All in all, You’re a Big Boy Now is a winning amalgam of quirky comedy and serious drama that offers glimpses into complicated lives, and that keeps it from becoming merely an inflated situation comedy. The picture is in some ways slight and slender, but it nevertheless indicates the stirrings of a major directorial talent. Goodwin and Wise cite critic Joseph Morgenstern as stating that not since Orson Welles went riding out of town “has any young American made a film as original, spunky, and just plain funny as this one.”10 Charles Champlin, critic of the Los Angeles Times, delivered the ultimate accolade to Coppola by acknowledging that the young writer-director already deserved to be termed an auteur.
Asked at the time of the film’s American release how the movie’s box-office performance would affect his career, Coppola replied stoically, “If the movie’s a bomb it won’t destroy my reputation as a director because I don’t have any,” adding that he could always go back to being a screenwriter for the time being.11
Although budgeted at $800,000, the picture eventually cost closer to $1 million, which it never recouped during its original release. The film was not a commercial success because, besides the mixed reviews, the two leads were unknowns who had not yet established themselves in the movie world, and the supporting players likewise lacked marquee value for the youthful filmgoers at whom the film was targeted. When Big Boy failed to attract ticket buyers in its initial New York and Los Angeles runs, Warners-Seven gave it only a limited distribution across the rest of the country. The upshot was that the movie did not break even until it was sold to television.
The young principals in Big Boy continued to pursue film careers. Elizabeth Hartman’s career never really got off the ground, and she finally took her own life in 1987. Although Big Boy was not a moneymaker, Warners-Seven was sufficiently impressed with Coppola’s handling of the film and the positive reviews it received in some quarters to ask the promising young director to make Finian’s Rainbow, a movie musical with Fred Astaire.
Finian’s Rainbow (1968)
The merger of Warner Brothers and Seven Arts had reached the point where Jack Warner, the venerable Warners production chief, finally sold his stake in the studio to Seven Arts. Earlier, when Joseph Landon, producer of Rainbow, had broached Coppola’s name to Warner as a possible director for the film, Warner dismissed Coppola as too young and inexperienced for a big musical (George Cukor was a sexagenarian when Warner picked him to direct My Fair Lady in 1964). After Warner’s departure, however, Eliot Hyman was named chief executive officer of the company. Hyman, in turn, appointed his son Ken as production chief (“the son also rises,” as one wag quipped), and Ken Hyman was interested in nurturing young talent in a way that Jack Warner, a scion of the old Hollywood, was not. So Ken Hyman authorized Landon to consider Coppola for the director’s chair for Finian’s Rainbow.
The new administration at Warners-Seven Arts had some very practical reasons for setting their sights on Coppola. To begin with, the studio had not allocated a huge budget for Rainbow, despite the fact that at the time it was customary to assign a generous budget for a large-scale musical, such as Funny Girl (1968). But Warners-Seven wanted Rainbow to be made quickly in order to cash in on the wave of musicals initiated by the blockbuster Sound of Music (1965) before the trend waned, and they wanted to do so at bargain prices. Hence, instead of the $10 million budget usually set aside for a musical in those days and a six-month production schedule, the studio wanted Rainbow to be made for a thrifty $3.5 million on a three-month schedule. Consequently, the front office really wanted Coppola to helm Rainbow, not only because they knew a young director would not command a substantial salary, but also because he had proved with the low-budget You’re a Big Boy Now that he could bring in a picture on time with a shoestring budget. They also hoped he could give the picture the vigor that Big Boy had.
By this time Coppola had taken some office space and commenced writing the first draft of a screenplay that would eventually become The Conversation. Landon phoned him and cagily sent up a trial balloon by inquiring of Coppola if he knew anyone who could direct Rainbow. “I thought about it,” Coppola remembers, “and I gave him some suggestions and hung up.” Coppola did not suggest himself because he had promised himself not to make another film for a major studio unless he was assured of a reasonable degree of artistic freedom as director. The next day Landon phoned again and this time asked him flat out, “What about you?”12
Coppola pondered Landon’s offer for a few days and initially turned it down after reading the hackneyed script that had been derived from the old-fashioned 1947 Broadway show. Nevertheless, Coppola eventually changed his mind because, for a start, Ken Hyman had let it be known that he planned to attract up-and-coming directors by giving them more artistic control of their films than had been the case under the old regime at Warners.
In addition, “musical comedy was something that I had been raised with in my family, and I thought frankly that my father would be impressed.”13 Carmine Coppola had conducted the pit orchestra for the road companies of several Broadway musicals when Francis was a lad, and young Francis got a chance to see some of them. Moreover, Coppola had written the script and lyrics for a musical while he was still in high school and had directed a musical show at Hofstra in his college days. Then too, making Finian’s Rainbow afforded Coppola the opportunity of directing one of the screen’s legendary hoofers, Fred Astaire. But what finally clinched the deal for Coppola was the score lyricist E. Y. Harburg (who had written the lyrics for The Wizard of Oz), and composer Burton Lane had served up in Rainbow: a score that boasted a bumper crop of songs like “Old Devil Moon” and “If This Isn’t Love.” Several of these songs had become standards, and they went a long way in explaining why the musical had racked up 725 performances on Broadway. In fact, Coppola judged the score one of the best ever composed for the American musical theater, and so he was essentially persuaded to make the picture “by the goddamn thought of doing all those wonderful musical numbers.”14
Still Coppola had to contend with the screenplay, adapted from the script of the stage play. Finian’s Rainbow takes place in Rainbow Valley, Missitucky, a mythical Southern village. Finian McLonergan (Fred Astaire) and Sharon, his daughter (Patricia Clark), have fled to America from Glocca Mora, Ireland, to elude Og, a leprechaun (Tommy Steele), whose magical pot of gold Finian has stolen. Woody Mahoney (Don Francks), a sharecropper, sells Finian a plot of land, on which Finian buries the pot of gold that has the power to grant three wishes to whoever possesses it.
Sharon uses one of the wishes to teach a lesson to the racist Senator “Billboard” Rawkins (Keenan Wynn). She temporarily transforms him into a black man to let him experience racial bigotry. Sharon uses the second wish to restore the senator to his status as a white man. Meanwhile, Howard, a black friend of Woody’s, has invented a way of growing menthol tobacco, which brings prosperity to Rainbow Valley when he and Woody form the Tobacco Cooperative with the black and white sharecroppers. Og the leprechaun eventually becomes human so that he can woo Susan the Silent, Woody’s mute sister (Barbara Hancock). Og himself invokes the third and final wish that the crock of gold can grant in order to give Susan the power of speech. By then Woody has fallen in love with Sharon, and they are married. At the fade-out Finian departs, continuing to “follow the rainbow” wherever it will lead him. The theme of the story seems to be that gold is merely a base metal, while people constitute the world’s true wealth—a rather banal notion not calculated to keep the moviegoer up nights pondering it.
As noted, Coppola was appalled when he read the “cockamamie” script. The creaky plot of the twenty-year-old formula musical simply did not hold up. One of the principal elements of the plot concerns the blustering Senator Rawkins who threatens to disrupt the racially integrated community of sharecroppers. The social commentary implied in this situation was at odds with the never-never-land atmosphere of the rest of the story, which revolved around Og, the fanciful leprechaun whose crock of go
ld can make people’s dreams come true. The two strands of the story had been combined in what was nothing less than a shotgun marriage. As Coppola put it, “A lot of liberal people were going to feel it was old pap” because its civil rights stance seemed woefully outdated in the wake of the intervening two decades of racial struggle. It was a white man’s patronizing approach to civil rights. Conversely, “the conservatives were going to say it was a lot of liberal nonsense” when it came to a racially integrated group of sharecroppers. “I knew I was going to get it from both ends.” He therefore overhauled the screenplay in an effort to “make it acceptable for contemporary audiences” and yet remain faithful to the spirit of the original show. Thus the film ends with emphasis on the whites and blacks working together with good old American know-how, raising mentholated tobacco and bettering their communal existence in the bargain. In sum, Coppola thought Rainbow was a marvelous show of yesteryear: “I tried to make it work on its own terms and not get fancy.” He endeavored to give it a “timeless” dimension so that the period in which the story is set is never really defined.15
Coppola did his best to turn out a respectable movie musical within the limitations of schedule and budget imposed on him. He was granted three weeks of rehearsal time prior to shooting. Following the same procedure he used on You’re a Big Boy Now, he took over a small rehearsal hall on the lot and ran through the whole show without scenery or costumes, with Astaire and the rest of the cast accompanied by Carmine Coppola on the flute with a pianist and a drummer. And, just as he did on Big Boy, he had a run-through before an audience in a theater-in-the-round format, which admittedly looked more like an Omaha high school production than the makings of a movie musical. (Coppola’s father stayed on to help in orchestrating the score.) “We rehearsed for about three weeks and shot it in just twelve weeks,” Coppola remembers. “It was not a luxury production.”16
Coppola had petitioned the studio brass to permit him to shoot the picture on location in Kentucky, but they refused. They wanted him to film the movie on the backlot and to employ an enormous forest set they had spent a lot of money to build for an earlier musical, Camelot (1967). It would stand in for rustic Missitucky, thereby enabling the studio to get its money’s worth out of the forest set. In effect, that meant that the dancers had to perform on soft grass and muddy earth—instead of on the hard surfaces of a proper dance floor—as Astaire led the jolly inhabitants of Rainbow Valley in merry dances through fields and streams. This situation became a bone of contention between Coppola and dance director Hermes Pan. Since the issues that led to the falling out between the director and the choreographer have not been explored in detail in previous discussions of Finian’s Rainbow, it is appropriate that I do so here.
Pan, a veteran of several vintage Astaire musicals like Blue Skies (1946) and The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), had been hired at Astaire’s behest. He maintained that he could only stage dance numbers properly on the carefully prepared surfaces of a dance floor and that the soft, grassy turf of the rural outdoor sets on the backlot was inadequate for his purposes. Coppola rejoined that they had to make do with the sets they had at their disposal, notably the Camelot forest set. They reached an impasse. Coppola was not satisfied with Pan’s choreography, and Pan contended that it was the best he could do with a principal set that had not even been designed for the present film. He asked to have more rehearsal time, but Coppola could not grant his request since there was no margin in the tight production schedule.
“The choreography was abysmal; let’s be honest,” says Coppola bluntly. “We fired the choreographer halfway through the picture.” Coppola staged most of the musical numbers eventually. To give Hermes Pan “equal time,” it is appropriate to record his remarks about Coppola, whom he thought “a real pain. He knew very little about dancing and musicals.” Pan observed that “these schoolboys who studied at UCLA think they are geniuses, but there is a lot they don’t understand.”17 Obviously Pan shared the attitude of the old Hollywood toward the generation of young filmmakers coming out of university film programs who had not done an apprenticeship in the studios. Pan could console himself, however, that he still retained an official screen credit as choreographer on the movie—although it is doubtful that he would have wanted to be held responsible for what passed for choreography in the production numbers Coppola staged.
Coppola, after all, would be the first to admit that he was no dance director. Nevertheless, he did develop a concept for each number in the wake of Pan’s departure from the film. “I dreamed up the way the numbers were going to be done,” he explains. For example, for “Something Sort of Grandish” Coppola decided, “I’ll shoot it on a hill and have Petula Clark hanging white bed sheets” on a clothesline while she warbles a duet with Tommy Steele. “If this Isn’t Love” would be done with children’s games. “On that Great Come-and-Get-It Day” the sharecroppers “are going to throw away all their old furniture in big piles,” looking toward the day when the Tobacco Co-op begins to pay off.18
Be that as it may, the bulk of the production numbers were filmed without any set choreography once Pan had walked off the picture. Coppola would play back the music for a dance routine and instruct the dancers to “move with the music” while he directed them from behind the camera. Astaire, who was accustomed to plotting out each dance routine in meticulous detail with a choreographer, had to make do with Coppola telling him, “We’ll put the camera here; Fred, go over there and do something. Then let’s have two girls block in this space.”19 Astaire, old trouper that he was, would then oblige with a little impromptu soft shoe routine as he danced his way around a rustic backyard or shuffled off down a country road.
Coppola would shoot about eight takes of a musical number and have Astaire and the other dancers improvise their way through the number each time, so that each take varied somewhat from all the others. During editing Coppola then pasted together the best bits from each take into the final version of the number.
In some of the production numbers Coppola sought to get by with no choreography at all by substituting a montage of quick cuts. For example, “If This Isn’t Love,” which, as mentioned, is structured around children’s games, opens with Woody singing as he rides atop the hood of a truck, followed by a series of jump cuts showing Woody in a tug-of-war, running in a sack race, playing leapfrog and blind man’s bluff, and dancing around a maypole.
In the end Warners-Seven permitted Coppola to shoot on location for a scant eight days. This footage was carefully interspersed throughout the film to enliven the bulk of the footage that was shot at the studio. It was used to particularly good advantage in the opening credit sequence. Coppola assigned Carroll Ballard, a fellow film school alumnus, to do second-unit photography for the title sequence. During the opening credits the camera roams over a field of flowers and then pans up to Finian and Sharon hiking through the fields. The camera then takes in a rainbow as Sharon sings, “Look to the Rainbow” (recalling Harburg’s lyrics for a song in The Wizard of Oz, “Over the Rainbow”). There follows a succession of quick shots, wherein the pair pass several legendary American landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Glacier National Park, in the course of their journey to Rainbow Valley, where they arrive at the close of the credits. Coppola shot the rest of the location exteriors in Modesto, Monterey, Carmel, and San Francisco, with cinematography that is clean and handsome.
Besides the paucity of location footage in the movie, there were other drawbacks for the production, one of which was that some of the actors did not meet Coppola’s expectations. Don Francks, a former lounge crooner, never improved much as an actor, Coppola remarks, while Tommy Steele tended to overplay his role with too much exuberance, which was in keeping with his stage persona. “I felt the leprechaun should be more shy and timid and bewildered,” Coppola complains. “I wanted him to be an introvert leprechaun, a guy who speaks in a quiet voice and finally becomes a human being.” At Coppola’s insist
ence Steele began to tone down his performance during rehearsals, but “somehow during the actual shooting, little by little he slipped back into his familiar character,” mugging and pulling faces. Only when serenading Susan the Silent with “When I’m Not Near the Girl I Love, I Love the Girl I’m Near” was his delivery less mannered and more subdued. In short, Steele did not scale down his performance for the camera, but acted broadly, as if he were playing to the last row in the balcony from a theater stage. (Steele took such a drubbing from the critics that he acted in only one more film.)
Finally, Keenan Wynn was fine as the bombastic Senator Rawkins in his early scenes—until the senator is transformed into a black man. At that point Wynn’s over-the-top performance smacks all too much of a comedian doing a blackface routine in a minstrel show.
Yet, despite the movie’s stringent budget and tight schedule, Finian’s Rainbow was being groomed by the studio brass to be a roadshow attraction, with reserved seat performances at advanced prices, complete with an overture and an intermission. It would therefore have to compete with more lavish, expensive musicals like Funny Girl, to its own disadvantage. The studio even opted to blow up the film to 70 mm for the roadshow engagements, and the wide screen ratio dictated that the top and the bottom of the frame had to be cropped, thereby cropping off the feet of Astaire and the other dancers while they were dancing. When the film was processed in 70 mm, Coppola moans, “no one bothered to check the top and bottom of the frame.”20
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