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Just before Thanksgiving, 1967, Coppola confided to Lucas that he was starting work on his next film for Seven Arts, and that he had a spot for him in the crew.
The shoot on Finian’s Rainbow was expiring in a gaudy sunset of mutual congratulation. For $3.5 million, Coppola had delivered a film that looked as if it could well have cost $15 million. But he knew the film would fail. The important thing was to get another one up and running before anyone at Seven Arts realized it too. Fortunately, his stock stood so high with the company that they agreed not only to produce his original screenplay, The Rain People, but to let him direct it as well. Armed with their backing, Coppola persuaded IATSE to waive its rules and let him shoot the film his way, with a small crew, moving from location to location as the mood took him. Technically, a unit shooting outside Los Angeles was supposed to hire men from the district branch, or ‘Local.’ If they insisted on using their own technicians, they still had to pay a local crew, as had happened on Mackenna’s Gold, even if the men simply sat about playing pinochle.
Coppola told IATSE his film was actually a documentary, and so should be exempt from union rules. The union cautiously agreed to at least discuss giving Coppola special consideration. Taking this for carte blanche, he wheedled some money out of Seven Arts and assembled a scratch crew with an old friend, Bart Patton, who became the film’s line producer.
Coppola based The Rain People on an incident from his childhood when his mother, after a family argument, left home and checked into a motel for two days. His heroine, Natalie Ravenna, is a married woman who, finding she’s pregnant, goes on the road to ‘discover herself She drives across country, picking up hitch-hikers, falling into relationships with people, only to shed them and move on. She discovers something about herself, but only at the expense of others. ‘Killer’ Kilgannon, a brain-damaged football player she picks up, calls her ‘a rain person.’ In one of Coppola’s more portentous lines, he explains, ‘The rain people are made of rain, and when they cry, they disappear, because they cry themselves away.’ In the end, after having been unable to help Killer, and watching him cheated and humiliated, Natalie stands by helplessly as he battles with Robert Duvall, a cop with whom she has become involved sexually, and Duvall’s daughter shoots him.
Killer was played by James Caan, who’d been at Hofstra University with Coppola, and had gone on to Hollywood stardom in Howard Hawks’s Red Line 7000 and El Dorado, and Robert Altman’s Countdown. Coppola flew Caan to Hofstra to shoot a crucial sequence: the football game in which Killer is injured. The trip delighted Lucas, as did the way Coppola brushed away the problems of guerrilla filmmaking as if they were fluff on his jacket. They couldn’t afford a cinematographer or lights? Why not shoot everything with a 16mm Bell & Howell, hand-held? It would look more authentic anyway. No sound recordist? Didn’t matter – George could record sound. George, as it turned out, could also carry the camera equipment, find props for the few staged scenes, act as production manager, and almost everything else.
It was a reminder to Lucas of his student film days, and of his time on the race-car circuit. Nothing could have been more different from the elephantine shoot of Finian’s Rainbow. This was surely the filmmaking of the future, an American nouvelle vague, distinguished by the qualities that François Truffaut had described as typical of American film-making – ‘grace, lightness, modesty, elegance, and speed.’ Walter Murch said, ‘I think for Francis and George, that film was the prototype. If they could operate making a film out of a storefront in Ogallala, Nebraska – and do it successfully – then there was no reason why they should live in Hollywood.’
But Coppola almost immediately chilled Lucas’s enthusiasm. How was the THX treatment going? Lucas confessed he hadn’t looked at it in weeks.
‘You’ve gotta learn to write,’ Coppola told him sternly. ‘Nobody will take you seriously unless you can write.’
Lucas explained that writing exhausted him, both physically and mentally, but Coppola told him he was going about it the wrong way. ‘He said, “Look, when you write a script, just go as fast as you can. Just get it done. Don’t ever read what you’ve written. Try to get it done in a week or two, then go back and fix it, and then go back through as fast as you can, and then go back and fix it – you just keep fixing it. But if you try to make each page perfect, you’ll never get beyond page ten.”’ He also suggested Lucas read Shakespeare, his own personal inspiration.
Coppola persuaded Warners to option THX for $3000, then told Lucas that that would be his salary for working on The Rain People. Throughout the shoot Lucas got up at 4 a.m., laboriously wrote a scene for THX, in pencil, in crabbed capitals in the sort of lined ‘blue books’ he’d used for school exams, then started the day’s work. Not all such stories have happy endings, however. ‘I finished it,’ says Lucas, ‘and showed it to him, and he said, “This is terrible. I think we ought to hire a writer.”’
Coppola found a playwright with some feature-film credentials prepared to work for very little, and set him to work rewriting the screenplay. Meanwhile, Lucas scrounged a 16mm camera and a Nagra tape recorder, and suggested making a documentary on the production. Coppola, a pushover for self-promotion, skimmed $12,000 from the publicity budget to pay for it.
Spending more and more time in New York while Marcia continued to work on commercials in Los Angeles was placing a strain on their relationship, and Marcia finally flew east in February 1968. One of Lucas’s jobs was scouting locations, and on a wet Sunday in February he took Marcia to the next one on his list, in Garden City, Long Island, and proposed to her.
In April 1968 Coppola went back to Hofstra to shoot another football game, and late in the summer the Rain People caravan of seven vehicles and twenty people started to roll across America. Lucas was on board, but not Marcia. At the start of filming, Coppola magisterially banned wives and girlfriends from the shoot, ignoring the fact that a VW van trailing the caravan carried his wife Eleanor, their two children and, as babysitter, a teenager named Melissa Mathison, later the screenwriter of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial and wife of Harrison Ford.
As well as the cast, the caravan included a recreational vehicle fitted with a Steenbeck so that editor Barry Malkin could cut the film as they went along. The cameraman was Bill Butler, who later shot Jaws for Steven Spielberg. Everyone kept in touch via two-way radio. Footage was airlifted to New York every day, and rushes normally caught up with them three days later – too late to reshoot if Coppola had second thoughts. In Ogallala, Nebraska, editor Malkin finally called a halt. He needed time to assemble the mountain of material, so the crew camped at the Lakeway Lodge while Coppola occupied an old shoe store downtown as a production office, where Malkin spent five weeks making a preliminary cut.
Lucas persuaded Coppola to hire Marcia as cutting-room assistant. When Lucas rang to tell her, he sensed some resistance. Haskell Wexler had asked her to work on his feature Medium Cool, which he was both directing and shooting against the background of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Once the convention became the focus of riots over the war in Vietnam, he’d had the audacious idea of setting a fictional story about a reporter at the heart of the disturbances, and shooting it with lightweight camera and fast stock, just like the cinéma vérité directors. Wexler’s invitation to work on the film excited and flattered Marcia, but she loved Lucas enough to turn it down and leave for Ogallala. Fortunately, Wexler delayed editing, so she was able to work on both films.
All the time, Lucas was shooting his diary of the production, snatching shots of Coppola which, in retrospect, showed him more revealingly than he had either expected or wanted. This Coppola is a blustering, filibustering dynamo, living on his nerves, inventing both the film and himself as he goes along, and relying on his imposing, near-biblical stature and commanding manner to steamroller any opposition.
The documentary shows him hectoring the Warners head office by phone, yelling, ‘The system will fall by its own weight! It can’t fail to!’ Later, he moans, ‘I’m tired of being the anchor when I see my world crumbling.’ Lucas also glimpsed the paper-thinness of this persona when Coppola decreed that everyone, himself included, should be short-haired and clean-shaven when they rolled into the midwest. (In Easy Rider, roughly contemporary with The Rain People, long-haired Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper are blown away by a redneck with a shotgun.) But Coppola without his patriarchal beard proved a different, less imposing person. Nobody took him seriously, not even the crew he’d dominated for so long. Some didn’t even recognize him. So startling was the change that Lucas had to add a line to the commentary of his documentary explaining the radical mass-depilation.
When there was time, Coppola and Lucas kicked around ideas for future projects. One was inspired by Medium Cool. Why not make a film about Vietnam the same way, shot like a documentary, on 16mm, in black and white, while battles were actually taking place?
Nobody now remembers who first thought of it – or, more correctly, everyone is certain that they first proposed basing such a film on Joseph Conrad’s short novel Heart of Darkness. In Conrad’s story, a man goes up the Congo River to investigate reports that Kurtz, the local agent for a Belgian trading company, has gone crazy and set himself up as a sort of god. He finds Kurtz ill and raving, and he dies with the words: ‘The horror! The horror.’
No factor of Coppola’s working methods complicated the making of The Rain People more than sex. It suffused the production. James Caan was a notorious seducer, an habitué of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion who boasted he’d slept with seventeen consecutive Playmates of the Month. Coppola was also, in the words of a friend, a ‘pussy hound.’ He would halt production to fly back to New York, supposedly for conferences but actually to pursue some new mistress.
On one occasion, Coppola abandoned the crew in Blue Ball, Pennsylvania, in a motel with no phone, TV, or restaurant. ‘I got a little angry about that,’ says Lucas. ‘Francis was saying all this “all-for-one” stuff, and he goes off and screws around in New York. He felt he had a right to do that, and I told him it wasn’t fair. We got into a big fight over it.’ Throughout all this, Coppola’s wife Eleanor stood by patiently, bringing up the children and accepting the sympathy of everyone.
Coppola fought too with Shirley Knight, his star. Knight, like her character Natalie, was pregnant, and her nerves were on edge. The semi-nude bedroom scenes, dictated by Coppola’s conception of Natalie as a woman looking to experience sex with other men before she settled down to motherhood, disturbed her. They wrangled over interpretation, over the problems of this kind of shooting. In reaction, Coppola trimmed her part and built up that of Robert Duvall. Knight protested, and the situation deteriorated still further, exacerbated by Coppola’s evident attraction to her.
The tensions increased as production went on. When Marcia came out to Nebraska to work on the film, Coppola took an obvious interest in her. ‘Everybody wanted Marcia,’ says John Milius. ‘Part of [Lucas’s] disagreement with Francis is, I’m sure, because Francis attempted to hit on Marcia, because he attempted to hit on the wives of everybody. But that was Francis. What was it Talleyrand said of Napoleon – “He was as great as a man can be without virtue”? Francis was for Francis – but Francis was great; a truly great man. He’s still my Führer.’
The production of The Rain People was as close to a honeymoon as Lucas and Coppola ever got. ‘George was like a younger brother to me,’ said Coppola, ‘I loved him. Where I went, he went.’ But Lucas was less sanguine. ‘My life is a kind of reaction against Francis’s life,’ he mused. ‘I’m his antithesis.’
All this would be grist to the Star Wars mill, but for the moment confidence was in the ascendant. Like everyone else on the unit, Lucas struggled to save The Rain People and Coppola’s reputation. He filmed some of the arguments between Coppola and Knight, but didn’t use them in his documentary. Francis had become his Führer too.
9 The March Up-Country (#ulink_7688ce2f-4532-5eed-9115-d051485b5de5)
We could leave, and live in the superstructure.
LUH, in THX1138. Script by Walter Murch and George Lucas
In Ogallala, the locals had been so flattered to have a film crew in town that they offered to convert a local grain warehouse into a sound stage. Despite his memories of those ‘Let’s do the show right here!’ musicals of the late thirties, Coppola declined, but it planted the idea of a decentralized film industry, not tied to Hollywood, in his mind.
Indirectly, Coppola brought the dream a giant step closer to fulfilment when he remembered he’d promised to deliver a speech in San Francisco to a forum of eight hundred high-school English teachers on ‘Film in Relation to the Printed Word.’ Claiming he was needed in Ogallala to tie up loose ends, Coppola persuaded Lucas to do it.
Speaking in public terrified almost all the New Hollywood directors, and Lucas more than most. When he and Spielberg planted their palmprints in the cement outside Mann’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard for the premiere of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984, Spielberg, urged by owner Ted Mann to make a speech, said awkwardly, ‘We had snakes in the last picture and bugs in this picture. But supposedly man’s greatest fear is public speaking, and that will be our next picture.’
That his audience would be made up of high-school teachers, of whom he had ambivalent memories at best, increased Lucas’s distaste for the chore; but such was Coppola’s influence that he flew back ahead of the crew to make the appearance, arranging to meet them in Berkeley the following week.
Another speaker at the convention was John Korty. Eight years older than Lucas, he’d worked his way through film school creating animated TV commercials. In 1964 he moved to Stinson Beach, just south of Bolinas, rented a big gray barn for $100 a month, installed some second-hand film equipment, and began making films. He’d produced and directed two independent features, including The Crazy Quilt (1966), for less than $250,000 each. They did well, too, and won festival prizes. After the convention, Lucas visited Korty’s operation, then rang Coppola in Nebraska. ‘You gotta see this,’ he said excitedly.
The Rain People caravan rolled into the Bay area on 4 July 1968. Radio and TV were still full of the news that Robert Kennedy had died in Los Angeles from gunshot wounds the previous month, less than two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis. The deaths of King and Kennedy drove home to Lucas and Coppola the deteriorating nature of big-city American society. As a character remarked in Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974), ‘Every time you turned around, someone just shot one of the best men in the country.’
Coppola and unit manager Ron Colby made a side trip to Stinson Beach to look over Korty’s operation, and within a week Coppola was the prophet of decentralization. He had seen the future, it worked, and it was in Northern California. ‘We started fantasizing about the notion of going to San Francisco,’ he said, ‘to be free to produce films as we had done on Rain People. It was a beautiful place to live, and had an artistic, bohemian tradition.’
In Korty’s simple enterprise, Lucas too glimpsed a movie business shaped precisely to his personality. Korty’s films were accessible, but not overtly commercial. He was removed from Hollywood, but still connected to the audience by the independent cinemas which had proliferated since the studios relinquished their hold on exhibition. Above all, this was a cinema without big stars and the problems they brought with them – problems Lucas had seen doing their damage on The Rain People.
Coppola, inevitably, was more grandiose. Working in a barn on worn-out Moviolas was bullshit. He had something more baronial in mind. This difference in scale would be another wedge driven between Coppola and Lucas, master and mentor.
Finian’s Rainbow was due for release on 9 October. Nobody expected it to live up to Warners’ inflated expectations. Early in August, Coppola gave a gloomy interview to the Hollywood Reporter, which headlined it: ‘Francis Coppola to Make Only Own Stories in Future.’ Shortly after, he told critic Joseph Gelmis: ‘It’s come to the point where I just want to get out altogether. I’m thinking of pulling out and making other kinds of films. Cheaper films. Films I can make in 16mm.’
With his salary on Rain People at an end, Lucas began editing his documentary about The Rain People, christened Filmmaker – or rather, filmmaker – and subtitled ‘a film diary’. He also picked up the strings of his friendships with people from USC. Charley Lippincott was finishing his PhD and running the USC film society, but many others were already working in the industry. Milius had just had his first script filmed. Coppola commissioned him (with Warners’ money) to write the adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness relocated to Vietnam. Lucas would direct it.
‘George and I would talk about the battles,’ says Milius, ‘and what a great movie it would make. He loved it because of all the technology, the helicopters, air strikes by Phantoms, the night-vision scopes and devices to detect people walking around at night, and I loved the idea of a war being fought that way. Of course, we hadn’t lost it then, so it was a little easier to be interested in it. We wanted a scene where the guys are doped out of their minds and they call in an air strike on themselves.’ The provisional title was Apocalypse Now, inspired by a button Milius had seen worn by a hippie that said ‘Nirvana Now:’ ‘I loved the idea of a guy having a button with a mushroom cloud on it that said, “Apocalypse Now.”’
Haskell Wexler had hired Walter Murch to mix TV commercials for a company he partly owned. In the autumn, Lucas suggested to Coppola that Murch, whom he hadn’t met, mix The Rain People. He got the two men together, and after one meeting Coppola pointed to the piled-up cans and said melodramatically, ‘Here’s the film. Cut the sound.’ Murch started work in a tiny house in Benedict Canyon. The fact that he didn’t belong to the union worried Murch more than it did Coppola, though he eventually found it an advantage. Too nervous to order sound effects from a library for fear that someone would demand to see his union card, he invented and improvised. The result was a quantum leap in the quality of movie sound. To cover the union problem, Coppola invented some new terms, ‘sound design’ and ‘sound montage,’ which conveniently obscured Murch’s activities.
Kinney Services, a conglomerate which made its millions out of parking lots, had bought Warner Brothers. Coppola mulled over a way of getting them to back his move to San Francisco. He found it in the experience of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, who’d made Easy Rider on a few joints and a shoestring, and who were now the hottest talents in Hollywood. As the novelist Joan Didion wrote, ‘every studio in town was narcotisized on Easy Rider’s grosses, and all that was needed to get a picture off the ground was the suggestion of a $750,000 budget, a low-cost NABET or even a non-union crew, and this terrific twenty-two-year-old director.’ Under ex-agent Ned Tanen, a close friend of editor Verna Fields, Universal had launched a program of ‘youth movies’ for under $1 million each. This initiative was to produce most of the worthwhile and commercially successful post-Easy Rider films by young directors, including American Graffiti.
Coppola was twenty-nine, with one dud to his credit and, if he was any judge, another one waiting to emerge in The Rain People, but he was ready to embrace the Easy Rider ethos if that’s what it took to relocate to San Francisco. He and Ron Colby flew to Cologne in the autumn of 1968 for the Photo-kina exhibition, which showcased the latest in film equipment. Dazzled by high-tech German gear, Coppola impulsively ordered an $80,000 Keller sound-mixing system and some cameras, not knowing where the money would come from to pay for them, nor in what premises he would install them.
In Denmark, they visited a company called Laterna Films. ‘I was thrilled to see a beautiful old mansion with gardens and trees that had been turned into a film company,’ Coppola said. ‘The many bedrooms had been transformed into editing rooms, the garage was a mixing studio; everywhere young people were working on their films, discussing their projects while eating lunch in the garden.’ He was particularly charmed by the collection of rare magic lanterns and early motion toys kept in the house. They illuminated a route back to the cinema’s earliest days, when movies were still a game, and film-makers took to the road whenever it pleased them, setting up studios in barns and improvising stories from the events of the day. He returned to California even more determined to leave Hollywood.
On 22 February 1969, George and Marcia married at the United First Methodist Church in Pacific Grove, near Monterey. John Plummer was best man. Coppola came, as did Murch, Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, and even Verna Fields. The newlyweds left for a honeymoon in Big Sur in Marin. Driving into Marin County, on the other side of San Francisco Bay, they fell for sleepy Mill Valley, a typical Northern California town, with redwoods and a river, and rented a small hilltop house on Vernal Road for $120 a month. Any thought of a career in Hollywood was forgotten. The future was here. Lucas was sure of it.
America was moving toward a more sensual, self-gratifying society, where sex and drugs were more important than rock’n’roll. 1969 saw the publication of I’m OK – You’re OK, The Sensuous Woman, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) and Portnoy’s Complaint. The year’s top tunes were songs from the show Hair. Its theme, sung by the Cowsills, and the 5th Dimension’s version of ‘Aquarius/Let the Sunshine in’, like the Beatles’ ‘Come Together,’ and Blood, Sweat and Tears’ ‘You’ve Made Me so Very Happy,’ promoted peace, happiness, free love and dope. In August, a six-hundred-acre pasture in upstate New York became the site of the cultural phenomenon called Woodstock. It was a good time to be alive, and there was no place better in which to be alive than Marin County.
The rewritten screenplay of THX arrived, and Lucas didn’t like it: ‘It may have been a good screenplay, but it wasn’t at all what I wanted to make into a movie.’ He shuffled together the exercise books containing his draft, and had them typed up in a legible form.
The Lucases’ Mill Valley house was small, with only one bedroom, but they had plenty of visitors from Los Angeles, curious to see what drew the smartest of their contemporaries to the rural wilderness. Richard Walter and his wife visited. So did Milius: ‘I remember going up there with my first wife, and sleeping on the floor, and eating this wonderful San Francisco bread, and the food, and all of us going out together and having a great time. They didn’t have any money, but it wasn’t a bad life. They didn’t suffer.’ But not suffering wasn’t the same as doing well, and Lucas felt the current was leaving him behind, especially when Marcia began getting work. She would have preferred to have a baby, but he shied away from any such commitment.
To open a production company in San Francisco, Coppola needed a film contract. He persuaded the new administration at Warners that he wasn’t to blame for the failure of Finian’s Rainbow. It was a product, he argued, of the old and outdated system fostered by Jack Warner, now swept away. The Rain People, on the other hand, was a movie for the new Warners.
It was a shrewd strategy. Warners-Seven Arts visualized itself as a studio for the decade of Easy Rider. Its boss, Steve Ross, was a silver-haired, smooth-tongued operator who had taken Kinney out of the mortician business into car hire by renting out at night the limos used for funerals by day. They moved into parking lots, despite the fact that this was a territory that had been associated with organized crime, and then diversified into movies. The studio head was Ted Ashley, a hot talent agent taking his first turn behind an executive desk. John Calley was his lieutenant. Their department for youth films and products was run by Fred Weintraub, who’d made a fortune selling clothing and entertainment to college audiences and running a chain of campus coffee shops.
Coppola played on Warners’ greed to sell them a radical proposal. Once his new company was up and running, he would guarantee them seven feature films, none costing more than a million dollars, the first of which would be the long version of THX1138, which he budgeted – seven being his lucky number – at $777,777. This would be followed by The Conversation, a Coppola original about surveillance experts, probably starring Marlon Brando as ‘the best bugger on the West Coast.’ He threw in scripts by Huyck and Katz, and Robbins and Barwood. Scratching for ‘go’ projects, he also offered Lucas and Milius’s Vietnam film Apocalypse Now.
For the make-or-break meeting, Coppola flew down to Los Angeles, but, Easy Rider-like, rode onto the lot astride a huge Harley Davidson. He was well prepared, with the help of Lucas, who gave Charley Lippincott $100 to create a montage of ‘underground’ films to show the Warners board. ‘We put together this presentation showing that it was going to be futuristic,’ said Lucas, ‘and outlining how we were going to be shooting it on location and such. And we put in there that we were going to develop this very unusual reality using “rotary-cam photography.” Fortunately nobody at the studio asked us what it was, because it was nothing.’
After this, Coppola moved in. He had a new movie ready to go, he told the suits. Here’s the script – he slammed down a draft of THX1138, which he’d barely read. Here’s the cast – except for Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasence, all were unknown, and none had yet been asked if they wanted to appear. ‘Where is the money?’ he asked them rhetorically. He departed in a roar of exhaust, leaving them to chew on his proposal. The next day, when he still hadn’t received the green light, he wired them: ‘PUT UP OR SHUT UP’ – or, in some versions, ‘SHAPE UP OR SHIP OUT.’
Warners did put up, but not as whole-heartedly as Coppola had hoped. They offered to lend – not advance or invest – $3.5 million, part of it in the form of $2500 a week seed-money while Coppola was setting up his company. If they liked THX1138, this sum could become a down-payment on the package. If they didn’t, Coppola would have to refund every penny. Given that he had no other offers, Coppola agreed.
Lucas received the news with delight. The way Coppola described it to him, the strings attached to Warners’ offer became thistledown. Immediately, he and Coppola, with Korty’s help, began visiting mansions in Marin County, looking for the future headquarters of the company. They made an offer on the Dibble estate in Ross, but while Coppola was raising the money, it went to someone else. The buyer already owned another mansion, and Coppola offered on that too, only to have the zoning commission refuse his application to transform it into a film studio.
Gradually, Coppola turned against the Laterna model. If he couldn’t find a mansion, maybe he should look for something in San Francisco itself – where, in addition, staff and services were more readily available. Dismayed, Lucas argued that the whole point had been to abandon city influences. He cited Korty’s rural retreat. All he wanted, he said, was ‘a nice little house to work in.’ But Coppola bulldozed him. The sound equipment would arrive shortly from Germany, and they must have a place to install it. Anyway, their working capital was all his, raised by selling his Los Angeles house and taking out substantial loans on the promise of a Warners deal.
Korty found a recording studio at 827 Folsom Street, in what locals derisively called the ‘warehouse and wino’ section of San Francisco, and Coppola leased three floors. Once Coppola had persuaded Korty to become the first tenant of their new facility, Lucas threw up his hands. Francis had won again.
Eleanor Coppola conceived and managed the décor of the new facility while Francis toyed with names. His first choice, ‘Transameri-can Sprocket Works,’ traded on the current taste for the Edwardian, which had hippie girls wandering Haight-Ashbury in Pre-Raphaelite braids and gypsy skirts, accompanied by men in crimson pre-World War I military tunics over jeans and sandals. Remembering Laterna’s magic lanterns, Coppola finally chose ‘American Zoetrope,’ after the optical toy of a spinning drum with vertical slits through which one glimpses dancing or running figures.
The Rain People, proudly bearing the American Zoetrope logo, opened on 27 August. Reviews were mixed, but Coppola brushed them aside, consumed by the fulfilment of his dream. The new company’s name not only implied that it could do everything from A to Z, but, once it was launched as a public company, would alphabetically give it a spot near the top of the share listings.
For the moment, however, nobody but Coppola owned any shares – not even Lucas, whom he grandly named vice president. Mona Skarger, one of the producers on The Rain People, became secretary-treasurer. Christopher Pearce was general manager. Jobs were also found for Bart Patton, Bob Dalva and Dennis Jakob, all cronies of Coppola, some going back to high school and Hofstra. Perhaps thinking of insinuating someone more personally loyal to him than to Coppola, Lucas offered the job of head of intellectual property – basically head of development – to Charley Lippincott, who turned him down. He didn’t want to move to San Francisco, nor to give up his ambition to make documentary films.
Being located in San Francisco had one definite advantage for Lucas and Coppola: few films were made there, and the local branch of IATSE, its hands full with mainly theatrical technicians, didn’t look too closely at who did what at Zoetrope. Cameramen could record their own sound, and even direct. The union listed Walter Murch as simply a post-production worker, a flexible term that could encompass editing, sound editing, even scriptwriting.
The day they took over the building, Coppola ordered everyone up on the roof and had them photographed: Korty, Carroll Ballard and an unknown guy – already names were being forgotten – each with a hand-held 16mm camera; Milius in sombrero and bandoliers; Warners’ liaison man Barry Beckerman; Lucas, almost unrecognisable in heavy beard and wide-brimmed black felt hat, like some middle-European anarchist; Bob Dalva, also with camera; Larry Sturhahn, later to be the producer of THX; Al Locatelli, its eventual production manager, incongruously playing a flute; Dennis Jakob, crouched behind an enormous piece of sound equipment. And of course Francis, dressed in a long double-breasted coat and a felt hat with turned-up brim, and clutching a zoetrope under his arm – the model for an allegorical statue in some Sicilian square of the town’s great explorer who had encompassed the world.
The sound equipment arrived, and was installed while carpenters were still sawing in the corridors. Walter Murch arrived on his BMW motorbike to supervise. For him, the chance to work on a state-of-the-art Keller system was more than enough reason to relocate to the Bay area. Able to handle seven separate strips of film in gauges from 8mm to 70mm, and video as well, it was the most advanced piece of equipment of its type in America – so advanced that when it broke down, an engineer had to fly in from Hamburg to fix it.
Word quickly spread of the radical new venture. Stanley Kubrick, cinema’s most famous recluse, corresponded with Coppola about special effects from his rural hideout in England. John Schlesinger said he wanted to rent space. Mike Nichols intended to invest. One night, Coppola was making coffee in the conference room when Orson Welles rang. He was thinking of making a film in San Francisco, he said. Awed, Coppola talked with him for half an hour, coffee pot in his hand, while the water overflowed from the sink and flooded the room.
American Zoetrope officially became an entity on 14 November 1969, when Coppola’s attorney filed the incorporation papers. The facility, though still far from ready, was opened by San Francisco’s Mayor Joseph Alioto on 13 December. Alioto announced that Coppola had already spent $500,000 on equipment, never mind staff. Except for John Korty, who was cutting his feature Riverrun, the only person actually working there was Haskell Wexler, who was shooting a huge rock concert being held at nearby Altamont with the Maysles brothers. He offered Lucas a few days’ work as a cameraman, and Lucas was there on the day when Hell’s Angels employed as security men murdered a member of the audience, Meredith Hunter. John Milius insists that Lucas shot the scenes of the killing which were later used in the documentary Gimme Shelter. Lucas says he can’t remember.
American Zoetrope became a target of pilgrimage. ‘It all looked too good to believe,’ said one early visitor, ‘terribly chic and terribly sincere, with leggy secretaries in crocheted miniskirts, $50,000 KEM and Steenbeck editing tables, Creative Playthings paraphernalia, bubbly chairs, and blowups of D.W. Griffith on the walls.’ The main reception area was dominated by a pool table and a silver espresso machine. Fabrics from the Finnish company Marimekko draped the walls, their purples, oranges and yellows echoed even in the décor of the freight elevator. Every Thursday night, Coppola screened classic movies, with a buffet of Chinese food. A lavish brochure in faux art-nouveau style promised films and facilities that combined the best of Europe and America, of Hollywood and the Bay area.
Prospective tenants soon found it was too good to believe. Zoetrope could only handle the kind of films Coppola wanted to make: mobile movies shot on location with hand-held cameras. There was no sound stage, and only minimal facilities for wardrobe and props. Coppola had recklessly paid $40,000 for a Mitchell BNCR camera which nobody could afford to rent, and bought a range of the latest lightweight Arri-flexes and portable tape recorders. His old mentor Roger Corman came to take a look. As well as being godfather to Coppola’s son Gio, he was an executor of his will. Coppola asked him what would happen to all this equipment if he died. Corman said, ‘I’ll put it all in a truck and take it down to LA, because you’re in the wrong city, Francis.’
Instead of presiding over a cinematic renaissance, Coppola found himself trying, without success, to supervise a tribe of vigorous young film-makers, all looking out for themselves. ‘Everyone was off in his own little corner, competing,’ recalls Carroll Ballard. $40,000 worth of equipment disappeared in the first year, and a number of company cars were cracked up. Desperate to put the facility in profit from the start, Coppola set rental rates that were high for the time: $175 a month for one of the seven cutting rooms, $240 a month for an editing machine to go in it, and correspondingly more for office services, production facilities and time on the Keller console. He was parsimonious when it came to funding the projects which would be Zoetrope’s lifeblood. To write and direct THX, Lucas would get only $15,000; but even that was not immediately forthcoming.
Lucas, fretting about being able to replicate the clinical emptiness of his student THX, wondered if he could shoot in Japan. ‘The idea was, it was this weird dictatorial society in the future,’ says Gary Kurtz, ‘and if it was totally alien as an environment to the audience, and it was in a foreign language, you might be able to believe in the isolation of the main characters. Well, nobody in Hollywood liked that idea.’ All the same, Coppola truculently announced Japanese locations as an accomplished fact. ‘George is going to direct it in his own way. I’m giving him my strength. I’m saying, “If you want me, you’ve got to give George Lucas his break.”’
Warners weren’t sure they wanted either of them, particularly when they got around to reading the script of THX1138. It had little real plot, aside from the idea of a man fleeing an overpowering society. There was no motivation. Nobody was characterized. The ending was ambiguous, THX climbing from a manhole into a world of which we see nothing except a huge sun and a solitary bird.
Lucas sulked. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘at the studio they don’t understand scripts; that they should look more like blueprints than novels. They don’t even know who [Marshall] McLuhan is over there.’ Nevertheless, he asked Walter Murch to help with the script, and they amplified the story where they could. ‘We just threw everything up in the air and watched it come down,’ said Murch. The setting was narrowed down to the twenty-fifth century. They sketched in some social background. Everyone is tranquillized, and their sex drive numbed by drugs. They wear only white, and their heads are shaved. Most, including THX – pronounced ‘Thex’ – who works on a production line assembling robots, have been grown parthogenetically, by artificial insemination, but his girlfriend LUH7117 – ‘Ler’ – is a ‘natural born,’ and therefore suspect.
A god, OMM, dark-eyed, Semitic, with a sensual mouth and a short black beard – the physical antithesis of his predominantly Caucasian subjects – watches unblinking from every wall. He offers benign moral supervision, urging: ‘Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents, and be happy.’ Citizens commune with him in electronic booths that also fulfil the function of psychoanalysts. A taped voice – Murch’s – welcomes them with ‘My time is yours,’ and responds to their pleas for help with anodyne recorded comments, and an absolution that ends in the exhortation to get back to work. Anyone who demands more is likely to be arrested and beaten by police, sometimes to death, on television.
Robots, uniformly tall, dressed in the black leathers and white helmets of Californian Highway Patrol motorcycle cops but with blank chrome faces – another gibe by Lucas at the bêtes noires of his adolescence – impose law and order. During the film we see one of these robots, malfunctioning, walk repeatedly into a wall. Another, ominously, is seen shepherding a tiny child into an elevator.
In the feature version, LUH seduces THX by reducing the medication that suppresses his sexual instinct. Previously satisfied with telecasts of ritual beatings and callisthenic-like dancing by a bald, naked black woman, THX is persuaded to make love to LUH. ‘It manages to have a lot of nudity in it,’ says Richard Walter of the film, ‘but to be anti-erotic. George’s work is extremely non-sexual. He is uncomfortable with sexuality’ – a view borne out by close-ups of LUH and THX’s pale, hairless bodies pressed together in joyless union.
Typical of Lucas’s later work, and of his life, the sexual initiative is taken by the woman. The film also has an undercurrent of homoeroticism. THX’s superior, SEN5241, played by British actor Donald Pleasence, is homosexual. His room-mate has just been ‘destroyed’ for unspecified reasons, and he reprograms the computer to have THX assigned to his living space.
LUH becomes pregnant, and both she and THX are arrested for drug evasion and sexual perversion. In the original screenplay, LUH is raped, then beaten to death on TV, but Lucas never shot these scenes, and we know no more of her fate than the fact that her name is reassigned to one of the countless embryos growing in ranked bottles in the city’s labs.
THX and SEN, convicted of interfering with the computer, are sent to a featureless white prison whose inmates remain out of fear of the surrounding formlessness, expending their energy in aimlessly plotting to escape. Exasperated, THX simply walks out, followed by SEN. In the white emptiness they meet SRT, a large, amiable black man convinced he isn’t real at all, but a ‘hologram’ who couldn’t make it on TV. They find their way back to the crowded corridors of the main complex, but SEN loses his nerve. Stumbling into the TV studio which broadcasts OMM’s image to the psychoanalysis booths, he humbly confesses his shortcomings to the poster-sized picture of the god stuck on the wall.
Awaiting arrest, he watches a group of children playing. All of them have bottles attached to an arm, from which ‘liquid education’ drips into a vein. One asks SEN to reconnect his tube, and he reminisces about the much larger containers through which one acquired knowledge when he was a boy. As the children gape in astonishment, the police arrive to take him away.
Meanwhile, THX and SRT steal jet cars, but the maladroit SRT can’t get his started, and when he does, promptly drives it into a pillar. THX rockets down a series of tunnels, pursued by the motorcycle police. At the end of the line he abandons the car and continues on foot. Lucas shot a scene in which THX falls into a garbage compactor and is menaced by a rat-like creature, but dropped it as unconvincing, only to recycle it in Star Wars. THX has less trouble with some scavenging Shelldwellers – bearded dwarfs, the progenitors of Star Wars’ Jawas, who live in tunnels – and starts climbing a huge ventilation vent towards what he calls ‘the upper positive place.’ Two police are close to catching him when, abruptly, Control calls off the pursuit: it’s exceeded its budget. THX emerges on the surface, where he faces a presumably hopeful sunrise.
Lucas visualized the film in Panavision format, but that would have meant hiring expensive equipment. He compromised with Techniscope, a format popular with cost-cutting European and Asian producers looking to achieve wide-screen without special lenses. It simply cut the frame in half horizontally, producing an image half the height of conventional 35mm and twice the width, which nevertheless could be blown up to normal 35mm in the lab. Its deficiency was obvious: with half of a 35mm frame filling the same screen area as a full frame, the image risked being dark and grainy. But the Technicolor labs could print Techniscope prints direct from the original by using a dye-transfer matrix, avoiding the need to make a negative, so the quality was excellent, and remained so until they abandoned this method.
Other inventors found equally ingenious ways around the patents on various wide-screen systems. Paramount embraced VistaVision (‘Motion Picture High Fidelity!’), in which the film ran horizontally through the camera, offering a larger image than conventional 35mm. The clarity was superb, but the fact that it needed special cameras and projectors limited its use. Special-effects technicians, who loved the system for its large negative size, would rescue and restore Vista-Vision cameras to shoot the next generation of science fiction films, including Star Wars.
Lucas was delighted to be directing his first feature film. His budget might not be much in Hollywood terms, but his family was astonished at his achievement at only twenty-five years old. On the other hand, directing was daily torture, a constant process of revision and improvisation, with the ten-week production period ticking off in his brain every instant.
San Francisco’s new subway, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART), was under construction, and Lucas persuaded them to let him shoot in the completed tunnels. Other sequences were shot in parking stations, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Centre in San Rafael, and at the Lawrence Livermore atomic energy laboratory. The tiny crew moved between locations in one of the vans in which Coppola had crossed the country during the shooting of The Rain People.
Robert Duvall from The Rain People played THX, and Maggie McOmie LUH. Veteran Ian Wolfe was one of the prisoners windily discoursing on the nature of freedom. Knowing Lucas’s discomfort with actors, Coppola told Ron Colby to choose people who wouldn’t need more than a hint from the director, but Lucas still wrangled with them. Using a technique he would continue on American Graffiti, he shot most scenes with two cameras simultaneously. ‘That captures emotional stunts it’s hard to get after the first take,’ says Duvall.
Coppola imposed his crony Larry Sturhahn on the film as producer. If Lucas could ever have been comfortable with any supervisor, it was certainly not Sturhahn, who, he charged, spent most of his time on the phone, and hung up only to interfere. Coppola later confessed that he knew the two men wouldn’t get on. ‘George,’ he said, ‘needed someone to hate.’ As long as he could direct his animosity towards Sturhahn, he wouldn’t be blaming Coppola.
The pressure of too little money and not enough time encouraged improvisation, some of it inspired. Lucas tinkered together models and fireworks to create the film’s few special effects, like an explosion on the robot assembly line. Nobody was happy to have their head shaved, as was required of the whole cast, and there was a shortage of extras until someone thought to approach the drug rehabilitation centres Synanon and the Delancey Street Foundation. Enrolment required addicts to shave their heads as a sign of commitment, and most were happy to earn a few days’ wages as extras in the film.
Working with limited lights and a hand-held camera fitted with a thousand-meter telephoto lens pushed Techniscope to its limits. Warners, who, as the financing company, automatically saw the daily rushes, began muttering about the photographic quality. There was a growing sense that Coppola had sold them a pig in a poke. They held off breaking openly with him for only one reason: Patton. Franklin Schaffner’s film of Coppola’s screenplay opened on 5 February 1970, and, despite reviews which fretted about its jingoism, proceeded to make a fortune. Anyone that good, reasoned some within Warners, was worth cutting a little slack. But only a little. Lucas characterized their attitude as: ‘We’re the king and you’re the serfs.’
The attic at Mill Valley became a cutting room, and Lucas spent most nights there with Marcia, editing. At the same time, Walter Murch cut the sound – ‘Not,’ Lucas agrees, ‘the way things usually were done.’ Traditionally, movie mixers aimed for clarity, arguing that most cinemas had such poor sound systems that the audience was lucky to hear anything. Lucas wanted THX1138 to have a ‘musical’ quality, which Murch took to mean a sense of continuous ambient sound, sometimes almost inaudible. The layering of sounds had always fascinated Murch, and he’d developed a technique called ‘air-balling,’ in which one sound envelops but never quite obscures another. Renaissance composers for the unaccompanied voice routinely employed this effect, which may be where Murch got the idea, but nobody had yet applied it to film. Murch’s experiments spurred Lucas to pioneer better cinema sound. The new system would be called ‘THX Sound,’ and its slogan would be, ‘The Audience is Listening.’
For the soundtrack of THX, Murch created, in his phrase, ‘a Dagwood sandwich of sound and music, with no clear split between them.’ Recorded music was slowed down, speeded up, played backward, mixed with natural sounds or those of machines. For the prison scenes, he used the bass note of a large room humming with machinery.
The credits of THX1138 ascend the screen, suggesting a steady descent underground, an idea borrowed from an inter-title in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Before them, Lucas inserted one minute from a trailer for Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940). Over scratchy, poorly-copied images of spaceships fizzing like firecrackers and a blond Buster Crabbe straight-arming aliens as if they’re the Notre Dame defensive line, the voice-over urges audiences to see how this American football hero copes with the threats of the twenty-fifth century – an implied comment that the future might be very different from the one imagined by Hollywood.
Lucas, probably coaxed by Murch, later justified the elaboration of THX1138 by calling it ‘a Cubist film – the story, the sound and the images were all views of the same thing simultaneously.’ He defended its didactic tone: ‘Everyone else calls it science fiction,’ he said. ‘I call it documentary fantasy. The film is the way I see LA right now; maybe a slight exaggeration. Duvall comes off drugs and discovers he’s been living in a cage all his life with the door open. It’s the idea that we are all living in cages and the doors are wide open and all we have to do is walk out.’
Marcia for one didn’t buy these justifications. She found the film cold, humorless, and arrogant – a summary of the negative elements of Lucas’s character. Coppola agreed. He would later tell Lucas to ‘write something out of his own life; something with warmth and humor that people can relate to.’ Even Lucas got the message. When he shot a few pick-up scenes in a Los Angeles studio and Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz came to watch, he told them, ‘I have an idea I’d love you guys to do. It’s a rock’n’roll movie and it takes place in the fifties and it’s about music and cruising and deejays.’ He sent them his notes, and over the next month they worked up a five-page outline of what Lucas had first entitled ‘Another Quiet Night in Modesto,’ but now preferred to call American Graffiti.
Preoccupied with the slide of American Zoetrope into anarchy and bankruptcy, Coppola took only a fitful interest in the progress of Lucas’s film. The first time Marcia showed him a completed reel, he simply shook his head and murmured, ‘Strange. Strange.’ After that, he didn’t see any more until the whole film was edited.
He was more concerned about extracting a long-term commitment to Zoetrope and its program from Warners, which summoned him to a meeting of the studio management on 21 November 1969. Ever the showman, Coppola created a ‘black box’ for each executive containing the screenplays for all seven proposed films, bound in black with the emblem of American Zoetrope. These boxes in turn went into a crate, ominously coffin-like, which two men carted into the Warners office.
They carted it out almost as quickly. Warners wanted no part of the projects, or of Coppola. His frantic pitch, handing round cigars and assuring them that he and he alone had the secret of making successful films, only alarmed them more. Even before he had seen any of THX1138, Frank Wells, head of business affairs, told Coppola they wouldn’t be putting up any more money, and they expected him to refund the $300,000 already spent. ‘Warner Brothers not only pulled the rug out from Francis,’ said Walter Murch grimly, ‘they tried to sell it back to him.’
10American Graffiti (#ulink_c5cc045b-b2b6-5b3f-aaee-d7f8a6c81bb2)
There’s no message or long speech, but you know that, when the story ends, America underwent a drastic change. The early sixties were the end of an era. It hit us all very hard.
George Lucas
The impact on American Zoetrope of Warners’ rejection was immediate. The weekly screenings and Chinese buffets ceased. Nescafé replaced espresso. The mini-skirted secretaries evaporated. Just as rapidly, support for projects drained away. Humiliatingly, Coppola had to tell Orson Welles he couldn’t make the film they planned. Stanley Kubrick no longer returned his calls. Without being asked, people packed up their offices and left. When those who stayed, like John Korty, found their rent soaring from $200 a month to $1000, they departed too.
Paradoxically, once Coppola abandoned his ambitious production plans and slashed his overheads, American Zoetrope began to turn a small profit. Film-makers on location in the area hired its cutting rooms, equipment, and vehicles. An advertising division made TV commercials for cooking oil and instant paella, and another department, Tri-Media, produced educational films; but none of these enterprises showed enough profit to eat into the mountain of personal debt.
