A sort of “meta” work, this documentary means digging through the penetralia of a quagmire, (1) for Coppola in making the movie (and in understanding the Vietnam War, itself regarded as a quagmire), (2) for the doc’s makers in examining the movie’s production, and (3) for me (and others) coming to terms with this
[What is this—a blog entry with heart, ambition, care, and copious flaws, somewhat-dumped on the marketplace in a desultory August? Sort of like how Apocalypse Now was premiered 33 years ago! This entry derives in part from an article, and additional research, I drew up starting in 2005, and tried to publish but did not. As the draft of this article was, this entry will be in some ways incomplete, but will probably be more than enough for you. My apologies for some end notes not having page references; this has to do, in part, with the amorphous quality of research I did in about 2005. And you say—But I want the next chapter in Greg’s long story on CommonStealth! Edit 8/25/14.]
Perhaps the one film director who can arguably be called a key measure of the baby boomers in terms of how strivingly sublime, and incidentally ridiculous, they could be is Francis Ford Coppola (even though he is slightly older than the baby boomer generation; he was born in 1939). In other words, if you displayed a picture of Coppola to Gen-Xers and younger generations, as a sort of Rorschach test or Thematic Apperception Test, and you asked, “What does this bring to mind?,” they might say all kinds of things ranging from “Ambitious artist, had the courage to make the first major movie about Vietnam, was talented in ways ranging from writing to directing to producing” to “Overly ambitious, pompous, self-promoting; wildly overreached with Apocalypse Now when he could have made a definitive statement; abusive of his actors to the point that Martin Sheen almost died.” I think there’s merit to all these assessments, but I would say I tend to be definitely more favorable toward Coppola than not to be.
Mind you, I like him as an artist. But in writing an attempt at a succinct article on a very complex subject, on which there have been strong negative opinions, acknowledging the negative will sometimes seem as if I share these opinions, which I really do not.
In writing this, though I have a good feeling for what I want to do, it seems this could get much longer than I want it to be, so let’s bite the bullet. He started making movies in the 1960s; he did a horror film for Roger Corman, released in 1963. Some of his earlier films include You’re a Big Boy Now (1966); Finian’s Rainbow (1968), a musical that was the last such film Fred Astaire starred in (it is surprisingly evocative of Coppola’s visual/production flair, though the chirpy musical lyrics and dialogue are, for me, a pain to listen to); and arguably his first notable mature effort, the road film The Rain People (1969), whose stars include Robert Duvall. He also had gone to the film school at UCLA, while other notable directors and the like attended USC (George Lucas, for one); I don’t know enough to say definitive things here about the rivalry between these two schools and its implications for star directors that came out of them in the late 1960s. Still, there are useful things said about this area in an interesting documentary included on the relatively recent (2004) DVD of the George Lucas-directed THX-1138 (1971). (By the way, amid all his late-’60s work, Coppola also was a cowriter, with Edmund North, of the script for the film Patton [1970], for which he won an Academy Award.)
Coppola also wanted to start an independent film studio, American Zoetrope, and it began in 1969 with a slate of projects that were, if I understand the situation right, part of a proposal package made toward anticipating a multi-film partnership with Warner Brothers (which would have mainly been the distributor, I suppose). Then when THX-1138 was finished and Warners didn’t like it (and, more importantly, it didn’t do well at the box office), Warners severed the relationship with Zoetrope. Among the projects that had been on the original Zoetrope/Warners slate was Apocalypse Now, whose script had been written by John Milius, a Zoetrope associate who later would be a director and writer of noted films, and who frequently turns up in DVD commentary in a range of films.
In a sort of groping funk following the Warners cutoff, after having produced THX-1138 (with Lucas directing), Coppola was given an opportunity from Paramount Studios to direct a movie version of the pulp novel The Godfather (1969), in a working relationship with Robert Evans, the noted Paramount executive who not only headed the studio but also produced individual films—including several of the ones (such as Chinatown [1974]) that defined the “Second Golden Age of Hollywood.” Coppola gave the Mafia novel a sumptuous treatment in The Godfather (1972), which went beyond the old-time gangster film and even the conventional notion of a soap opera, which of course, in a sense, the story was. The film, of course, made movie history; it won Oscars, was a big hit, paved the way for using genre works to serve as “literature about America” (more on this later), and put Coppola on the film auteur map.
This movie and its significance are well known. (Also, Coppola’s most innovative directorial style was in place by this time. His cinematographer on the Godfather films, Gordon Willis, remarked sarcastically at some point that Coppola’s style—maybe he was criticizing Coppola’s obliviousness to the cameraman’s needs, and I am roughly paraphrasing here—was, metaphorically, to have an actor cross a set with his shirt on fire, and if everything came out all right, then all was well. This was quoted, I believe, in one of my important sources, Biskind and Cowie, to be referenced in end notes to come [End note 1].)
His next films, the relatively small but gripping story The Conversation (1974) and The Godfather Part II (1974) gave him perhaps the unique distinction of having directed two films, the second a successful sequel to a major hit of two years before, which vied for Best Picture at the Oscars, with The Godfather Part II winning the Best Picture Oscar, while The Conversation won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
By 1975, it seemed he could do no wrong, and this came at a time when the baby boomer generation seemed to appreciate having someone who seemed very much “of them” while making films that not only conformed with genre conventions to some extent but addressed themes related to national distress—Godfather looking at the dual nature of American life in (1) its traditional embrace of family values and yet (2) its hypocritical utilization of violence and/or self-delusion about what we are doing. Meanwhile, The Conversation looked at the paranoid situations we were finding ourselves in while the Watergate scandal was cancerously eating at our trust in the federal government—perhaps all sorts of high-level authority. Today, the idea may seem absurdly pretentious or overly ambitious, but when Coppola turned his attention to a film about Vietnam, with pre-production starting in 1975, a few months after (?) the fall of Saigon, it seemed as if he was the one artist (of popular entertainment that was increasingly achieving high-minded artistic status) who could help us come to terms—as a culture, as a body politic, or whatever—with Vietnam, the soul-traumatizing war.
(By the way, some historical moorings: I am not an expert on the politics—foreign or domestic—behind the Vietnam War. Certainly, conforming rather slavishly with 1970s culture, I felt as a teen that the war was wrong, fundamentally ill-advised; but I was 13 when the fall of Saigon happened in 1975, and certainly could never have felt at risk of being drafted. Meanwhile, I am not antithetical to the military life. My uncle Wesley served in Vietnam, for two tours of duty—about 1964-66 and about 1969-71. During the second tour, in 1970, I believe when he was temporarily on leave because my father had just died, he left me the memento, “clue,” whatever you want to call it, of an Army Corps of Engineers pin—which I guess a relevant soldier wore on his collar; it looked like a little castle. My father and his older brother Charles both served in the military, in the 1950s. One of my cousins has served in the military, too; given his age—he was born in 1975—he served in Iraq and Afghanistan VISTA , in 1986-87—and not for a full term. But my willingness to be serious about the “expectations” of national service led me to sign up with the Selective Service when President Carter reinstated it in response to the Soviets’ invasion of Afghanistan. I remember being scorned by peers at GWU in 1980 for having done this; to me, it was a simple requirement and didn’t entail automatically being drafted, but these peers felt otherwise. Anyway, to our modern eyes—which maybe are all but numbed and half-forgetful about Vietnam, given the wars since 2001 that have made demands on our attention and emotions—there was an interesting little piece in The New York Times on Sunday, August 12—in the “Sunday Review” section, p. 4, “Exploding the Myths About Vietnam,” which includes discussion about commentators using the Vietnam War as a reference point—not quite appropriately, says the writer—for assessing our involvement in Afghanistan as a “quagmire.” It is by a U.S.
Apocalypse Now starts to coalesce
On the business level, in 1975, the Apocalypse Now (AN) project was resurrected—after having been considered a project for George Lucas to direct in about 1969—as part of Coppola’s trying to start his own studio American Zoetrope again (this is according to the film being review here, Hearts of Darkness; there are also relevant parts of the story in two books that are among my main sources [2]).
With AN, he was not working for Paramount
The film’s principal photography, almost entirely in the Philippines
At Cannes in 1979, at a press conference shown in Hearts of Darkness, Coppola, seeming thin, tired, and a bit distracted, made his famous comment that this film simply wasn’t about Vietnam, it—or producing it—“was Vietnam. It was crazy. …”
The film is finally delivered (in 1979), to mixed reviews, and Coppola’s star starts to fall
The film was first released in August 1979, but I first saw it at a theater in Manhattan
In subsequent years I began to be swayed by the critical views of the film that saw it as not-minorly flawed. Actually, I would find reviews of it—when I wrote a paper on it in 1984 for a film class I took after graduating from college—that (in total) took a critical axe to it for nearly every initiative it took. Here is how I interpreted this situation—using the 1984-compiled quotes but writing from a more sympathetic-to-the-film perspective—for an article I drafted through early 2006:
Time lamented that the movie was a “collection of footage” that was sometimes “breathtaking” visually but was assembled into an “emotionally obtuse and intellectually empty” story. The characters of the movie aren’t well enough developed, the review says, with the result that the movie’s “panoramas of death” lack a “human context.” The voice-over narration was “desperately” inserted to attract the audience to Willard and to clarify plot points. (This latter is one of the more preposterous criticisms, because there was narration in the original script, and when Walter Murch, one chief editor of the film, started to edit it in 1977, he started to record the narration himself—perhaps as a sort of logistical guide for himself in the editorial process—to help put the original rough cut into shape. [12]) Willard’s narration is “alternately sensitive, psychopathic, literary, gung-ho, and anti-war.” (If you carefully consider the narration, it’s hard to understand what of it is actually “gung-ho.” The first recognition of “the Air Cav”? This is said [by Sheen] ironically.)
[The conservative] National Review opined, even though the reviewer was not disappointed with “sizable chunks” of the movie, that the movie suffered from a “dissociation of sensibility.” Ideas and feelings expressed in the film were “crude,” “immature,” and “pretentious” because Coppola failed to feelingly engage himself with his material and represent his engagement. His use of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a story basis for the film is “puerile” and “self-serving,” with the result that sometimes allusions to the novel in the film are “gratuitous.”
[The liberal] The New Republic seems to have been more sympathetic, noting for instance that Apocalypse Now is “at its best in delivering the textures of the first freaked-out, pill-popping, rock-accompanied war.” The reviewer pointed out that Coppola had an “apparent sense that the world is seen more truthfully when it is seen as spectacle” (which could be considered a redundant way to characterize one director’s style in forming movies, because this would seem an essential premise to moviemaking of any kind). But the movie offered a “message” that was “too patent to affect us” and it was politically “empty.” Moreover, as moral allegory, it “fizzles completely.”
The part of the movie that has typically received the most criticism through the years is the last 35 or so minutes, featuring Willard’s dealings with Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando. Time snorted that Brando as the renegade colonel Walter E. Kurtz “does little more than [spout] quotations from Conrad and T.S. Eliot.” National Review said that Kurtz’s horrors shown late in the film are not much more remarkable than the horrors that were shown in Willard’s journey up the river to find him. Kurtz is not portrayed well as broken down due to a “basic human loss of control [or the] fallibility of moral choice.” The New Republic said that the scenes with Kurtz are conspicuously unsuccessful and Kurtz’s literary quotations—he reads from Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” for example—are “glib attempts to enlarge him.”
If you think a lot of these critical remarks are thick-headed or mean, I would agree. They almost suggest critics united in having an agenda to react harshly to the film, perhaps in view of Coppola’s hubris-like long delaying of the finished product. But I would suggest that people were rather perfectionistic about their “meaningful” films in those days: they wanted them to reflect reality with clear eyes and an aim to solid, responsibly derived meaning. Today, of course, we can watch AN and appreciate it for how far it really does go to say something deep about something that troubled us very much in the 1970s, and we can wonder why no one tries to do this, at least in this way, anymore (though we know the reason, given marketing logic and current audience tastes).
Due to the sheer strain of production and the financial liabilities, never mind the critics, Coppola was never the same. His next film, One From the Heart (1982), a sort of odd love story long on visuals and short on story, failed miserably at the box office. He was not again regarded, at least for several years, as having the greatness he was seen to have in the 1970s. Even Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), whose development had begun in the 1970s [13] and which was anticipated as a possible return to form, was disappointing at the box office—it made less than it cost. He did a third installment of The Godfather, released in 1990, which while interesting (I was surprised at how good it was, relatively speaking and all things considered, when I finally saw the whole thing about two years ago), is widely regarded as not as good as either of the first two.
Hearts of Darkness (in 1991) adds journalistic exposure
It was with this background that Hearts of Darkness was made, released in 1991 (shown on cable, Showtime, at first), later available on video from Paramount
Who knows how history will treat this situation. Now I have seen Apocalypse Now so many times (especially since about 2006) that you would think I’m sick; and while I have varied my viewpoint on it in different directions over about 30 years, I have been fond of it for about the past decade. In all fairness, I think the least that can be said is this:
(1) It was the first film that tried to treat Vietnam
(2) You can still like the film, and admire how it tries to do this job by using as a story framework Joseph Conrad’s novella “Heart of Darkness,” even while admitting the film’s flaws, both technical and more broadly artistic.
(3) As just suggested, the film has some historical importance, in the movie realm and in American culture more generally. It isn’t simply a baby boomer’s toy. [16]
(4) If you agree with two or all of these points, then Hearts of Darkness will interest you, because it is useful in appreciating AN to understand the pros and cons, revealed during its production, of the ambitious writer/director/producer who made this film, and who indeed was the sine qua non for its happening at all and its being shoved by main force to completion.
I have to say that, having seen this documentary several times, I still like Coppola as a man and an artist; but if the Vietnam War was an instance of the U.S. “coming apart at the seams” in a way not seen since the Civil War, then Coppola was being a sort of national psychotherapist in making the first try at a definitive film of the war—his 1979 program stating “It was my thought that if the American audience could look at the heart of what Vietnam was really like…then they would be only one small step away from putting it behind them”—in effect, a sort of South African-style “Truth and Reconciliation” session for the war-scarred public. [17]
But to produce the means for this, it took Coppola’s inadvertently becoming—I think it’s fair to say this, though he denies ever having seen a psychologist or psychiatrist (New York Times Magazine, December 16, 2007, p. 30)—both manic and depressive, definitely expressive of bipolar disorder, as part of the tortuous process of finishing this film. Evidence? If you watch Hearts and hear Coppola’s own recorded comments, or see a photo, referencing his idea of committing suicide, and compare this with a filmed monologue by him elsewhere in Hearts where he ebulliently talking about the various qualities of AN, and then you know from Biskind that he was prescribed lithium from about 1979 through about 1982, you know, without being a doctor, that he was suffering from bipolar disorder, exacerbated by the tensions of making AN. Again, it’s not something he would have bragged about; but I think it’s fair to allude to in this blog entry, to help explain some of the motivation behind the way the movie was stewarded, with full enough sympathy for him.
But this making a movie while being occasionally manic and occasionally depressive happened within a situation that incidentally incurred the years-long resentment of several of his actors (such as Frederic Forrest and Sam Bottoms, quoted in the 1991 Hearts of Darkness; they sound more forgiving in the 2006 DVD extras). Further, the process entailed the near-death of Martin Sheen in late February 1977—making Sheen the one saint of the whole affair. Today, lawsuits would fly all over like scared sparrows if a similar situation happened with a movie’s production. But in those days, filmmaking baby boomers could seek in a project like this—seeking in the sense of the rock group The Who’s song “The Seeker”—the truth in a jungle, and if they survived the trip, America got a broadly therapeutic film.
Summary of points about Hearts
I didn’t want to go too deeply into this; as you can see, not only have I done considerable research on AN, but the topic is such that, if you’re in for a mil, you’re in for a million—and it rather gets you crazy. The complexity, morally and factually, make it hard not to be about as ambitious as a Coppola project in addressing it. A few salient points:
Hearts of Darkness was hard to find for some time. I bought a videocassette via Amazon several years ago; and when the 2006 “Complete Dossier” DVD of Apocalypse Now Redux came out, the extras did not include Hearts. But I understand that a later, BluRay [?] version of the full set of ANR materials includes Hearts. It’s not hard to understand why; the film makes Coppola look least admirable of all the major players in the AN production saga.
Coppola commented extensively during the production of AN, when he was filmed talking about it and was at other times audio-recorded, the latter not always with his knowledge (according to Hearts). It was apparently with his blessing that Eleanor’s diary was published in about 1980, based partly on these recordings (noted in Hearts, and also in Cowie, I believe). The film Hearts as including some of these recordings was still more than a decade off. Some of Coppola’s comments are astute, showing that he was his own toughest critic as the film was being made, through an agonizingly long process. Example (I may paraphrase a bit): “My greatest fear is to make a pompous, embarrassing, shitty film on an important subject, and I am doing it. I can tell you from the bottom of my heart that the film will not be good.”
With as many ways that the difficulty of making AN have been told, among those in the Coppola camp or sympathetic to him, the most difficult actor was Marlon Brando, who threatened to pull out of the production and keep his $1 million advance if the time he was supposed to be involved was changed. (The story is told in Hearts and also in Cowie.) Apparently Coppola kept to the schedule for Brando, which meant he was filmed in September 1976. But this was midway through principal photography, in fact slightly more within the first half of it. About eight months more of photography was to be done. So Coppola, who had a highly difficult time writing an ending for the movie (which would come out in the wash in how critics viewed the film in 1979), had to settle with what he did with Brando, which involved mainly improvisation, in September 1976.
Yet for some reason, in Hearts, and to some extent in director commentary in the 2006 DVD release, the impression is given that the Brando debacle was at the end of production. Importantly, it was not. Possibly—I’m speculating—Coppola’s self-doubt regarding the film as production went on was based in part on Brando’s lackluster contribution in September 1976. Certainly, everyone agrees that Brando’s role in this film is not among the best of his career [18], and represents a big enough flaw in AN. Notably, Brando never contributed commentary or an interview to Hearts or any other AN packaging. The one deviation from the usual story about Brando’s role in AN is that, while all other stories indicate that Brando caused Coppola to have to sit and have discussions with him, wasting precious production time, Brando in an autobiography or biography of his own claims that Coppola was responsible for this. [19]
Martin Sheen: The almost-martyr of the production
Final comment must be reserved for Martin Sheen. He had been in the Terrence Malick film Badlands (1974), and had been in the earlier, Mike Nichols-directed film of Catch-22 (1970) and the TV movie The Missiles of October (~1974). He was still enough of an up-and-comer when AN was made that he was never given top billing in this film. Both Brando and Robert Duvall were billed above him in the 1979 and 2001 programs. To me, Duvall’s performance, while famous and still entertaining, looks more minor as years go by. But for sheer dedication to the film and for the threat to his health the production unexpectedly posed, in my opinion Sheen should be at top, at least above Brando. [20]
Not only does Sheen appear quite often in the film as a to-be-identified-with “witness to the madness” of the Vietnam War as well as the somewhat opaque Special Forces assassin he is portraying, but, as I said, he had a heart attack in late February 1977 that nearly cost him his life. [21]
Earlier, on August 3, 1976, he was filmed in the hotel scene in which, in the final film, jump-cuts (originally criticized as chaotic, and now looking pretty modern) add texture to him “freaking out” while naked apparently in an episode of R&R prior to being called to a specific assignment again. Hearts shows some of the more extended sequence in which this behavior was captured. For those who were entranced by his son Charlie Sheen’s “Tiger blood” eccentricities in winter/spring 2011, here in 1976 was his father, not simply acting irresponsibly, but delivering arresting acting while both drunk and seeming to experience a nervous breakdown.
Sheen, interviewed for Hearts—and generally seeming the most magnanimous interviewee in the film—said he’d been in a “spiritually chaotic” state. Background facts help us understand: After a typhoon in May 1976, sets had to be rebuilt, and production was shut down for about two months, with participants returning to the U.S.
Sheen came back, but apparently not in the best of morale, when the early-August shooting went on. Coppola coaches him in the August 3 shooting with reminders of his (Sheen’s) wife, home, etc. Sheen seems to cry in acute distress and agony…and eventually virulently curses Coppola. In 1991 Sheen says he pretended he’d forgotten what happened that night, but actually, he “remembered it all.” Sheen here shows himself to be among the most forgiving of the principal actors, while his feelings toward Coppola don’t seem of unalloyed affection.
Then there was his heart attack the next year. A voice recording of Coppola, on the phone, berating a producer for gossip that had been occurring in Hollywood about Sheen’s having had a heart attack may seem chilling to some, and may seem more understandable to others who are familiar with the typical complexities of such projects. Many millions of dollars had been spent on filming, but Coppola was afraid that United Artists would shut down the production and “force me to finish it with what I’ve got” if they found out about Sheen’s illness. “And I don’t have the movie yet,” Coppola argues, almost sulkily.
He adds that he’s really “scared” for the first time on this film; so please, he implores, have it known in Hollywood that any rumor—“what’s going on in trade winds”—about Sheen’s health is “f**king gossip.” (The 1979 program says, with something like discretion, that Sheen was hospitalized for “heat exhaustion.”)
Sheen got treatment (though he was given last rites at one early point, according to Hearts) and took a vacation for a few weeks. Then he was back on the set, looking healthy. In fact, there was still some significant stuff in the film to be made: especially the famous sampan massacre scene, done on April 26, 1977; this is one of the most dignified and structure-giving scenes in the film.
Now you know, today, if a director was so intransigent in pursuing his protracted production of a film (to catch all he wanted to put in it despite all the hurdles), and an actor’s near-fatal heart attack was to be hushed up, well, a lawyer might come flying in in his own version of a Huey, and a whole new torturously protracted process would begin. He might come in a squadron, with the officially painted “scales of justice” symbol in place of the horns of the cavalry, and some joker might have hand-painted “litigation from above” on the noses of the choppers.
“First of the Ninth was an old law firm that had traded in its ethics for shysterism and went tear-assing around the States, looking for the Shit. They’d given some poor old souls a few surprises here. What they were litigating now hadn’t even happened an hour ago.”
End notes
1. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, & Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood
2. Ibid.
3. I think this was in Cowie; sorry I don’t have the page number.
4. I strongly believe Cowie details much of this. (I’m not sure where the $24 million figure comes from; perhaps Cowie.) Biskind says the budget was originally outlined to be $12 million, and ballooned to more than $30 million (p. 375). These same figures are noted in the very interesting 1979, multi-page program that was distributed at early showings of the film. (A digital version of it is available, I believe, in the 2006 DVD.)
5. In the film Hearts, under review here, one underling—as does Coppola’s wife Eleanor, in an inference—indicates that Coppola had mortgaged his big California house as part of the financing. By the way, Coppola’s Wikipedia biography indicates he appeared in bankruptcy court multiple times years after he had worked on AN; I don’t know the details of these court involvements.
6. According to the 1979 program.
7. Biskind (p. 361) says there were 250 hours of footage. Coppola in his 2006 DVD commentary points out that, while there was an initial five-hour assemblage—a sort of work print, or first editorial version—knowledge about which among fans would apparently spur rumors or hopes that a much longer AN existed somewhere—this was merely an initial version, which obviously had to be whittled down. Of course, the 1979 version of the movie was about 2:40 in length; the 2001 Redux version was about 3:20.
8. There were many editors for the film—one good litmus test of what a nightmare making the film was. While today, as in the 2006 DVD, Walter Murch gets mentioned as if he was the main editor, he was one of several in 1979, and a lot of his area of responsibility, I believe, was in the sound collage, which he was an expert at (the main credits of AN in the 1979 program list him not as supervising editor but as doing “sound montage and design”)—he did this in George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973). In the 1979 program, there are at least 13 editors who were either film editors or supervising editors (Walter Murch is among those noted with just the simple, rather high-level title “editor”); five sound editors, including a supervisory one; one music editor; three “dialogue editors”; five assistant sound editors; and six “apprentice sound editors.” There were also five “re-recordists,” including Walter Murch. One editor, Gerald Greenberg, is noted by Coppola in the DVD 2006 as having been in charge of just all the film concerning the helicopter charge on the seaside village, which comprised, I believe, most of the work before the May 1976 typhoon that destroyed many of the sets and held up production for a while. There was so much film for this set of scenes, that the volume could have made up one movie just itself (said in the 2006 DVD, I think). The helicopter-attack scenes also represent the film at its most exciting, and most absurdist: a helicopter brigade not only helping a “patrol boat, riverine” (PBR) get into a river where the delta was too shallow, but blasting away at the enemy emplacements there just to make the area safer for Colonel Kilgore’s men to surf—the film’s most bluntly absurdist part.
9. Not only were there many editors, but there were many cameramen. Vittorio Storaro is noted as the expert and award-winning cinematographer, and rightly so; but there were so many subordinate cameramen under him that, in some Hearts scenes, you can hear someone translating what Coppola was saying into Italian for the benefit of these men; and later on, you hear them singing in Italian at a party.
10. Noted in Biskind, I believe; perhaps also in Cowie.
11. Noted in Hearts.
12. I forget where I read this—maybe in Cowie.
13. Noted in Cowie; also noted in the Wikipedia article on the film.
14. Noted in Cowie, I believe. See also Eleanor’s Wikipedia bio.
15. This sort of thing has been addressed in the past by the likes of J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1959/1970). Philosopher Hannah Arendt provides an introduction to this book. Gray, I believe, was a veteran of World War II.
16. For useful humor, there is the Vietnam-movie satire Tropic Thunder (2008), which makes allusions to AN.
17. A biography of Marlon Brando, who played Colonel Kurtz, notes that Coppola, in the planning or early-production stages, considered AN to be his most important film (no big surprise). Peter Manso, Brando: The Biography (New York: Hyperion, 1994), p. 838, 839 (?).
18. A critic is quoted in, I believe, Biskind as saying, after viewing AN (this may paraphrase a bit), “I don’t know, I think they paid him [Brando] by the pound.”
19. Manso and/or an autobiography by Brando (Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me [New York: Random House, 1994]) goes to lengths to claim that it was Coppola who was delaying filming Brando’s parts while the clock was ticking, in violation of the contract. But, as longtime Coppola associate Fred Roos notes in Hearts, and as the Coppola camp contends in general, Brando was the one doing the contract-defying delaying. I think Coppola’s camp is more credible; watch Hearts and judge for yourself.
20. Sheen’s Wikipedia bio is right, I think, on one thing: “He is considered one of the best actors never to be nominated for an Academy Award despite his acclaimed performances.” For AN, he was nominated for the American Movie Award for Best Actor, and for the British BAFTA Award for Best Actor. Strangely, a number of basic facts related to his tenure in this film are in a bit of dispute, between my main references: for instance, as to when he first came to the Philippines to participate, after Harvey Keitel, previously in the Willard role, was fired: the 1979 program says April 26 (reports to set); Biskind, April 24 (p. 348; arrival in the Philippines, not necessarily arrival at the set); Manso, May 1 (arrival in the Philippines; p. 839).
21. When was the heart attack? Cowie: March 5 (p. 125); Hearts: February 28 (Eleanor Coppola quotes a journal entry dated March 1, saying he’d had the MI the night before); Biskind: March 5 (p. __?); and the 1979 program says Sheen was hospitalized March 5. It’s possible Sheen had the MI on February 28 and wasn’t admitted to the hospital until March 5.
