CAN YOU PICTURE WHAT WILL BE?
From the author of "Coppola’s Monster Film: The Making of Apocalypse Now"
John Milius was a cocksure, militaristic asthmatic who grew up amid wealth and privilege near the Bel Air Country Club in Los Angeles. “He did not like the country club people and they didn’t like him,” explained his daughter Amanda.
In order to find his own way, Milius gravitated to the beach where he became part of the surf crowd. His father, feeling that this environment consisted mostly of slutty beach chicks and drugs, was not suitable for his son, so he removed him from it, sending him to a military academy in rural Colorado.
There young John quickly adapted to his new environment, learning about the mountain man Jim Bridger, teaching himself how to set trap lines and live in a hostile environment. It was there that John developed a love of classic literature, and read Heart of Darkness, a 1902 novella by Joseph Conrad.
Conrad’s novel is at the heart of Apocalypse Now
Based on the author’s experiences on a boat running trade in the jungle rivers of the Belgian Congo in 1890, it concerned itself with a station agent named Kurtz, who after living deep in the jungle with natives, becomes a demigod, worshipped by the locals as such. This leads to Kurtz, a man of high ideals, to betray his humanity.
Just as Kurtz was a product of his environment, so was Milius. He read the book sitting next to a tree in the forest, convincing himself that a bear or “a yeti” was ready to pounce on him. Completely enveloped by his environment, Milius overcame fear, and learned to conquer his surroundings.
He decided to enter the military, determined to become a fighter pilot like his hero, Chuck Yeager. The Vietnam War was just getting started and Milius hoped to fly missions “in country.” However, his aspirations were dashed when he “washed out,” a result of his asthmatic condition.
Depressed, almost suicidal, he went to Hawaii where one day he came upon a movie theatre playing a week’s worth of films by the famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. He was immediately uplifted by these movies, and had an epiphany: “The next best thing to being a general is to be a movie director.” He also had a second awakening: “USC is the West Point of Hollywood.”
The University of Southern California was indeed one of only three universities in the U.S. offering film study at that time, the others being UCLA and NYU. Milius enrolled in USC where he immediately befriended fellow classmate George Lucas and a Cal State, Long Beach student who spent so much time at the USC film school he might as well have been enrolled. His name was Steven Spielberg.
Lucas was the artistic genius, specializing in the visual. Milius was the word man, the writer. Together they made student films that were so successful Time magazine took notice of their work.
While at USC, the militaristic Milius, described by his son Ethan as “an oppositionalist . . . if the counter-culture was going left he was going to go right,” was put off by student protest of the Vietnam War. One day he saw a sign that read “Nirvana Now,” as if by dropping acid one could attain bliss.
Milius found a button and modified it to look like a B-52 outlined against a mushroom cloud. Underneath it read, “Apocalypse Now.”
“Let’s get it over with,” Milius would say.
Inspired in part by this concept, he and Lucas became “connoisseurs of the Vietnam War.” They felt a movie about Vietnam would be incredibly visual; lots of colors, tremendous technological gadgetry, and a sense of hallucination.
John Milius (center) and George Lucas (right) envisioned the film at USC, where they be-friended Steven Spielberg (left)
Lucas wanted to film it in the Sacramento Delta near where he grew up; a small anti-war movie with comedic elements as in Dr. Strangelove. Milius’s grand vision grew out of a strange art film directed by a part-time USC instructor named Haskell Wexler, who had helped Lucas get into the film school. Wexler had made Medium Cool, in which actors were strategically placed near the action at the 1968 Democrat National Convention, in which riots broke out.
Milius’s idea was literally to bring a film crew to Vietnam, where they would set up camp and have actors playing roles in and around the battles, which at that time were raging. The Tet Offensive had begun. For some strange reason the Department of Defense did not authorize the making of such a movie.
Milius had taken a screenwriting course with a crusty old movie veteran named Irwin Blacker. Milius asked him if anybody had ever made a film out of Heart of Darkness. No, he was told, it could not be done. Orson Welles, who had told the novel’s story on the radio, tried it with RKO, but quickly abandoned it as being too expensive and hard to film on water, making Citizen Kane instead.
Several other leading screenwriters had taken a crack at it, without luck. Told to forget the idea, Milius said, “That was like waving a red flag in front of a young bull. It was the first thing I did.”
The Time magazine article caught the eye of a young talent agent named Mike Medavoy, who represented Milius and others coming out of the USC and UCLA film programs. Soon Milius was getting paid, getting screen credits, and had his name in the Hollywood Reporter. Spielberg landed a TV deal.
Coppola and American Zoetrope
In the mean time, a man named Francis Ford Coppola, who was still young but a few years older than Milius, Lucas and Spielberg, had graduated from UCLA’s film school, gotten experience working for Roger Corman, and had written the screenplay for a war film, Patton.
Francis Ford Coppola, director supreme
Coppola was filming on the Warner Bros. lot when Lucas, who had earned a special “scholarship” to study the business up close, approached him. The two became friends. They were also kindred spirits. Lucas did not really want to work in Hollywood. He preferred to make documentaries in San Francisco.
Coppola was a New Yorker but also wanted to live in San Francisco, where he could create “little films” far from the fake boobs and sleaze balls of Hollywood. Coppola had some money, his salary for writing Patton, and a nebulous six-film deal with Warner Bros. He and Lucas moved to San Francisco and set up a studio called American Zoetrope, which Coppola described as “a counter-culture M-G-M.”
They were joined by a procession of their film school classmates from USC and UCLA. This included Milius, who was tasked with turning his Heart of Darkness script into a working screenplay called Psychedelic Soldier.
First, however, Zoetrope developed for the screen Lucas’s succesful student film, THX 1138, starring Robert Duvall. When the “suits” at Warners saw it, they hated it. In fact, they hated it so much they pulled the plug on Coppola’s multi-picture deal. The fine print on the contract stated that at any time they could terminate the agreement and Coppola, who per his style had already spent the money the studio gave him, had to pay it back. This meant the end of Zoetrope and Psychedelic Soldier, now named Apocalypse Now.
But Coppola had an ace in the hole. First was Patton. So far removed from mainstream Hollywood he did not even know the movie was being filmed for Twentieth Century Fox, Coppola one day was asked to come back to L.A. to fix a European editing machine he apparently was the only one who knew how to fix.
While working on the machine Coppola looked up and saw dailies with George C. Scott. He asked what it was and was told, “That’s Patton, our big war film for 1970.”
His second card was The Godfather, a hot-selling novel being developed by Robert Evans and Paramount. Evans wanted Coppola, the only Italian-American director working at that time. At first Coppola said no, that it besmirched his ethnic heritage. With Evans on the phone, Coppola in San Francisco turned to Lucas, in their Zoetrope offices, and asked what he should do. Lucas reasoned that the money from The Godfather was their only way to save Zoetrope. Coppola said yes. When Paramount became displeased with his work and was prepared to fire him, Coppola won the Oscar for Best Screenplay on Patton. It saved his job on The Godfather.
Morrison
At UCLA, Coppola became friends with Jim Morison, Ray Manzarek and other members of The Doors, a successful rock group. Morrison and Manzarek had been film students. In 1966, Morrison sang a song called “The End” at the Whisky A Go Go, a famed bar on the Sunset Strip. Originally an ode to a love affair ending, Morrison changed it into Greek tragedy, featuring lyrics in which he sang of a desire to kill his father and then, like Oedipus, have sex with his mother. The song also featured strange orations about “waiting for the summer rain,” and “all the children are insane,” as well as “a Roman wilderness of pain.”
Jim Morrison was a “rock god” and a poet
“The End” now referred to death, which Morrison tempted by singing, “C’mon on baby, take a chance with us.”
To Coppola, many of these lyrics had a haunting reflection upon the war in Vietnam now raging. “Can you picture what will be?” asked Morrison, further intoning of “desperately in need of some stranger’s hand in a desperate land.” There were “elaborate plans,” of “everything that stands . . . no safety or surprise, the end.”
At the time perhaps not, but later these and other lyrics would sound like America envisioning the end of Communism once and for all, of making plans to attain that . . . end. It sounds like the U.S. helping the South Vietnamese, even if nobody realized it at the time the song was first released.
“I’ll never look into your eyers again,” sounds like a soldier watching his buddy die.
“Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain” could easily refer to the American Empire fighting in the jungles. The theme of insanity matched many people’s view of the war as an “insane” enterprise. The theme, “All the children are insane,” would be further emphasized when Apocalypse Now came out, referencing the “children” who treat the “insane” Kurtz like “a god,” in the film as in the novel.
The “summer rain” sounded a lot like the monsoons descending upon Vietnam for months at a time. “There’s danger on the edge of town,” had multiple meanings, ranging from an old time Western cowboy shootout to the “mission creep” of the war.
“Ride the king’s highway, baby,” sounds like the roads built by Army engineers ostensibly to bring food to villagers, but also to transport weapons to the troops.
“Weird scenes inside the gold mine . . . Ride the highway west, baby . . . the West is the best . . . get here, and we’ll do the rest,” all sound like jingoistic references to the superiority of Western capitalist, i.e., American culture.
“The blue bus” was commonly used as a context for LSD, more and more used by soldiers. “Driver where you takin’ us?” also sounds like mission creep.
“The killer awoke before dawn, and put his boots on,” describes soldiers preparing for battle. “He took a face from the ancient gallery,” could easily be interpreted as boys who must put away their youth and yearning for home to do what must be done in war. These lyrics perfectly mimic the final scene where Captain Willard kills Colonel Kurtz.
“Father . . . ‘Yes son’ . . . I want to kill you, ” brings up visions of fragging officers.
“Come on baby, take a chance with us,” could be a call to adventure, Hemingway’s vision of war.
“This is the end, beautiful friend . . . my only friend . . . it hurts to set you free but you never followed me . . the end of laughter and soft lies . . . of times we tried to die,” captures death on the battle field, the end of innocence, inculcated by “lies.”
The Doors did not intend any of these lyrics to resemble Vietnam, and few of their fans saw the war in the song either, but Coppola filed away these images and this music for a later time, a time in which, by luck, by divine intervention, “The End” would be perhaps the most perfectly descriptive theme music describing a film ever produced.
Meanwhile Milius became friends with many Vietnam veterans returning from the war. Some were attending USC on the G.I. Bill, and through them he heard all their stories. He asked them what music they listened to in ‘Nam.
“The Doors, man,” they would say.
“The Doors was the sound track of the Vietnam War,” Milius later stated, adding that when he told members of the band this, “They were horrified.”
Milius loved The Doors and began to formulate the idea of using their music in Apocalypse Now. He was not yet enamored with “The End,” but rather by “Light My Fire,” which he associated with the “fire” of war, and in early drafts of his screenplay it would be this song that plays as a sound track.
The New Hollywood
The term “New Hollywood” roughly comprises the period between Bonnie and Clyde (1967), ending with the disastrous Heaven’s Gate (1980). The impetus for this period of creative magic started when the old moguls retired, and the big studios were bought up by corporations. Agents changed the dynamic of contracts. Suddenly stars and “auteur” directors had more control than studio execs.
Most of the USC and UCLA film graduates found meaningful work in Hollywood, which heretofore had not happened. It was a young, hip generation determined to make new kinds of movies.
Coppola made both Godfather epics, making him the most famous director of all time.
Milius wrote Jeremiah Johnson and directed both Dillinger and The Wind and the Lion. This vaulted him to fame and fortune.
Lucas made American Graffiti, one of the most successful films ever.
Spielberg made Jaws, the biggest moneymaker ever at the time.
They were on their way.
Hubris
The Godfather epics won Academy Awards, as did Coppola’s The Conversation. This added to Coppola’s Oscar for Patton. He could do anything he wanted. What he had always wanted was to have enough freedom, enough power, and enough money to do just that, and to do it not in Hollywood but in San Francisco. He now owned a gorgeous home and vineyard in the wine country.
In 1974-75 he re-opened American Zoetrope and set out to do Apocalypse Now, which was slated as the next movie following THX 1138 when Warner Bros. pulled the plug on their deal. He commissioned Milius to write a final draft, versions of which had been written in varying form since USC.
Just as Patton seemed a film Milius, not Coppola, should have written, Apocalypse was a movie Milius might have seemed more likely to direct, but despite success with Dillinger and The Wind and the Lion, Milius could not argue against the master filmmaker of them all, the great Coppola, directing his vision.
Only, at first, it was offered to Lucas. He after all had been almost as much a father of the project as Milius back at USC, and he expressed a desire to do it. However, Lucas still saw it as a small movie with comedic elements, shot “documentary-in-style” like The Battle of Algiers or even Medium Cool. This was not Milius’s idea, at all.
Coppola saw the movie strictly as an opportunity, a huge war epic like The Longest Day and Patton, which would pack in theaters, making him so much money he could settle down and make his little visionary pictures, such as Tucker. If he were to accomplish this, he not Lucas had to direct.
There was some confusion and bad feelings when Coppola exercised some contractual language in the original Zoetrope deal that took the Apocalypse project away from Lucas - not to mention Milius, who did not care - retaining it with Francis.
“Lucas never wanted to make that movie the way we envisioned it,” Milius later said, adding that his old friend was not the kind of guy to shoot in the Philippines in “the mud,” in “malarial” conditions that would “test ones’ sanity.”
Soon it was a a moot point, with Lucas involved in Star Wars.
In December of 1975 Milius turned in the shooting script. Coppola attempted to get cooperation from the now-Republican Department of Defense, who had done that with other films like The Green Berets. They refused, objecting to the idea of an officer working for the CIA as an assassin, sent to kill another officer.
But Coppola put his own money on the line, backed in part by loans from United Artists, owned by the Trans-America Corporation, whose headquarters were across the street from the Zoetrope studios.
“Someday I’ll own this,” Coppola said, staring at the Trans-America tower.
But underneath all the confidence were unsettling developments. Coppola had been warned not to shoot in the Philippines because of the monsoons.
“It’ll be a rain picture,” he blithely replied.
While he had a screenplay, in fact an absolutely brilliant screenplay, Coppola knew without telling anybody that he did not like the ending. He would go into filming without a finished script, intending to write the end according to his own vision essentially “on the fly.”
He also did not have his star. He wanted Marlon Brando, whose career he had resurrected with The Godfather. Brando did not wish to do it. Coppola seemed to think he would eventually get Brando, and if not there was Steve McQueen, Robert Redford or Al Pacino. Pacino in particular did not want to touch the project, seeing himself stuck in rice paddies for months.
His real star, the anchor of the film, would be the character of Captain Willard, and for this role he had Harvey Keitel, a fabulous actor and ex-Marine.
What could go wrong?
Disaster
Early in 1976 Francis Ford Coppola packed his wife and kids into a plane to the Philippines. He intended to film river sequences with Harvey Keitel and helicopter scenes soon thereafter. He still hoped for Marlon Brando to eventually arrive and play the role of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, but was negotiating his contract.
Coppola did not like Milius’s ending, which he considered jingoistic and even tinged by racism, with the Willard and Kurtz characters shooting at American helicopters in orgiastic violence, all the while yelling how great it was to be a white man with such fire in his loins.
But that seemed a small distraction. Coppola would re-write the ending in his quarters at night. He lived lavishly, trekking in high-end food, wine and liquor.
The shoot was immediately in trouble when Keitel shot the river scenes. At one point Keitel was lost on the patrol boat, and communicated by walkie-talkie with the crew, announcing, “Hello? This is Harvey Keitel.”
It was obvious early on Keitel was not right for the part. He was a New York actor with a New York accent, known for playing mob characters. Coppola and assistant Gray Fredrickson saw in the dailies that he was not right for the role, and made a very hard decision, which was to cut off Keitel and send him home. Keitel did not particularly complain. He seemed relieved.
Coppola wanted Martin Sheen, a great young actor, who very much wanted the role, but was filming The Cassandra Crossing in Rome. Coppola arranged to meet Sheen in an executive lounge at the Los Angeles InternationalAirport over Easter weekend. The particulars were arrived at, and Sheen was able to finish his work in Italy quickly, then make his way to the Philippines, but not without reservations. His wife worried about his health over there, and Sheen told friends he had premonitions of disaster, but the bottom line was he wanted to make a Coppola movie.
Martin Sheen’s performance was nothing less than iconic
The helicopter scenes were moved up after Keitel’s departure. Unable to get assistance from the Defense Department, Coppola made an arrangement with Ferdinand Marcos, the dictator of the Philippines, to make use of theirs using government pilots. The trouble was that Marcos was embroiled in a civil war with Muslim separatists and Communists. Every day, the scenes would begin shooting, when invariably the helicopters would be diverted to some hot spot with rebel forces.
Coppola never knew when this would happen. Entire, highly orchestrated, expensive helicopter scenes would be upended literally in mid-air. In addition to that these scenes were not well coordinated, at least from the ground, where the crew would stare aghast as helicopters seemed to barely miss each other, a flying acrobat show resembling Howard Hughes’s Hell’s Angels (1930). Luckily - and luck is the operative word - there were no accidents, but Coppola was left with a jumble of footage, unaware as to whether he truly had usable scenes.
The ground scenes with Robert Duvall as Colonel Bill Kilgore and with the general at ComSec Intelligence went off fairly well, but the shoot was still behind schedule and over budget when Martin Sheen had a heart attack on his birthday. This came on the heels of a drunken shoot in which Sheen plays a man in despair in his hotel room, does a karate chop to a mirror, breaking it in real life, then collapses in personal agony - not acting - while rubbing blood all over himself. By pure luck, it was captured on film and remains a marvelous bit of acting, but at what cost?
With 11 minutes of screen time, Robert Duvall practically stole the show
Sheen’s heart attack set off rumors; that he was dead? That the film be canceled? Coppola had to deal with this, which included money people in Los Angeles threatening to pull the plug, not to mention most of the film community was beginning to think the project a joke, and its director a megalomaniac who had gotten too full of himself after The Godfather success.
Sheen’s brother was flown in to do pick-up shots, mostly of Willard’s back on the boat. Finally Sheen returned, just in time for the monsoons. Coppola bravely tried to film through the rain, actually capturing a few scenes that did not make the original 1979 cut (added in the redux, 2001). The set was literally swept away and had to be re-built.
Falling further and further behind in time and budget, they pushed on. Each day actors did not know what scenes they were shooting. The movie was not shot in the screenplay’s chronological order.
Brando
Finally Marlon Brando agreed to come at a cost of some $1 million a week. He had not read Heart of Darkness or Milius’s screenplay. He also weighed 300 pounds. He was supposed to be playing a tough-as-nails airborne ranger, the picture of fitness.
Marlon Brando’s performance is ultimately judged one of his best
Scenes with Brando had to be shot in shadows to hide his girth. Without memorizing his lines, each day the crew would sit and wait for hours while Coppola went off somewhere with Brando, asking him philosophical questions about war and humanity, hoping to get useable footage.
All of this took over a year.
Wine country
In 1977 Coppola flew his family and the crew back home, settling in his Napa Valley editing bay with canister after canister of film. He had no idea what he had, and less idea of his ending. Milius had at one point been flown to the Philippines, convincing the crew that he would save the day and talk sense into the crazed director, who like the Kurtz character had lost his mind in a malarial jungle just as the United States had in Vietnam. Milius however became convinced by Coppola’s charisma that the film would be the first to win the Nobel Prize.
“I was like Von Rundstedt going in to see Hitler,” Milius recalled. “He was supposed to tell him the army was about to fold on the Eastern Front, but was so convinced by Hitler that, ‘Ve can win. Ve don’t need gazoline.’ ”
Coppola flew Milius to Napa to help with voiceovers, which were not in the original screenplay. But the year spent trying to edit Apocalypse Now, now dubbed Apocalypse When? by the press, was as chaotic as the Philippines shoot. While the media made fun of the project, Coppola and his editors smoked tremendous amounts of marijuana, days going by with no progress. On top of that one of the editors became so schizoid he tried to burn some of the footage.
Apocalypse Now
Finally, by May of 1979, Coppola flew to the Cannes Film Festival, where he brazenly announced the film was not like Vietnam, “it is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like.” He analogized the shoot, in which an American crew flew to an Asian jungle with too much money, too much equipment, and like all Americans endeavored as Harrison Ford said, “To blow it up bigger than life,” as being just like the war effort itself, in which slowly but surely everybody “went insane.”
At Cannes, Coppola asked the media to make suggestions on his ending, which caused much criticism, but the film still won the Palme d’Or. He later showed some public screenings in New York, but over the fall made more changes to the ending, ostensibly settling on the “final” version seen by the majority of the public over Christmas, 1979, in time for an Oscar run.
Audiences did not known what to make of the film. The helicopter scenes and Duvall’s Kilgore character were lauded. The first three-quarters were extraordinary filmmaking, but the last hour with Brando in shadows, mumbling, with a strange end that was confusing, caused much criticism. Many hated it.
But over time, the end was fleshed out and better understood, and people began seeing it a second and third time. Milius hated Coppola’s ending, punching a wall. “They turned it into Hair,” he complained, but over time he too saw that his ending, which looked like Reaganesque 1980s movies - think Rambo - was too much, and Willard’s killing of Kurtz more closely matched the theme of Heart of Darkness. “I’m proud of that film,” he said, adding that he had to “ramp up the horsepower” to make a modern Vietnam epic.
This included the crazy concept of introducing surfing and “California culture” into the film. “Here was this very American culture of surfing, of rock ’n’ roll, of Playboy bunnies, being inculcated against this ancient Oriental culture,” he said. The music of Jim Morrison revived his stature years after his 1971 death, and is as enduring a feature of the movie as any other aspect. In the end, this became perhaps the most appealing takeaway audiences had of the movie. Coppola, as much a father of Apocalypse as anybody, generously stated, “Every good scene in the film comes from John Milius.”
Somehow Coppola and Milius made a movie about death and misery and sex and rock music and California culture all in one
Eventually it became a classic of American art, one of the greatest movies of all time. It did not happen overnight, but Coppola made his money back and millions beyond that, as did investors including UA/Trans-America.
The Academy Awards failed to recognize its greatness, but the beautiful videography of Vittorio Storaro, the performances of Sheen, Brando, Duvall and others, has been recognized as bravura.
A movie about the making of Apocalypse Now would make for a great film or HBO miniseries.
Steven Travers is a former screenwriter who has authored over 30 books including Coppola’s Monster Film: The Making of Apoocalypse Now. He is a USC graduate and attorney with a Ph.D who taught at USC and attended the UCLA Writers’ Program. He played professional baseball, served in the Army JAG corps in D.C., was in investment banking on Wall Street, worked in politics, lived in Europe, and was a sports agent before finding his calling as a writer. He has written for the San Francisco Examiner, L.A. Times, StreetZebra, Gentry magazine, Newsmax and MichaelSavage.com. He lives in California and has one daughter, Elizabeth. He can be reached at USCSTEVE1@aol.com or on Twitter @STWRITES.