Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  COPPOLA AND BOGDANOVICH were the same age. Francis was born on April 7, 1939, in Detroit, while dad Carmine was playing the flute on the Ford Sunday Evening Hour radio show; thus his middle name. He was sandwiched between his older brother, August, who was brilliant and handsome, the Renaissance prince, and young Talia, his father’s favorite. Francis recalled that his mother would say, “ ‘Augie’s the bright one, Tallie’s the beautiful one, Francie’s the affectionate one.’ And it was true.”

  Carmine had been a child prodigy, whose instrument was the flute. He hit his peak in his twenties, and went downhill from there, once bottoming out by playing the piccolo at the track with a Nedick’s hat on his head. Like many people who flee from what they’re best at, Carmine took his talent for the flute for granted, and longed to spread his wings, compose symphonies or conduct opera.

  Carmine was the “maestro,” and his wife, Italia, catered to his every whim. The emotional life of his family turned on what Francis later called the “tragedy” of his father’s career. Coppola once said of his father, he was “a frustrated man who hated anybody who was successful.” Remembers Talia, “All of us felt guilty, about being young, about having our own lives. I thought, How can I go to school, how can I be happy, how can I be anything, with my poor father not doing well. It’s a terrible thing when you feel that your success is occurring when someone close to you is experiencing failure.”

  Carmine and Italia did not want any of their children to go into the arts. “For my generation, the biggest thing for Italians was to be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, get married,” says Tallie. “In high school, when Francis wanted money to direct a film with a little Kodak camera, my mother wouldn’t give it to him, and I went to the janitor, who gave me a quarter to help him.”

  Because the family moved from city to city, Coppola was the perennial new kid in class, with a girl’s name, yet, the class donkey. Truly an unprepossessing adolescent, he was skinny and graceless, with floppy ears, a cleft chin, and glasses. He compared himself to Ichabod Crane, was eaten up with self-loathing, mortified by an imagined physical anomaly. “I used to go into school with my glasses off and face covered, I was so embarrassed about my lower lip,” he said. “My mother wanted me to get a lip job to make my lips skinny.”

  When he was eight or nine and living in Jamaica, Queens, Francis was struck by polio. He spent nearly a year in bed with his legs paralyzed, in quarantine. Polio was a killer, and none of his friends could or would visit him. Tallie remembers them crossing the street to avoid her. “All the kids just vanished,” Francis recalls. “I basically didn’t see a kid for a year and a half.” The family was terrified. “I remember my mother and father crying,” he continues. “I had never seen my father cry before. I was shocked when I tried to stand up and I couldn’t. They sent me off to some hospital in Jamaica. The kids were three high in beds in the hallways and the bathrooms. My doctor said, ‘You know, you’re a young soldier, and you have to understand that you’re not going to be able to walk again.’”

  Francis recovered from his illness, but he never regained his agility. One leg was shorter than the other, and he felt branded. He says, “A lot of my getting into the movie business stems from me feeling this isolation, and since I wasn’t good at sports anymore, I gravitated to the theater, because theater, like athletics, is something that you do after school and you make friends and you have parties.”

  Coppola graduated from Hofstra College at the end of the ’50s, and enrolled in UCLA Film School. In 1963 he wrote and directed Dementia 13 for Roger Corman in Ireland. Even then, before the ’60s really took hold, his friends at UCLA were scandalized. “I was called a cop-out because I was willing to compromise,” he remembered. On the set, he ran into a friend of a friend, Eleanor Neil, an artist and a tapestry-maker. With a pale, WASPy look and long brown hair parted in the middle, she was a bit of a hippie, wore a leather Eisenhower jacket, beads, and long skirts with odd combinations of color, purples and oranges. She was everything he was not, the porcelain Polly Platt to his olive-skinned Bogdanovich, and he hired her as the art director. He was three years her junior. They were married in February 1963.

  The same year, producer Ray Stark hired Coppola, then twenty-four, to rewrite Reflections in a Golden Eye. He quickly became the house writer for Seven Arts, working on scripts for pictures like This Property Is Condemned, and Is Paris Burning? He was filled with dreams, but with an ambivalence that would run through his career, he expressed a qualified willingness to work within the system. “The way to come to power is not always to merely challenge the establishment, but first to make a place in it and then challenge and double-cross the establishment,” he said. “You have to set your sights and be unscrupulous.”

  In 1966, he began working on a script for a movie of his own, You’re a Big Boy Now. Bored with the hack work he was doing for Seven Arts, he quit. Using the tricks he had learned from Corman, and breaking all the rules, Coppola shot You’re a Big Boy Now the same year at the tender age of twenty-seven. Like the Monkees, it was either a homage to, or rip-off of, Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night, depending on your point of view. After he had finished, Coppola walked the streets of New York with his head high and chest out, feeling pretty good about himself. Then, someone told him, “There’s another young director who’s made a feature, and he’s only twenty-six.” “What?” screamed Francis in dismay. “I was so shocked. It was Willie Friedkin.” When Coppola’s film opened in March of 1967, the L.A. Times ’s Charles Champlin wrote words that expressed Coppola’s innermost longings: You’re a Big Boy Now “is one of those rare American things, what the Europeans call an auteur

  film.”

  Coppola installed himself and Eleanor in an A frame in Mandeville Canyon, and bought a Jaguar. Friedkin was a frequent visitor, and Francis tried to fix him up with Tallie. Recalls Friedkin, “Francis was always the first to hear about a new piece of equipment. He bought a new lightweight Arriflex, said, ‘Look at this, this is what Godard uses and this is how we’re all gonna make films someday, and all this big shit is gonna disappear and we’re gonna be free to tell our stories in the street.’”

  In the fall of 1970, Coppola met Martin Scorsese at the Sorrento Film Festival. Scorsese was an intense kid from New York who had an encyclopedic knowledge of film and spit out his words like machine-gun bullets. He was small, bearded, and long-haired. Francis—large, bearded, long-haired, and also from New York—looked like his older brother. The two men became fast friends.

  WOODSTOCK, released in 1970, had become such a big hit for the new Warners management that Fred Weintraub tried to repeat the trick by dropping a million or so dollars on a bunch of hippie rockers to drive across the country in a caravan of buses, giving free concerts and generally doing their thing, while a crew filmed their antics. The first editor had mucked it up, and Weintraub summoned Scorsese, whom he had met when the young film school graduate from New York was editing Woodstock, to recut it.

  When he arrived in January 1971, Scorsese came down with a serious case of culture shock. “I had a really hard time adjusting to L.A.,” he recalls. “Even living by myself. I was basically a kid, very sheltered. Food, I had no idea. Driving, forget it.” The freeways terrified him. He drove his 1960 white Corvette on local streets only. His asthma got worse. He was in and out of the hospital, couldn’t go into a room in which someone was smoking, kept an oxygen tank by his bed. “I never really got much sleep at night because of waking up coughing,” he recalls. “I had mounds of tissues around the bed in the morning. By the time I got past an attack in the middle of the night, took an asthma pill and fell into a really deep, peaceful sleep, it was time to get up again. So I was always a little cranky, never quite all there. Wherever I went, I was always late.”

  Scorsese medicated himself with an inhaler, and he gained a lot of weight as a result of the junk food he was eating and the cortisone he was taking. Says Don Simpson, who met him on the Warners lot, “What he was taking wa
s basically speed. Marty was always saying, ‘Here, you want a hit of this?’ One hit, you were just flying. I finally realized why he was so hyper, because he had the inhaler to his nose day and night, which is why he could stay up for days on end talking about movies and music, more about music than movies. He had this rock’n’roll head, knew every lyric and every title. He understood that the music was really a critical aspect of the Zeitgeist of the times.”

  The only two people Scorsese knew in L.A. were John Cassavetes and Brian De Palma. Scorsese had met De Palma at NYU, the summer of 1965, the year The Sound of Music cleaned up at the box office. The two men had adjacent editing stalls. De Palma was already a legend for the struggling filmmakers in New York. He had several independent features under his belt—Greetings and Hi, Mom/, featuring a very young Robert De Niro. When Weintraub called him in the spring of 1970 and asked him to direct a picture for Warners called Get to Know Your Rabbit, the director joined the exodus to L.A. He dropped in on Jennifer Salt, a young actress and friend he had used in a couple of movies. (She was the daughter of blacklisted screenwriter Waldo Salt, who wrote Midnight Cowboy.) Salt was staying with actress Jill Clayburgh, who was in town from New York doing Othello at the Mark Taper Forum. Salt recalls, “We were all sitting on the beach, and I said, “I’m going to move out here.’ Brian said, ‘Me too. Come on, let’s take this town by storm.’ The feeling was, we were kids and we were going to take over Hollywood.”

  Get to Know Your Rabbit starred Tommy Smothers. It was alike in spirit to Greetings, another installment in the mini-cycle of dropout films that included A Thousand Clowns and The Trip, and seemed to suit De Palma’s temperament. But the New Hollywood directors were not proving so easy for the studios to assimilate. Brian knew Rabbit wasn’t working, wanted another week to shoot. Warners said, “You’ve had your time, forget it.” De Palma wanted to innovate, use 16mm footage. Warners told him he was crazy, “We don’t do things that way here.” Recalls Scorsese, who was on the lot at the same time, “We were fighting to open up the form. Our idea was, the lighter the camera the better. You could move faster, break down a location faster, get the lights off the ceiling faster. We weren’t equipped to shoot in studios, didn’t come from the studio tradition.”

  Warners was not sympathetic. “Brian De Palma was a monster,” says Calley. He threw him off the picture, and it was recut and released, just barely, in 1972. Says De Palma, “I always felt Warners had a certain kind of elitist arrogance to it that started with Calley and Ashley—these guys were somewhere in the ether. They talked to Stanley Kubrick and Mike Nichols, and we were obviously not important.”

  THE DAY AFTER Bluhdorn hired Coppola to direct The Godfather in 1970, the director and family celebrated by sailing for Europe on the Michelangelo with no more than $400 and a bunch of credit cards belonging to his assistant, Mona Skager. He commandeered the bar on the ship as his office, broke down the book, and pasted the pages all over the windows.

  The studio had assigned the film to Al Ruddy, who, with his associate producer, Gray Frederickson, a bluff, fun-loving Oklahoman, had done another Easy Rider rip-off, Little Fauss and Big Halsy, the only movie Paramount had produced in recent memory that had come in under budget. Ruddy discovered that Coppola was not so pliable as the studio had assumed. The young director fought for period setting (the ’40s, which was the time frame in the novel), fought to shoot in New York, fought for a larger budget—and won. His stub-born refusal to cave in to Paramount’s demands, together with the book’s long-term lease on the best-seller list, brought the studio around, transformed the film from a low-budget quickie into something very different.

  After hitting a wall with BBS, Fred Roos had gravitated to Coppola, whom he helped with the casting. Roos had a positive genius for matching the right face in the right role, and he too planned to draw heavily on the pool of New York theater- and TV-trained ethnic actors for The Godfather. He and Coppola used a lot of nonactors as well, just because they looked right, like a former wrestler, Lenny Montana, known as the Zebra Kid, just out of New York’s Rikers Island prison, who played Luca Brasi. Coppola, like Altman, like Bogdanovich, like the other New Hollywood kids, didn’t care about marquee names. “I was not looking for stars,” he says. “I was looking for people who would be believable to me as real Italian-Americans, who don’t talka lika Luigi, and have New York accents as opposed to Italian accents.”

  Evans, who was a celebrity himself, did believe in stars, and as The Godfathers profile rose, he took a sudden interest in the casting. After all, this was a studio picture, Coppola was a nobody, a pisher, and Evans expected to call the shots the same way he had on Love Story and his other movies. But even so, such was the sense of entitlement enjoyed by the directors of this generation, that Evans was unable to impose his whim even on someone as powerless as Coppola. The casting of The Godfather was a battle between the Old Hollywood approach of Evans, and the New Hollywood ideas of Coppola. Everyone had a candidate for every part, and no one seemed to have the ultimate authority.

  According to James Caan, who had appeared in The Rain People, Coppola’s initial wish list consisted of himself for Sonny, Robert Duvall for Hagen, and Al Pacino for Michael. Pacino in particular was anathema to Evans. Although The Godfather was written as an ensemble piece, it was Michael who was going to have to carry the picture, and Evans worried that Pacino couldn’t do it. He was unknown, short, and looked no more like a movie star than Michael J. Pollard or Gene Hackman. Evans suggested Redford, Beatty, Nicholson, even his pal Alain Delon, and kept referring to Pacino as “that little dwarf.” Recalls Coppola, “They told me Al was too scruffy and looked too much like a gutter rat to play a college boy.” Every time Coppola finished a conversation with Evans, he hammered the phone, smashing it with the receiver. Pacino did little to help his own cause. Indeed, the young actor impressed nobody but Francis. While Pacino waited to see the director at the Zoetrope offices on Folsom Street, he wore a groove in the carpet nervously pacing around the pool table. He refused to look anyone in the eye, keeping his gaze cast down at the floor.

  Meanwhile, Coppola began scouting locations. He ate pasta at the table of Scorsese’s mother and father in Little Italy. “He recorded my father’s voice to listen to the accent,” Marty recalled. “My mother was constantly giving him casting suggestions. One night at dinner she told him she wanted Richard Conte in the picture, and he put him in. Another time, she asked him how many days he had to shoot, and he said, ‘A hundred days.’ She said, That’s not enough.’ I said. ‘Mom, don’t get him terrified!’”

  But the casting problems wouldn’t go away. Decisions were made and un-made. Who would play the Don himself? Coppola wanted Marlon Brando, but Brando was out of favor. His antics in Mutiny on the Bounty were legendary—he was reputed to have given the clap to half the women on Tahiti, where the film was shot. He was hugely overweight, and worse, his most recent picture, Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn!, had flopped.

  Undismayed, Coppola tried to sell Brando to the Paramount executives at a fractious meeting at the headquarters of Gulf + Western in New York. When he brought up Brando’s name, Stanley Jaffe, prematurely bald and pugnacious, slammed his fist on the table and announced that the actor would never play the Don as long as he was head of Paramount Pictures. Whereupon the director appeared to have an epileptic fit, and dramatically collapsed in a heap on the floor, as if rendered senseless by the stupidity of Jaffe’s diktat.

  Shaken, Jaffe gave in. Coppola videotaped Brando transforming himself into Don Corleone by putting Kleenex in his mouth and shoe polish on his hair. “I knew it was a waste of energy to talk to Ruddy, even Evans, and that it was Bluhdorn who didn’t want him, so I went to New York,” the director recalls. He set up a half-inch videotape playback machine on Bluhdorn’s conference room table and went into his office and said, “Could I just see Mr. Bluhdorn a minute?”

  “Francis, vat are you dooink?” Bluhdorn poked his head into the conference room and looked at the
video screen, saw Brando putting up his blond hair, and barked, “No! No! Absolutely not, I don’t vant a crazy guy!” and started to leave the room. But he turned back for a moment, just when Brando began to shrink in his skin like a deflated balloon. He gasped, “Who are ve vatchink? Who is dis olt guinea? Dat’s terr-iff-ic!” Coppola got his man.

  Francis and George Lucas discussed the pressures that the studio was exerting on Francis. George said, “Don’t try to make this into one of your films. Just roll over and let them do it to you. Trying to win a game of poker with the devil, they’ll crush you, and you won’t get the money you need to make the films we want.” But it was too late. Coppola was deeply immersed in Mafia lore, had scouted locations, had made the picture his own. And then there was the biggest incentive: to fuck Evans. According to Roos, “Early on, Francis said about Evans, ‘This guy’s an idiot. Ninety percent of what he says is stupid.’ He handled him. Tolerated him.”

  Eventually, Evans gave in. “Four months later, after all this tension, I ended up with my cast, Brando and Pacino,” Coppola says. “If I hadn’t’ve fought, I would have made a movie with Ernest Borgnine and Ryan O’Neal set in the ’70s.” But Coppola was exhausted. Recalls Bart, “Evans made Francis’s life miserable. Bob took his preparation time shooting fucking tests. Francis didn’t have time to think about the movie, the locations.”

  Paramount was still fighting to keep the budget low. The lead actors were paid only $35,000 each. Brando, who was desperate for the role, was paid $50,000, with some net points thrown in. Coppola only received $110,000 and six points (6 percent of the net).

  Ellie, pregnant with Sophia, her third child, relocated to New York to be with Francis in a tiny apartment on West End Avenue. Coppola sat down with Dean Tavoularis and Gordon Willis, the DP, to plan the visual style of the picture which, they decided, would be classic in its simplicity. “There weren’t a lot of contemporary mechanics introduced, like helicopters and zoom lenses,” says Willis. “It was a tableau form of moviemaking, where the actors move in and out of frame, very straightforward. It was supposed to feel like a period piece.” The director recalls, “We talked about the contrast of good and evil, light and dark, how we’d start out with a black sheet of paper and paint in the light. The camera would never move unless the people were moving.”