Godfather (7 page)

Dr. Caleb orders the lake to be drained, and a gravestone turns up, bearing the inscription “Forgive me, Kathleen dear.” Caleb recalls that Billy has been suffering from nightmares ever since Kathleen's death, so the doctor strongly suspects that Billy knows more about Kathleen's death than he has ever divulged. Accordingly, at the wedding reception for Richard and Kane on the lawn of the estate, Caleb confronts Billy with the ubiquitous wax figure of Kathleen's corpse, which had turned up in the dollhouse earlier.

He forces Billy to admit that he accidentally pushed Kathleen into the
pond when they were scuffling about, playing a children's game on the shore. In fact, the effigy of Kathleen is really a wax doll Billy made to “relieve his guilt for her death,” as the doctor puts it. With that, Billy goes berserk and is thereby revealed to be a homicidal maniac whose obsession with death has led him to murder Louise and others. Just as he is about to attack Kane with an ax lying conveniently on the lawn, Dr. Caleb shoots him dead. Caleb then melodramatically buries Billy's hatchet in the skull of the effigy, to dramatize the fact that the curse on the Haloran family has been shattered at last.

It is easy to pick flaws in
Dementia 13
. For one thing, Dr. Caleb's explanation of Billy's psychosis is “cookbook Freud,” a bizarre elaboration on Freud's theory of neurotic guilt. The screenplay has an interesting premise, but the ending is too abrupt and hence unsatisfactory. For another thing, the performances are uneven: while some of the cast underact, Patrick Magee gives an unbridled performance and well nigh chews up the scenery. In addition, Karl Schanzer turns in a performance as Simon that is just as amateurish as the one he gave as the Peeping Tom in
Tonight for Sure
.

On the other hand, veteran actress Eithne Dunn as the disturbed matriarch steals nearly every scene she is in. Another point on the positive side is that the limited budget and short shooting schedule inspired Coppola to improvise practical solutions to production limitations in a rather inventive manner. For example, because most of the scenes took place at night or in murky interiors, Coppola photographed many scenes in deep, jarring shadows. He was therefore able to get away with simple, sparsely furnished settings because they were shrouded in shadows and, in this fashion, to conceal the film's meager production values. More importantly, the murky, darkened sets were perfectly attuned to the grim atmosphere of a horror picture. Another plus for the film is that the pace never lags, since the suspenseful story is punctuated with not only scenes of violence but smatterings of piquant sex. At one point Richard and Kane are shown embracing passionately on the grounds of the estate while the camera pulls back to reveal Lady Haloran spying on them from her window.

Nevertheless, Corman was not satisfied with Coppola's rough cut. When the director showed it to him back in Hollywood, Corman lambasted the picture immediately after the screening. He criticized the shallow, inept script, which presented a pinwheeling series of murders without enough transitional material to link them together into a coherent narrative. After a stormy shouting match, Coppola convinced Corman that he could film some additional material along with some voice-over narration by various characters on the sound track in order to plug up the holes in the plot. He
then shot some additional footage, with Griffith Park in Los Angeles standing in for the Irish countryside.

But Coppola drew the line when Corman insisted on another ax murder to bolster the picture's commercial potential for the drive-in trade. When Coppola adamantly refused to oblige him, Corman commissioned Jack Hill, who had worked on
Tonight for Sure
with Coppola, to write and film a couple of additional scenes to accommodate him. “Roger wanted some more violence, which he got—though not from me,” Coppola states laconically.
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Corman expressed his gratitude to Hill by giving him a screen credit that reads, “Second unit written and directed by Jack Hill.”

Not yet finished tinkering with the movie, Corman saddled the picture with a five-minute prologue called the “D-13 Test,” in which an actor impersonating a psychiatrist tested filmgoers to ascertain if they were emotionally stable enough to view the movie. The questions he asked the viewers to consider included: “Are you afraid of death by drowning? … Have you ever attempted suicide?” This opening, which was presumably part of Hill's second unit work, was used only for the movie's original theatrical release and was jettisoned when
Dementia 13
was released on TV and on videocassette. Finally, in an effort to beef up the film's ad campaign, the sensational posters warned, “Do not see this film alone, or if you have a weak heart.”

The majority of film critics ignored
Dementia 13
when it opened in New York in September 1963. Even
Variety
, which normally reviewed lesser Corman efforts like
The Young Racers
, overlooked it. The few reviewers who did notice it dismissed the picture as the sort of teen-oriented “axploitation movie” that was typical of the Corman film factory, made on a microbudget with a shooting schedule to match. One critic opined that the characters were mostly cardboard cutouts and that the plot was drowned in blood. Another reviewer quipped that he was not interested in learning about the fate of the first twelve demented lunatics referred to in the movie's title—number thirteen was quite enough. He added that the wooden dialogue at times seemed muffled and that that, after all, might be a blessing.

Be that as it may,
Dementia 13
did show a modest profit and has been judged more benignly by film historians who have reassessed it over the years. Thus, after it was released to video,
American Film
commented in 1990 that Coppola's skill in portraying cinematic violence in
The Godfather
was already operative in
Dementia 13
, “in which the finest scenes are decidedly the bloodiest”—for example, the “tabloid-lit” scene in which the murderer slaughters Louise, “who should have known better than to take a mid-picture swim in her underwear.”
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In addition, Cowie sees the picture as a bellwether of Coppola's future career and astutely observes that
Dementia 13
prefigures Coppola's later work by introducing his interest in the family as a source of strife and tragedy—from the neurotic Lady Haloran's endless mourning for her dead daughter Kathleen to her criminally insane son Billy's multiple homicides. Looking back on the movie, Coppola seems satisfied with it. “I think it showed promise; it was imaginative,” he comments, appraising it as more than a mere accumulation of clichés. “In many ways it has some of the nicest visuals I have ever done.”
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He may well have in mind the convincing atmosphere of dread created by the shots of the forbidding castle with its shadowy passageways, which is effectively employed to suggest a disquieting atmosphere of fear and foreboding. It is worth noting that there is a homage of sorts to the film in an episode of
The Sopranos
(2001), a TV series about the Mafia. In it the daughter of a Mafia don and her date attend a screening of
Dementia 13 at a
New York revival house and are appropriately frightened.

Shortly after Coppola finished his chores on
Dementia 13
, he decided to sever his relationship with Corman. He appreciated the firsthand experience he had obtained as a tyro filmmaker while working under Corman's tutelage, but he was still disgruntled about the additional scenes Corman had insisted that Hill add to the picture. So, in the early winter of 1963, when Coppola was offered a job as screenwriter at $375 a week by Seven Arts, an independent producing organization that later amalgamated with Warner Brothers, he took it. Seven Arts had expressed interest in Coppola on the basis of his winning the 1962 Samuel Goldwyn screenwriting award, a coup that Corman had publicized in the trades while Coppola was in his employ.

Coppola was still a graduate student at UCLA at this point, and he recalls that “the day I got my first job as a screenwriter, there was a big sign on the film school's bulletin board saying, ‘Sell out!”‘Although some of his fellow students encouraged him to work in the film industry and even came over to Ireland to help him make
Dementia 13
, others treated him with a resentment grounded in jealousy. “I was making money,” he explains. “I was already doing what everybody was just talking about.”
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Seven Arts was in the business of packaging film productions: preparing a first-draft script, obtaining commitments from stars and a director, and then selling the production package to a major studio, which would then
finance and produce the movie in question. In 1963 Seven Arts had an option on Carson McCullers's controversial novella,
Reflections in a Golden Eye
, an exercise in Southern Gothic dealing with homosexuality, nymphomania, and other lurid topics. No screenwriter had as yet been able to come up with a viable script from this shocking material. With the option on the book running out, the front office decided to let Coppola, their newest acquisition, take a crack at it. Seven Arts was pleased with the decent screen adaptation of the novella that Coppola was able to turn out in six weeks, and so was John Huston (
The Maltese Falcon
), who was set to direct. But Huston's previous commitments forced him to postpone the venture, and when he finally made the picture he ultimately used a screenplay by Chapman Mortimer and Gladys Hill. The film as finally released endeavors to conjure up some dark melodrama, only to wind up chasing its own tail amid a slew of unlikely plot twists. So Coppola was fortunate not to have his name associated with the final product.

Meanwhile, Seven Arts was still impressed with his version of the script, for his screenplay for
Reflections
showed that he could tackle a job on order and for hire and do it well. So they raised his salary to five hundred dollars a week for the next three years. Coppola eventually worked on eleven scripts, but he only received an official screen credit on three of them, and it is those three films that will be highlighted at this point. To begin with, Coppola received a screen credit as co-writer on two 1966 films on which he worked for Seven Arts:
This Property Is Condemned
and
Is Paris Burning?

This Property Is Condemned
is a one-act play by Tennessee Williams that can be acted on the stage in about twenty minutes. Coppola was familiar with the play, since he had directed it on the stage at Hofstra. The play simply presents a thirteen-year-old girl named Willie Starr who has been deserted by her parents. Willie recounts for a lad named Tom the sad story of her sister Alva, who took care of her until Alva's untimely death from lung cancer. And so it is Alva whom Willie idolizes and wants to imitate. Unfortunately, since Alva was a prostitute in her mother's boarding house/brothel for railroad men, Willie naively but firmly believes that the kind of life Alva led is the only truly glamorous existence for any girl. Consequently, there is little doubt by play's end that Willie is condemned to take up her sister's sordid way of life.

An enormous amount of expansion was imposed on the play's slender plot to bloat it into nearly two hours of screen time, which is fairly obvious when one views the movie, directed by Sydney Pollack (
Out of Africa)
. The three principal authors of the 1966 film version—Fred Coe, Edith Sommer, and Coppola—elaborated Williams's slender little tale far beyond
his original conception. The basic format the screenwriters hit upon was to make Williams's play the framing device for the picture. Accordingly, they broke the one-act play roughly in half, presenting the first portion as a prologue to the film and the remaining segment as an epilogue. In this way they utilized almost all of the play's original dialogue in their screenplay. In the prologue of the film, Willie, played by Mary Badham (
To Kill a Mockingbird
), describes her family and present situation to the boy Tom, and in the epilogue she wraps things up by telling Tom what happened to each of them. The scriptwriters then had to devise a full-blown story told in flashback to fit between the prologue and the epilogue. Several of the characters in the picture are derived from people to whom Willie refers in the one-act play.

The one character who is cut from whole cloth in the movie, and who has no discernible counterpart in the play, is Owen Legate (Robert Redford). He is a railroad inspector who hopes to marry Alva (Natalie Wood). But before Owen can make an honest woman of Alva, her life is tragically cut short by lung cancer. Williams told me in conversation that he was understandably disappointed in the finished product. Indeed, he accurately assessed the film as a “vastly expanded and hardly related film with the title taken from a very delicate one-act play. The movie was hardly deserving of the talents of Robert Redford and Natalie Wood.” Or, one might add, the talents of Sidney Pollack and Francis Coppola.

It was not uncommon in Hollywood for a platoon of writers to work on the same script. As writer-director Preston Sturges (
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
) once quipped, writers worked in teams, like piano movers. This was a system Coppola deplored. He estimates that after the script he had prepared with Coe and Sommer was submitted to the front office an additional dozen script doctors tinkered with the screenplay before it was finally completed. And the meandering continuity of the finished film demonstrates that too many cooks well nigh spoiled the broth. The final shooting script was not very good, he recalls in
On the Edge
, “not that our version was much better.” Yet Ray Stark, Coppola's immediate boss at Seven Arts, continued to see him as competent and dependable, and raised his salary to a thousand dollars a week. He became known around Seven Arts as a “clutch writer, a troubleshooter salvaging movies that were teetering on the brink of catastrophe.”
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