Godfather

by Gene D. Phillips

  At all events, the skimpy production numbers, coupled with the dated storyline (with the racist senator experiencing a miraculous change of heart), coalesced to make the movie decidedly not a favorite with audiences or with critics. Coppola’s brave effort to yoke liberal social attitudes about Southern racism to a quaint, threadbare Irish fable about leprechauns just did not come off. Even the tune-bank of charming songs could not save the picture.

  Pauline Kael writes, “For the sake of some rather pretty songs,” one must endure “the three fairy-tale wishes and the race-relations paradise,” i.e., the racially integrated Tobacco Co-op, as well as the “hypertense Tommy Steele’s Puckish leprechaun.” Yet Kael adds sympathetically, “With this kind of decaying material that reeks of old Broadway,… the best Coppola can hope for is to keep the show moving, and he manages to do that.”21 Coppola simply shrugs, “I was brought in to direct a project that had already been cast and structured.”22 He had done the best he could to sell a tale drenched in sentiment to an audience of supposedly world-weary cynics. At its best, Rainbow is an amiable if lightweight musical filled with simple, goodhearted rustics. Nevertheless, Fred Astaire understandably termed Finian’s Rainbow overall the biggest disappointment of his long career. Not surprisingly, it was the sixty-eight-year-old Astaire’s last appearance as a lead in a musical.

  One unexpected dividend that did come out of Coppola’s travails in making the picture was that it provided him with the opportunity of meeting George Lucas, with whom he would collaborate in the years ahead. Lucas, a University of Southern California film student, had won a scholarship that entitled him to an internship at Warners-Seven Arts, whereby he could observe a film in production for six months. Since Rainbow was the only film being filmed on the Warner lot at the time, Lucas showed up daily on Coppola’s set. He was aware that Coppola was the first film school graduate to go big time and wanted to make a good impression on him.

  They sensed that they were kindred souls from the outset. Lucas recalls, “We were the only two people on the set who were under forty or fifty and who had beards” and who had both gone to film school.23 Adds Coppola, “I was very grateful to have someone of my own generation around to discuss what I was trying to do as opposed to what I was able to do.”24 He told Lucas, “Look, kid, you come up with one good idea a day and you can actually do stuff for me.” Coppola made Lucas his administrative assistant on the picture. One of his tasks was to take Polaroid snapshots of the sets in order to check the lighting. Later on, Coppola invited Lucas to kibitz in the editing room.

  “We became very close friends,” Lucas remembers, “because in every single way we’re opposite, two halves of a whole. Coppola’s very Italian and compulsive,” whereas Lucas is Scandinavian, “conservative and plodding.”25 Lucas was a fledgling filmmaker and Coppola was his mentor, and this relationship would continue on Coppola’s next film, The Rain People. “We respect each other,” Lucas has said, “but at the same time we are totally different personalities. He says he’s too crazy and I’m not crazy enough. Francis spends every day jumping off a cliff and hoping he’s going to land okay. My main interest is security…. But the goals we have in mind are the same. We want to make movies free from the yoke of the studios.”26

  3

  Nightmares at Noon

  The Rain People and The Conversation

  Things have a way of turning out so badly.

  —Tennessee Williams

  Warners-Seven Arts was satisfied with Coppola’s direction of Finian’s Rainbow; particularly his filming of the musical numbers. What’s more, although the picture was not a box-office bonanza, it earned $5.5 million in its initial run, and Coppola had brought the picture in on a budget of $3.5 million. The front office was therefore interested in the movie he wanted to make next, a modest production based on an original scenario of his own entitled The Rain People. Production chief Kenny Hyman was continuing to pursue his policy of encouraging young directorial talent at Warners-Seven, and with good reason.

  As noted before, Hollywood was faced with the rise of television. Instead of trying to upgrade the quality of their films, the studios first turned to technical innovations as a possible way of saving their audience. Thus Hollywood seemed convinced that a wider screen with the old traditional plots acted out on it would do the trick. That was certainly the studio’s thinking behind the making of Finian’s Rainbow. But movie audiences continued to defect to television, as they all too often found the average Hollywood product stuck in familiar grooves. The studios began turning to the new breed of young directors who wanted to depart from the conventional formulas of past Hollywood movies. Francis Coppola was one of the crop of budding auteurs who wanted to get away from Hollywood and make movies his own way. So he invested some of the money he had earned for directing Finian’s Rainbow in eighty thousand dollars’ worth of state-of-the-art technical equipment. He purchased, among other things, a German-made Steenbeck editing machine, which was a significant improvement over the clumsier Moviolas still in general use in Hollywood. His fellow film school alumni, Coppola remembers, said that he should “take the money and run.” That is, a young director should make one studio film “and then make a personal film; but when they get the money, they’re too terrified to do it. If you’re not prepared to risk some money when you’re young, you’ll never risk it.”1 Coppola, as we shall see, never hesitated to gamble his bank account on a pet film project.

  His own savings, of course, were not enough to float even a low-budget film version of The Rain People. Hence, he got Warners-Seven to provide financial backing to the tune of $750,000. The scenario had its antecedents in 1960, says Coppola: “I had started to write a long screenplay entitled The Gray Stationwagon; I eventually changed the title to Echoes.” It dealt with three women, all of whom decide to leave their respective husbands. He soon realized that it was far too ambitious an undertaking for a twenty-one-year-old aspiring filmmaker. “I never finished it,” he told me in Cannes.

  Nearly a decade later, when he wanted to make another personal film based on a script he had written himself (which is what You’re a Big Boy Now was), he turned again to that old manuscript. “I decided to do the story of just one of these women.” And that was the genesis of The Rain People.

  The Rain people (1969)

  When Coppola took You’re a Big Boy Now to the Cannes International Film Festival, he met Shirley Knight, the star of Dutchman (from the Le Roi Jones play), which was also entered in the festival. In Dutchman, Knight plays a racist prostitute who humiliates a black man on a subway train and finally stabs him. Knight was crying because some journalist had spoken rudely to her. Asked about this episode, Shirley Knight told me that one of the international press corps quite gratuitously assumed that the actress shared the racist attitude of the harlot she played in the film and berated her for it. She recalls that Coppola, who had always wanted to write a film tailored to a particular actor, said to her, “Don’t cry. I’m going to write a film for you.” Knight was delighted at the prospect of someone writing a part especially for her. “Oh, really?” she replied. “That’s nice.”

  The original idea of Rain People was suggested to Coppola by an episode from his childhood. His mother Italia, after a horrendous quarrel with her husband Carmine, disappeared for three days. Coppola later learned that she took refuge with her sister, “but at the time she told me that she had stayed in a motel,” he says. “It just clicked with me, the idea of a woman just leaving and staying in a motel.”2

  The plot of this tragic drama concerns Natalie Ravenna (Shirley Knight), a depressed young housewife with a child on the way who impulsively decides to walk out on her husband one rainy morning and to make a cross-country trek in her station wagon. She takes this rash course of action in the hope of getting some perspective on her life. Natalie at this juncture feels stifled by the responsibilities of married life, epitomized by the prospect of having a child. “She gets married and suddenly starts feeling her perso
nality being eroded, because marriage restricts her personality,” Coppola explains, “and she’s pregnant—that’s the final straw.”

  As she drives along the highway, she occasionally thinks of happier times, as when we see flashbacks to her Italian wedding, foreshadowing the opening wedding scene of The Godfather. In the course of her journey she picks up a hitchhiker, an ex-football player named Jimmy “Killer” Kilgannon (James Caan), who turns out to be mentally retarded as a result of a head injury he suffered in his final game. In effect, Natalie now has yet another “child” on her hands, and, almost in spite of herself, she gradually comes to care for him more and more as they travel along together.

  “So it’s a story of a human being becoming more and more responsible toward another human being. It’s like a woman sitting next to the kid she’s going to have.”3 In brief, Jimmy becomes the surrogate for the child Natalie is carrying.

  In a sense both Natalie and Jimmy qualify to be numbered among the rain people of the film’s title. The rain people are tender, vulnerable types who, as Jimmy himself describes them at one point, are “people made of rain; when they cry they disappear, because they cry themselves away.” Like the rain people, Natalie and Jimmy are easily hurt, and, sadly, they will both end up wounding each other deeply. The rain glistening on the deserted sidewalks in the opening credits takes on new meaning when Jimmy tells Natalie about the rain people.

  Coppola actually had gotten the ball rolling for the picture in late 1967, when he took his production assistant George Lucas, coproducer Bart Patton (who played the slasher in Dementia 13), and James Caan (a fellow Hofstra alumnus) to the Hofstra campus over the Thanksgiving weekend to film some footage at a football game that would serve for flashbacks to Kilgannon’s days as a college football star. This was even before Coppola had struck a deal with Warners-Seven, and he used these sequences to convince Kenny Hyman to back the movie.

  When the studio was considering the project, Coppola presented the movie to the executives as a fait accompli—he affirmed that the film was ready to go into production, as evidenced by the fact that he already had the football game footage in the can. He simply told them on Friday, “Look, I’m starting to shoot in earnest on Monday, and I need money; and if you don’t give it to me, I’ll get it from someone else.” This, we remember, is precisely the approach he had employed to get Warners-Seven to finance You’re a Big Boy Now, and it worked again. The studio officials anted up the money, “and I never showed them the script.”4 Lucas, admiring Coppola’s method of bluffing studio bosses, quipped that Coppola could sell ice to the Eskimos. After meeting with Coppola, Hyman was really convinced that seventy-five thousand dollars was not a huge risk for a director of Coppola’s talents.

  Barry Malkin was selected by Coppola as editor for the movie. He was a boyhood acquaintance of the director’s from Queens. “We lived in the same neighborhood as teenagers,” says Malkin, but they had not seen each other for years. Malkin visited fellow editor Aram Avakian while the latter was working on You’re a Big Boy Now, and he noted that the screenplay bore the name of Francis Ford Coppola. “I used to have a friend when I was a kid named Coppola,” he exclaimed. “I wonder if it’s the same guy.”

  When Avakian got around to inquiring if Coppola knew Malkin, he answered, “I knew a guy named Blackie Malkin,” which was Malkin’s nickname as a youngster. Coppola eventually asked Malkin to edit Rain People. “It was my opportunity to edit a class feature film,” Malkin states, after working on a forgettable programmer called Fat Spy (1966). Rain People was being released by a major studio. Coppola and Malkin went on to collaborate on several features thereafter, because Malkin found Coppola an easy director to work with: “For starters, we don’t have discussions about which take to use; our tastes are similar, and there is a mutual trust.”5

  In the spring of 1968 Coppola assembled a hand-picked cast and crew to make the movie, which he planned to shoot entirely on location. Together they formed a caravan consisting of five cars, as well as a Dodge Travco minibus that had been remodeled to carry their technical equipment. Making the film while traveling cross-country reminded Coppola of his experience of working on Roger Corman’s Young Racers, which was shot while the crew were migrating across Europe in a minibus (see chapter 1).

  They traveled for four months through eighteen states, filming as they went. Coppola did not set out with a finished screenplay in hand. He took with him a draft dated February 7, 1968, but he continued filling it out as shooting progressed. When he spied a setting that appealed to him along the way, the group would stop, and he would work out a scene for the actors to play. Thus, while in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Coppola heard tell of an Armed Forces Day parade and incorporated it into a sequence.

  George Lucas went along as production manager. Coppola wangled some money from Warners-Seven to enable Lucas to shoot a documentary about the making of Rain People, entitled filmmaker: a diary by George Lucas. The crew also numbered cinematographer Bill Butler, administrative assistant Mona Skager, and editor Barry Malkin—the film was edited en route on the Steenbeck, which was on board the Dodge minibus. In addition to Shirley Knight and James Caan, Robert Duval came along to play the key role of Gordon, a motorcycle cop with whom Natalie gets involved. In all, there were twenty actors and crew members in Coppola’s entourage.

  The footage shot each day was regularly sent to a New York laboratory for processing and returned within three days. Malkin edited the footage in the Dodge minibus, as noted before. He taped a sign on the outside of the Dodge, christening their mobile movie unit “The Magical Mystery Tour.” The Steenbeck at which he worked, he recalls, was wedged into the original kitchenette space of the mobile home, which also doubled as the dressing room.

  The last two months of shooting were in Nebraska, so Coppola took over an abandoned shoe shop in Ogallala and transformed it into his command post. The production team occupied an empty store, says Malkin, and flew in additional editing equipment from the Warners-Seven stockpile. He started a full-scale editing of the footage into a preliminary rough cut at this point. Coppola was convinced that making Rain People 15,500 miles away from the Hollywood studio “shark pool” was the prototype of how he would like to make movies in the future. If he could operate out of a store front in a one-horse town in Nebraska, there was no reason why he should have to live and work in the Hollywood film colony thereafter.

  George Lucas thought of his half-hour documentary filmmaker as a cinematic journal that “offers a personal viewpoint on the daily tension and stress occurring during a film production.”6 The documentary records the odyssey of Coppola and his convoy of actors and technicians, living out of suitcases as they traveled through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and, ultimately, Nebraska. Coppola, of course, had to keep in touch with the studio brass back at Warners-Seven. Filmmaker includes a shot of Coppola pacing back and forth during a heated discussion over the long-distance wire with a studio executive who fears that Coppola is drifting further and further out of studio control as he continues his cross-country trek. Coppola finally loses patience and issues a sweeping condemnation of the hidebound studio system. “The system,” he barks into the phone, “will fall by its own weight!” adding that he is determined to finish the picture on time and on budget—and on his own terms.

  At other times in the course of the documentary Coppola confesses to his colleagues his doubts about reaching journey’s end successfully, as when he frantically rewrites a portion of the screenplay to work in the Armed Forces Day parade in Chattanooga. Late in the documentary, when the going gets especially rough at one point, Coppola confesses, still on camera, “I am tired of being the anchor when I see my world crumbling.”

  Lucas remembers the whole production experience as the best of times and the worst of times. He affirms that the cast and crew shared some good times during the trip. “It was difficult, but for the young clowns that we were, it was fun.” By contrast, the twenty people
involved in the expedition spent countless nights in cheap motels in the middle of nowhere, and “that was nervewracking.”7

  One of the difficulties posed by shooting the film entirely on location was that the director of photography, Bill Butler, had to make do with the minimum of lighting equipment that had been brought along in the minibus. Butler came from Chicago TV and was shooting his first Hollywood feature. He was in his forties, making him the oldest member of Coppola’s production unit on the picture. His experience in making TV documentaries had taught him how to shoot quickly and efficiently with a small crew. “I told Coppola I could shoot just about any kind of scene that he could dream up,” Butler says. Coppola followed the same procedure on the present film as he had on You’re a Big Boy Now, filming the location scenes as much as possible with the natural light available at the location site.

  Gordon, the motorcycle policeman to whom Natalie is sexually attracted, lives in a trailer park, and Butler had to light a night sequence there. For an interior scene in the trailer, he simply screwed photoflood lamps into the lighting fixtures already available in the trailer in order to provide sufficient lighting for shooting the scene. For exterior shots, as the characters walked around the trailer park at night, Butler hid lights behind bushes on the grounds in order to provide illumination for shooting. “It’s a real challenge when you have a minimum number of lights to work with,” he comments. “You really have to be inventive.” He liked working with Coppola on this film and on The Conversation because “he gives you a lot of freedom. He lets your creativity work for him.”8

  The screenplay, we know, was not in final form when Coppola’s caravan hit the road to begin filming. Consequently, Coppola was constantly revising the script, changing any dialogue that no longer fit the flow of the shooting as it progressed. He was carefully modifying the dialogue by improvising with the actors during rehearsals in order to make the dialogue fit the action of the scene satisfactorily. Coppola found shooting the film on location to be stimulating. In the controlled environment of the studio, he told me, “you lose the random, unpredictable things that can energize a scene.” A case in point is the Armed Forces Day parade in Chattanooga. In the scene Jimmy, temporarily separated from Natalie, wanders dazed and confused among the spectators and the youngsters in the high school bands as they march down the street, as if he were a little boy who has lost his mother.