Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  The new Zoetrope would not only enjoy total independence from the studios, controlling its own pictures from inception through release, Coppola would show the studios how it was done. Using the latest video technology supplied by Sony, he would transform the production process so it would be as smooth and streamlined as the high-tech aluminum Air Stream—dubbed the Silverfish—he now called his office. With actors reading the script into a Betacam, standing in front of Polaroids of the storyboards, with songs and the occasional effects laid in, Coppola would “previsualize” his pictures, edit before a single frame of film was shot, thereby reducing costs, making movies faster, with less muss and fuss than the studios with their old, cumbersome methods of production. At least, that was the theory. In Newsweek, Coppola announced, sounding much like Dennis Hopper a decade earlier, “It’s going to be the survival of the fittest, and the long-established studios will be brought down....”

  Coppola saw Zoetrope as a petri dish of creative talent, a repertory company, a sanctuary that would shelter talent cast off by the studios: Hollywood veterans, rich in experience; European auteurs the studios regarded as uncommercial; a new generation of kids, too independent and crazy to work within the system; and veterans of the other crafts—writers, DPs, sound designers—who wanted to break into directing. He gave an office to British director Michael Powell (Peeping Tom), whom Scorsese had rescued from oblivion. Courtesy of Tom Luddy, directors like Godard, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, and other great Europeans prowled the lot. He signed such actors as Fred Forrest and Teri Garr to long-term contracts, like the old studios.

  “I was excited when it seemed that Zoetrope could set up right there in Hollywood,” recalls Matthew Robbins. “It was like, We’ll show them there’s another way of making films, a collaborative way. There’s such a thing as a community of filmmakers. It was like a Trojan horse, looked like a studio, but it was just us guys.”

  The first of Zoetrope’s slate of films was scheduled to be released in 1982. Coppola himself would direct One from the Heart— insiders would eventually call it One Through the Heart—herald of a new, non-narrative American cinema. But there was one flaw: Francis’s megalomania. Intended as a small, delicate porcelain figure of a film to be shot entirely on a soundstage, at the furthest remove from the excesses of Apocalypse, One from the Heart went way out of control, burying the dreams for a new cinema under its leviathan budget. Coppola locked himself away in the Silverfish and conveyed his instructions to the actors over a loudspeaker. Says former Zoetropian Bob Dalva, “Francis’s voice was asking Teri Garr to do this emotional thing, and she was looking up at the ceiling talking back to him. Everybody on the stage stopped what they were doing and listened to this conversation. It was bizarre.” This was a director who loved actors, who inspired them to great work. Something was seriously awry.

  “Francis never wanted to hear ‘No,’” says Skager. But by the early ’80s, his aversion to the “n” word was considerably more extreme, and he had gathered around him a new group of people to run the studio, none of whom would speak the taboo syllable. Continues Dalva, “Francis was a man who could talk you into anything. ‘Walk off the bridge!’ ‘Okay, that’s a great idea, I’m gonna do it.’ The new guys never caught themselves, and they all went off the bridge.” And Skager, “One from the Heart started at $12 million, and the way it was going, I said, I don’t think it’s twelve, I think it’s twenty-two. He really got upset. He took it as a betrayal.” In fact, the budget rose to $23 million almost before the shooting had begun. Ultimately, the picture cost $27 million, making a mockery of Coppola’s claim that the new video technology would reduce costs.

  After a disastrous exhibitors’ screening on August 18, 1981, and then a similarly catastrophic preview at Radio City Music Hall in New York in January 1982, One from the Heart was deemed so uncommercial Coppola had a hard time even getting a distributor for his flagship film. He finally reached an agreement with Columbia, and the picture opened on Valentine’s Day of that year. It closed seven weeks later at the end of April, buried in an avalanche of viciously negative reviews. One from the Heart made less than $2.5 million. It was Coppola’s first flop in a decade and a half, but it was a resounding and embarrassing one. “One from the Heart sank a lot of people’s hopes and dreams,” says Robbins. “It was really a bitter moment. Because he could have done it, but there was some gambler beast within him, and he was seized with an irresistible urge to bet everything, and he lost. It was unforgivable.”

  Francis was mortgaged to the eyeballs. He had made Robert Spiotta, devoid of any obvious qualifications save for an old friendship going back to their college days, head of his studio. “Spiotta was in way over his head,” he says. “Originally, I didn’t have any of the liability of One from the Heart. The Chase Manhattan Bank would come to my house every night, asking me to take personal responsibility, and I kept saying no, so they kept pressuring Spiotta. One night he knocked on the door, I was in bed, he told me they had worked it out, and I just had to sign this document and we could go on. Stupidly, I signed it, and that was the signature that caused me to take the responsibility from the bank onto me.”

  Still, Coppola gambled, as he had when he indebted himself to UA to finish Apocalypse, that none of his backers could live with the stigma of being the one to pull the plug. But he hadn’t counted on Jack Singer, a Canadian real estate mogul who had lent him several million dollars, secured by Coppola’s real estate. Singer called in the loan and ruined Coppola.

  “George couldn’t understand how Francis got away with it for years and years,” says Huyck. “He would say, ‘I don’t get it. When I go to a bank and I borrow money to make a movie, I have to pay it back.’ After the banks finally closed Francis down, he said, ‘See, it caught up with him.’” But he offered to buy the Sentinel Building and Francis’s Napa home and hold them like an interest-free loan until Coppola was able to buy them back. Ultimately, Francis didn’t need to do that, but he was grateful.

  “Every Friday I would have to notarize some more documents to sign over more property” recalls Skager. “He lost the block in Mill Valley, the apartment house, the Hancock Park house in L.A., the Broadway house, the Little Fox Theater. The only things that survived were the Sentinel Tower and the vineyard in Napa.” His dream—to provide the directors’ cinema of the ’70s with an independent base for production and distribution, lay in ruins.

  Coppola filed for bankruptcy, and on April 20, 1982, he announced that the studio would be offered to the highest bidder. Said Coppola at the time, “With the collapse of my studio, everything fell into a black hole. I have no present at all. I live like a flea, in between two blocks of granite. There’s no space. It’s horrible.”

  Francis was in New York for Scorsese’s fortieth birthday in November. Marty was in a funk, still reeling from the King of Comedy disaster, and his failing marriage to Isabella Rossellini. After a late dinner at Odeon, a hip restaurant in New York’s downtown TriBeCa district, he was pacing his loft, complaining that his business manager had confiscated his credit cards. “I’m broke, I’m broke, I don’t have a cent,” he said over and over. Francis responded, “Marty, would you calm down? You’re broke, I owe $50 million!”

  Part of Coppola feels that he was the victim of a conspiracy. “Apocalypse Now was totally financed outside of the establishment,” he says. “People felt that if directors started to realize that all they needed to do was that, there would be no place for the traditional hierarchy of agents and studios. Zoetrope was considered a threat. With my interest in technology, my studio was a dangerous precedent. And someone who (a) made the kind of megalomaniac kind of comments that I did, and (b) actually was doing it, I think you have to brand a person like that a little bit of a nut.”

  Coppola never again made a picture comparable to the masterpieces of the ’70s. He once said that the man who made the Godfathers died in the jungle, and perhaps he was right. Maybe it was the lithium that lobotomized his work. Says producer Al
Ruddy, who watched his career from a distance after they fell out over The Godfather, “Before The Godfather, he was a nobody. After, he was one of the most important directors in the world. Nobody is prepared for a trip that heavy. He got very caught up in being the kind of man that Charlie Bluhdorn was. He lost some of his focus, was another example of a director destroyed by living the movie.”

  BY 1983, Spielberg and Irving were back together, but Steven had still not decided whether to marry her. Around the time of the celebrated Lee Marvin palimony case, all the business managers in Hollywood became nervous about their clients. According to a source, Sandy Breslauer, Spielberg’s business agent, called him up, and said something like, “Steve, if you’re going to be living with Amy and you’re not going to get married, you have got to come up with this prenuptial agreement that we will write up, and you’ve got to get Amy to sign it. Because the consequences if you don’t are extreme.” But Spielberg was afraid of Irving’s reaction, and he put it off. Breslauer kept pestering him. One night, as they were going out, the phone rang. It was the business manager. He said, “Steve, did you talk to Amy about the living together?” He said, “No, but I’m going to do it right now.” So he knocked on the door of the bedroom, said, “Amy!”

  “What?”

  “That was the Breslauer office, and they—I gotta talk to you about... there’s this thing they want us to sign.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s like this prenuptial thing, and you gotta—”

  “Steve, are we going to get married?”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “You said, prenuptial!”

  “No, no, no, I don’t mean prenuptial, I mean this living together deal.” She slammed the bedroom door in his face.

  Irving got pregnant in 1984, on her thirty-first birthday, September 10. One night, Spielberg was over to De Palma’s for dinner in New York with a group of friends. As usual, he was complaining about Amy, saying, “I don’t know if I want to get married, but she’s pregnant, what am I going to do?” Brian said, sweetly, “Maybe we ought to have anybody who hasn’t slept with Amy stand up.”

  Steve and Amy finally married on November 27, 1985, five months after the birth of their son, Max. De Palma was the godfather. Said Robbins: “When Steven decided to marry her, I was very worried. It was no fun to go over there, because there was an electric tension in the air. It was competitive as to whose dining table this is, whose career we’re going to talk about, or whether he even approved of what she was interested in—her friends and her actor life. He really was uncomfortable. The child in Spielberg believed so thoroughly in the possibility of perfect marriage, the institutions of marriage, the Norman Rockwell turkey on the table, everyone’s head bowed in prayer—all this stuff. And Amy was sort of a glittering prize, smart as hell, gifted, and beautiful, but definitely edgy and provocative and competitive. She would not provide him any ease. There was nothing to go home to that was cozy.”

  Marriage and parenthood did nothing for the relationship. The baby took her out of the career loop, and she was no longer an ingenue. “I had a baby and lost my place on line,” she said. In 1986, Irving complained publicly, “I started my career as the daughter of Jules Irving. I don’t want to finish it as the wife of Spielberg or the mother of Max.” She groused that marriage to Spielberg made her feel like a politician’s wife.

  Eventually, Spielberg divorced Irving, who is said to have gotten the largest settlement in history—in the neighborhood of $100 million. He married Kate Capshaw, with whom he had had an affair during the filming of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Says Gloria Katz, “Kate outmanipulated the most manipulative woman who ever lived.”

  As Spielberg became even more wealthy and powerful, many of the friendships forged in the ’70s fell away. “It started out that everybody worked together, helped everyone else,” says Milius. “But as soon as they got money, everyone turned on each other. Suddenly you were hot, you were special. You could now move into that house in Bel Air. You could have your own offices, editing rooms, all these appurtenances of power that in the studio system only came to people after twenty years of making films. Steven and George had tremendous power, and they never asked me to do anything for them.”

  Robbins had done uncredited work on Jaws and Close Encounters, and Spielberg had rewarded him with a point on the latter. His own film, which he had written and directed, Dragonslayer, flopped in 1981. Spielberg was in the midst of preproduction on E.T., but invited him down from the Bay Area to stay at his Malibu beach house while he recovered his spirits. To divert himself, he read Melissa Mathison’s script for E.T. He recalls, “I said, ‘What is this doing in here? Why don’t you do this, why don’t you do that?’” Spielberg reacted very much like he always reacted in these situations. He said, continues Robbins, “ That’s great, that’s great. I gotta write it down.’ I said, ‘I’ll do it, give me a typewriter.’ The script was 143 pages long. I cut over twenty-five pages for him, took out a key character, a neighbor kid who figured out what was going on with E.T. I got this idea they should tarp in the house, just bag it, like when your house is being fumigated. I lost myself in this rewrite, and I felt really proud of myself at the end of it. By that time, I’d been around enough to feel that this was not a joke, but was getting serious. I had to leave for the airport at the end of my ten days. I poked my head into Steve’s office, said, ‘Well, gotta go!’ He looked up and said, ‘Okay, uh, thanks, Matt!’ I went home. No point, no nuthin’. For me, that was the end of those great days where you could fool around like that, where you were working on everyone else’s movies as much as you were working on your own, like being at film school, swapping points back and forth, like it was Monopoly money. It’s really a shame. I guess I miss that more than anything.”

  Money was the solvent that dissolved the tissue of the ’70s like acid on flesh. Years later, at Robin Williams’s fortieth birthday party in Napa, Steven and Kate were hanging around with John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, and a few others. Travolta is licensed for multi-engine jets. Somebody asked, “So John, you flew your own plane up here? What kind?”

  “A Learjet.”

  Steven broke in, “Oh yeah, a Learjet. Do you have the kind where you can just walk into it, or do you have to duck your head?”

  “You have to duck your head,” replied Travolta.

  Steven turned to Kate and said, “We don’t have to duck our heads on ours, do we?” It wasn’t meant as Learjet one-upmanship, but that’s what it was. The kid from Laurel Canyon with an orange Trans-Am had come a long way.

  LUCAS WAS FINISHING his trilogy, and he turned the job of supervising the ranch to Marcia. But she had no interest in what she derisively called “decorating.” Unbeknownst to their friends, George and Marcia’s marriage was in trouble. “For me, the bottom line was just that he was all work and no play,” says Marcia. “I felt that we paid our dues, fought our battles, worked eight days a week, twenty-five hours a day. I wanted to stop and smell the flowers. I wanted joy in my life. And George just didn’t. He was very emotionally blocked, incapable of sharing feelings. He wanted to stay on that workaholic track. The empire builder, the dynamo. And I couldn’t see myself living that way for the rest of my life.

  “I felt we were partners, partners in the ranch, partners in our home, and we did these films together. I wasn’t a fifty percent partner, but I felt I had something to bring to the table. I was the more emotional person who came from the heart, and George was the more intellectual and visual, and I thought I provided a nice balance. But George would never acknowledge that to me. I think he resented my criticisms, felt that all I ever did was put him down. In his mind, I always stayed the stupid Valley girl. He never felt I had any talent, he never felt I was very smart, he never gave me much credit. When we were finishing Jedi, George told me he thought I was a pretty good editor. In the sixteen years of our being together I think that was the only time he ever complimented me.”

&nb
sp; Marcia suggested that they see a therapist, but Lucas had that small-town animus against psychotherapy, probably absorbed from his father, and he discouraged her. “His general feeling was that shrinks are fucked-up people or they wouldn’t have been shrinks in the first place,” she says. Marcia began to withdraw from the marriage, suggested a trial separation. George rejected that; for him, it was all or nothing. He implored her to wait until Jedi was released. She did, and then got involved with Tom Rodriguez, an artist who created the dramatic stained glass dome over the Skywalker library.

  Lucas was crushed. Divorce was the daily coin of Hollywood, not Marin County. “It violated all of the small-town traditions and virtues, all his certainties about himself,” says Robbins. For all his inability to express it, he was very much in love with her. “I know he wanted me to stay, but it was just too little too late,” she says. Their friends were shocked, although some saw it coming. Says Ronda Gomez, who, with her husband, Howard Zieff, used to spend a lot of time with the Lucases, “He just didn’t want to have fun. Marcia wanted to go to Europe and see things. George wanted to stay in the hotel room and have his TV dinners.” From a lower-middle-class background, Marcia had always lived modestly, and she was uncomfortable with Lucas’s new Hearst-like Xanadu. Says Murch, “I think what Marcia saw was that his success was winding him tighter and tighter into a workaholic control-driven person, and she thought that this was destructive, which it probably is in the long run.”

  Marcia took a reported $50 million in settlement money with her. “He was very bitter and vindictive about the divorce,” she says of her ex-husband. “Francis and Ellie used to have an Easter party out in Napa, and the first couple of years after the divorce, I used to get to see everyone, the Barwoods, the Robbinses, and then I stopped being invited. Years later I ran into Ellie down in L.A., and she said, ‘I always wanted to call you to explain that when Francis and George were working on Tucker, George asked him not to invite you, because he was very uncomfortable around you.’ That really hurt. It’s not enough that I’m erased from his life, he wants to blackball me too, with people who were my friends. It’s like I never existed.”