A morally serious, earnest look at the responsibility of people in a
modern society where new forms of data collection, and incidental breaches of
privacy, have become increasingly common
(Second in a series of blog entries, titled "Whose side is he on?")
Subsections below:
Subsections below:
The story, and some
of the 1970s marquis stars
Zeroing in on a major theme, via Coppola’s history
Zeroing in on a major theme, via a look at outmoded details
Editor Murch becomes important to the texture of the film
A key scene of Harry’s editing develops as a major plot aspect
Odds and ends in the film
[Edits 9/16/13.]
This film has the distinction of having lost the Best
Picture Oscar in February 1975 (or whatever month that the ceremony for 1974
films was) to another film by its director, Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather Part II. The Conversation was esteemed in its
day, but today it is hard to find it in libraries—the Godfather films remain far and away more popular than it. But
it still remains an example of Coppola at his creative peak, though it also
shows what he can do as seen in his very most recent films like Tetro (2009): make a small, arty film
that also carries weighty-enough thematic significance. (End note 1)
The Conversation won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in
(or for) 1974. It is considered by the likes of Leonard Maltin (in his yearly
compendium) as a great film of the 1970s. But it actually was among the small,
personal films Coppola wanted to do, and was in a sense sneaked in to the
production pipeline he had going with the studio Paramount in the early 1970s;
this studio is who backed The Godfather
(under executive producer Robert Evans).
Today, to me at least, TC seems smaller than the way it seemed to be
talked about in the 1970s; in effect, it does match Coppola’s idea of making
more intimate films that he himself wrote. But how well its themes match
today’s viewers’ expectations, especially in light of its focus on surveillance
and invasion of privacy, as well as the sense of personal responsibility of
someone doing surveillance, is a very interesting, and not simple, question.
The story, and some of the 1970s marquis stars
Gene Hackman, at or near
the top of his career arc, plays a rather sad man, Harry Caul, who (in 1974)
works as a freelance surveillance/private-investigation expert. This was
something that in today’s terms would fit squarely within the geek/techno-nerd
class, which was a relative rarity then. This though the movie has a scene at a
surveillance/P.I. convention that was a real such convention, where Harry
(fictionally, as the real-life convention producers allowed) is recognized by
others of his kind there as a star in their field.
In the story at hand, Harry is
working for a businessman, referred to only as the Director and played by
Robert Duvall, who has contracted him to spy on, and record the
conversation of, a young couple in a public area that is the real Union Square in San Francisco, during a
workday lunch break. (Harry’s immediate contact at the contracting company is a
young assistant to the Director—the assistant turning out rather ambiguous
himself—named Martin Stett, who is played smoothly and with the slightest hint
of menace by a young Harrison Ford.) It is shortly before Christmas.
In terms of resounding with the
public in 1974, after Harry has captured the couple’s conversational words on
tape, his listening to words that are hard to decipher, as recorded on a
reel-to-reel tape recorder, of course had affinities with the Watergate crisis
that was coming to a climax in 1974, given the latter’s famous aspect of Nixon’s
having said potentially incriminating things on tape. Nixon’s resignation would
be that August; so perhaps in audience eyes, the film seemed to speak, at least
tangentially, about one of the rawest “issues of moment” concerning government skullduggery.
But this was mere coincidence;
according to DVD comments (in yet another viewing option) by cinematic editor
Walter Murch, the film was apparently inspired in part by Michelangelo
Antonioni’s film Blowup (1966)
(Coppola notes this fact too); and Murch says production on The Conversation started in November
1972. Still, the film’s look at issues of privacy raised by spying,
wiretapping, and so on, was au courant then; and as it happens, a similar concern
is no less current today, with the controversy that has developed over “spying”
on Americans by the National Security Agency. (The technical differences,
though, are important to the extent of almost radically redefining the way we
would discuss them [and hence they might make this film quite dated], and I’ll later hint at possible discussion of them.)
But this story isn’t just about
a man either seeming morally ambiguous with his spying, or, more per the
story’s agenda, his discovering “nasty doings” via electronic eavesdropping
that he then might try to intervene in. He also faces some rather acute moral
crises about his own role regarding what he discovers.
There are two young people whose
conversation Harry records—they are played by Frederic Forrest (who was later
to feature in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now
[1979] and One From the Heart [1982])
and Cindy Williams (who also featured in George Lucas’ American Graffiti [1973] and was later a
star of TV’s Laverne & Shirley). How they relate (boyfriend and
girlfriend?) is unclear at first. And are these two people, as Harry seems to
find later, in listening more closely to the recording, at risk of getting
killed? This is what Hackman’s Caul comes to fear, in a peculiarly isolated way.
This acute concern seems to bind up ironically with his own way of being both
nondescript and rather dull as a personality, and also “paranoid” about
maintaining his own privacy.
But early on, he can’t make out
all the taped conversation. He has to replay it, and technically manipulate it,
to really decipher it. (Coppola says both in 2000 comments and in a tiny
making-of doc from 1974 that a key structural aspect of this film’s design is repetition.)
Very generally speaking, layers
seem to be uncovered that increase Harry’s intrigue and fear and moral concern,
and are paralleled by the moral (and legal) complexity that he gets mired in.
Zeroing in on a major theme, via Coppola’s history
It’s hard to discuss this film
as I might other films—for their relevant thematic aspects, and when spoilers
are less a concern because the films are so old and familiar—without delivering
spoilers for this one that would really ruin a pleasure of viewing it for those
who haven’t seen it. This film marries a character study with a more gripping
suspense story. The suspense side can’t be enjoyed if I reveal what happens in
its second half.
Not surprisingly, this film does
concern a theme of paranoia; and this along with its slice-of-life portrait of an ostensibly highly alienated person makes it a classic 1970s film. Harry in
some ways seems an “antihero,” not in terms of having moral failings but in his
just being rather boring and solitary, with almost no “personality” aside from
his privacy-compromising work. But in its ’70s way, the film also looks at some
moral conundrums in the texture of modern American life, and may seem a little
too quiet and “esthetically oriented” to languid adult life for today’s young
audiences.
TC has Coppola’s virtues in using certain visual textures for
interest (in an analog, not digital, way). For one thing, it makes use (as in a
party scene), as Coppola used to do, of getting the most out of group
situations where a milling set of people develop some cinema verite level of interest out of their activity, with some
moving in and out of a shot, while the camera doesn’t do much more than dolly,
or pan around.
During the more
surveillance-related scenes, sound oddities and texture are sumptuously shaped
by the editor Walter Murch, who was for this film both film (picture) and
sound editor, the first time he did picture editing. He had done sound design
for American Graffiti (1973), which
was directed by George Lucas and produced by Coppola, and Murch would be the
(head) sound designer for Coppola’s later Apocalypse
Now.
Moreover, TC exemplifies Coppola’s interest in actually doing a sort of
literary effort with a film—one could well imagine a written story of TC would be a good short story or
novella assigned in college. In his 2000 commentary, Coppola talks about the
film’s story as (in his character-study side) inspired in part by a character
named Harry Haller in Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf
(one of those novels that was big in the 1960s, which I never read, and have
never been impelled to read, for better or worse). It was also influenced, as I
said, by the film Blowup, for its
suspense side; and Coppola says that with some of its slower, interpersonal
moments (as at the party), it reflects Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire (this in
particular tying in to some quality, I believe, and in Coppola’s opinion, of
the performance by actress Elizabeth MacRae). Coppola, in fact, notes in DVD
commentary that Streetcar was the
first “adult” book he read as a teenager. If all this sounds a little
pretentious, at least we can watch this film, not really conscious of these
influences, and enjoy it for what charm and intrigue it has.
Aside from this particular
analysis, Coppola was arguably the most backbone-like of the auteur style of
directing in the 1970s, and he was certainly one of the most impresario-type
producer/directors working on behalf of his own material. Even if he was
inspired by already-recognized literature to an extent (the pulp novel The Godfather, or the esteemed novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad),
from this position he fashioned, with his best films works that had
literature-like approaches, some rather accomplished thematic statements:
* For the Godfathers, the theme could be: “The essence of American life is
that success in business and support for family interests can be married to
violence, with the Mafia distilling this mixed ethos” (recall the conversation
in the first film where Kay says to Michael, criticizing what his father does,
that senators and the like don’t have people killed, and Michael responds, “Now
who’s being naïve?”).
* The theme of Apocalypse Now (along with a general
supposed cataloging of what went on during the Vietnam War): “What does it take
for a man to become a killing machine, who (when he’s a colonel, like Kurtz)
can go crazy in a quagmire of a war so that he becomes a tyrannical savage, and
when a special operative (Captain Willard) sent by the Army to assassinate him
becomes entranced by him, becoming another intrigued acolyte of sorts when
finally in his presence, before mustering the courage to kill him?”
* And The Conversation: “Our technology and related business ethos have
become such that when a solitary surveillance contractor stumbles upon some violence about to happen, as he tries to intervene in what conspiracy
he feels he’s discovered, violence is also done to his conscience and to his
private life.”
Coppola, of course, also started
a literary magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story,
which (from what I understand, or among its aims) seeks stories that address
themselves to how films can be done to represent literature.
Be all this as it may—and you
may feel that Coppola operated in an era that allowed this once, which is now
past; or maybe you feel he was pretentious—but we should look at one set of
little details in The Conversation
that, however dark the film may seem now, shows us how it can be relevant to
today.
Zeroing in on a major theme, via a look at outmoded details
What would a modern version of The Conversation be, addressing the
Internet, or other more modern forms of surveillance (such as
helped law enforcement identify the Boston
bombers last spring)? From what I’ve read of it, the modern release Closed Circuit seems similar to TC in one or two surface ways, but TC is a morally serious, earnest look at
the responsibility of people in a modern society where new forms of data
collection, and incidental breaches of privacy, have become increasingly common
and ultimately show how, with the geyser of technical innovation, there also
comes a parallel geyser of moral complications. (This though the
character-study side of Harry Caul’s story, with his Roman Catholic practices,
may seem a bit quaint, or rudimentary, to viewers today.)
Unfortunately, I defer
commenting on the modern-day aspects to this kind of story.
Editor Murch becomes important to the texture of the film
In DVD options that allow
during-film commentary, editor Walter Murch is one solo commenter; Coppola is
another, in an alternative option. Murch turns out to have been essential to
the making, and even the texture (and certain moral points), of this film. Murch’s
contribution wasn’t minor; in a way, he was almost a second director. The
context in which this film was made shows how.
Murch points out that TC had been on a slate of several films (mentioned
in my End note 1 below) that the
producing company American Zoetrope, spearheaded by Coppola, sought to make as
it tried to secure a partnership with Warner Brothers in the late 1960s. With
the commercial failure of Lucas’s THX-1138
(1971), Warners dissolved—or didn’t even consummate—its relationship with
Zoetrope as the latter had envisioned it, with its slate of films. Among the
slate were also (among others) Apocalypse
Now and The Black Stallion, both
of which eventually were made, and certainly the former of which represented
(in a sense) a huge opportunity missed by Warners. (End note 2)
Once Coppola had a more
limited-project partnership of sorts with Paramount
for The Godfather, which turned out
enormously successful, according to Murch, TC
apparently wasn’t terribly interesting to Paramount,
but the studio was interested in Coppola’s doing a sequel to The Godfather. Coppola arranged a deal
in which he could do TC, with Paramount as producing
studio, and then do The Godfather
sequel afterward.
A situation then arose, partly
described by Murch on the DVD, where Coppola would be involved in shooting TC during certain times, and Murch would
have the task of being the primary one to edit down the resulting “rushes,” and
assembling an initial sequence or the like. When he could, Coppola would review
this, and give guidance. The situation, from my own interested-amateur’s
understanding of Hollywood, left Murch in something of the director’s chair,
when it came to doing editing work, in a way that was far afield of what some
directors, particularly auteur types, would want. But Murch with his sensitive
editor’s ear/eye and patience was key to assembling the film in the rather
richly sampling way it unfolds.
To an extent, TC was made, in a much smaller version
to be sure, similar to Apocalypse Now,
especially regarding the latter’s early helicopter-squadron attack scenes. That
is, Coppola had no problem being on set to guide activities that were being
filmed, but an inordinately enormous amount of footage could be produced that
then had to be waded through by an editor to cull out a crafted sequence of
shots and scenes for the final film. In TC’s
case, this was true only for its scene in Union Square, for which Murch says
“probably 10 times” the normal amount of footage was filmed that would normally
be for a scene of its final length. There were multiple cameras on the ground,
and another few on top of buildings. This followed a “documentary style” of
production, Murch says. When taking the material to edit, there was so much
pictorial material that it put Murch on his mettle to whittle it down,
requiring him to have his “wits about [him].”
Moreover, the microphones used in
Union Square to capture Williams’ and Forrest’s conversation were sometimes
hindered by street-level noise and also microwave transmissions in the area,
Murch says. In fact, he would have to rerecord the two actors’ conversation, in
a different (uninhabited) park, having them perform it three times (with their
manner of doing it, with cadences, etc., remarkably as it had been in Union
Square, he says), for “looping” or editing-in later.
All this material, of course,
meant that Murch had pieces to readily drop in at later points in the film
where Harry recalls the conversational moments that so touched him originally,
some of whose meaning only became clear later. Still later, he would recall
some of this stuff when “putting two and two together” on discovering further
facts. Thus, the voluminous production material, plus Murch’s editing role,
conduced to the film’s atmospheric psychological realism. (As for further
details about aspects of the couple’s dialogue, I leave it to you to view the
DVD, because some of it would spoil your viewing.)
A key scene of Harry’s editing develops as a major plot aspect
Another way Murch’s editing role
almost had a directorial story-defining role here is that a series of shots
where Harry is in his office, starting with his first being there after he was
in the field at Union Square, ran all the way through his later replaying his
tapes in order to try to figure out one line Frederic Forrest’s character is
saying to Cindy Williams’. In other words, his first working on the tapes and
his later closer editing of them was originally all one sequence. But, Murch
says, this all made for too long a sequence to sustain audience interest in an
early test viewing, so Murch separated sections of this long sequence, and had
the set of shots where Harry is deciphering the unclear Forrest statement come
after Harry’s initial attempt to drop off his work at the Director’s office,
finding that the Director is not there, and that only Martin Stett is there,
requesting that Harry leave the work with him. At this point Harry refuses to
deliver the work.
On his leaving, he sees the
Williams and Forrest characters at the office building where the Director is
located. Harry is given food for thought….
Having the line-deciphering
sequence occur after Harry has returned to his office, following the aborted
dropoff, adds to how Harry’s personal intrigue in the whole surveillance matter
is spurred by doings at the Director’s office building.
But let’s go further into a
technical area.
Murch points out that the tape
recorders and related machinery in Harry’s warehouse “office” are kept
deliberately a little behind the times for 1974, to conform with the fact that,
as was conveyed by a surveillance expert that Murch says has spoken on Nixon’s
18-minute tape gap (or such), the truly eminent surveillance technicians like
to assemble their own machinery from cobbled-together items they get, however
they can, on their own. They don’t buy state-of-the-art machines that are more
akin to consumer equipment.
Moreover, in the first sequence
in which Harry is in his office, he has three tape players, each with a reel
(each reel having been recorded from one of the three sources he later proudly tells a
colleague are what he used on this job), and he synchronizes the machines by a
coding beep at the start of the tape. There is a fourth machine that he uses to
create a sort of composite recording derived from the three source reels. That
is, he is doing what might be called in tape-era music-recording “mixing down” multiple-track
source recordings (following my understanding derived from, among other things,
The Beatles’ Recording Sessions
diary-like book, by Mark Lewisohn, published in 1988). In music mixing, the
original recordings are on different tracks of a multi-track tape, and you
adjust the volume and maybe the tone (varyingly) to include, or delete, signals from the original
tracks, and record the finished product onto either a new tape, or onto an
empty track on the original tape. (Today, with digital technology, a lot more
can be done, and done more easily, with such mixing.)
Because the couple in Union Square was walking
all over, with different sources of interfering sounds cropping up on the
different tapes, in his editing room, Harry has to energetically vary the
volume on his different source tapes to come up with a resultant complete
conversation. When he is trying to decipher one of Forrest’s lines, he keeps
finding some music playing over it, drowning it out. Finally, starting to get a
clearer playback of it, but still stymied, he has to take a technical special
step.
Here is a fictionalized
component to Harry’s equipment. Murch says (in his modern-day commentary) that
according to the nature of analog tape recording, then or now, it would be next
to impossible to recover some spoken words that were so thoroughly drowned out
by music playing in the foreground that was recorded at the same time. But
Harry attaches a little piece of equipment that seems to function as what we
might call some kind of filter (this latter is not a word Murch uses). Now Harry
can hear the line: “He’d kill us if he got the chance.”
Harry thinks he’s stumbled onto
a plot to murder these two young people—which they are apparently aware of.
Harry, who has self-righteously and annoyedly advised his colleague, played by
John Cazale, that the content of these recordings—even the aspect of
human nature in general—doesn’t really concern him, nor should it concern the
colleague, indeed Harry is emotionally touched by these two people’s apparent
predicament, and thereupon hangs the rest of the film’s story.
Murch suggests, in his DVD
comments, that digital technology today is closer to filtering out extraneous
noise in the way Harry’s 1974 little metal box seems to do. And of course,
where the Internet is concerned, we know that means of ferreting out
“actionable information” by corporations, the government, and whoever else are
much more numerous, able, and morally complicating than the situation in 1974
with Harry’s reel-to-reel tape recorders.
Odds and ends in the film
This film includes contributions
from some of Coppola’s major production partners, such as Fred Roos as
producer, Mona Skager as another producer, and Dean Tavoularis as production designer
(note the diaphanous cloth over a lampshade, a touch he uses in Apocalypse Now Redux [2001]). It also
includes actors early in their careers, including Teri Garr.
On this latter actress, her
scene, relatively early in the film, bears one of the more peculiar aspects of
the story. She seems to be a “kept woman” of Harry’s; she is his girlfriend,
living in her own apartment, as we find that he regularly pays her rent. What
she does (for a career) is unclear. And we see him becoming more alienated from
her, as a phase in his growing paranoia, which seems to have started with the
project assigned to him by the Director.
David Shire, Coppola’s
brother-in-law (married to his sister Talia), composed the tasteful piano music
that adds such atmosphere to the film.
Allen Garfield plays the
East Coast rival to Harry in his field, whom Harry meets at the convention and
later has over to his office building (with a group of others) for an impromptu
party. Garfield offers some 1970s flavor with his character’s somewhat pushy
manner, but to me he (or his character) seems rather boorish by today’s
standards.
Another detail that I don’t
think spoils the film for you: the dream sequence about two-thirds of the way
through, where Harry is trying to explain himself to Cindy Williams’ character
in a foggy park, was originally meant for the end of the film, according to
Coppola in 2000 comments. But Coppola dropped this plan when he had to cut the
filming of the scene short because of interference at the park where it was
shot, by police, reporters, and the like.
##
End note 1.
In the DVD I found (through a
library system) of The Conversation, in
one viewing option, Coppola does rich, thoughtful commentary (recorded in 2000).
In this, he remarks in ways that align with comments he also makes, regarding
his career aims, on the 2006 DVD of Apocalypse
Now (1979). With the latter, he expresses his preference for making small
films, and almost with the same stroke he seems to suggest AN was a mistake, to an extent (because of how big it got, and he
implicitly suggests it got beyond him, or got to be more of a complex problem than
he really wanted). But in comments with TC,
he speaks as if his original career plans, apparently symbolized by the slate
of movies he wanted to have Warner Brothers produce/distribute from the
Zoetrope team of filmmakers (more on this in the text of this review), were to
mainly focus on small, personal films that he wrote.
After doing The Rain People (1969), he apparently wanted to do TC next, then a film on the automaker
Preston Tucker (which he would only finally make in the 1980s, for a 1988 release). When
the Godfather project came his way,
which is clearly what put him into the great-director stratosphere (in public
eyes, and critical eyes) and brought him public recognition and the love from a
studio (Paramount) that gave him more freedom to do his work, he entered a
phase—which he speaks in 2000 as if he only wanted it to be one “chapter” of
his life—of doing big-story films, based on novels, that were also big
productions. These included The Godfather
Part II (1974) and Apocalypse Now, which latter marked, as critical
consensus has it, the end of the great-film phase of his career. In the TC commentary, he says he wanted and/or
expected to get back to smaller, personal films after AN (though when he had this plan isn’t clear), but as he says, he
never really got back on that track—this said in 2000. Arguably he did get back
on that track when he did his films of the past decade, Youth Without Youth (2007) and Tetro.
End note 2.
Some of this story of Zoetrope
and Warners, I believe, is found in Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex,
Drugs, & Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1998). But also, there’s a pretty good story, told by several
speakers, in DVD-extra commentary in the modern (2005?) DVD release of THX-1138.
