When one crew member asked Francis how he could treat Ellie so badly, he said, “Look, I have these three women in my life, each one is very different, and each one has a place. I’m not hurting anybody. This whole thing is riding on me, and all of this I’m doing is making me very happy, and everybody is benefiting from it. Eleanor and my family are happy because I’m happy.” A lot of people who weren’t so happy felt he was more interested in getting laid and smoking dope than shooting the great work of art they thought they were there to create.
Coppola shut down the production again in December 1976, for a Christmas break, the end of Phase II. Back in the U.S., he ran into Kael. She was full of advice, as usual, and warned him against using the “Ride of the Valkyries” for the soon-to-be celebrated sequence in which a fleet of American helicopters descend like black birds of prey on a cluster of thatched huts where school-children are at play, firing missiles and dropping mustard yellow smoke bombs, while Robert Duvall, playing Colonel Kilgore, announces, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” and watches his men surf. Coppola recalls, “She was a real know-it-all. She said it had been used by Lina Wertmuller in Seven Beauties. I always felt that Kael turned on me because I didn’t kiss her ass as much as I was supposed to.”
He screened a rough assemblage in San Francisco and was ecstatic, as manic as he was depressed a few weeks before. Ellie was suspicious. “He was never, on any of his films, excited and up like he is now. He was always a real tortured-sufferer type,” she wrote in her journal. “There is a kind of franticness.... If I say anything to the contrary, it is taken for negativity, disloyalty or jealousy. I think that Francis is truly a visionary, but part of me is filled with anxiety. I feel as though a certain discrimination is missing, that fine discrimination that draws the line between what is visionary and what is madness. I am terrified.”
ALMOST IMMEDIATELY after scoring big with Shampoo, Beatty plunged into a light comedy, Heaven Can Wait, with a script by Elaine May. Beatty set the picture up at Warners. But once again, as with Shampoo, there was trouble. The business people began to nickel-and-dime him, no water cooler in the production office, that sort of thing. There was trouble at the top. Ted Ashley felt, in his words, that “Warren, who was among the most finicky, obsessive people, might take a picture that we thought was commercially marginal, and bring it to the point where we’d lose a bunch of money.” According to one source, Beatty wasn’t coming up with a budget for the heaven scene. Wells asked, Beatty procrastinated. Wells asked again, Beatty procrastinated again. Wells and Beatty were both tough negotiators; they pushed each other’s buttons. Finally, there was a meeting among Wells, Calley, and Beatty, shortly before they were scheduled to begin production. Wells asked him yet again for the numbers on the heaven scene. Beatty, irritated, said, “Do you want to make a budget, or do you want to make a movie?” As usual, Wells wanted to make a budget, and let him walk. Wells and Towne had gone to the same school, played water polo. Wells had been a goalie, and Towne quipped, “He’s still a goalie. He won’t let anybody score.”
Warners would regret it. Beatty always had a backup. He had devoted his considerable charms to wooing Barry Diller, who prided himself on being a hardnose. But Diller was no match for Beatty, who used to refer to him, playfully, as “The Chairman.” Says Simpson, “Barry had his pets and his favorites. He loved to play with Beatty and Redford, while a lot of other things fell through the cracks.” In any event, Diller stepped in, and the very same day Wells said no, he said yes.
This time, Beatty decided to direct it himself, but since he was starring as well, he asked Buck Henry to co-direct it with him. The rest of the cast included Charles Grodin and Dyan Cannon. After Henry had been profiled as the “hottest writer in Hollywood” in the New York Times Magazine in 1970, his career had not gone well. He was clever and wickedly funny, a gregarious man who had to be at every gallery opening, every new theater piece, every party, and would take every acting job that came along. He had a hard time making himself sit down alone and write. Directing, even co-directing, a Beatty movie was a big break. But it was a mixed blessing. “Warren is a master manipulator,” says Henry. “When I arrived at Paramount the first day, there was a sign on the front gate, ‘Welcome to Paramount, the Home of Buck Henry.’ Of course, a few days later, there was a sign that said, ‘Welcome to Paramount, the Home of Charles Grodin.’ ”
Beatty and Henry began the search for the female lead. Beatty tested actresses, and tested more actresses. After every test, he would turn to Henry and say, wistfully, “She’s no Julie.” Recalls Henry, “I didn’t realize this was a pretend search for a lead actress until late in, after hearing ‘But she’s no Julie’ for the fiftieth time.” Julie and Warren were long over, and she had no interest in acting in the picture. Nor were they on particularly good terms. Beatty had to send his cousin, David MacLeod, over to England to intercede for him. Eventually, she gave in. “I think he always knew it was going to be Julie,” says Henry. “But they were so edgy, that he also knew—he’s so weirdly smart about this kind of shit—that at the end of this movie, he wasn’t going to be able to say, ‘Julie, I want you to look me in the eyes in this scene,’ without her getting irritated. He needed somebody who could take the place of the director, and say, ‘Just stare at him while he’s talking.’ That was me.”
Indeed, there is a scene in the movie in which Warren and Julie are walking through the rose gardens of a grand estate. He is wearing a stylish leather jacket, and she has a haircut she hated, the one she sneeringly called her “dolly girl” hairdo. In the film, romantic music is swelling up on the soundtrack, drowning out their conversation, wherein Christie was saying, in her clipped British accent, “I can’t believe you’re still making these fucking dumb movies when, I mean, there are people all over Europe making fabulous films, about real things, Fassbinder and so on, and you’re still doing this shit,” and then she’d smile at him as if she had honey on her tongue. Beatty just laughed, but there it was again, the old itch that needed to be scratched: Was he a serious filmmaker? His next film, Reds, would dispel any lingering doubts.
Beatty had always been afflicted with the disease of perfectionism, and as his power grew, he was increasingly able to indulge it. “Warren is the only director I’ve ever really had fights with,” recalls Henry. “We used to fight a lot about dumb things, like he would say, ‘It’s midnight, let’s do another two hours.’
“‘Tuck you, we’ve got to get up at six.’
“‘Well, we need to work on this.’
“‘No we don’t. It’s perfectly fine the way it is.’ He liked to worry things to death, like, ‘I don’t like take thirty-two.’ I think that tires out the actors. The last day, we shot well into the night, two or three in the morning. When we finished, the crew and the actors just walked off into the night, while Warren sat at a playback machine watching the takes, not saying goodbye, just letting everybody sort of dissolve.”
IN LATE JANUARY 1977, Coppola returned to the Philippines for what he believed would be the final few weeks of shooting. Eleanor remained in San Francisco, furnishing him with the usual supply of air-conditioners, table linens, frozen steaks, wine, and kitchen utensils, and brooded over her husband’s state of mind. Finally she sent him a telex that conveyed her fears. She told him that with his supply lines of food and equipment, he was creating his own Vietnam, creating “the very situation he went there to expose.” She called him an “asshole,” and copied Tavoularis, Storaro, and even the production manager. Francis was furious. At this moment, when his professional life hung in the balance, she had stabbed him in the back. Five days later, on March 5, 1977, Martin Sheen had a heart attack. Coppola knew that if the news reached L.A. or New York, he would be shut down. If Sheen could not return to work, it was all over, he would lose everything. He was appalled and frightened when he heard that crew members were calling home, saying that the actor had died.
Coppola’s mood swings were getting more erratic. As h
e put it, “We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment—and little by little we went insane.” Francis was now living in Hidden Valley, a spectacular resort inside an inactive volcano, smoking lots of dope. Despite a change for the better in the weather—the oppressive heat had broken, and a dry, cool wind had come up—Francis was in a black humor. Melissa had just left. He was blaming himself for Sheen’s heart attack. One evening in the middle of March, Coppola had flown in a chef from Japan to prepare an elaborate meal of Kobe beef. Suddenly he sank to his knees, weeping, then had a classic epileptic seizure, banging his head against the wall, thrashing about on the floor, foaming at the mouth. His pilot thrust a belt between his jaws to prevent him from biting his tongue. He had been about to rehearse Linda Carpenter in a scene in which she read tarot cards, and now, in his delirium, he was convinced that she was a witch, he the devil, the movie evil, and that the apocalypse of the title was actually at hand. He swore he had seen the white light, was going to die. His last request was that Lucas finish the picture. Two days later he appeared to be fine, flew in a print of one of his favorite movies, Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, to screen.
Eleanor, who was in San Francisco, flew to his side. According to Cyndi Wood, who played another Bunny and was also staying at Hidden Valley, Coppola asked her to tell his wife about his relationship with Carpenter. She did. Francis and Ellie discussed separation or divorce. “I was in, like, love triangles, beyond my thing, and I almost—and I was tired, and Marty had just had a heart attack, and it was my own money, and I didn’t feel good about my relationship with my wife,” Francis recalled. But he couldn’t bring himself to make the break. “I didn’t want to lose my children,” he said. “A lot of men can do that. But I was just not the kind of person who could go and wipe out my family like that and do a second family. I will never do that. I just can’t.” He lay at Eleanor’s feet, stroking her ankles, moaning, “I’ll never do it again, I’ll never do it again.”
March 20, the one-year anniversary of the beginning of principal photography, came and went, unremarked. Sheen recovered surprisingly quickly, and was working again by mid-April. In early May, Coppola wrapped. He finally returned to San Francisco in the middle of June 1977, in a BAC III—a sizable plane about four times the size of a Gulfstream, seating eighty, that he had wangled from a South African manure millionaire, after a 238-day shoot (double that of Jaws), with 250 hours of footage, a few weeks after the premiere of Star Wars, which he missed. The budget, which had begun at $13 million, had reached nearly $30 million and was still climbing. Francis had lost nearly a hundred pounds. He owed $14 million in overruns. UA had sunk $25 million in the film and found it prudent to take out a $15 million insurance policy on his life. If he died, UA would walk away with a $1 million profit. He joked that he was worth more dead than alive.
Coppola still needed another $10 million for post-production, and was forced to put up the rest of his assets, including the Napa house, future profits from The Black Stallion, which was then in production under his aegis with Carroll Ballard directing.
Coppola intended to make a big push to finish the picture quickly. A crew of carpenters set to work building customized editing tables out of mahogany brought back from the Philippines, and laminated maple plywood. Francis divided the picture among several teams of editors, and beefed up the editorial staff. He promoted one of his former baby-sitters, and hired almost any warm body that walked through the door. Some of the veteran editors raised their eyebrows. “The cutting was turned over to Francis groupies,” grumbles one. But he also gave work to aspiring filmmakers who would never have been able to break into the business in L.A. or New York because they were not members of the union. Says Jerry Ross, a sound editor, “I owe everything I have to his wonderful madness.”
Yet Francis was so depressed the work ground to a halt. “We’d come to work every morning and for three months there was literally nothing to do,” says Richard Candib, an editorial assistant. In the fall, a number of people were laid off, and Francis took off for Europe in his BAC III. (Tavoularis was responsible for the deco design of the interiors, which reflected the decor of his office. He also designed the crew’s uniforms.) Some people suspected Melissa was with him.
In October, Francis had told Eleanor that he was in love with another woman. “The emotion rose up from my feet like a tide,” she wrote. “It hit me in the chest and knocked me backward.” He said he loved both of them. “I have been comfortable believing the lies,” she continued. “Just like Kay in the last scene of The Godfather. All of the evidence tells her that her husband has had people killed, and when she asks him, he says no, and she believed his words. All the evidence through the years, the little presents, notes, things I would find in Francis’s pockets after a trip, the pin sent to him in the Philippines that he wore on his hat as a good luck charm. And when I would ask, I would hear, ‘Ellie, she is a friend, she has been a big help to me—she is no threat to you.’ I believed the words, I denied the evidence. I didn’t want to see the truth.” Ellie thought about Jackie Kennedy, how after the president was assassinated, she came into her own, was allowed to live her own life. “There is part of me that has been waiting for Francis to leave me, or die, so that I can get my life the way I want it.” She finally let go. She went into the kitchen and threw bone china against the walls.
Coppola promised to break it off with Mathison, but continued to see her. She accompanied him to a special screening of The Last Waltz in L.A. that Scorsese arranged for him. She moved into a house on Wolfback Ridge Road high up on the Marin Headlands in Sausalito, with a sweeping view of the bay. Francis paid the rent. When Ellie was not around, which was often—she was busy decorating the Napa house—he would bring Melissa to screenings.
Francis’s pal Dennis Jakob joined the editing team. Jakob was eccentric, to say the least. But the director regarded him as a genius. It is said that he worked with a skull in his lap, nervously rubbing his fingertips across the surface. Francis was having a dalliance with a pretty editorial apprentice whom Dennis apparently fancied. Telling Francis, “You can have her or Melissa, but not both,” Jakob walked off with several reels of work print that contained the last third of Apocalypse. One day Francis received a baggie filled with ashes that Jakob claimed were burned film. When two assistant editors went to negotiate with Jakob, he said he would return the reels if Francis sent Mathison to sleep with him. Eventually he was convinced to return the film anyway. (Jakob could not be reached for comment.)
WHILE COPPOLA FIDDLED, other pictures stole his thunder. Close Encounters, which ended up costing a whopping $19.5 million, was released on November 16, 1977, and the same week, Star Wars supplanted Jaws as the top grossing picture of all time. Spielberg believed that if Close Encounters had beaten Star Wars to the screen, it would have done better. The reviews were gushy and adoring. Kael called Spielberg a “magician.”
The politics of Spielberg’s picture appeared to be not that different from that of the Watergate-inflected, Jaws: government conspires to keep an important truth from the people, and only an ordinary joe can get to the bottom of it. But somewhere along the road to Close Encounters, Spielberg must have understood the same thing Lucas understood after THX: audiences were tired of bad news. Although they loved being vicariously sliced and diced, dismembered by a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth, they loved to be uplifted even more, overwhelmed by a power that was benevolent, The Exorcist stood on its head. More money could be made by taking the high road and appealing to our better selves; awe was more commercial than fear.
And an even richer vein was our sentimental view of our better self as the inner child, the innocent youth we used to be. Dreyfuss’s Neary is the first of Spielberg’s childlike, regressed adults. Absorbed with his obsession, he plays with mashed potatoes, making of them a model of Devils Tower, where the mother ship comes to earth and reabsorbs him, returns him to the womb. “I really wanted to take a child�
��s point of view,” Spielberg said, “the uneducated innocence that allows a person to take this kind of quantum jump. Neary is no different than any of the kids.”
At the same time, Neary is a version of Spielberg’s father, Arnold, a man obsessed with his work who was never there for the family. Because as much as Spielberg and Lucas wanted to indulge their Peter Pan complexes, return the boomers to the sandbox, much as they backed kids against adults, Spielberg’s movies in particular are colored by longing for the absent dad, a nostalgia for authority. His families are often fatherless; the plots are set in motion by the moral and emotional vacuum at the center of the home, and resolved by father surrogates. Both the Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana Jones trilogy end on a note of generational harmony, with the revelation that the repentant Darth Vader is Luke’s father, and the reconciliation of Indy with his father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indy’s final words are, “Yes, sir!” In Close Encounters, Neary-the-child, entering the mother ship in a trancelike daze, surrenders himself to the superior power of idealized grown-ups, grown-ups as they appear to children, in the same way that Star Wars ends with the famous parody of Triumph of the Will. The evil over-thirties of the Nixon era would become the avuncular adults of the Reagan era—Reagan himself in particular. Lucas and Spielberg finally succeeded in turning the counterculture upside down.
With two blockbusters in a row, Close Encounters confirmed Spielberg’s place, along with Lucas’s, in the pantheon of profit. The studio blew up his first check to poster size. The amount? Four and one half million dollars. At the Alto Cedro house, he had a vast pine desk in which was planted a state-of-the-art phone system, flush with the top. It was one of the first to feature a speed dialer, and Spielberg loved to show it off to friends. “Look, I just press this, I don’t have to do anything,” he said happily. The list of names next to the Lucite buttons included Begelman, Sheinberg, Calley, Diller, Ladd, Medavoy—every one the head of a studio. The road had forked. Speilberg had gone one way; his peers, for the most part, had gone another.
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