Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  As usual, Towne was taking his time getting a completed script to Paramount. He came to Bart with the idea for a Tarzan story from the gorillas’ point of view. Bart thought it was just a delaying tactic, and said, “I don’t want to hear about it. Just finish Chinatown.” So Towne called Calley, to whom he was very close, and set up the Tarzan project at Warners.

  The script Towne finally handed in told a long, intricate tale, teeming with characters and scenes, chock-full of detail and small touches that limned the texture of America in the ’30s. It contained a startling subplot, in which the theft of water and the rape of the land were mirrored by an unspeakable family crime, incest between Noah Cross, a rapacious developer, and his daughter, Evelyn. In the portrait of Cross, Towne may have been settling some family scores. Cross displayed a passing resemblance to Towne’s own father, Lou. Both were developers. According to Towne’s wife, Julie Payne, “Lou wanted him to go into the building business, which neither Robert nor his brother, Roger, had any interest in. I think his father hated Robert. He didn’t pay any attention to him until he became successful.”

  Polanski finally arrived in L.A., and began house hunting. A friend found him one at the top of Benedict Canyon that required he drive past the Cielo Drive house with its split-rail fence still decorated with Christmas lights. Polanski had blocked it out, didn’t even notice. Eventually, he rented George Montgomery’s home in Beverly Hills.

  According to Evans, Polanski’s first reaction to the script was dismay. He exclaimed, “What kind of script is this? I should’ve stayed in Poland.” He and Sylbert, who was slated to design the production, met with Towne at Nate ’n Al’s, a delicatessen in Beverly Hills. “We said the script needed an enormous amount of work,” recalls Polanski. “It was terribly long and convoluted, it had too many characters, it had a lot of episodic scenes which were not essential and were making it more confused. Bob was a little bit depressed after that.”

  THE BUZZ AROUND THE RELEASE of The Godfather was fierce. The film opened in New York in an unseasonably late snowstorm on March 15, 1972. The lines were six abreast, blocks long. Evans had been counting on Brando’s appearance at the premiere to make it an event, but Brando ducked out at the last minute. Evans plugged the hole with Henry Kissinger, who flew up from Washington. Ali flew in from the set of The Getaway in El Paso. As he waltzed MacGraw around the floor of the St. Regis roof, Evans was blissfully unaware of her affair with McQueen. “This was the best time of my life, but it was all a fraud,” he says. “My wife was fucking another guy, and I had no idea. She had as much interest in being with me as being with a leper. She was looking at me and thinking of Steve McQueen’s cock.”

  Coppola, his sense of himself as an artist deeply compromised by the very fact that he had agreed to direct this film in the first place, the feeling of violation compounded by his conviction that the movie was going to be a flop anyway, and still nursing the wounds inflicted by the struggle to bring the film to the screen, fled to Paris, where he wrote a script. His friends called, saying, “The Godfather’s a huge hit.” He’d answer, “Oh, yeah, great,” and turn back to his work.

  The marketing campaign for The Godfather was traditional; the money was spent on print ads. The exhibition pattern, however, broke new ground, would change the way movies were distributed, paving the way for the ultimate destruction of the New Hollywood. Prior to The Godfather, pictures played first runs for a specified number of weeks before they went into their second and third runs. During the first run, they opened at one A screen in every market. The A screen had “clearance” over other A theaters in the vicinity, which meant that if a picture played a prime location, say, the National in Westwood, no other theater within a fifty-mile radius could book it for the length of the first run, which could last for a year or more. Then the picture worked its way down to the second- and third-run theaters. Moviegoers in Hollywood or the San Fernando Valley were expected to make the trek to Westwood. This was a good system from the director’s point of view—the movies had plenty of time to find their audiences—but was less than desirable from the studio point of view. For one thing, the ad dollars were expended on the first run when the picture was playing a relatively small number of theaters, so by the time it got to the thousands of second- and third-run theaters, there was no advertising support. For another, the revenue from exhibitors trickled in slowly, over months, sometimes years. To Yablans’s way of thinking, the studios were risking huge amounts of money, and in effect subsidizing the construction of new theaters with money that properly belonged to them and could have been collecting interest. He not only bullied the exhibitors into paying substantial amounts up front, often more than covering the costs of production, he also got a better split. In the case of The Godfather, Yablans says he got an unprecedented $25 to $30 million from the chains before the picture even opened, and a 90/10 split (in favor of Paramount) for the first twelve weeks, after which the percentages became more equitable. As Ruddy put it, Yablans made the exhibitors an offer they couldn’t refuse: “It was the start of the blockbuster mentality. Paramount had the locomotive, and fuckin’ killed them. You want The Godfather? You owe us $80,000. We want the money, now!”

  But what Yablans really wanted to do was to break the exhibitors’ clearance policy. Because of its three-hour running time, if he couldn’t book it into multiple theaters in a single market, he would never get the kinds of profits he anticipated. Gene Klein was the owner of National General, which controlled Westwood, among other locations. Yablans brought him to Evans’s home, where he took everyone he wanted to impress, and they got drunk and stayed up all night. Yablans hammered Klein until he gave in.

  In New York City, The Godfather opened in five first-run theaters, with playtimes staggered. Nationally, The Godfather made what was then an unusually wide break, going to 316 theaters, adding another fifty-odd over the course of the next few weeks. The cumulative result of Yablans’s methods—the money up front, the favorable splits, the massive release—resulted in a dramatic, not to say revolutionary, transformation of Paramount’s cash flow. Money poured through the pipeline, faster and in vastly greater volume than ever before in the history of the movie business, a million dollars a day by mid-April. In mid-September, only six months after it had opened, the film became the biggest grosser of all time, surpassing Gone With the Wind, which took thirty-three years and numerous re-releases to set its record. By the time its first run was concluded, The Godfather netted $86.2 million in domestic rentals. Not only did The Godfather revive Paramount, which owned an unprecedented 84 of the 100 points, it was like a jolt of electricity for the industry, which was still awakening from the half-decade-long coma that began after The Sound of Music.

  At a meeting, some months earlier, Coppola, joking with Evans and Ruddy, had asked for a Mercedes 600, the big stretch limo, if the picture hit $15 million. Evans replied, “No problem at $50 million.” Recalls Coppola, “When the picture had done $100 million, George Lucas and I walked into the Mercedes dealership in San Francisco and I said, ‘We want to see the Mercedes 600.’” They were custom-made, very expensive and hard to get. The Pope had one, so did Francisco Franco. “The salesmen kept passing us along to other salesmen, because we looked like slobs, and had driven up in a Honda. They showed us a few sedans, and we kept saying, ‘No, no! We want the one with the six doors.’ So finally some young salesman who didn’t know any better took the order. I said, ‘Send the bill to Paramount Pictures,’ and they did.”

  The Mercedes was nice, but money alone would not salve Coppola’s wounds. He would never be satisfied merely with a commercial hit, not even one with the elephantine proportions of The Godfather. It was the reviews that were the sweet revenge. Kael (sometime later), called it “the best gangster film ever made in this country.”

  The Godfather hit a cultural nerve. It was all things to all people, which is perhaps, as marketers would soon realize, a sine qua non for blockbusters. On the one hand, it is very much a film
of the ’60s. Released just before Watergate, the brilliant opening scene in which the massive head of Brando gradually emerges from the darkness as the camera slowly pulls back, while Bonasera the baker petitions the Godfather to avenge his violated daughter, establishes the premise that the American dream has failed, the melting pot is an illusion, and the ethnic poor are trapped at the bottom of an unjust system. The Mafia provides what the government does not: simple justice, and a version of welfare for the underclass, an Old World system of values that cushions the shock of capitalism. Like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, The Godfather was critical of the values of the generation of the father. Coppola compared Michael Corleone to Nixon; he began as an idealist, distancing himself from the Family, and ended up by embracing and replicating its values.

  On the other hand, despite Coppola’s schoolboy Marxism (he always equated the mob with capitalism), The Godfather looked forward to the conservative family values of the Reagan era. In judging how far The Godfather was from some of the generation gap films that preceded it, it is only necessary to compare the scene Towne wrote in which a dying Don Corleone and Michael reach an understanding, to the scene in Five Easy Pieces in which Bobby Dupea and his father, symbolically mute and crippled, do not. In its emphasis on generational reconciliation, on ethnicity, and on the Mafia as, in effect, a privatized government of organized vigilantes that performs functions the government can’t or won’t, it foreshadows the Reagan right’s attack on the Washington establishment in the next decade. “In the seventies, we felt families were disintegrating, and our national family, led by the family in the White House, was full of backstabbing,” said Towne, referring, of course, to the Nixon gang. “Here was this role model of a family who stuck together, who’d die for one another.... It was really kind of reactionary in that sense—a perverse expression of a desirable and lost cultural tradition.”

  Finally, unlike the antigenre exercises of Hopper and Altman, Coppola, like Bogdanovich with What’s Up, Doc?, breathed life into a dead formula, looking forward to the genre gentrification of Lucas and Spielberg to come.

  Ironically, although Warners executives dismissed Coppola as a wannabe auteur, he connected to the themes of The Godfather (and its sequel) in a profound way. The issues of power, sibling rivalry, masculinity, and patriarchy hit home as they never would again in any other film he would ever make. Coppola obviously identified with Michael, the prodigal son, and in Michael’s pact with the devil lies the tale of Coppola’s uneasy relationship with the studios, and his brave, if stumbling attempts to build his own independent power base. The Godfathers would be the most personal films Coppola would ever make.

  THE OSCARS THAT YEAR fell on April 10. The Last Picture Show was up against The French Connection, A Clockwork Orange, Fiddler on the Roof, and Nicholas and Alexandra. The Academy awarded Charlie Chaplin an honorary Oscar, which he traveled from his home in Vevey, Switzerland, to accept. It was the first time he had set foot on American soil since 1952, when he left under the shadow of the House Un-American Activities Committee investigations. The hand of Bert Schneider was evident; it was a BBS family affair. He had orchestrated the rehabilitation of Chaplin, produced a documentary on him that Artie Ross put together, and asked Bogdanovich to select the sequences from Chaplin’s work to show on Oscar night. Candy Bergen shot his picture for the cover of Life.

  Obviously identifying with Chaplin, who was persecuted in his adopted country, and still smarting from the pain of The Godfather production despite the picture’s success, Coppola was feeling sorry for himself. He thought, Charlie Chaplin, man, I can’t believe he’s accepting an Oscar. They called him a communist, and now that he’s an old man and no longer a threat, who wants it then? When I’m eighty years old they’re not gonna trudge me out and give me some humanitarian award. I want it now, when I’m young and have ideas, can do something with it. But nobody’s rooting for me.

  The French Connection beat out The Last Picture Show, winning five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Gene Hackman), and Best Director. Clutching his Oscar, Friedkin rushed up to Bogdanovich.

  “Congratulations, Billy.”

  “Peter, Peter, Peter... ”

  “Billy, what? What?”

  “You know? You’re gonna get a dozen of these.” He threw his arms around Bogdanovich, hugged him close, and in the process thumped him hard on the forehead with his Oscar. Bogdanovich—who never would win an Oscar—thought, Jesus, you already won the fuckin’ Oscar, now you’ve clobbered me on the head with it.

  Towne and Polanski worked on the Chinatown script at Polanski’s house for two months or so in the spring and summer of 1973. It was hot and dry, the revisions went slowly. Towne didn’t think the script needed a lot of work and put small effort into doing any. He arrived every morning around eleven with his dog, Hira, took and placed phone calls, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, relit it.

  “The goddamn dog would lie on my feet in this hot room and drool,” says Polanski. “Bob would fill his pipe and smoke, and this smoke filled up the room—it was really a hard experience for eight weeks of that. Bob would fight for every word, for every line of the dialogue as if it was carved in marble.” Polanski would give an impassioned speech about why this scene should be changed in such and such a way, and then Bob would kind of nod his head and say, “I’ve got to take Hira out now for a piss.”

  “We fought, every day, over everything,” Towne confirms. “Names. ‘What’s her name?’ ‘No, it can’t be that, it’s too Jewish.’ ‘Who says it’s Jewish?’ Over the teenyboppers that Roman would run out and take Polaroid pictures of diving off the fucking diving board without tops on. Which was distracting. With braces.”

  Nowhere in the script was there a literal Chinatown. Towne thought that was fine; he was a writer, and for him, it was metaphor. But Polanski, the director, wanted something concrete, felt strongly there had to be a scene set in Chinatown. They went back and forth. At one point, Sylbert quipped, “Maybe it’s enough if they eat Chinese food.”

  Then there was the ending, a famous locus of dispute that quickly deteriorated into mutual abuse. “I went to art school in Poland—”

  “A Polish art school’s a contradiction in terms, you fuckin’ asshole,” Towne interrupted.

  “A guy would draw an arm and he didn’t want to change it because he didn’t think he could draw another one.”

  “Roman, if you think you’re talking about me, you’re fuckin’ full’a shit. I can draw as many arms as you want. I just think it’s bullshit to rewrite this.”

  In Towne’s original script, Evelyn Mulwray kills her venal father, Noah Cross. In other words, a happy ending in which innocence defiled is avenged and evil is punished. For Polanski, the world was a darker place. He felt Cross should live, get control of the child he incestuously fathered, while Evelyn should die. The detective, Jake Gittes, can do no more than look on, helplessly. “I thought it was a serious movie, not an adventure story for the kids,” says Polanski. Concludes Towne, “Roman’s argument was, That’s life. Beautiful blondes die in Los Angeles. Sharon had.”

  COPPOLA WAS GRADUALLY LEARNING to enjoy his success. Truly the ugly duckling transformed into a swan, when he went down to L.A., he would sample the favors of women, courtesy of Frederickson. “For a long time I didn’t want to be alone,” he recalled. “The romances... were pretty conventional, schoolboy kind of romances. I had a couple of romances that were sort of the-most-beautiful-girl-you-ever-saw kind of things, which all of us, when we’re young, have that fantasy.”

  Back in San Francisco, he began getting million-dollar checks in the mail from Paramount, anointing the new aesthetic and moral legitimacy of the director with enormous economic power. “I was... one of the first young people to become rich overnight,” he said. Francis started to think of himself as Don Corleone. Still, he was nagged by the feeling that he had taken a momentous misstep from which he would never recover. “In some ways it did ruin me,” he complained. “It ju
st made my whole career go this way instead of the way I really wanted it to go, which was into doing original work as a writer-director. Basically, The Godfather made me violate a lot of the hopes I had for myself at that age.”

  For a dreamer like Francis, sudden riches were a mixed blessing. He was like a boy sitting at a table loaded with sweets; he couldn’t decide what to eat first, and characteristically, he ate them all. The rush of power distracted him. “It just inflamed so many other desires,” he explained, adding, “I think I was just running away from being alone with myself as I had been forced to be when I was sick as a kid. I didn’t want to be in a room alone with no friends.”

  Coppola spent his money on real estate and toys. He bought a robin’s egg blue twenty-eight-room Queen Anne row house at 2207 Broadway (near Fillmore) in San Francisco’s posh Pacific Heights with a breathtaking view of the Golden Gate Bridge. One room was devoted solely to electric trains. His friends referred to him as “F. A. O. Coppola.” Another contained a Wurlitzer juke box full of rare Enrico Caruso 78s. A ballroom was turned into a projection room, replete with a Moog synthesizer and a harpsichord, and a collection of roller skates left over from You’re a Big Boy Now. He greeted guests wearing a caftan. Like a newborn porpoise, he cavorted in a small, clover-shaped Moorish-style swimming pool. A Warhol Mao print hung on the wall in the dining room, and the furniture was Italian modern, leather belted on chrome. There was a brass bed in the master bedroom. A few years later, at the end of Coppola’s buying spree, when he had homes in San Francisco, Napa Valley, Los Angeles, New York, and a temporary one in Manila where he was shooting Apocalypse Now, Ellie realized she was responsible for twenty-seven bathrooms.

  Coppola had no interest in reviving Zoetrope in its old, collective form. Instead, he re-created it as a more traditional production company, housed in the Little Fox Theater and the Sentinel Building, a landmark seven-story flatiron building that had survived the 1906 earthquake. Francis bought it from the Kingston Trio. Faced with cream color tile and copper molding, it was nestled at the corner of Columbus and Kearny among the strip joints and peep shows of North Beach, within spitting distance of City Lights Booksellers and Tosca, a trendy bar. He restored it with tender loving care and lots of money. His own offices, on the top floor, designed by Dean Tavoularis, were fit for a Renaissance prince. There were windows on three sides, intricate handcrafted white-oak paneling and inlay in the art deco style, brass fixtures polished to a high sheen, and a cupola girdled by a 360 degree diorama depicting scenes from his pictures under a deep azure sky painted by Dean’s brother, Alex.