The documentary shows him hectoring the Warners head office by phone, yelling, ‘The system will fall by its own weight! It can’t fail to!’ Later, he moans, ‘I’m tired of being the anchor when I see my world crumbling.’ Lucas also glimpsed the paper-thinness of this persona when Coppola decreed that everyone, himself included, should be short-haired and clean-shaven when they rolled into the midwest. (In Easy Rider, roughly contemporary with The Rain People, long-haired Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper are blown away by a redneck with a shotgun.) But Coppola without his patriarchal beard proved a different, less imposing person. Nobody took him seriously, not even the crew he’d dominated for so long. Some didn’t even recognize him. So startling was the change that Lucas had to add a line to the commentary of his documentary explaining the radical mass-depilation.
When there was time, Coppola and Lucas kicked around ideas for future projects. One was inspired by Medium Cool. Why not make a film about Vietnam the same way, shot like a documentary, on 16mm, in black and white, while battles were actually taking place?
Nobody now remembers who first thought of it – or, more correctly, everyone is certain that they first proposed basing such a film on Joseph Conrad’s short novel Heart of Darkness. In Conrad’s story, a man goes up the Congo River to investigate reports that Kurtz, the local agent for a Belgian trading company, has gone crazy and set himself up as a sort of god. He finds Kurtz ill and raving, and he dies with the words: ‘The horror! The horror.’
No factor of Coppola’s working methods complicated the making of The Rain People more than sex. It suffused the production. James Caan was a notorious seducer, an habitué of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion who boasted he’d slept with seventeen consecutive Playmates of the Month. Coppola was also, in the words of a friend, a ‘pussy hound.’ He would halt production to fly back to New York, supposedly for conferences but actually to pursue some new mistress.
On one occasion, Coppola abandoned the crew in Blue Ball, Pennsylvania, in a motel with no phone, TV, or restaurant. ‘I got a little angry about that,’ says Lucas. ‘Francis was saying all this “all-for-one” stuff, and he goes off and screws around in New York. He felt he had a right to do that, and I told him it wasn’t fair. We got into a big fight over it.’ Throughout all this, Coppola’s wife Eleanor stood by patiently, bringing up the children and accepting the sympathy of everyone.
Coppola fought too with Shirley Knight, his star. Knight, like her character Natalie, was pregnant, and her nerves were on edge. The semi-nude bedroom scenes, dictated by Coppola’s conception of Natalie as a woman looking to experience sex with other men before she settled down to motherhood, disturbed her. They wrangled over interpretation, over the problems of this kind of shooting. In reaction, Coppola trimmed her part and built up that of Robert Duvall. Knight protested, and the situation deteriorated still further, exacerbated by Coppola’s evident attraction to her.
The tensions increased as production went on. When Marcia came out to Nebraska to work on the film, Coppola took an obvious interest in her. ‘Everybody wanted Marcia,’ says John Milius. ‘Part of [Lucas’s] disagreement with Francis is, I’m sure, because Francis attempted to hit on Marcia, because he attempted to hit on the wives of everybody. But that was Francis. What was it Talleyrand said of Napoleon – “He was as great as a man can be without virtue”? Francis was for Francis – but Francis was great; a truly great man. He’s still my Führer.’
The production of The Rain People was as close to a honeymoon as Lucas and Coppola ever got. ‘George was like a younger brother to me,’ said Coppola, ‘I loved him. Where I went, he went.’ But Lucas was less sanguine. ‘My life is a kind of reaction against Francis’s life,’ he mused. ‘I’m his antithesis.’
All this would be grist to the Star Wars mill, but for the moment confidence was in the ascendant. Like everyone else on the unit, Lucas struggled to save The Rain People and Coppola’s reputation. He filmed some of the arguments between Coppola and Knight, but didn’t use them in his documentary. Francis had become his Führer too.
We could leave, and live in the superstructure.
LUH, in THX1138. Script by Walter Murch and George Lucas
In Ogallala, the locals had been so flattered to have a film crew in town that they offered to convert a local grain warehouse into a sound stage. Despite his memories of those ‘Let’s do the show right here!’ musicals of the late thirties, Coppola declined, but it planted the idea of a decentralized film industry, not tied to Hollywood, in his mind.
Indirectly, Coppola brought the dream a giant step closer to fulfilment when he remembered he’d promised to deliver a speech in San Francisco to a forum of eight hundred high-school English teachers on ‘Film in Relation to the Printed Word.’ Claiming he was needed in Ogallala to tie up loose ends, Coppola persuaded Lucas to do it.
Speaking in public terrified almost all the New Hollywood directors, and Lucas more than most. When he and Spielberg planted their palmprints in the cement outside Mann’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard for the premiere of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984, Spielberg, urged by owner Ted Mann to make a speech, said awkwardly, ‘We had snakes in the last picture and bugs in this picture. But supposedly man’s greatest fear is public speaking, and that will be our next picture.’
That his audience would be made up of high-school teachers, of whom he had ambivalent memories at best, increased Lucas’s distaste for the chore; but such was Coppola’s influence that he flew back ahead of the crew to make the appearance, arranging to meet them in Berkeley the following week.
Another speaker at the convention was John Korty. Eight years older than Lucas, he’d worked his way through film school creating animated TV commercials. In 1964 he moved to Stinson Beach, just south of Bolinas, rented a big gray barn for $100 a month, installed some second-hand film equipment, and began making films. He’d produced and directed two independent features, including The Crazy Quilt (1966), for less than $250,000 each. They did well, too, and won festival prizes. After the convention, Lucas visited Korty’s operation, then rang Coppola in Nebraska. ‘You gotta see this,’ he said excitedly.
The Rain People caravan rolled into the Bay area on 4 July 1968. Radio and TV were still full of the news that Robert Kennedy had died in Los Angeles from gunshot wounds the previous month, less than two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis. The deaths of King and Kennedy drove home to Lucas and Coppola the deteriorating nature of big-city American society. As a character remarked in Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974), ‘Every time you turned around, someone just shot one of the best men in the country.’
Coppola and unit manager Ron Colby made a side trip to Stinson Beach to look over Korty’s operation, and within a week Coppola was the prophet of decentralization. He had seen the future, it worked, and it was in Northern California. ‘We started fantasizing about the notion of going to San Francisco,’ he said, ‘to be free to produce films as we had done on Rain People. It was a beautiful place to live, and had an artistic, bohemian tradition.’
In Korty’s simple enterprise, Lucas too glimpsed a movie business shaped precisely to his personality. Korty’s films were accessible, but not overtly commercial. He was removed from Hollywood, but still connected to the audience by the independent cinemas which had proliferated since the studios relinquished their hold on exhibition. Above all, this was a cinema without big stars and the problems they brought with them – problems Lucas had seen doing their damage on The Rain People.
Coppola, inevitably, was more grandiose. Working in a barn on worn-out Moviolas was bullshit. He had something more baronial in mind. This difference in scale would be another wedge driven between Coppola and Lucas, master and mentor.
Finian’s