Screenwriter Edmund North then made some modifications in the Coppola version, but the shooting script is essentially Coppola's work.

Coppola depicts both the triumphs and trials of the aggressive, eccentric general, just as he said he would. Thus the film presents Patton's decisive victory over German Field Marshall Rommel in the African campaign. But it also encompasses the scene in which Patton, while visiting a medical outpost near the war zone, accuses a whimpering soldier suffering from shell shock of malingering, calls him a “gutless coward,” and slaps his face. The episode becomes notorious enough to reach Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower, who demands that Patton apologize in front of his troops.

In brief, the movie presents a portrait of this intriguing, complicated figure in an ambiguous fashion, showing him as a legendary commander committed to serving his country and as a military leader who thirsted for fame and glory as the reward for his exploits on the battlefield. Accordingly, critics applauded the script for examining both the virtues and the faults of the general, without leaning too much in either direction—and that is precisely what Coppola intended to do from the start.

This spectacular war epic (nearly three hours long), as it happened, did not reach the screen until 1970, when it won the Academy Award as the Best Picture of the Year as well as Oscars for Schaffner and Scott and Coppola and North, who shared the official screen credit for the screenplay.

Coppola wrote only one more script for a film that he did not personally
direct. After the successful launching of
The Godfather
in March 1972, Robert Evans, Paramount's production chief, asked him to compose the screenplay for the film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's celebrated novel of the Roaring Twenties,
The Great Gatsby
, which would be directed by Jack Clayton (
Room at the Top)
. It seems that the muddled script submitted by Truman Capote, filled with confusing dream sequences and flashbacks, was not acceptable. In fact, Evans, in his autobiography, termed Capote's screenplay “a miscarriage” and moaned that “we're back at starting gate without a jockey.” Evans wanted Coppola to provide a more straightforward rendition of the plot.
⁴⁰

Coppola took on the task in order to provide himself with a change of pace from working on
The Godfather
and hammered out a serviceable script in five weeks. He followed a procedure he had employed in adapting
The Godfather
for film: he began by pasting each page of the novel into a large notebook and summarizing the action in the margin. This notebook was the road map that guided him in writing each scene. Then he spent several mornings pecking away on a portable typewriter in a New York hotel room as he committed the script to paper. Each afternoon he would dictate what he had composed in the morning to a secretary, who produced a clean copy.

In the story, Jay Gatsby (Robert Redford) crystallizes the American Dream for himself in Daisy (Mia Farrow), the girl he lost to millionaire Tom Buchanan a few years earlier. Gatsby, of course, is deeply hurt by Daisy's rejection. But he eventually decides to mount a campaign to win her back by attempting to amass a fortune by racketeering. Nonetheless, Gatsby is doomed never to win Daisy away from Tom. He is eventually killed by a lunatic who mistakenly assumes that Gatsby is responsible for his wife's death. Evans remembers that “Coppola delivered a screenplay that really worked.”

“Francis came in and did an absolute miracle job,” Clayton has said, adding that he made only minor alterations in the screenplay that Coppola turned over to him. Clayton did admit to removing some passages from the script that he thought were superfluous, however, and to putting into the screenplay some material from the book that Coppola had not originally included. But anything that was added to the film, Clayton emphasized, “was
always
in the book.” Yet it is precisely Clayton's additions to his screenplay that Coppola afterward contended were responsible for extending the duration of the finished film to the point where the movie seemed,
in his estimation, “interminable.”
⁴¹
One salient example will suffice to illustrate Coppola's point. On the one hand, Coppola had included in his script the scene from the novel in which Gatsby's father, Henry Gatz, comes to town for his son's funeral. He included this scene because he thought it important for the viewer to see that, ironically enough, in the eyes of at least one person, Gatsby had really grown up to be the great Gatsby, for, as far as Henry Gatz could tell, his son had become a distinguished man of business who had possessed at the time of his death an enormous estate complete with all the luxuries that money could buy. On the other hand, Coppola did not believe that the film should continue on to depict the funeral itself, in spite of the fact that that scene is in the book, because he felt that playing out such a scene in detail would needlessly protract the running time of a film he was hoping could be kept down to a manageable length. Coppola had planned instead to have the movie conclude with a further touch of irony. As Coppola describes the final scene as he envisioned it, Gatsby's father, while looking around his sons bedroom, “sees the picture of Daisy, and he says, ‘Who's the girl?”‘ That, Coppola maintains, should really have been the end of the movie.

Had Mr. Gatz's remark about the photograph been used to conclude the film, Coppola continues, it would have neatly tied in with the shot of this same photograph of Daisy that appears in the course of the movie's opening credits. In this manner the movie would have both begun and ended with the picture of Daisy, Gatsby's most cherished possession and the symbol of his dreams and ambitions. “So what I had set up at the beginning,” Coppola concludes, would have gone “all the way to the end.”
⁴²
By adding the lengthy funeral sequence to the script as a replacement for his own much more terse finale to the movie, Coppola contends that Clayton made the closing scenes of the movie that follow Gatsby's death seem less like an epilogue than an anticlimax.

Regardless of which side one takes in the matter of Clayton's adding the funeral episode to Coppola's script, it must be conceded that all of the interpolations Clayton made in the screenplay, taken together, eventually resulted in a motion picture that in the last analysis seems at times slow paced and overlong. To that extent, it seems that Coppola's complaints about Clayton's revisions of his screenplay were ultimately justified.

Despite the fact that some Hollywood wags had dubbed the film “The Great Ghastly,” Redford's box-office appeal made the movie a commercial success. But that did not alter Coppola's negative opinion of the final film. He then moved on to write and direct
The Conversation
.

Looking back on the time that he spent writing screenplays for other
directors, Coppola reflects, “I don't enjoy the directing process; and if you had asked me the question, whether I was a writer or a director before
Gatsby
, I would have said I was a writer and I just direct sometimes.” But when he saw the way that Clayton spent time “fidgeting” with his screenplay for
Gatsby
without his knowledge or consent, he realized the strong influence a director has on the way a film turns out.
⁴³
Coppola therefore resolved regularly to direct the scripts he wrote.