Worse, Brando had neither read Conrad’s book, learned his lines nor done any preparation whatsoever for the role. ‘Francis had to literally start from scratch with him,’ says Doug Claybourne. ‘He had to bring him up to speed on what the thing was about and who the character was.’ According to Dennis Hopper the whole production was shut down for a week while Coppola read Brando the novel out loud. ‘Nine hundred people, the cast and crew, just sat and waited!’ he said. ‘We called it “the million dollar week”, because Marlon was getting paid a million dollars a week.’
When Marlon finally got round to reading the script he didn’t like it at all, and refused to play the role as written. Each morning Coppola would trudge over to Brando’s dwelling and for hours they’d debate and pore over the dialogue. Coppola sensed Marlon was stalling because he’d yet to get a handle on how to play Kurtz. The director was also getting nervous. ‘I only had him for fifteen days and I used up five of them just listening to him talk about termites.’
Finally, on the fifth day, Marlon shaved off all his hair and arrived at the idea of improvising his scenes and letting Coppola’s camera capture whatever came out of his mouth. Self-conscious of his killer-whale appearance, Marlon also stipulated that he dress in black and for the most part be filmed in shadow. Coppola agreed to steer his camera away from his enormous belly.
Marlon also wanted nothing to do with Dennis Hopper. Coppola had cast Dennis as a character who doesn’t appear in the book, a photojournalist who’s part of Kurtz’s inner entourage. Dennis agreed to play the role on the understanding that he would be given at least one line of dialogue with Brando. ‘That was my contract.’ Dennis had idolised Brando since his teenage years. Early screen acting gods had been the likes of Orson Welles and John Barrymore, but they soon became old hat when the thirteen-year-old Dennis saw films starring Brando and Montgomery Clift in the same week. ‘It changed my life.’
Marlon simply refused to work with Dennis, or even appear on the set at the same time. Instead he’d shoot one night, Dennis the next; that’s how they worked to get their scene done. Dennis came in once and Coppola said, ‘Last night Marlon called you a snivelling dog and threw bananas at you.’ So the actor had to endure this prop man throwing fruit at him all night long. Crushed that his hero wanted nothing to do with him, Dennis wondered if he was ‘giving off something that freaks him out’. Or maybe because of Marlon’s experience of alcoholic parents he had a major problem with Dennis’s drink-and-drugs lifestyle.
Dennis was certainly in a bad way on the film according to George Hickenlooper, who directed the seminal documentary Hearts of Darkness about the making of Apocalypse Now. ‘Dennis recounted the story to me that he was asked, “What can we do to help you play this role?” And Dennis said, “About an ounce of cocaine.” So he was being supplied by the film production drugs that he could use while he was shooting.’
Hopper’s performance as the crazed photojournalist is, well, crazed. ‘That’s the way he was, on and off camera,’ says Frederickson. ‘He was pretty crazy on that film, but he was fun and everybody loved him, a great guy. There wasn’t an edge to his craziness at all. Actually he’s a lot more serious and less friendly now that he’s not so crazy.’ For some of the crew he was also taking his method acting a little bit too far. ‘Dennis was notorious on set for never taking a shower,’ says Doug Claybourne. ‘You didn’t want to stand too close to him.’
Dennis even managed to set his hotel room on fire, according to Frederickson. ‘He had his girlfriend there and they were having a romantic night and he had all these candles and put them too close to the curtains and it caught on fire.’ Claybourne also recalls the incident. ‘Suddenly this flaming mattress came hurtling out of Dennis’s hotel room window and landed in the river outside.’
Like Marlon, Dennis improvised many of his scenes. Hours and hours of footage was shot, but Coppola chose to use only a few choice moments. His death scene was also removed. When Dennis takes a photograph of Kurtz he more or less signs his own death warrant and is hoisted up on a rope and shot to ribbons. A life-size dummy of Dennis was constructed and filled with ninety-eight squibs. ‘Now that dummy cost more than I got paid for the entire fucking movie,’ argued Dennis. ‘So, y’know, who’s the biggest dummy?’
Catastrophes continued to plague the production. Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack and Coppola, convinced he was to blame, one evening had an epileptic seizure, banged his head against the wall, rolled round on the floor and foamed at the mouth like a rabid dog. These were Coppola’s darkest hours from a stressful shoot that would have felled most other directors. ‘We had access to too much money,’ he later confessed, ‘too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.’ Dennis said, ‘Ask anybody who was out there. We all felt like we fought the war.’
Coppola, though, had more to lose than most. Some of the money being squandered was his own, several millions, in fact, and the director faced financial ruin if the film couldn’t be completed. No surprise that Coppola’s marriage almost collapsed as the pressure increased and the director suffered a nervous breakdown, declaring on three separate occasions during filming that he intended to commit suicide. He was ready to die out in the Philippines, do whatever it took to finish the film. Dennis could relate to that.
Sheen eventually recovered and work began again. When Marlon finished and it was time for him to leave, Coppola needed a big favour from his star. He approached Frederickson, ‘because he knew I got along with Marlon. Francis didn’t get along with him that well.’ Coppola needed Marlon to come out just for a quick close-up of his lips saying, ‘The horror, the horror.’ Frederickson went to Marlon’s hotel; he was getting ready to catch his flight to Hong Kong. ‘My contract’s up; I finished yesterday,’ said Marlon. ‘It’s just a little favour,’ Frederickson replied. ‘We’ll fly you out there, shoot it in an hour and then you can be on your way.’ Marlon smiled, ‘It’s never an hour, you know that.’ He then calculated how much he’d been paid for his stint on the picture. ‘It comes to about $75,000 a day,’ he said. ‘I’m in the Marlon Brando business, I don’t do anything else. I’m not in real estate or oil, I sell Marlon Brando. So you’re asking me to do a $75,000 favour. Would you ask that of the president of General Motors?’ Frederickson went back to Coppola. ‘When I told him he was furious and raved, ‘OK, tell Brando I’ll pay him the $75,000, but I’m gonna keep him here all day long.’
After 238 days Coppola finally wrapped. The budget had ballooned from $13m to nearer $30m. United Artists wanted Apocalypse Now to be their big Christmas 1977 release, but the opening was pushed back and pushed back as Coppola worked frenziedly in his editing suite for months on end arranging some 200 hours of footage. Critics started referring to the film as ‘Apocalypse When?’
Doug Claybourne stayed with the picture when it moved into post-production, working with the actors as they dubbed their lines, many of which were inaudible owing to background noise on location. Marlon came in for two weeks. ‘I remember one time Francis came in late to the studio and Marlon said to me, “You’ve got to get me a water gun, Doug.” So I ran out and bought a dollar water gun and gave it to Marlon. He filled it up and put it in his pocket and when Francis came into the recording suite he let him have it, wet him down good, saying, “You can’t be late, Francis, you’ve got to be here on time.” He loved to pull that kind of stuff. He was a real jokester, and a gentle guy and very sweet. Just a gentleman.’ Martin Sheen also found Marlon extremely friendly. ‘He went to great lengths to crack a good joke. The only thing he would not talk about was himself, or movies, or acting.’
Apocalypse Now finally opened in 1979 and is today rightly regarded as a masterpiece and a life-changing experience for most of the people who worked on it. Doug Claybourne recalls helping to organise the press screenings in New York. ‘I had all the actors together at the theatre but I couldn’t find Dennis. I had to go back to the hotel and I found him in his room, stark naked with his cowboy hat and his cowboy boots on.�
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Years later, when George Hickenlooper made his documentary, most of the stars and crew were happy to talk about the movie. Except Marlon. Hickenlooper tracked him down to the set of a movie. As he walked to his trailer Hickenlooper made his move. ‘Mr Brando, we’re making a documentary on Apocalypse Now. Would you be prepared to do an oncamera interview?’ Marlon turned round and stared like death into Hickenlooper’s face, his eyes boring into his psyche. ‘Why are you making a film about that fat fuck? He owes me two million dollars.’ Obviously Marlon was having issues with his royalty payments from Francis. ‘You tell that fat fuck,’ Marlon continued, ‘that if he pays me the two million, you can film me taking a shit.’ With that the trailer door slammed shut. Hickenlooper never got his interview.
Look at this fucking shit we’re in, man. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. And with a whimper, I’m fucking splitting, Jack.
Dennis Hopper had been in the Philippines shooting Apocalypse Now for just over a month. On his last night he and Coppola got roaring drunk together. An assistant was looking on nervously; his task was to get Dennis to Manila to catch a flight to Germany, where he was due to start filming the Wim Wenders thriller The American Friend (1977). Dennis refused to leave until there was no more beer left in the house.
At Hamburg airport Dennis was dazed and confused, knowing neither where he was nor why he was there. Still wearing his character’s costume from Apocalypse Now, at first sight Dennis gave Wim Wenders the impression that ‘he was drugged out of his mind’. Maybe the Coppola shoot had taken more out of Dennis than he realised because the actor was ‘totally impossible to work with for the first couple of weeks’, according to Wenders. ‘I told him that either we’d get someone else or he’d have to prove to me that he was the great actor that I knew he was. He was totally suicidal. He took every drug in the book.’ In the end Wenders confronted Dennis, telling him straight, ‘Are you gonna die tomorrow or are you gonna become an actor?’
Relations between Dennis and his co-star Bruno Ganz were even worse. The two of them had diametrically opposed approaches to acting. Dennis arrived on set entirely unprepared, not even knowing his dialogue, but once the camera turned he attacked the material with enthusiasm. ‘He had an incredible presence,’ said Wenders. Ganz, who came from a theatrical background, had been fretting for days about the scene, going over every gesture, every word, and so was completely thrown and disturbed by Dennis, who basically didn’t give a toss. ‘They actually had a fist fight in the middle of one scene because they hated each other so much,’ says Wenders. ‘There was no way I was going to work with these two maniacs.’
That night both actors decided to settle their differences and talked things through until the early hours of the morning. As dawn rose they’d reached an understanding and actually went on to become good friends. Overall, Dennis enjoyed the experience, later calling The American Friend ‘probably my best film’. He and Wenders discussed making another movie together, and flew to Mexico to scout locations, but the trip ended in chaos when Dennis started shooting guns in a Mexican town and was summarily deported from the nearest airport. It wasn’t until 2008 that the two of them reunited on a picture, Palermo Shooting, with Dennis playing, of all things, Death.
For Dennis, taking drugs or drinking like a maniac while working was always about the job at hand, not the drugs or the booze; they just kept him going. When work started to dry up, then the drug taking was about wallowing in self-pity and anger. For a while therapy looked like being a solution, but not for long: Dennis wasn’t the type to sit in a circle for everyone to gawp at his insecurities and problems. ‘Numbers of times through my life I have been asked to be in therapy. Or demanded to be in therapy. Or forced into therapy, but I just wore them out, I guess.’
Do I . . . play polo?
Somewhere amongst his bedroom-hopping activities Warren Beatty found time to make a movie, a romantic comedy called Heaven Can Wait (1978). Originally conceived as a vehicle for Muhammad Ali, a friend whom Warren regarded as a potential movie star, the great sportsman didn’t want to quit fighting so the character was changed from a boxer to a footballer and Warren played it himself. He also tried to cast Hollywood legend Cary Grant as God, dropping by his house to try the personal touch. Grant said no and asked his girlfriend Maureen Donaldson, an entertainment journalist, to see Warren to his car. En route Warren asked Maureen for a date. One thing led to another and poor old Cary was ditched and Maureen moved in with Warren.
On Heaven Can Wait Warren again pushed himself to the limit, putting in eighteen-hour days working as star, co-producer, co-writer and director, having finally taken the plunge, calling the difference between directing himself and being directed the difference between making love and masturbation. To be on the safe side, though, he roped in friend Buck Henry to act as co-director and sought advice from the highly seasoned crew he’d assembled. Many in the industry wondered, though, if he’d listen to them. Buck Henry admitted there were plenty of disagreements on set. ‘When Warren wants to do something his way, he has it all figured out, so you goddamn well better be prepared to argue your case if you differ with him.’ David Foster, who produced McCabe and Mrs Miller, is the first to acknowledge Warren’s pedigree: ‘Of course he’s a multitalented guy, it’s just hard for him to listen to other people, I guess. He’s such an intense guy. To get an answer he’ll check six different people. If a car drives by and he thinks it’s silver, but he’s not quite sure, he’ll ask six people, “Is that silver or grey?” He’ll question you to death. Intuitive, he’s not. Everything has to be thought out and thought out, it’s overkill. But he’s been very successful, so what the hell.’
A big talking point on the movie was the return of Julie Christie, who was making her third and final film with Warren. Afterwards he graciously declared that he could not have functioned without Julie on Heaven Can Wait. What he failed to mention was she at first turned him down flat and he had to fly to London to persuade her to be in it. William Fraker was the cameraman and remembers Beatty arriving back in LA. ‘He said to me, “We’ve got Julie, she’s coming back to Hollywood and, Billy, I want her to be beautiful in this picture. Absolutely beautiful.” I said, “OK, she’s a well-trained actress, disciplined, she’ll hit her marks, but Warren, you’d better hit your marks, too, if you want to look as pretty as Julie.” And he was magnificent. They were both beautiful in that picture. And it was a lot of fun to make; Warren’s a phenomenal guy, very generous.’
Observers couldn’t fail to notice that Warren still carried a torch for Julie, she less so for him (‘cool’ might be the operative word). During one candid moment Julie made her views perfectly clear about the formulaic material Warren was wasting his talents on. ‘I can’t believe you’re still making these fucking dumb movies when there are people all over Europe making fabulous films, about real things, like Fassbinder, and you’re still doing this shit.’
That was unfair; Heaven Can Wait is a supremely well-crafted movie. Audiences thought so, too, and made it a smash hit. The poster had Warren in tracksuit pants, trainers and angel’s wings sprouting from his back. Bob Evans, a man whose marketing savvy Warren admired, was invited to comment on the artwork. Evans loved it, except ‘No cojones,’ he said. ‘Your sweat pants, there ain’t no crease. Looks like you’re sporting a pussy.’ Warren scrapped the campaign and ordered a reworking. Half a million dollars down the drain. Evans called it, ‘By far the most expensive crotch retouch in cinema history.’
Warren was still very pally with Evans, but their friendship had an edge. When in a Rolling Stone article Warren claimed to be the fastest phone dialler in the world, Evans called him up to say his son Joshua was faster and could easily ‘out-touch-tone’ him. ‘I’ll wipe him off the street.’ Warren said. They arranged to have a dial-off in Evans’s screening room, which had two phones. When Warren arrived at the house he blasted, ‘Where’s the fuckin’ runt?’ Josh appeared and they began their dialling duel. Josh proved to be the
fastest finger. Warren went into a huff and didn’t speak to the boy for more than a year.
Most critics seemed to accept the fact that Heaven Can Wait was essentially lightweight, but the influential Pauline Kael, a supporter of Warren’s since the beginning of his career, dismissed it out of hand. Warren felt betrayed, so issued a challenge that many a film director has wanted to offer a critic after a particularly foul review. OK, then, he said, see if you can do better, come out to Hollywood and make movies. It was the ultimate dare and Kael foolishly accepted a development deal Warren wrangled out of Paramount. In her rush to rise to Warren’s bait Kael forgot one thing: she was a writer, not a movie maker. She was treated as a joke in Hollywood and soon fled back to New York, her reputation severely damaged. It was an incredible piece of calculated revenge. ‘We’re talking about manipulation on a level unknown to man,’ Buck Henry called it. ‘This is so Machiavellian; even I can’t quite believe it, except that it was Warren.’
I ain’t no slab of meat to be auctioned off, but, what the hell. Fine by me.
Following the aftershocks of the Polanski rape trial, Jack Nicholson set off for Mexico, hoping a change of scenery might do him good. The film was Goin’ South (1978), very much a personal project which he intended to both star in and direct. It was a comedy western that couldn’t possibly create any major problems, could it? Enter John Belushi.
A household name in America thanks to his inspired appearances on TV’s Saturday Night Live, Belushi had yet to make a movie but was already hooked on the drugs that would eventually kill him. Jack hired Belushi because he’d heard he did a brilliant comedy impression of a Mexican, perfect for the small role of a sleazy local sheriff. People knew the cocktail of drugs Belushi was consuming altered his personality dramatically, but no one was expecting the sight that greeted them when he arrived late for the shoot, looking as if he hadn’t slept for days. Shunning his hotel room, Belushi insisted on staying with Jack in the more luxurious bungalows up in the hills. ‘I’ve gotta get outta here,’ he grumbled. ‘The hotel is suck-o, man,’
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