The last shooting day was May 21,1977. According to the production log, Coppola addressed the cast and crew at day’s end: “I’ve never in my life seen so many people so happy to be unemployed.”30 Shortly after, Coppola and company pulled up stakes and went home. Coppola still required an additional $10 million for postproduction. UA, which had by this time sunk $25 million into the production, was reluctant to invest any more. So he had to sink his personal assets into the film, which included mortgaging his home on Pacific Heights in San Francisco, to bring the picture to completion.
One journalist quipped that Coppola had virtually pawned his wedding ring just to finish his picture. Coppola was not amused. He recalls that he was crushed at the time when the press ridiculed Apocalypse Now because it seemed to be an out-of-control “financial boondoggle.” Why was it a crime, he wondered, for him to spend his own money on a serious war picture, when the studios were willing to bankroll movies “about a big gorilla (King Kong) or a jerk who flies across the sky (Superman)?”31
Press reports about the turbulent shooting period continued to circulate long after the film wrapped. One dispatch concerned corpses of North Vietnamese regulars killed by Kurtz’s renegade army, which are strewn around the grounds of his temple compound. It was alleged that there were some real cadavers mixed in with the dummy corpses on the Kurtz compound set. The film’s press office vigorously denied this news story. More precisely, Dean Tavoularis points out that he had obtained a lot of bones from a restaurant, which he piled up in Kurtz’s courtyard. When the crew noticed the stench and the rats crawling over the bones, one of them surmised that they were human remains, which was decidedly not the case. (There is a close-up in the documentary of a pile of these bones with flies buzzing around them that is not in the finished film.)
The temple set was modeled on Angkor Wat, an ancient temple still preserved in Angkor, Cambodia. Tavoularis explains that Kurtz’s macabre compound, complete with its decaying temple, was meant to reflect Kurtz’s descent into madness and barbarism—and Conrad’s vision of the depths of human depravity: there are altars covered with plastic skulls as well as heaps of bones scattered around the set, and an eerie mist that envelops the compound. “I was living in the house of death that I was making,” Tavoularis remembers, and growing depressed because of the grotesque atmosphere as time went on. The whole picture, he concluded, “was a nightmare.”32
A much more unsettling report in the press about the production stated that Coppola had had a nervous breakdown late in the shooting period. This news dispatch had been given some credence when Coppola himself introduced Apocalypse Now in a press conference at the Cannes International Film Festival in May 1979, which I was present to hear. He made the following declaration, which was widely quoted thereafter: “Apocalypse Now is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, had access to too much money, too much equipment; and little by little we went insane. After a while, I was a little frightened, because I was getting deeper in debt and no longer recognized the kind of movie I was making. The film was making itself, or the jungle was making it for me.” He seemed to be saying that the film had been made in just the kind of muddle that had doomed the U.S. Army in Vietnam.
Eleanor Coppola in her diary confirms the serious bout of depression Coppola experienced during filming. She records on March 14, 1977—almost a year to the day after principal photography had begun—that Coppola suffered what she termed “a sort of nervous breakdown.”33 He was rehearsing a scene on the set, when suddenly he sank to his knees and began to weep. Then he suffered an “epileptic seizure, thrashing about on the floor and foaming at the mouth.” He was delirious and was afraid he was going to die. His final request was that George Lucas should finish Apocalypse Now.34 Two days later he was back on the set, as if nothing had happened.
In discussing this incident, Coppola states emphatically, “I am an epileptic,” and the seizure he suffered on the set of Apocalypse Now was genuine.35 He also admits that he pretended to have a fit while he argued with the studio brass about casting Brando in The Godfather. But that was a gag, he says, and the Paramount executives present knew it.
More recently, David Thomson has written that Coppola “ran into a ‘Heart of Darkness’ of his own while making the picture: He was out of control … began to use drugs,” and became involved with another woman. Thomson quotes Brando as stating that during shooting Coppola was “alternately depressed, nervous, and frantic.”36
In addressing himself to Thomson’s remarks, Coppola states, “To say I began using drugs” during production “is a great overstatement.” He confesses that he had begun chain-smoking cigarettes, which he had never done before. “At the worst I began smoking marijuana” during filming and postproduction, “but that was the extent of it.”37 In short, he never developed the sort of drug addiction that plagued Dennis Hopper in the mid-1970s.
He was exhausted from the endless shoot, he explains, and worried about going further and further over budget and over schedule, not to mention the crises precipitated by Sheen’s heart attack and the typhoon. Admittedly, smoking cigarettes and grass was making him weird at times, he concludes. In the documentary Hearts of Darkness Coppola remarks in a taped conversation with his wife during shooting, “This film is a $20 million disaster. Why won t anyone believe me? I’m thinking of shooting myself.” He is then shown holding a prop revolver to his head—a melodramatic gesture that he hardly meant to be taken literally. Yet William Phillips, in his essay on the documentary, takes Coppola at his word when he writes, “So anguished did he become that he was considering … how he could commit suicide.”38
During postproduction, in the fall of 1977, Coppola was diagnosed by a psychiatrist as having manic-depressive tendencies, for which lithium, a tranquilizer, was prescribed. Because Coppola did not want it bandied about Hollywood that he was taking medication, he arranged to have the prescription written under the name of Kurtz. “Lithium made me nauseous,” he explains, so he ultimately decided that he could arrive at some sort of emotional stability without it, “and I just stopped.”39 At all events, Coppola contends that the idea that he suffered a “so-called breakdown” during shooting is “exaggerated; it was much more your basic, old-fashioned mid-life crisis.”40
Coppola’s mid-life crisis also involved his renewing his personal relationship with Melissa Mathison, who served as his production assistant on Apocalypse Now, as she had done on Godfather II (see chapter 5). Eleanor Coppola gives an anguished account in her diary of the whole affair. She writes that on April 13, 1978, she found a loving card from Mathison and confronted her husband about it. Coppolas mother Italia commented afterward, “I love that Ellie; she’s a saint. Even when Francie was with that Other Woman, he loved Ellie; and when that Other Woman wanted him to leave Ellie, he wouldn’t. Ellie—she stayed; and she gained.”41 (Mathison later married one of the cast of Apocalypse Now, Harrison Ford.)
When Coppola returned to San Francisco, he was faced with one million feet of film (about 250 hours) to edit into a feature. He began working with supervising editor Richard Marks and coeditors Walter Murch, Gerald Greenberg, Lisa Fruchtman, and Barry Malkin, plus a bevy of assistant editors. They were using the state-of-the-art editing facilities at American Zoetrope in Coppola’s Sentinel Building, as well as an annex that had been installed across the street.
Coppola transferred all of the footage to videotape, which was much easier to work with than cumbersome reels of 35 mm film. Once a scene had been edited, it would be transferred to celluloid. Gerald Greenberg states that Coppola parceled out specific sequences for each editor to work on: “it behooved us to break the film up, so we could each concentrate on just these sequences.”42 Greenberg’s superb editing of Kilgore’s helicopter attack became a benchmark for the other editors. Since Coppola was determined to give a definite shape to Apocalypse Now, he sometimes would stay up most of the night to
do a preliminary edit of a crucial scene and then turn it over to the editing team the next morning.
Furthermore, he shot some additional footage on his Napa Valley estate near San Francisco and in the surrounding countryside in order to plug up some holes in the narrative. The shots of Willard reading Kurtz’s dossier and commenting on it as he journeys upriver were done at this time. Willard is impressed with Kurtz’s heroism in the days before he went off the deep end. “What balls!” he exclaims in reading of Kurtz’s valiant exploits.
The first rough cut, which was finished in the late summer of 1977, ran seven hours, remembers Richard Marks. It ultimately took two years to create the final cut. “I’ll probably never work on anything that monumental again.”43
Walter Murch doubled as sound specialist as well as a film editor. He emphasizes that Apocalypse Now was the first stereo film he ever worked on. “There are two channels of sound in both the back and the front of the movie theater” he explains, “so, with stereo, you give the audience a sense of being surrounded by sound.”
When Murch began mixing the sound track in the fall of 1977, he noted that the original narration in the Milius screenplay had long since been abandoned. “I felt that there was so much turbulence in the storytelling,” he recalls, “that the only way of clarifying the plot was to replace the narration. It seemed necessary, because Willard is such an inactive, inarticulate character—the only way to get inside his head is to have him relate to us through the medium of narration.”44 Richard Marks agreed: At the beginning of the film, “there is Willard, a soldier and a CIA operative, who is given a mission. You’re asking the audience to identify with a hired killer and to follow him up the river.” But they would not identify with him, “unless they could understand his pain” by way of his voice-over narration.45
Coppola concurred with Murch and Marks and eventually brought in Michael Herr to compose a new narration in the spring of 1978. A former war correspondent in Vietnam, Herr had published a series of articles on the war in Esquire magazine, and they were subsequently collected in a book, Dispatches (1977), which is generally considered to be the best reportage by any correspondent to come out of the war. As a matter of fact, Herr’s articles in Esquire had been the source of some of the incidents that Milius had woven into his original script.
Herr found that the narration written by John Milius was too gung ho and too tinged with machismo and, as such, “totally useless. So, over a period of a year, I wrote various segments of narration. Francis gave me very close guidelines.”46 At the point Herr first viewed the rough cut, in February 1978, it was five hours—two hours shorter than the first cut of August 1977. Major excisions had been made, particularly in the Kurtz compound sequence, removing much of Brando’s improvisations (which survive in fragments as voice-overs in the completed film) as Marks and his editing team pared down and simplified Brando’s remarks.
Herr’s hardboiled narration fleshes out Willard’s character with significant details—something Milius’s narration failed to accomplish. When Willard is given his mission to assassinate Kurtz, a rogue officer who has committed unspeakable atrocities, Willard muses over the sound track, “Everyone gets what they want. I wanted a mission; and for my sins, that’s what I got.” As two officers come to his hotel room to summon him, he continues, “They brought it up to me like room service—a real choice mission, and when it was over, I’d never want another.” Willard’s remarks echo Conrad’s narrator in “Heart of Darkness,” when Marlow says he was given the mission to find Kurtz in order to pay for his sins. Furthermore, through Willard’s narration we learn of his cynical attitude toward the top brass and their conduct of the war: “They were four-star clowns, who were going to end up giving the whole circus away.” He never expresses himself that bluntly to others. In brief, the film is inconceivable without Herr’s narration.
While Coppola continued toiling on the rough cut, he opted to have some test screenings in the spring of 1978. In fact, he is credited with “beginning the Hollywood vogue of test-screening movies,” declares Michele Wallens. “I was, and probably still am, a theater director,” says Coppola. Out-of-town tryouts are “part of a long-standing tradition in the theater, and I was looking for a modern way of accomplishing it” for a film.47
Filmgoers were given a letter from Coppola at the test screenings, inviting them “to help me finalize the film.” After one test screening in New York City in May 1978, he addressed a memo to himself in the wee hours in his hotel room. He was distraught when some preview cards said that the final section of the movie in Kurtz’s compound failed to jell. Moreover, he was disappointed that several filmgoers thought the Kilgore helicopter attack, which he considered a run-of-the-mill action sequence, was the highpoint of the whole movie. “The film reaches its height level during the fucking helicopter battle,” he moaned. “My nerves are shot, and my heart is broken.”48 The premiere, which had been delayed from Christmas 1978 to Easter 1979, was now postponed until August 1979, much to the displeasure of the feisty young Andreas Albeck, the new president of UA. United Artists was on the verge of financial collapse, and the studio needed a blockbuster to save it. Albeck was desperately hoping that Apocalypse Now would help.
Across the street from the Sentinel Building was the skyscraper that housed the headquarters of Transamerica Corporation, a conglomerate that owned an insurance company and many other diverse business interests. It was also the parent company of UA, which it had acquired in 1967. James Harvey, executive vice president of Transamerica and chairman of UA, became increasingly worried about Apocalypse Now, as UA continued to pump additional funds into the film’s postproduction phase. Coppola gave Harvey a telescope with a note, saying, “So that you can keep an eye on me,” by training the telescope on Coppola’s office across the street.49 As in the case of Charles Bludhorn, head of the parent company of Paramount while Coppola made the first two Godfather movies, the filmmaker thought it wise to be on good terms with the big boss. Still, the fate of Apocalypse Now was shrouded in the San Francisco fog.
Already displeased with Coppola, the UA brass were chagrined by his decision to go for broke and unveil what he termed “a work in progress” at the Cannes International Film Festival on May 13,1979. One official stated that Coppola’s decision constituted “momentary insanity born of arrogance.”50 Coppola saw it as the most public “sneak preview” in cinema history—a chance for him to obtain worldwide publicity for his beleaguered movie. He did that and more: Apocalypse Now won one of the two Grand Prizes awarded at the Festival that year, and Coppola became the only director ever to win the Palm d’Or (Golden Palm) at Cannes twice (the first time was for The Conversation). Coppolas gamble had paid off. Consequently, the top executives at UA and Transamerica were reassured by this turn of events. I personally observed that after the award ceremony on May 24, when Coppola was being interviewed by a swarm of journalists on the front steps of the Palais des Festivals, the director of Apocalypse Now was being hailed as the top auteur filmmaker of his generation.
The one sour note struck at Cannes was that the film’s ambiguous ending was thoroughly disliked by many members of the international press corps. As a matter of fact, Coppola had experimented with more than one ending for the picture during postproduction. He said at the time that “working on the ending is like trying to crawl up glass by your fingernails.”51
The first ending Coppola considered came right from his version of the screenplay: Willard orders what he calls a “purgative air strike” on Kurtz’s temple compound over the shortwave radio, before making his getaway downriver in his PBR. Shortly afterward, according to the script, “The air strike hits with all its force. Balls of fire sweep down on the temple; it is the biggest fireworks show in history.”52
As it happened, Coppola had to destroy the Kurtz compound set when he decamped from the Philippines, so he blew it up and had his camera crew record the multiple explosions with several cameras. He was therefore able to insert this
footage of strobe-lit flames into the film to portray the bomber attack on Kurtz’s fortress. But Coppola rejected as too violent this ending in which Kurtz and his army of barbarous ex-soldiers and savage natives, all wearing war paint, are annihilated.
In the second ending he devised, the one shown in Cannes, Willard assassinates Kurtz with a machete, then stands frozen on the temple steps, aware that when Kurtz’s people genuflect before him in homage they expect him to replace Kurtz as their godlike leader. At the final fade-out, Willard is still on the steps, unable to decide what direction he should take. “The film thus ends with a moral choice,” says Coppola. “Will Willard become another Kurtz? Or will he learn from his experience” and decline to be their new master? “The audience didn’t like the ending shown in Cannes,” he continues—nor did his staff.53 The audience experienced the frustration that comes from witnessing an unresolved dilemma. So Coppola jettisoned that ending and chose a third ending, one in which Willard definitely refuses to become the incarnation of Kurtz, since he is unwilling to embrace Kurtz’s warped, malevolent philosophy. Instead, he leaves Kurtz’s kingdom behind and boards his PBR, which will take him back to civilization. “So many people preferred this ending, because it gives a sense of finality, that I am using it,” he said at the time. “I mean, I’m making this film for people, so the hell with it!”54
The movie premiered in August 1979 in a few large cities in 70 mm, for reserved-seat performances at which programs were distributed in lieu of screen credits. This version did not include the air assault on Kurtz’s compound, which Coppola had rejected earlier. “People are not interested in just seeing helicopters fly by or in seeing explosions,” he explains. “[T]hey want a story and character interaction”55
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