Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  Bob liked to do things in style; no one ever drank out of paper cups, always crystal. He never imbibed during the day. He was strictly an “Is it five o’clock yet?” kind of guy. In fact, the crew always knew they were on the last shot of the afternoon when he sent a prop man for his first glass of Cutty Sark. Altman could be a mean drunk. “Bob had a black side when he drank,” says Thompson. “He’d be in his cups, sitting around, telling stories, having a wonderful time, and all of a sudden the booze’d hit him, and he’d go after you—he’d kill you, across a room, he could just say, ‘Let me tell you something about yourself.... Your fucking personality is just...’ and you’d be in tears and leave. It got to the point where when I’d fix him a drink, I’d fill the glass with water, and then float a little scotch on the top, and very carefully take it over to him, so when he’d drink it, he’d think it was solid scotch.” Adds Litto, “Whatever you could say about Bob’s high life and fast living, I’ve never seen his lifestyle interfere with his work during that period. At five in the morning he was sobered up, at his office at six.”

  Altman loved to gamble and would often take off for Las Vegas on the spur of the moment. On one trip he was accompanied by a pal and his female companion. The friend entered Altman’s room at the Sands to find the director cavorting among $100 bills scattered about the rug. He had just won $5,000. According to the friend, Bob said, “I’ll give you one of these for your girl.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? You’re not getting her!”

  “I’ll give you two!”

  Altman took to grass like a guernsey. Thompson and his other friends were relieved. He’d get a relaxing high off weed without the nastiness that surfaced with booze. Altman flung himself headlong into the ’60s. He let his hair—what there was of it—go long, grew a beard, wore turtlenecks, caftans, ankhs, and beads.

  Despite the fact that he was set up in his own offices, the late ’60s was a dark time for Altman. He refused to do any more TV, determined to hold out for a feature. Meanwhile, he’d sit around with his pals watching old Combat episodes and guzzling Cutty Sark. He was gambling, trying to make enough off the track to get along, living off Kathryn’s child support payments. His drinking got worse. He would pass out in restaurants and have to be carried home.

  In 1968, Altman got That Cold Day in the Park through Litto. It was tough going. Says Litto, “Nobody wanted to make a picture with Bob Altman.” Finally, the agent corraled Donald Factor, heir to the cosmetic fortune, to finance it. Nicholson wanted to play the lead, but the director thought he was too old. Harold Schneider was the assistant director (Altman couldn’t stand him, fired him right away), and the picture was shot in Vancouver. Bob couldn’t help directing off the set, plucking the wings off the people around him. According to one source, he liked to play mind games. He was the kind of person who liked to stir the pot, betray a confidence to get a reaction, tell someone what someone else had said behind her back—making it up if necessary—just for the fun of it.

  ABOUT A WEEK after Calley took his new position, he got a telegram from San Francisco that said, “Shape up or ship out.” It was signed, “Francis Ford Coppola, American Zoetrope.” Coppola had a long-standing relationship with Warners, for whom he had done Finians Rainbow. It had been a disaster, and worse, a detour away from Coppola’s vision of himself as an auteur. He was determined to get back on track, get away from the back lot and make his own films his own way. When he was a child, his mother once disappeared after a quarrel with his father and spent two days alone in a motel. This incident became the kernel of The Rain People, which he wrote while he was working on Finians Rainbow, and directed in the summer of 1968. Coppola always believed in forcing the studio’s hand by spending as much of its money as he could until it had no choice but to commit. It worked with The Rain People, although in this case he used his own money to prime the pump. “To have had the guts to have plunked down $20,000 of his own was astonishing,” says Walter Murch. “That has been part of Francis’s genius all along, to walk not only out on the gangplank, but off the edge of it and seemingly not fall down but sort of hang there in space while the sharks are nipping at his heels, and he’s saying, ‘Come on out, it’s great.’” Eventually Coppola persuaded Warner-Seven Arts to back it. “Francis could sell ice to the Eskimos,” Lucas said admiringly. “He has charisma beyond logic. I can see now what kind of men the great Caesars of history were, their magnetism.”

  Like Easy Rider, The Rain People chronicled a cross-country trek, albeit in the opposite direction, from east to west. Like Hopper and Fonda, Coppola and Lucas realized movies no longer had to be shot and edited in Hollywood. The new, lightweight equipment meant that they could just get on the road and look for the “real” America, shooting real stories about real people. (Coppola was careful to refer to The Rain People as a documentary so he wouldn’t have to use a union crew.) The crew, no more than twenty-odd people, bundled themselves into vans and headed out of New York. Among them was a skinny teenager named Melissa Mathison, who would go on to marry Harrison Ford and be nominated for an Oscar for writing E.T. Melissa had been baby-sitting the Coppolas’ kids since she was twelve, and was busy arranging three-legged races while the guys talked film.

  In the documentary Lucas shot about the making of The Rain People, he catches Francis on the phone to the studio, screaming, à la Hopper, “The system will fall by its own weight! It can’t fail to!”

  On the road, Coppola and Lucas had conversations that sounded not too different from those between Schneider and Rafelson. “Francis saw Zoetrope as a sort of alternative Easy Rider studio where he could get a lot of young talent for nothing, make these movies, hope that one of them would be a hit, and eventually build a studio that way,” said Lucas. “It was very rebellious. We had very off-the-wall ideas that never would have been allowed to infiltrate the studios. Zoetrope was a break away from Hollywood. It was a way of saying, ‘We don’t want to be part of the Establishment, we don’t want to make their kind of movies, we want to do something completely different.’ To us, movies are what counts, not deals and making commercial films.” Added John Milius, who stayed in L.A. but would revolve around the gravitational field of Zoetrope, “Francis was going to become the emperor of the new order, but it wasn’t going to be like the old order. It was going to be the rule of the artist.”

  After he wrapped The Rain People, Coppola took off for Denmark, where he visited a company, Laterna Films, housed in a mansion by the beach, filled with state-of-the-art equipment and stunning girls. His fate was sealed. At a trade fair in Cologne, he made an impulse purchase of new, flatbed KEM editing consoles and sound mixers for $80,000. He had no money to pay for them and no place to put them.

  Coppola’s wife Eleanor did not want to raise her kids in the Hollywood lifestyle; Francis didn’t want to live in the shadow of the studios, and was particularly unhappy with their lock on post-production sound. He had an intuition that in the hands of creative people, sound could make a much greater contribution to filmmaking. They chose San Francisco. “I think Francis left L.A. because he didn’t want to be a small fish in a big pond,” says Marcia Lucas, who moved up north with George to take part in the experiment. “I think he wanted to be a big fish in a small pond.” In any event, Francis set up the temporary headquarters of American Zoetrope in the fall of 1969 in two floors of a warehouse at 827 Folsom Street. They hired hippie carpenters to frame the walls who were so stoned on acid that the next day the Sheetrock had to be ripped out because it was off plumb. Ellie chose orange cloth to cover the walls and royal blue for the furniture. There were transparent inflatable plastic couches she had purchased in Europe. Coppola installed a pool table and an espresso machine. Antique zoetropes (primitive viewing devices) were tastefully displayed in Mylar cases behind the receptionist. Francis’s office was decorated in Swedish modern—Eames chairs on a gold-colored rug. There were editing rooms, and space for an art department, wardrobe, props, and sound dubbing. The core
group, all of whom moved up from L.A. with their families, included Lucas, who was vice president, and Murch. As flamboyant as Coppola was, there was one rule at Zoetrope—no drugs—which distinguished the company from the weed-wacked BBS.

  Coppola continued to dazzle the young filmmakers he had gathered around him. Murch sound-mixed The Rain People at Folsom Street on the new German machine. Something went wrong with it, and after they all stood around for a while scratching their heads, Francis said, “I betcha it’s the capacitor. Gimme a soldering iron.” To Murch’s astonishment, Coppola dropped to his hands and knees and crawled under the mixing console, took out one of the capacitors, and soldered on a new one. Says Murch, “He was not somebody who said, ‘Let’s bring in an expert to fix it.’ You had to admire a guy who not only wrote, produced, directed, but was able to figure out what was wrong and patch it up, which was beyond my ability, even though I was the sound mixer.”

  Francis had a serious impact on Lucas, always telling him he was a genius, building his ego. According to Marcia Lucas, “George was not a writer, and it was Francis who made him write, said, ‘If you’re gonna be a filmmaker, you have to write.’ He practically handcuffed George to the desk.” Francis was always after him, insisting he would have to learn how to talk to actors. But it soon became clear that George’s and Francis’s notions of what the new company should be differed radically. If Francis wanted to create a countercultural MGM, all George wanted was a roof over his head where he could gather his friends and re-create the USC experience. Their clashing styles were a source of friction. “My life is a kind of reaction against Francis’s life,” Lucas explained. “I’m his antithesis.” Francis was large and bulky, Lucas small and frail. Francis was emotional, George, reserved. Francis was reckless, George, cautious. Francis was collaborative to a fault. Lucas had a vision he defended fiercely. Where Francis would delegate, Lucas was a control freak, would have done everything—write, shoot, direct, produce, and edit—himself. No matter how little money Francis had, he always acted like a man with more. No matter how much money George had, he always acted like a man with none. Coppola referred to him disparagingly as the “seventy-year-old kid.” Countered George, “All directors have egos and are insecure. But of all the people I know, Francis has the biggest ego and the biggest insecurities.” Still, Francis was probably the best friend the shy and socially maladroit Lucas would ever have.

  AFTER CALLEY RECEIVED Coppola’s telegram, he called Francis, asked him what he was up to. The director explained that he had gathered a bunch of talented former USC and UCLA students in a new company. He particularly talked up Lucas, told Calley he was a “gigantic talent,” and pitched THX 1138, a feature based on Lucas’s student short that Francis had promised to produce. “George was like a younger brother to me,” says Coppola. “I loved him. Where I went, he went.” Coppola persuaded Calley to give him $300,000 for developing ten or so screenplays that he referred to as his “multipicpac,” which included his own script for The Conversation, and others by his film school pals Willard Huyck, Carroll Ballard, Matthew Robbins, Hal Barwood, and so on. He also convinced Calley to back THX, and give him another $300,000, to finance the start-up of Zoetrope. (In addition, he tossed into the pot a John Milius script called Apocalypse Now that he had absolutely no relationship to, except that Lucas, who was attached as director, had told him about it.) He assured Warners that he would take responsibility for the financial controls, be the daddy, the big brother, the bridge between the studio and the kids who trusted him but would not have anything to do with the studio.

  Barry Beckerman was assigned to baby-sit Coppola for Warners, but such was Francis’s personal charm that Beckerman went over to the other side. “Francis had this Mansonesque effect on all of us,” he recalls. “If he’d told me to stab Ashley, I probably would’ve stabbed Ashley.” The one thing Coppola knew how to do really well, right from the beginning, was spend money. Adds Beckerman, “As Francis always said, it takes no imagination to live within your means.”

  Coppola told Warners he wanted to do personal films, like Fellini and Antonioni. He submitted an autobiographical script, but Warners was not impressed. “Frankly, it was puerile, just boring,” says an executive who read it. “It was not Antonioni, it was Anthony Quinn, and made me feel that he wasn’t terribly interesting as a person making films about himself. He was a wonderful filmmaker, but not an auteur.”

  The Zoetropeans couldn’t live by dreams alone, and they had to struggle to stay alive. It wasn’t long before the experiment began to turn sour. Equipment disappeared. The company was often unable to meet payroll. Much to Coppola’s chagrin, some of the employees tried to unionize. Coppola was not sympathetic. “The feeling from working for Francis is tough shit if you don’t think you’re getting paid enough or if you don’t think your working conditions are good enough,” said Deborah Fine, a former Zoetrope librarian. “There’s a million people out there that would kiss the ground to work for him for nothing.”

  ONE DAY, when Altman was hanging out in Litto’s office, the agent handed him a screenplay, saying, “This is written in a style that might appeal to you. Read it.” It was M*A*S*H. The writer, Ring Lardner, Jr., was just emerging from the shadow of the blacklist. Litto saw a similarity between the feel of the piece and the material Altman liked to do. Altman called a day or so later and said, “This is great. Can you get me the job?” Litto replied, “I don’t know. Probably not.” Fox was an old-line studio that still liked to work with producers. Ingo Preminger had a deal there, and Richard Zanuck had given him the green light on M*A*S*H. Lots of directors, including Friedkin, had turned it down. Litto showed Preminger some of Altman’s work. Preminger liked what he saw, and decided to take a flier on the director. Litto negotiated the deal, $125,000, and 5 percent of the picture. But when Fox heard that Preminger wanted to hire Altman, they went through the roof. He was still infamous for a TV show he did nearly a decade earlier that had gotten the studio into hot water. One of the Fox executives expressed the general feeling at the studio: “You’re making a deal with trouble!” Owen McLean, Zanuck’s business affairs guy, was a tough nut. McLean called Litto, said, “George, I have a memo here that Ingo, without authorization, made a deal with you for Bob Altman. We cannot stand behind this because Ingo was not—”

  “All I know is I made the deal, Owen. I’m just a humble agent. Just tell me what you have to say and I’ll transmit your proposal to my client.”

  “You’re full of shit, George, but here’s the deal: $75,000 cash, take it or leave it. Don’t come back and try to negotiate with me. That’s what he gets if he wants to do the picture.”

  Litto called Preminger, said, “McLean is trying to provoke me. He doesn’t want Bob to do the picture.”

  “What are you going to do, George?”

  “I’m going to make the deal, and if the picture’s great, I’m depending on you to fix it later.” Litto called Altman, told him the terms. Altman was furious. Litto said, “Bob, you really want to fuck ’em?”

  “I’d love to fuck ’em.”

  “Okay, take the deal. You’ll make a great picture. I’ll make you rich on the next one, all right?” The director acquiesced. Litto never did make Altman rich. But he came close, and would have succeeded had Altman not indulged in his propensity to shoot himself in the foot.

  Altman had a deal. But Lewis “Doc” Merman, head of physical production, was going to make sure Altman knew his place. He said, “This guy’s not gonna run roughshod over us.” Despite the inroads New Hollywood directors were making in the front office, the heads of physical production, as well as the department heads—camera, lighting, sound, editing, and so on—were old-line veterans set in their ways. They insisted that movies be shot the way they had always been shot, which meant with studio equipment, no matter how obsolete or ungainly, operated by union crews. They didn’t care that movies could now be produced cheaper and faster with small, often local crews and lightweight equipment. In fact, i
nexpensive methods threatened their turf. Hopper was right when he said that pictures that cost under a million dollars undermined the whole system. Angry, Altman scrawled a note that read, “M*A*S*H is not going to be directed by Robert Altman,” and stuck it to his bathroom wall. One night, Kathryn called Litto’s home in Benedict Canyon. “I have terrible news,” she said. “Bob was up all night. He’s not going to do the picture.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He’s on his way to see you right now to tell you he’s not going to do the picture. I don’t know what we’re going to do. We’re so far in debt.”

  “Kathryn, relax. He’s going to do the picture.”

  “How do you know he’s going to do the picture?”

  “Because he owes me too much fucking money not to do the picture.”

  Altman pulled up in the driveway, walked in the door. “George, I don’t want to do the picture. First it’s sixty-five days, now it’s forty-five days. Boy, I can’t stand this shitheel Merman. He wants me to start a shot here, as the guy walks out the door. I cut, and three weeks later I shoot the other piece. I had a great time making Cold Day in the Park, no fucking bosses around.”

  “I know you really liked that. But Don Factor still don’t have his money back, and it was only five hundred fucking grand.”

  “But he won’t let me make the movie the way I want to make it. I’ve gotta pick my own cameraman. I need my own art director. I want to shoot off the lot in England, Seattle, or—”

  “Fox’s Malibu Ranch. It’s off the lot.”

  “Okay, the Malibu Ranch.”

  “You know what? You haven’t said anything here that I think is unreasonable or outrageous. Why do you think they won’t give you this?”

  “Doc fucking Merman...”

  “Doc fucking Merman is not your producer. You have to talk to Ingo.” Preminger saw to it that Altman got what he wanted.