T hree directors who emerged at the beginning of the 1970s became powerful producers and redefined what Hollywood cinema might be. Like other novices of the time, they were less directors than "filmmakers" who had tried their hand at every aspect of the craft, from writing to postproduction. They understood movies as total creations, and they sought to put their personal stamp on everything they did. They were also well acquainted with each other: Francis Ford Coppola acted as producer and mentor for George Lucas on American Graffiti, and later Lucas and Steven Spielberg collaborated on several projects, notably Raiders of the Lost Ark (1980). Still, their paths diverged. With The Godfather, Coppola proved that he could turn out a mainstream masterpiece, but he wanted to go further, to turn Hollywood into a center of artistic cinema. Lucas and Spielberg wanted to modernize the system without disturbing it.
Coppola broke through first. His youth comedy You're a Big Boy Now (1967) borrowed the flashy techniques of Richard Lester's Beatles films and the swinging-London pictures. Coppola came to know the collapsing studio system from the inside, moving from Corman's American International Pictures to screenwriting (the Oscar-winning script for Patton, 1970) and then to directing, with the unsuccessful Broadway musical Finian's Rainbow (1968). The Godfather yielded him great financial rewards, but instead of promptly parlaying his success into a commercial career, he plunged into an intimate, ambivalent art movie, The Conversation. He turned The Godfather, Part " (1974) into a complex, time-juggling piece. Then he embarked on the vast, exhausting, budget-shattering Apocalypse Now (1979).
Coppola's was bravura filmmaking on a grand scale. In college he wanted to direct theater, and in many respects he remained an actor's director. For The Godfather he fought Paramount to hire Marlon Brando and AI Pacino and gave prime roles to James Caan, Robert Duvall, his sister Talia Shire, and other little-known actors. During rehearsals he had actors improvise scenes that would not be in the film, and he held dinners in which the actors ate and drank and talked in character. For The Godfather. Part " he added New York stage legends like playwright Michael Gazzo and Lee Strasberg, the dean of the Actors Studio.
This interest in performance was balanced by a risktaking cinematic sensibility. The Godfather was remarkably poised, partly because it refused the fast cutting and camera movements of the early 1970s. Coppola and his cinematographer, Gordon Willis, settled upon a “tableau" style that emphasized a static camera and actors moving through rich, often gloomy, interiors (Color Plate 22.3). In contrast, the fragmentary montage of sound and image in The Conversation sets the audience adrift in alternative times and mental spaces. In Apocalypse Now, Coppola would strive to give the Vietnam War an overpowering visual presence, with psychedelic color, surround sound, and slow, hallucinatory dissolves.
Coppola had founded his company, American Zoetrope, in 1969 in order to nurture his personal projects. After years of yearning for a facility, he bought the Hollywood General studio in 1979, renamed it Zoetrope Studios, and announced that it would be a center of new technology for feature films, an "electronic cinema" based on high-definition video sent out by satellite. He rebuilt the stages and directed performances from his trailer via video feeds. The main result was One from the Heart (1982), a flamboyantly artificial musical drama filled with stunning pictorial effects (Color Plate
22.4). One from the Heart would influence the French cinema du look of the 1980s (p. 620), but the cost overruns and public indifference led to a massive failure. Soon Coppola was forced to sell his facility to satisfy his creditors.
What followed were twenty years of difficulty. Coppola launched some intriguing projects such as the teenage dramas The Outsiders (1983) and Rumble Fish (1983), as well as the brash Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988, produced by Lucas). He never ceased to experiment with eyecatching compositions (22.22) and offbeat storytelling techniques, such as the use of a fake publicity film in Tucker and
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22.22 Tucker: an in-camera optical effect connects Tucker with his wife as they talk on the phone.
World History
