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Francis Ford Coppola | page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

After two years of post-production, the nearly finished film screened at Cannes in 1979 and ended up sharing the Golden Palm with "The Tin Drum." Coppola gave a frighteningly perfervid press conference in which he said, "My film is not a movie; it's not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam." There must have been something both lunatic and exhilarating about Coppola at that press conference, getting carried away with his own metaphor: "We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane."

Of course, "Apocalypse Now" isn't Vietnam; it is only a movie (as Sheen's wife told him in the hospital). Its reflection of the filmmaker's despair doesn't deepen its view of the grief in Southeast Asia. John Milius' original script and Coppola's nonstop rewrites couldn't support the director's flood of notions; the production was designed at every stage as the sort of spectacle that overwhelms audiences rather than prods their understanding -- a movie that blows minds, not a movie that expands them. It wasn't even an actors' showcase. Only the most stylized performance -- Robert Duvall's bravura, "Patton"-esque caricature of Lt. Col. Kilgore -- had a chance to stand up to the physical grandiosity, and understandably won the most acclaim.

Yet the movie has become a contemporary benchmark. How many reviews of the current "Three Kings" tried to explain that film's combination of realism and absurdity by evoking "Apocalypse Now"? The lasting message of "Apocalypse" lies not in the thin, awkward retread of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," with Brando's Kurtz repeating (like his namesake in Conrad) "The horror! The horror!" No, the message lies in its druggy yet precise, blazing downer style, which says more about our post-Vietnam attitudes toward war than it does about war itself.

When I talk to moviemakers about Coppola, "Apocalypse Now" comes up as often as the first two "Godfather" films or "The Conversation." They admire its formidable craftsmanship -- the hallucinogenic merging of sound and image so that you can't tell electronic buzz from animal chatter, or jungle sounds from the whoosh of helicopters. Or the way palms burn abruptly with napalm, not with a dramatic burst but as naturally as sunflowers opening up to daylight, while the Doors' dirge "The End" plays out against the flames. Coppola has selected "Apocalypse Now" to spearhead his latest cutting-edge venture, American Zoetrope DVD Lab (the wide-screen, Dolby-digital transfer of "Apocalypse" hits stores Nov. 23). And "Apocalypse Now" was picked as the first subject of the Bloomsbury Movie Guide series (Karl French did the study). Reading it back-to-back with Michael Schumacher's dogged new biography, "From the Heart: The Life and Films of Francis Ford Coppola," I found the "Apocalypse Now" guide more engaging and illuminating.

Maybe that's because, particularly when viewed in conjunction with "Hearts of Darkness," "Apocalypse Now" becomes a movie epic that's really the epic about moviemaking, illustrating all the skills contemporary filmmakers need when pursuing an original vision on a mammoth scale. Seen that way it assumes a mad grandeur. There's Coppola's ability to talk a great movie: When he says that he considers the river journey a trip into past history, the concept is strong though the proof is weak. There's his seductive visual sense -- you can see why Eleanor Coppola, in her lucid, too-little-read "Apocalypse" diary, "Notes," compares watery landscapes lined with fish traps to "Paul Klee drawings on blue-gray papers." There's his consciousness of publicity and damage control, especially when he tries to maintain stability after Sheen's heart attack. And there's his astounding capacity for leadership, not just when he's dynamic and eloquent, but when he's bewildered.

The makers of "Hearts of Darkness," Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, placed Coppola in the tradition of Orson Welles, who scored a sensation with his radio adaptation of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," and tried unsuccessfully to helm a movie version before moving on to "Citizen Kane." They frame the film with Welles' Conrad broadcast, and it's a savvy stroke: It passes Welles' mantle of ravaged Hollywood genius on to Coppola. But it was RKO Studios, not Welles, that put the kibosh on his "Heart of Darkness," and Welles never had the chance after "Citizen Kane" to mount his projects with Coppola's spectacular pyrotechnics. And if Coppola hocked his own assets to keep "Apocalypse Now" in production (as Welles poured his own money into his later films), Coppola's distributor, United Artists, limited his liability by acting as guarantor for his most publicized loans.

The similarities between Coppola and Welles are illuminating, particularly their ability to galvanize troops and their experimentation with every element of film. But so are the contrasts. Welles' "Othello" won the Golden Palm at Cannes, but hardly anyone went to see it. "Apocalypse Now" not only co-won the Golden Palm, but also grossed more than $150 million worldwide. Welles made a living in his later years as the spokesman for Paul Masson wine. Coppola has made a fortune manufacturing his own wine. Coppola's myriad extra-movie interests -- from publishing San Francisco's City magazine in 1976 to publishing Zoetrope All Story magazine today; from restoring the Blancaneaux Lodge in Belize to reunifying the Niebaum and Inglenook wine estates in Napa and expanding his Niebaum-Coppola wine and food company -- have augmented rather than diluted his status in the movie game. He's on the board at MGM, and is said to have his eye on the driver's seat at United Artists, now an MGM subsidiary.

Next page | Teetering between attempts to carve out an empire of art and efforts to intensify his own artistic acts