Peter Bart

by the Mob (And Sex) Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies

  Coppola finally agreed to compromise on Sonny, only to learn that Pacino was no longer available for Michael. He had committed to a film called The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight at MGM on the assumption he would never land the Godfather role.

  Mindful of his director’s growing panic, Evans decided to play his Korshak card.

  A day later word was flashed that Pacino had suddenly become available again.

  Kirk Kerkorian was building his new hotel, the MGM Grand, in Las Vegas, and Korshak apparently reminded him about the risks of his potentially rising labor costs.

  In March 1971, Coppola was finally given the green light to shoot his film. Coppola had won most of his casting battles, yet he still—understandably—felt under siege. His cinematographer, Gordon Willis, was innovative but cantankerous. His editor, Aram Avakian, was secretive and vaguely critical. Paramount’s chief of physical production, Jack Ballard, felt the director was unprepared, faulting Coppola for devoting too much attention to testing actors, rather than scouting locations (the tests had been ordered by the studio, of course).

  Then, too, there were rumblings from the very characters who were the subject of the film—the mob itself.

  By and large, Italian-Americans admired the Puzo novel and Coppola had tried to fortify this affinity in his casting decisions. An actor named Gianni Russo with a mysterious background was cast as Carlo; he told fellow actors that Joe Colombo himself had urged the studio to give him the role. A massive, 320-pound bodyguard named Lenny Montana landed the role of Luca Brasi. During rehearsals, several of the bad boys found their way onto the set as observers.

  If a sort of tacit peace treaty had been arranged, it seemed shaky. Evans received what he interpreted as a threatening phone call. Then a bomb threat from an unknown source triggered the evacuation of the Gulf & Western building.

  A group surfaced calling itself the Italian-American Civil Rights League and began to issue vague admonitions about the content of the forthcoming movie. Though many felt this to be a faux organization, the corporate public relations men urged Al Ruddy to seek some sort of accommodation.

  Responding to the pervasive nervousness, Ruddy met with representatives of the League to assure them that The Godfather would be what he called “an equal opportunity movie.” The characters, he pointed out, would include a corrupt Irish cop and an equally dishonest Jewish producer. He even handed over a copy of the screenplay.

  A League representative thumbed through the pages. He obviously had no intention of reading it, or no talent to do so. His one demand: That the word “Mafia” be deleted. In fact, “Mafia,” which had once been the title, now appeared only once in the script, and Ruddy quickly promised its removal. Ruddy also pledged to contribute some of the proceeds from the premiere to benefit the League’s charities.

  However, an overzealous representative of the League saw to it that the story outlining Ruddy’s concessions was leaked to a New York Times reporter. The ensuing story suggested that Ruddy, on behalf of Gulf & Western, had made concessions to the Mafia, and Charlie Bluhdorn’s reaction was operatic. “Ruddy will have to go,” Bluhdorn intoned. No one at Paramount knew at the time why Bluhdorn was hypersensitive to any suggestions that the producer of The Godfather, too, was negotiating with the mob.

  His threats to fire Ruddy were quickly forgotten, however, and amid all the noise, no one seemed to notice that Francis Coppola had quietly started shooting.

  The preproduction period had been stormy for Coppola, and the rest of his ride would not prove any easier.

  The atmosphere on the set of The Godfather during the first two or three weeks was at best chaotic. Coppola knew that he hadn’t had enough prep time and hadn’t studied his locations. His screenplay ran to 163 pages, which was roughly 40 pages too long. Al Ruddy was impatient with Coppola for being too protective of the dialogue. Much of it, Ruddy reminded him, had really been written by Puzo, not Coppola. Gordon Willis, his cameraman, was behaving disrespectfully toward his director. “You’re not using your actors right,” he declared in a loud voice. By contrast, Brando was mumbling his dialogue, still finding his way into his character.

  The first flashpoint was prompted by the dailies. Coppola and Willis had agreed they wanted to shoot a dark, moody film, but the first few scenes were so dark that both Evans and I simultaneously removed our glasses, checking that we hadn’t been wearing sunglasses by mistake. “I can’t understand Brando and I can’t see the actors—other than that the work is great,” Evans commented, his voice laden with sarcasm.

  Charlie Bluhdorn had also asked to see the dailies, and I was dreading his reaction. Fortunately, he was too distracted by his erupting quarrel with his young president, Stanley Jaffe, to focus on The Godfather. I liked Jaffe personally and was disappointed to see him implode. At the same time, it was helpful to keep Bluhdorn distracted until The Godfather’s problems could be sorted out.

  As the movie moved into its second and third weeks, my primary concern was that Coppola was isolating himself. Even in the best of times Coppola was often uncommunicative, but now he had all but shut down his dialogue with the studio. Jack Ballard was spending all his time on the set and was not happy. My own instinct was to stay away, but I called Coppola every day in an effort to extend support. “If you wanted to go for that exaggerated dark look, why didn’t you prepare us for it?” I asked. “I’m on your side. I would have prepared my colleagues.”

  “I’m fixing it. Willis is an asshole.”

  “But he’s your asshole. You hired him. Talk to people, Francis. This is not the time to brood; it’s the time to lead.”

  “Things are getting better,” he replied.

  But they weren’t. Members of the supporting cast were feeling the angst. Duvall told friends he was persuaded that Coppola would be fired within two or three weeks—he suspected the studio already had “planted” a replacement on the set. Pacino was drinking heavily every night, convinced he would be fired the following day.

  The day after my conversation with Coppola, a palace coup broke out on the set. To my astonishment, Ballard announced on a conference call that Coppola “wasn’t up to the job,” that he wanted to designate Aram Avakian, the editor, as the new director. Al Ruddy had warned me that Avakian had been hovering around Ballard in a conspiratorial manner and that something dire was afoot.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I demanded of Evans. “I’m not willing to throw Coppola to the wolves, are you?”

  Evans seemed distracted. “The Avakian rumors ... I know about them.”

  “This whole situation is getting to be like a Mafia plot,” I continued. “Ruddy’s people in New York believe Avakian is sabotaging the dailies. The material we’re seeing has been scrambled so that the scenes don’t play.”

  “Francis can deliver. I know he can,” Evans said. “We’ve got to restore order, otherwise the movie will unravel.”

  “Please call Coppola. Tell him that the studio is behind him. And I’m telling Jack Ballard to crawl into a fucking hole.”

  While Evans may have had mixed feelings about his director, he now sprang into firm support mode. Not only did he calm the edgy Coppola with the appropriate reassurances, but he also told the corporate team to back off. Rumors of the failed Avakian coup were now rife within the company and Evans knew they had to be silenced.

  Coppola responded well to his vote of confidence. The actors, too, now rallied behind their director. Robert Duvall and Jimmy Caan in particular bonded with the other players; even the dour Brando flashed an occasional grin.

  I visited the set fairly often now and was pleased by the emerging camaraderie. Coppola was managing Brando with special respect and patience. Since the actor refused to (or was incapable of) memorizing his lines, his dialogue for every scene was carefully printed out and placed in his sightline on set.

  During the break in one scene, I approached Brando and put the question to him. “The lines—why do you want them printed out?”

&nb
sp; Brando gazed at me, his expression purposefully ambiguous. “Because I can read them that way,” he said. And clearly, that was the end of the discussion.

  “Francis is starting to act like a director,” Ruddy told me. “In good ways and bad ways.”

  Coppola, it seems, had already started renegotiating his deal with his producer. He now wanted “presentation” credit, which Ruddy had been accorded. He also asked Ruddy for a bigger share of his profits. Ruddy turned him down on both counts.

  Toward the end of the shooting schedule, Coppola brought forth his final demand. He would prefer to edit the movie at his ministudio in San Francisco, not in Los Angeles. The motivation behind that demand was readily apparent. Coppola wanted to go home. He wanted to insulate himself from the noise.

  It was all perfectly understandable, but profoundly inept politically. For one thing, Coppola had never elicited a firm understanding about the length of the cut he was expected to deliver. His instructions were to deliver a cut of two hours ten minutes, he later claimed. Evans insisted his mandate was for two hours fifty minutes. Frank Yablans, the head of distribution who had just been appointed to succeed Stanley Jaffe as president, felt the proper length was two hours twenty minutes. He had set a Christmas release date on that premise. Yablans’s release plan was a bold one: a wide release (for its time) in four hundred theaters. Though some exhibitors wanted to book the movie with an intermission, Yablans held firm, even canceling some bookings over the issue.

  Yablans was furious when he received a phone call from Evans stating that the Christmas release was impossible and that he and Coppola had differences about running time. In fact, the “differences” were more of emotion than fact. When Evans ran Coppola’s shorter cut—the one he claims he was asked to deliver—Evans correctly felt it was too stark. Coppola’s curt response was that Evans simply wanted to add material that he had cut so he could claim credit for “saving” the movie.

  My instinct was to try to serve as a middleman between the two. I had lured Coppola into this adventure and felt he deserved the right to exercise control over the cut, even though his contract did not specify final cut. I also felt it was imperative to preserve their working relationship, which was quickly deteriorating.

  But Coppola was in an angry sulk, and Evans had become obsessive about the subtle moments and nuances in the film that the director had overlooked in his editing. He felt that if he could seclude himself in an editing room, his vision of The Godfather would be vastly superior to the one that Coppola had delivered.

  The dialogue became nasty. “You’ve delivered a trailer, not a movie,” Evans snapped at one point.

  “Bob Evans’s ego is running rampant,” Coppola told anyone who would listen, including the press.

  Adding to the muddle was a health issue. Though Evans had not previously suffered back pain, he was now in such agony that he needed to remain prone on a hospital-type gurney. The bed was wheeled in and out of the editing room, where Evans remained during eighteen-hour days. Back in San Francisco, Coppola read an item in a gossip column about Evans’s new mission in life—that he was working night and day to salvage The Godfather. Coppola reacted by firing off an irate letter, insisting that his film did not require “salvaging.”

  Steadfast, Evans kept working. Now and then Coppola would glimpse some scenes and give his comments. Two or three times a week, Evans would summon me to the editing room and we would exchange ideas.

  One evening Evans and I ran about ninety minutes of the reedited film.

  After the screening we both sat in silence for a while. “I think it’s becoming a movie,” he said finally.

  I was in a daze. I didn’t want to respond. “It’s really taking shape,” I said in a noncommittal voice.

  When I got home, I went to my den and tried to sort out my feelings. Amid all the noise and rancor, an absolutely brilliant movie was somehow coming together. Had I become lost in self-delusion? I wondered. Or was this nightmare somehow becoming a transcendent experience—one that could change the lives of everyone involved?

  I decided not to share my ruminations with any of my colleagues. Especially not with Evans or Coppola.

  But I couldn’t help but wonder: Did they sense this too?

  The banner reception accorded Rosemary’s Baby among critics and filmgoers alike had a powerful impact on Roman Polanski. He was now the hot young director in Hollywood, hanging with Nicholson and Beatty, watching films at Evans’s house with Sue Mengers and other “insiders” and fielding the inevitable offers from other studios. He could even gloat over the fact that Rosemary’s Baby had outperformed Frank Sinatra’s movie, The Detective, which costarred Lee Remick instead of Mia Farrow. Suddenly Polanski was no longer the outsider, the bad boy of cinema. He had positioned himself squarely in the middle of the fraternity he had once scorned.

  Some of his old friends—shady characters from Eastern Europe—resented his metamorphosis. The young girls Polanski once favored were no longer receiving phone calls from him. The producer who regularly hosted opium parties in Malibu was no longer enjoying his prestigious company. Polanski now had a serious girlfriend, the actress Sharon Tate. Indeed, he intended to marry her.

  When Polanski and his new bride, now pregnant, moved to a quiet house on Cielo Drive, a short trip up Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills, one of his Polish friends told me outright, “Roman has gone bourgeois.” He added, “Suddenly I get phone calls from him telling me, ‘The baby is kicking, I’m going to be a father.’”

  Sharon Tate was a beautiful girl whose sunny disposition seemed the perfect antidote to Roman’s dark moods. Her movie career was blossoming after the release of Valley of the Dolls.

  Polanski’s relationship with Paramount had also levitated him to a new role as the patron of Polish cinema. An old friend, Simon Hessera, had directed a mediocre movie called A Day at the Beach, which Polanski helped write, and Evans now persuaded Bluhdorn to advance $600,000 to finance its completion. Polanski and Evans went shopping together for a Rolls-Royce, which was to be a surprise present for Polanski’s bride.

  I had lunch with Polanski at a French bistro during this period, and was confounded by his new persona. He seemed self-assured and upbeat, and, as always, our conversation leapt from literature to music.

  Over a second glass of wine, however, he told me of his sadness that his good friend Christopher Komeda had just died of a brain injury resulting from an automobile accident. Polanski had brought Komeda to Hollywood to compose the superb score for Rosemary’s Baby. Too many of his friends, Polanski acknowledged, had suffered misfortune at the moment of their greatest success and that fact haunted him.

  Three months later, on August 9, 1969, Polanski was in London when he received the phone call informing him that his wife, then eight-and-a-half-months pregnant, along with several other friends, had been found murdered at his home on Cielo Drive. Sharon Tate had been stabbed sixteen times and the word “PIG” had been written in her blood on the front door. Evans had been invited to join Sharon at the informal dinner she’d given that evening but had bowed out because Charlie Bluhdorn was arriving the next morning for meetings. Sharon’s other guests had included Gibby Folger, the wealthy coffee heiress, and Folger’s boyfriend, Wojciech Frykowski, who was one of Polanski’s rogue pals from Poland.

  Evans was numbed by the news and also furious over insinuations in the media that Polanski was himself a suspect. Even Time magazine observed that “Sharon and Polanski circulated in one of the film world’s more offbeat crowds,” suggesting that members of that “crowd” were somehow culpable.

  Evans met Polanski when he arrived from London and installed him in a dressing room on the Paramount lot that had once been used by Julie Andrews during production of Darling Lili. He also arranged for his Doctor Feel-good friend to keep him sedated.

  The image of the grief-stricken director sealed off from the world in an ornate dressing room struck me as grotesque. Evans shortly moved Polanski to his guest
house which in turn meant round-the-clock guards. The Los Angeles Police Department tapped the phones. News of the filmmaker’s whereabouts further prompted speculation that Evans, too, might somehow be implicated.

  Polanski emerged from his daze and worked with the police on their investigation—a trail that soon led to the Manson family—but he felt his life had turned into a bad movie. Sharon Tate’s funeral, he said, “was like some ghastly movie premiere.”

  Polanski spent most of his time in Europe following the Manson murders. In 1972 Evans persuaded him to direct Chinatown , which was to earn Polanski an Oscar nomination. The Academy Award would elude him, however. He would lose to Francis Coppola for The Godfather Part II.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Glitz Machine

  As I assessed the lessons of my studio experience, it had become increasingly clear to me over time that the hits emerging from the Hollywood studios were the result of inadvertency, not strategy. The so-called blockbusters released by Paramount, such as Love Story or The Godfather, both started out with modest budgets and limited expectations. By contrast, extravaganzas like On a Clear Day You Can See Forever or even Catch-22 were heralded from the start as future hits. At Twentieth Century-Fox, Doctor Dolittle was supposed to be a big smash, not Patton; Warner Bros. didn’t even want to release either Bonnie and Clyde or American Graffiti (George Lucas had already informed Universal that he was prepping Star Wars as a “personal picture” with a modest budget).

  A generation later, to be sure, Hollywood was to master the art of marketing the $200 million prepackaged “tent-pole” pictures. In the seventies, however, this sort of knowhow was a distant dream, and the recession mandated even further austerity to film budgets.

  By 1973, fortified by the success of the two Godfathers, Bob Evans sensed it was time for a more aggressive strategy. For some years he had been nurturing the idea of remaking The Great Gatsby, based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. In Evans’s mind, Gatsby was more a legend than a novel—one that embodied style, mystery, and romance. If Gatsby were presented with the right showmanship, it would be a preordained blockbuster.