The Francis Ford Coppola Encyclopedia

347 Pages·2010·10.19 MB·English

by  James M. Welsh

THE
F R A N C I S F O R D
C O P P O L A
E N C Y C L O P E D I A
James M. Welsh
Gene D. Phillips
Rodney F. Hill
THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC.
Lanham (cid:129) Toronto (cid:129) Plymouth, UK
2010
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Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
http://www.scarecrowpress.com
Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2010 by James M. Welsh, Gene D. Phillips, and Rodney F. Hill
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic
or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written
permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Welsh, James Michael.
The Francis Ford Coppola encyclopedia / James M. Welsh, Gene D. Phillips, Rodney F. Hill.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8108-7650-7 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-7651-4 (ebook)
1. Coppola, Francis Ford, 1939—Encyclopedias. I. Phillips, Gene D. II. Hill, Rodney, 1965–.
III. Title.
PN1998.3.C67H55 2010
791.4302'33092—dc22 2010010472

(cid:2) ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
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For Emily Ione, Kate, and Anne, always, and especially Anne.
—JMW
For Les Keyser, fi lm scholar and educator.
—GDP
For Lance Schwulst, and in memory of Ramzi Zacharia.
—RFH
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CONTENTS
FOREWORD: LIFE UNDER THE HOOD—
AN APPRECIATION OF FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
JOHN C. TIBBETTS
VII
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
XIII
INTRODUCTION: SO WHY DOES FRANCIS COPPOLA DESERVE
HIS OWN ENCYCLOPEDIA?
JAMES M. WELSH
XV
ENTRIES A–Z
1
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
291
INDEX
295
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
325
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
327
■ V
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FOREWORD
Life under the Hood—An Appreciation
of Francis Ford Coppola
John C. Tibbetts
T
HERE’S A memorable scene in Fran- Establishment.” Brave words, indeed. But
cis Ford Coppola’s Tucker, when after the spectacular box office successes of
automobile entrepreneur Preston the first two Godfather films (1972, 1974)
Tucker (Jeff Bridges) proudly steps on stage and the critical praise lavished on The Con-
to introduce to the press his newly designed versation (1974), the “debacles” (so-called
“car of the future,” the Tucker Torpedo. by some critics) of Apocalypse Now (1979);
Through the curtains and down the ramp One from the Heart (1982); The Cotton Club
glides the gleaming red beauty. Flashbulbs (1984); and most recently, Youth without
pop. Reporters rush forward. A bevy of Youth (2007) and Tetro (2009) suggest that
beauteous “Tuckerettes” blow kisses. Mem- Coppola has left the building, deserted his
bers of the Tucker clan exchange hugs. agenda, and betrayed his public. Indeed,
However, few in attendance could have more than a few critics have stated flatly
suspected that the “car of the future” is a that since One from the Heart, he has never
fake, a sham, a collection of hastily assem- fulfilled his promise, and that his mastery
bled body parts. of style and technique has merely made
The Francis Ford Coppola Encyclope- him a slave to it. Nothing could be more
dia takes a fresh look under the hood, as devastating than Pauline Kael’s critique
it were, at the technological dazzle and the of The Cotton Club: “He’s watching his
dramatic machinery of Coppola’s world. A brain cells twinkle. . . . His expansiveness
reassembly of those body parts is in order. has become strictly formal; emotionally, he
Once the darling of the so-called New Hol- seems to have shrunk.”
lywood in the late 1960s and 1970s, Cop- However, coming away from this book,
pola and his brethren, Martin Scorsese, we might find, as critic David Thomson has
Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, and Hal noted in his New Biographical Dictionary
Ashby, had portended a generation that of Film, that “no American career has had
breathed new life and conviction into such endless, entertaining turmoil, or says
auteurist theory and practice, while reviv- as much about making movies in America
ing, revising, and extending a faltering film now. No one retains so many jubilant traits
industry. “The way to come to power,” of the kid moviemaker, or has inspired
declared Coppola, speaking for his gen- darker comments.”
eration, “is not always to merely challenge The Francis Ford Coppola Encyclope-
the Establishment, but first make a place dia is a compendium of all things Cop-
in it and then challenge, double-cross, the pola, accumulated and architected by a
■ VII
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VIII ■ FOREWORD
team of indefatigable and knowing inquisi- George Lucas, famed cinematographer Vit-
tors and Coppola specialists led by James torio Storaro, and superstar Michael Jack-
M. Welsh, Rodney Hill, and Fr. Gene son to make for Disney the innovative 3-D
D. Phillips. Through this “labyrinth of Captain EO; that CBS Cable presented in
letters”—the sort of thing Borges envi- 1981 a documentary about Coppola’s par-
sioned in his story “The Library of Babel”— ticipation in the restoration of Abel Gance’s
we can stroll down endless corridors, exam- epic Napoleon? Regarding Apocalypse Now,
ine the shelves, pause before a particularly that the Redux version restores a twenty-
intriguing subject and title, and pluck out, four-minute “French plantation” scene,
by turns, a sublime passage and a foolish which includes a political discussion of the
anecdote. French involvement in Indo-China; that
For example, there are the neglected a frustrated Coppola had to trick a reluc-
and overlooked films of his youthful tant Marlon Brando into a screen test by
apprenticeship with Roger Corman in the submitting to a fake “makeup check”; that
early 1960s (Dementia 13); those first New journalist Michael Herr not only wrote the
Wave–influenced films, such as You’re a articles that inspired the film but served as
Big Boy Now (1966) and The Rain People a writer of the narration for both it and for
(1969); the canonical works, particularly The Rainmaker (1997)? And what about The
the Godfather films, The Conversation, and Godfather? We read about the legendary
Apocalypse Now; the troubled history of tussles Coppola had with producer Robert
the first American Zoetrope productions, Evans (ultimately Evans’s faith in Coppola
including the disastrous One from the Heart to direct stemmed from his belief that Cop-
(1982); the admirable series of Coppola- pola “knew the way [Italian] men ate their
produced titles, including The Black Stallion food, kissed each other, and talked”); that
(1979); later projects as a director-for-hire, author Mario Puzo envisioned Don Cor-
including the undervalued Tucker and The leone after Pope Alexander during the time
Rainmaker; and the negative reception of of the Borgias; and that Sterling Hayden,
his most recent films, Youth without Youth who portrayed McCluskey, organized
(2007) and Tetro (2009). during World War II covert operations
During our stroll, best recall the dic- behind German lines in Croatia. And who
tum, “The glance reveals what the gaze knew that since 1997 Coppola has edited a
obscures.” Thus, quick glimpses reveal magazine of fiction and film, Zoetrope: All-
some choice nuggets about Coppola’s Story, which has featured noted contribu-
world. Regarding his familial connections, tors Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut, and
in 1961 his father, Carmine, a classically Sherman Alexie?
trained musician, scored the first of several
films for his son, Tonight for Sure, a “nudie” Is there a pattern, an arc, a trajectory, a
exploitation flick; Coppola’s wife, Eleanor, meaning to be discerned in this vast, storied
not only witnessed the filming of Apoca- tapestry of lights, sounds, words, and col-
lypse Now but co-produced with him the ors? What about their many rude collisions,
profitable wineries and eco-friendly bou- their contrasts of fragile dreams and hallu-
tique hotels. And his son, Roman, directed cinatory nightmares, promises of enterprise
a curious film called CQ (2001), concerned and disasters of apocalypse, shock-cuts of
with—naturally—the travails of making editing, clashing color palettes of hot crim-
movies. Moreover, who remembers that sons and mordant, bruised greens, and the
Coppola once teamed up with producer gritty, realistic textures transformed by the
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FOREWORD ■ IX
unabashed theatricality of broad-brushed, thorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson deployed
self-indulgent sentimentality? Nowhere is an “omniscient eye” to regard the Ameri-
all of this more preposterously apparent can temper with a philosophical as well as
than in the gloriously improbable One from poetic attitude, audaciously trusting in their
the Heart. Here was Coppola’s bête noire, a own “infallibility” to read all Nature as a
rejection of realism and genre revisionism, “sublime alphabet.” (Stanley Cavell talks
embracing self-conscious artifice and a nos- about these “Emersonian moments” in his
talgia for classical Hollywood conventions. philosophical musings in The World Viewed;
Take the concluding scene, to cite just one and I propose they may constitute a key to
example: Coppola stages a reunion of sepa- “reading” films like Tucker, Rumble Fish,
rated lovers in high-flying style. After two and Youth without Youth.) Moreover, how
days of searching for each other, those finely observed and how potently relevant
errant lovers, Franny and Hank (Teri Garr here are Emerson’s own observations in his
and Frederic Forrest), are at last reunited. essay “Self-Reliance”—with their compact
Hank, distraught after a fruitless dash in utterances and twenty-one-gun bursts of
the rain to the airport to stop his lover’s rhetoric (sometimes verging on incoher-
departure, has returned to his rain-swept ency)—that the American observer is a
street and his shadow-haunted apartment. poet of action, whose power “ceases in the
But as he crouches in the darkness, about to instance of repose”; rather, “it resides in the
set fire to a pile of mementoes, Franny sud- moment of transition from a past to a new
denly appears stage right. The spell is bro- state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the dart-
ken. A pink and golden dawn quickly floods ing to an aim. . . . Good for that and good
the room. The crawling shadows vanish. We for nothing else . . . A War; an earthquake,
are in Wonderland. The tears of the lovers the revival of letters, the new dispensation
spangle their cheeks. “Oh, you silly boy,” by Jesus, or by Angels, Heaven, Hell, power,
sings Crystal Gayle on the soundtrack. . . . science . . . exist only to him as colors his
Outside, a yellow light twinkles over the brush.” And Hawthorne, likewise, might
blue neon, studio-bound streets. The Cur- have been predicting Coppola’s own pecu-
tains close on the scene. The $27 million liar American audacity when he observed
production was such a disastrous failure that the Transcendental artists seem always
that it bedeviled Coppola for more than a “careening on the utmost verge of a pre-
decade and destroyed Zoetrope Studios. cipitous absurdity,” seeking “the neutral
For a reexamination of this film, one ground where the Actual and the Imaginary
that may ultimately be considered one meet, coming as close as possible without
of his most significant works, turn these actually tumbling over.”
pages. . . . But to what degree does Coppola
By getting agreeably lost in the labyrin- inscribe himself in these neon conflagra-
thine corridors of thought and image in this tions, montage-collisions, and phantasma-
book, while thinking and rethinking, fuss- goric dreams? The best of Coppola, David
ing and fretting over its fractured, kaleido- Thomson suggests, does not reside in his
scopic portrait of Coppola, I’ve been com- “furious efforts” and “fearful fantasies”
ing to the conclusion that Coppola and his of “trying to be everything for everyone.”
work might be considered quintessentially Rather, Thomson continues, “he is at his
American. He is essentially a child of Ameri- best when secretly telling a part of his own
can transcendentalism—at least in the sense story, or working out his fearful fantasies.”
that those brash idealists Nathaniel Haw- Is Coppola, then, like the failed Tucker
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