Godfather (6 page)

Working for Corman, Coppola explains, “I felt as if I were climbing the ranks of the cinema industry.” His peers at UCLA, as ever, regarded his employment as Corman's “roustabout” as treason. They insisted that they would never stoop to working on exploitation films for the youth market and snidely predicted that Coppola would wind up a Hollywood hack. “I was prepared to do anything in order to make more films,” Coppola counters, and the best opportunity afforded him at the time was under the aegis of Roger Corman, who, after all, possessed a good deal of commercial savvy when it came to turning out pictures on the studio conveyor belt.
¹⁹
In short, working for Corman amounted to an intensive practical course in the mechanics of film production.

In the meantime, UCLA's film school was conducting a script competition, offering a two-thousand-dollar prize to the winner of the Samuel Goldwyn Award for the best student screenplay. In a single marathon working session Coppola expanded the scenario of an earlier short film,
The Two Christophers
, into a seventy-page screenplay entitled
Pilma
,
Pilma
, while consuming innumerable mugs of coffee. The story concerns an extreme
case of sibling rivalry, whereby a deeply disturbed youngster who is obsessively jealous of his older brother plots to murder him. According to Coppola, it was pure Tennessee Williams Southern Gothic, filled with the sort of lurid violence that characterizes Williams's plays. Corman was exceedingly proud when his protégé was the winner of the prestigious Goldwyn Award, and he took ads in the trade papers announcing Coppola's prize.

One day Corman inquired if Coppola could recommend a sound engineer he could hire for
The Young Racers
(1963), a movie he planned to direct about sports car racing that would follow the Grand Prix racing circuit across Europe and incorporate footage from various racing meets. With youthful bravado Coppola volunteered, ‘I'll do the sound.” With that, he says in Corman's autobiography, “I immediately got the Nagra sound recorder out of the closet at the office and went home to read the manual.” The first step was, “Push button A …,” and Coppola proceeded from there to master the art of sound recording.

“I had always thought a Grand Prix film would be fun to shoot with the races and the crowds,” says Corman.
²⁰
Robert Towne, who would later write some major scenes for
The Godfather
, also served as an assistant to Corman on the movie. Coppola was not only sound man but second unit director as well. Coppola betrayed his amateur standing as a sound recordist, however, when Corman screened rushes of the first day's footage. Cinematographer Floyd Crosby (
High Noon
) commented that the dialogue was inaudible and scornfully blamed the tyro sound man. Coppola unabashedly blamed Crosby for allowing the noise of the camera to be picked up on the sound track. Corman feels that, because Coppola did not hesitate to talk back to the older and more experienced film technician, he showed that he had guts.

In retrospect, Coppola explains that the movie was being shot with a camera that was somewhat noisier than the average motion picture camera (Corman never could afford state-of-the-art equipment). And yet the camera was not equipped with a blimp, a device that blankets the camera noise, since Corman's itinerant caravan was traveling with a minimum of equipment. As a result, it was not possible to shoot the movie and muffle the camera noise on the sound track. “So we had to redupe the dialogue for the whole picture,” Coppola concludes. Mark Damon, who played a retired racing driver, was not available when the redubbing was done, and so his lines were spoken by William Shatner.
²¹
In the end Corman says that he was satisfied with the sound track of the picture (although Coppola inexplicably received no screen credit as sound man).

“Working as a team for the races was quite exhilarating for me” Coppola comments. “I was soundman and second unit director.”
²²
In the latter capacity he shot most of the actual racing footage that was incorporated into the picture. According to William Campbell, who played a champion racer in the picture, Coppola would go out onto the race track in the middle of a race with his hand-held camera, “shooting pictures of these damn racing drivers, driving past him within six feet!”
²³
As a matter of fact, Coppola's exploits were somewhat less perilous than Campbell imagined. He would take his camera to trackside, lie on the ground, and photograph the racing cars as they whooshed by him, but he was not lying on the track, as Campbell suggests.

When the movie was released, the critics basically felt that in making the movie Corman had aimed merely to make a routine low-budget actioner and had not even accomplished that minimal goal.
Variety
summarized “the hackneyed story” as having to do with Joe Machin (William Campbell), a daredevil Grand Prix champion and womanizer, “with a girl in every pit stop,” who turns out to have “a heart of gold beating beneath the grease and goggles.”
²⁴
But the feeble plotline about Joe's multiple affairs is soft-pedaled in favor of following him from one racing event to the next. The movie engages the viewer's attention only intermittently, when it thrusts the spectator into the cockpit with the driver to go careening around the race track at championship speeds—thanks to Coppola's hand-held camera. So there were just enough thrills and spills amid the atmosphere of screeching tires and roaring crowds to satisfy the drive-in trade.

After the location shooting for
The Young Racers
had been completed in England with the Grand Prix at Liverpool, Corman remembers, “I decided to finance a second film.” After all, he had already paid the travel expenses of the cast and crew to bring them to Europe for the first film. Therefore, shooting two movies back-to-back and employing the same crew and some of the same actors would really be a money-saving enterprise.

Corman had brought over to Europe a Volkswagen minibus that he had outfitted with the technical equipment needed to shoot a film. “We had the minibus with the cameras, lights, and dollies,” Corman continues. “What we didn't have was a work permit. The most logical place to shoot the film was Dublin, because we could just ferry the minibus over from Liverpool. Ireland was much looser with labor permits.” Corman wanted to keep the film's budget to twenty thousand dollars, the amount he had left over from shooting
Racers
. He told Coppola that “if he could come up with an idea for a film in Ireland, he could direct it.”
²⁵

Coppola was enthusiastic about the prospect of directing a feature
film all his own. He told Corman, “Let me take a camera and some of the equipment and staff, and make a low-budget psychological thriller.” That night he came up with the concept of a “Hitchcock-type” horror scene and pitched it to Corman the following day.

Coppola described to Corman the following scene, in which, he says, he had included “everything I knew Roger would like:”
²⁶
“A man goes to a pond and takes off his clothes, picks up five dolls, ties them together, goes under the water, and dives down, where he finds the body of a seven-year-old girl with her hair floating in the current Then he gets axed to death.” Corman responded enthusiastically, “Change the man to a woman, and you've got a picture, kid!”
²⁷
Coppola willingly complied. Coppola now concedes that at that juncture he had no clear idea about who the woman was or what she was doing in the pond. So he arrived in Ireland with no script but with a secretary Corman had sent along to accompany him after Corman himself had returned to Hollywood. She was mandated by Corman to see to it that the young Coppola stayed within the stipulated budget. But Coppola sweet-talked her into allowing him to transfer the entire twenty thousand dollars that Corman had allocated for the movie into his personal bank account.

Moreover, in Ireland Coppola met a British producer, Raymond Stross (
The Fox)
. Coppola recalls that Stross was mightily impressed with the young director's description of his movie as a slasher-type picture, which was obviously designed to cash in on Hitchcock's highly successful
Psycho
, “with a lot of people getting killed with axes, and so forth.”
²⁸
Stross matched Corman's $20,000 with another $20,000 of production capital in exchange for the British distribution rights to the picture. Corman got to hear how Coppola by some adroit wheeling and dealing had managed to swell his own bank account with $40,000 of production money and was accountable to no one as to how he spent it. The producer accordingly wanted to withdraw his half of the money from the production—to no avail, since the entire amount was in Coppola's own account.

Coppola then settled down to write a screenplay, working virtually non-stop for three frantic days and nights. He developed his original concept into a full-length script, which he typed directly onto mimeograph stencils for immediate distribution to cast and crew. He had initially intended to call the movie
Dementia
, but Corman soon discovered that that title had been preempted by an hour-long 1955 film that depicted the Freudian
fantasies of a troubled woman. So Coppola added the legendary unlucky number to his title and came up with
Dementia 13
.

To shoot the picture, Coppola was allowed to use the facilities of Ardmore Studios in Dublin for free, since Raymond Stross was part owner of the studio. Coppola, with his minimal crew of nine, shot for nine days at Ardmore—which was the length of time decreed by Corman for principal photography. In addition, Coppola did some additional location work in the country for a couple of days, thereby going over-schedule slightly. He still completed principal photography in record time, but he did not shoot the picture in three days as some commentators on the film have asserted.

Once production was underway, Corman sent Coppola frequent telegrams urging him to include generous helpings of sex and violence in the picture to satisfy Corman's drive-in following, and Coppola did his best to comply. He had, after all, observed how some young filmmakers would try to straddle the fence between making an art house film and an exploitation film and would end up with some sort of hybrid “that wasn't good enough for an art film or funky enough as an exploitation film.”
²⁹
In short, Coppola had no illusions about what sort of movie Corman expected him to make and attempted to meet his producer's expectations.

A group of Coppola's fellow students from the UCLA film school came over to Dublin at their own expense to help out with the production. John Vicario, the camera operator, was accompanied by his girlfriend, Eleanor Neil, who had a degree from UCLA's Art Department. When she arrived at the farmhouse that was Coppola's production headquarters on location, she found Coppola, who had been up all night, shirtless and disheveled, pounding out some pages of the script on mimeo masters. She was impressed with his dedication. Eleanor Neil assisted the art director, Albert Locatelli, and eventually earned a screen credit as a set decorator. Meanwhile, her relationship with Vicario cooled as she and Coppola became an item. They eventually married after the picture was completed, in Las Vegas on February 2, 1963.

The cast of
Dementia 13
not only included some of the actors from
The Young Racers
, such as William Campbell and Patrick Magee, but also some of the members of Dublin's distinguished Abbey Theater, such as Eithne Dunn, whom Coppola coaxed into playing character parts.

The plot that Coppola conjured up for
Dementia 13
initially centers on John Haloran and his wife Louise. While John rows Louise, a brassy blonde, on a pitch-dark lake they argue about his mother's will, which stipulates that Louise will profit from Lady Haloran's will only as long as John, who has a weak heart, remains alive. John, exhausted from the strain of
rowing as well as from the quarrel, abruptly succumbs to a heart attack before they return to shore. The cruel Louise, after watching her husband expire, actually slaps his face in irritation at the thought of his jeopardizing her claim to part of his mother's estate by his ill-timed death. The scheming Louise pushes John's corpse overboard in order to hide his death and subsequently informs Lady Haloran (Eithne Dunn) and her other two sons, Richard (William Campbell), a sculptor, and Billy (Bart Patton), that John has flown to New York on business.

Lady Haloran, who presides over Castle Haloran, continues to mourn morbidly for her deceased daughter Kathleen, seven years dead, who perished in the lake as a child. Louise plots to drive Lady Haloran mad so that she can break the aging woman's will in the event that John's body is eventually discovered. In pursuing her plan, she ties some of Kathleen's nursery dolls together and dives into the lake, leaving them at the bottom of the lake, with a view to their eventually surfacing as an eerie reminder to Lady Haloran of Kathleen's death. While under water, Louise spies a life-sized replica of Kathleen's body lying next to a gravestone on the lake's floor. When Louise rises to the lake's surface close to the shore, she is bludgeoned to death by an unseen attacker. This episode, of course, is a revised version of the scene that Coppola originally pitched to Corman as the basis of his film.

Lady Haloran pays a visit to Kathleen's dollhouse, which she has turned into a musty shrine to her dead daughter. There she discovers the effigy of Kathleen—it apparently floated to the surface of the lake, was retrieved by the psycho loose on the estate, and was placed in Kathleen's playhouse. Just then the ax-wielder appears and savagely smashes the dollhouse to pieces. Lady Haloran flees the premises and narrowly escapes being murdered.

Richard's fiancée Kane (Mary Mitchel) endeavors to convince him to leave the doom-ridden estate, particularly after Simon (Karl Schanzer), an old friend of the Halorans, is dispatched by an ax after he discovers Louise's corpse hidden in the woods. Justin Caleb, the family doctor (Patrick Magee), then devises a scheme to smoke out the killer.