The Last Kings of Hollywood, page 14
* * *
The only people on the Godfather set to have any faith in their director, it seemed, were the actors. Francis, as he had done on The Rain People and would try to do again and again, had cast actors whose real-life dynamics he felt mirrored those of their characters on the page. Never did that alchemy work better than on The Godfather. Caan and Duvall, who were more experienced, treated Pacino with all the affection and ribbing older siblings reserve for their kid brother; all three of them—as well as fourth brother John Cazale—looked up to Brando, the actor they all idolized, the way sons do to a father of whom they are in awe. Visitors to the set on any given day might have seen Caan and Duvall mooning each other, Brando reading his lines off hidden cue cards (in one instance, a huge chalkboard sign propped up in a tree; in another, sheets of paper taped around Duvall’s body), and Francis looking serious and alone. His sister, Talia, felt, at times, like she shouldn’t have been on the movie, put in a position to see her older brother so vulnerable.
Paramount wanted the film violent, explicit. Classy wasn’t what they had in mind when they bought Puzo’s book. Working for Corman had taught Francis that all he needed were a few set-piece moments: Michael shooting Sollozzo and McCluskey dead, Luca Brasi garroted to death with his hand pinned to a bar top, Sonny machine-gunned to shreds at a tollbooth. Caan asked how many squibs were wired to his body for that last one and was told 147, and not to put his hands too close to any of them during the take or his fingers would get blown off. He thought of chickening out, but there were pretty girls on set watching.
One day, Evans invited his friend Robert Towne to visit the set. Towne was a sought-after “script doctor,” known around town for fixing the script to Bonnie and Clyde. He’d done favors for Evans before, and he knew Francis a little from the old days, when they’d both cut their teeth working for Corman. The tall, bearded, long-haired writer spent a few hours watching Francis work, then sat in a screening room at the Paramount Building in Times Square to watch four hours of dailies, with Francis by his side.
“That is without question the best footage I’ve ever seen,” he told Coppola when it was over.
Francis’s heart skipped with relief. Towne, he said later, was “the first and only person who told me The Godfather wasn’t a failure.” The two men agreed, however, that the film was missing a resolution to Vito and Michael’s relationship. Towne suggested writing a final scene for Brando and Pacino together, one that would show the love and respect between the father and the son—but also Don Vito’s melancholy resignation that his youngest and most promising boy was following in bloody footsteps he had hoped to steer him away from.
That sounded great, Francis said, but whatever new pages Towne wrote, he had to shoot them tomorrow.
Towne carried a copy of Francis’s script back to his hotel room, read it, took notes, felt his way into the picture’s voice. He sat typing until four in the morning. In the pages he handed Francis at the crack of dawn, Michael sits in the garden listening to his father as Vito breaks down the chess moves to come—“Barzini will move against you first,” he says, “he’ll set up a meeting with someone that you absolutely trust, guaranteeing your safety, and at that meeting, you’ll be assassinated”—before pausing and, unexpectedly, confronting his age, his enforced semiretirement, his legacy. He asks after his son’s family, apologizes for fretting, turns his eye to the past. He grows forgetful, distracted. He apologizes for not handing Michael a better, more legitimate inheritance—Senator or Governor Corleone, he says, rather than Don.
It was a short, quiet scene—three or four pages, under four minutes of screen time in the end—two men sitting at a table under the trees. But it was everything Francis wanted The Godfather to be.
Francis started believing in his film. He wanted so badly for it to be great, it was like his life depended on it. Late in the schedule, the cast and crew were out at Calvary Cemetery in Queens, filming the funeral of Don Corleone. Under a hazy gray sky, a somber Michael Corleone sits by the coffin as it is about to be interred, watching family, friends, and fellow mobsters pay final tribute to his father, each tossing a single rose onto the casket. Then one of Michael’s lieutenants, Tessio, asks to speak to him, and takes him aside to pass on a message from rival gangster Barzini, requesting a peace meeting—one Michael knows, from advice his father has given him in Towne’s new scene, is a trap.
Up until that exchange, the scene is wordless, a complex choreography of eyelines and body language. The crew shot all day, wrapping only when the sun began to set. Pacino said his goodbyes and made his way through the burial plots to his trailer, feeling good about his day’s work and excited about the short ride home and a cold beer or two. Ahead of him, a man sat on a tombstone in the dying light, “weeping like a baby[,] profusely crying.” Pacino was startled when he recognized his director.
“Francis, what’s wrong? What happened?” Pacino asked.
“They won’t give me another shot,” Francis answered.
He wanted to keep filming, but he’d lost the light. The sunset wouldn’t match the rest of the day’s takes. He wanted more, and he was devastated.
As he continued on to his trailer, it occurred to Pacino that maybe this picture was going to be worth something after all.
* * *
Another plane, and George and Marcia were in Cannes. THX 1138 screened, and George couldn’t reach Picker. The fortnight of the festival ticked to a close, and still he couldn’t pin him down. Finally, he cornered the executive on the terrace of the palatial Carlton Hotel, where most executives stayed, and pitched him American Graffiti again. Told him he could have the rights to the picture for just ten grand. It wasn’t much money, especially if George had to share it with Huyck and Katz, and it’s unclear where George came up with the $10,000 figure in the first place, though there are stories. A week in Cannes wasn’t cheap. “From what I hear,” Mike Medavoy recalls, George “needed money to get out of his hotel room. And he went to David Picker, and said, Look, I need five thousand dollars, and I’ll option you these two projects.”
Whether it was five each for two projects, as Medavoy recalls, or ten for American Graffiti, the sum on the table, George remembered later, amounted to essentially “nothing.” It was exactly the kind of arrangement George’s father had warned him against, back when George had first told him he wanted to be a filmmaker. Don’t ever go into business with your hobby, George Sr. had advised his son, because you’ll be taken advantage of and you’ll be doing stupid things. Doing things for love instead of money.
Picker thought about it for a moment.
“Okay, we’ll do it,” he said finally. “Or at least, we’ll give you the ten to write the script. Do you have any other films?” A standard Hollywood question: What else you got? Can we get dibs on the next one, just in case this one hits?
“Well—” George hesitated. “I have this sort of space opera thing. It’s sort of an action-adventure film in space.”
“Okay, we’ll make a deal for that, too.” They shook on it: $10,000 for United Artists to option the rights to American Graffiti and the “sort of space opera thing” George had been dreaming of, titled, at that point, The Star Wars.
The meeting had taken only minutes. It was such a good deal for the studio, and for such an inconsequential amount of money, that, years later, Picker admitted he couldn’t even remember making it.
George had never been a good traveler. He went back to Marcia, settled their hotel room bill, and braced himself for the long journey back home.
12
UNICORNS
The Godfather wrapped in August 1971, after three and a half months in New York and a brief stint in Sicily. Francis dove straight into cutting, with Peter Zinner and William Reynolds as his editors, and Murch, with whom he’d grown close, as his sound mixer. Even then, Murch says, “there was a big trough period where it looked like the film was not going to work. The studio kept hammering, and Francis was resisting … The feeling on The Godfather was: this is long, and dark, and self-indulgent.” Robert Evans wanted Francis to get rid of the score he had commissioned from Italian composer and conductor Nino Rota. He thought it was pretentious.
“If you boys don’t fight for this music,” said Murch’s wife, Aggie, “there’s not a decent pair of balls between you.”
Francis took a copy of the movie to Rome to show Rota in October. On the night of Saturday, November 13, shortly after coming back, he threw a party at his house to unwind. George and Marcia were there. There was something quaint about George and Marcia. Francis liked to call them “country mice”—happy and simple and, he’d add only a little dismissively, “sort of romantic, like kids picking oranges in an old Jane Powell movie.” Marcia loved Francis’s gatherings. The editor Richard Chew, who spent weeks on Folsom Street, remembers her as “very social,” which George decidedly was not.
On this evening, George was particularly disengaged from the merriment. He had kept in touch with Steven Spielberg as Steven returned to work, directing a couple more TV episodes and then a feature-length television movie, L.A. 2017, which aired in January of 1971—the story of a time-traveler caught in a dystopian future Los Angeles, where the populace lives underground to escape deadly pollution, while a fascist government polices them through the use of law enforcement psychiatrists. George had watched it on NBC, amused. It wasn’t quite a rip-off of THX 1138 4EB, but it was close—a “friendly homage,” he thought, with the benign haughtiness of an older sibling watching their kid brother imitate them. Since then, Steven had been handed the reins of another TV movie, Duel, based on a short story the genre author Richard Matheson had published in Playboy. On its face, Duel was simplistic—a traveling salesman on a business trip gets into a confrontation with a tank trunk, driven by an unseen driver, who pursues him along the road, trying to kill him—but word in LA was that young Spielberg had turned it into something electrifying. Something far more impressive than the kid had any right to make, given the thirteen-day shooting schedule, four-hundred-grand shooting budget, and strict seventy-five-minute runtime.
The buzz about Duel was so strong it thrummed up the coast to San Francisco, and the film was premiering on the Saturday of Francis’s party, so as the other guests mingled and drank Francis’s red wine, George kept an eye on his watch. ABC’s Movie of the Week started broadcasting at 8:30 PM and he was keen not to miss it. He figured he would let Marcia dance, give Spielberg’s little movie ten or fifteen minutes, see what it was like, and then return to hovering on the fringes of the good time. Shortly before 8:30, he drifted away from the laughter and conversation and climbed up the stairs. He found a room with a television and turned over to ABC.
“I remember very distinctly,” he said years later, “I started watching—and I couldn’t stop.”
At the first commercial break, he leapt out of his seat and ran down the stairs. “Francis, you’ve got to come see this movie,” he said. “This guy’s really good.”
Francis refused to be taken away from the fun. George ran back upstairs alone and sat there for the next hour, the lit television screen reflected in his eyeglasses, absorbed in Dennis Weaver’s desperate, sweaty escape from the monster truck. The party roared on through the ceiling beneath him, but George could no longer hear it. George responded to Duel as a piece of art not all that different from the mood poems he longed to make himself. A red car chased down dusty roads by an ugly truck as vividly designed as any human character; expressive sound design of the kind George and Murch were obsessed with. From the simplest of ideas, Steven had created an experience, not with plot, not with dialogue, but almost purely out of sound and images. George was “very, very, very impressed.”
Steven was proud of Duel, though his dream contract at Universal had become instead a nightmare obligation.
“TV for me wasn’t an art form,” he said later. “It was a job … I felt that it was like working in a sweatshop, and I wasn’t getting any of that stimulation, that gratification that I even got making 8mm war movies when I was 12 years old. I didn’t have that passion, because television sort of smothered the passion.”
Duel, a prestigious Movie of the Week, was finally his breakthrough. Critics loved it; executives took note. It was even scheduled for a theatrical release in Europe. Tentative offers came in. Jeff Berg set Steven up with Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood, to see if Steven might be a fit to direct a script they were shopping, a science-fiction adventure called Star Dancing. Steven liked the writers, and the evocative concept art they had commissioned from a Boeing design illustrator named Ralph McQuarrie, more than he liked the project. He passed, but he and Robbins and Barwood remained friendly. He worked with a pal, the actor Joseph Walsh, on a screenplay about Walsh’s gambling addiction, following two friends who can’t resist the lure of an elusive big score. Steven felt he could relate to the characters. It was a bit like show business—the “excitement,” Walsh said later, but “underneath all that, there is a trap. There is a sadness.” James Aubrey, the MGM executive who had screamed down the phone at Evans over Pacino breaking his contract, was keen on green-lighting it, on the condition it starred Dean Martin, with whom MGM had a working relationship, and was set and shot at the Circus Circus Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, which MGM owned. Steven brought Walsh’s screenplay to Universal, to which he was still under contract, but Sheinberg wasn’t interested. He declined to release Steven from his contract to work for Aubrey. Steven felt like he was treading water.
“You’re better off not being under contract,” his agent Mike Medavoy told Steven, “because everything Universal does is not very good. You gotta get out of your contract, and out of Universal.”
“I can’t do that,” Steven answered. “I’ve become really close to Sid Sheinberg, I can’t get out of it.”
“No studio is going to give you a movie, and then you go back to Universal, and they can’t work with you again because you’re under exclusive contract to Universal.”
“I can’t get out of it,” Steven repeated.
Medavoy shook his head. “You need another agent,” he said. He flogged Steven off to his colleague Guy McElwaine, a smooth and charming agent who had come to CMA from a career as a publicist.
Steven had reason to feel discouraged, but his new agent turned out to be a gift. McElwaine, who had once been Frank Sinatra’s public relations man, was old-school showbiz slick. He wore large eyeglasses with smoky lenses, and checked tweed jackets and paisley ties. His skin was a perpetual leathery tan. He liked a martini. You’d meet him and he’d talk and talk, giving you the impression he liked nothing more than the sound of his own voice—until you realized he had, somehow, negotiated you into a deal, as smoothly as his curveballs baited hitters into swinging, back when he played minor league ball after graduating from USC. He’d been in the business a long time; knew the unspoken rituals, the difference between lines you could cross and lines you couldn’t. McElwaine recognized the clients—like Warren Beatty and now Steven—who needed not just representation but hand-holding. Their confidence was outsize yet brittle. He also understood, as Medavoy hadn’t, that Steven was hungry to know more about the business, and how to play it. So, as he waited for Steven’s television contract to run its course, McElwaine took the initiative. He drove his young charge around, meeting executives, teaching him about the bottom line. He drove Steven to the house of Terry Semel, who ran distribution for Disney, so Semel could explain how films were sold and exhibited and how box-office revenue was divvied up. “Terry must have talked for about four hours straight,” Spielberg remembered. “I was taking notes, and at the end of the day I knew more about distribution and exhibition than I ever wanted to.” Semel took note, too: It wasn’t often he met a director who cared about the ins and outs of what he did.
In a touch of serendipity, around this time, Universal shook up its executive hierarchy. Lew Wasserman, while retaining Sheinberg as the head of Universal Television, was also handing him the reins of the motion picture studio. Richard Zanuck—president of 20th Century Fox and youngest son of Darryl Zanuck, the co-founder and chairman of the studio—had just been fired by his father, in no small part for having the temerity to question why sixty-eight-year-old Darryl was spending so much of the company’s money developing vanity projects for his mistress, twenty-four-year-old French actress Geneviève Gilles. The younger Zanuck was shrewd, hardworking, and charismatic. He’d already rescued Fox once, in 1963, when the fiscal disaster of Cleopatra, an out-of-control epic starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, had come close to sinking the company. (The situation was so dire, Zanuck had to shut the studio down for a while, just to stem the financial bleeding.) Zanuck had now found a new job as an executive vice president at Warner Bros., but Wasserman was working to poach him and his partner, David Brown, to a first-look deal as independent producers at Universal. They would buy their own material and develop it. They would have the pick of directors on contract to work with.
McElwaine said he’d set up a meeting. Maybe Steven had something he could bring them.
* * *
Francis finished editing The Godfather in the New Year. George helped, cutting a brief montage of crime scene photos and newspaper headlines about the war between the Corleones and rival families. He bailed Francis out when the director realized he hadn’t shot enough footage of empty hallways to intercut into the tense scene in which Michael finds his hospitalized father abandoned and vulnerable to assassination: Why not, George suggested, just use the trim ends on the existing shots—the seconds of footage before the assistant director called action and after he called cut? Studio editors usually discarded those as scraps, but George had learned to use every second of available film at USC.
