Godfather (9 page)

Novelist-screenwriter Raymond Chandler (
Lady in the Lake
) holds a similar view about the way a writer's screenplay is altered after being written: “Too many people have too much to say about a writer's work. It ceases to be his own.” On this point an upcoming Hollywood screenwriter says, “I don't feel the position of writers in Hollywood has changed much over the years,” since Chandler's time. “We know no script is going to start shooting without some changes being made, but there's this idea in the studios that everybody should be allowed to contribute to the process, that the script should please everybody.”
⁴⁴
Coppola certainly could attest to the prevalence of this attitude.

Still, whatever Coppola's gripes about the studio system, he worked conscientiously at the craft of screenwriting while he was employed by the studios as a screenwriter. When adapting another author's work for film, Coppola endeavored to be true to the thematic intent of his literary source, as in the case of
Gatsby
, for which he stuck as closely as possible to Fitzgerald's novel. Musing about the role of the screenwriter in the filmmaking process, Coppola ultimately resolved that he would never again entrust a screenplay he had written to another director.

Hollywood is a surreal place. The first time I saw a crane planting a full-grown tree in a garden, I realized that Hollywood is not organic; nothing grows or develops naturally there.

—John Schlesinger

The making of a motion picture is an endless contention of tawdry egos, almost none of them capable of anything more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion.

—Raymond Chandler

The collapse in the 1960s of Hollywood as the center of mass entertainment in America was precipitated by the advent of television, which became America's principal source of entertainment for the mass audience. The big Hollywood studios became aware that they must make an effort to present audiences with fresh material, not just a rehash of old commercial formulas long since overfamiliar to moviegoers.

Coppola had written a screenplay while he was still working for Seven Arts that was a fresh and inventive take on the usual “coming of age” movie, and he thought he could interest a studio in the property. The script was based on David Benedictus's novel
You're a Big Boy Now
, about a nineteen- year-old male working in a London shoe store. The book was brought to
Coppola's attention by Tony Bill, a young actor who hoped to play the lead if Coppola made the movie. “But I also suggested Peter Kastner to him,” Bill remembers, “because I had seen a little Canadian film he was in called
Nobody Waved Goodbye
(1965) about a troubled teenager. As it happened, Bill did not play the lead but, instead, the hero's buddy.
¹

Coppola had optioned Benedictus's novel for a thousand dollars and set about transplanting the story to New York City because he had always wanted to portray the life of a teenager living in New York, where he had grown up. Coppola had actually written his screen adaptation in his spare time in Paris while he was collaborating with Gore Vidal on the script for
Is Paris Burning
?—in order to “stay sane,” as he quipped. When Seven Arts got wind of the fact that Coppola had composed the script while he was in their employ, they claimed, quite rightly, that they owned the rights to any material Coppola had written while on their payroll as a screenwriter. He shrewdly pointed out to the front office that he owned the rights to the novel from which the screenplay was derived and they owned the script: “Therefore, I own one half and you the other. So let's do it together.”
²

At this time Seven Arts was merging with Warner Brothers, and Phil Feldman, business manager at Seven Arts for the past four years, had decided that the time was right for him to break with Seven Arts and become an independent producer. Feldman had faith in Coppola, and Coppola convinced him to produce
You're a Big Boy Now
. They began the preproduction phase for the film before they had obtained financial backing for the project. “We were shelling out our own money,” Coppola recalls, “using credit cards and what have you.”
³

Feldman finally negotiated a deal with Seven Arts that would resolve the dispute over the ownership of the screenplay: Ray Stark, Coppola's former boss at Seven Arts, would pay Coppola no fee for the script (which technically belonged to Seven Arts), but he would pay Coppola $8,000 for directing the movie on a twenty-nine-day shooting schedule. Stark, in return, got the newly formed Warner Brothers-Seven Arts to make the picture. “Why did I make
Big Boy
for just $8,000?” Coppola comments. “I would have done it for nothing.”
⁴

Coppola explains his strategy with Warners-Seven this way: “I don't ask anybody if I can make a movie.” He simply informs a studio that he is ready to go into production, “and if they're wise, they'll get in on it.” In the motion picture business very few executives can resist getting in on a project
that is already a going concern. So he and Feldman advised Warners-Seven that they were going ahead with the picture and that it was almost too late to get in on the ground floor. The moguls simply said, “Well, we might as well make this movie.”

But Warners-Seven only offered Coppola a measly $250,000 budget because the plot centered on a nineteen-year-old and there were few bankable teenaged stars. As a result, Coppola decided to cast relative unknowns in the key roles and to get better-known actors for the supporting cast. He accordingly cast as the young hero and heroine Peter Kastner, the promising Canadian actor, and Karen Black, a graduate of the Actors' Studio with one Broadway play,
The Playroom
, to her credit. In addition, he cast as the young femme fatale Elizabeth Hartman, who garnered an Academy Award nomination for playing a blind girl in
A Patch of Blue
(1965), her first film.

Hartman had appeared in a couple of other pictures, usually as a mousey, inhibited girl. In giving her an unsympathetic role Coppola was exemplifying his willingness to cast an actor against type. The late Elizabeth Hartman told me during a brief conversation that when Coppola phoned and asked her to play the sexy Barbara Darling she nearly cried. “Do you know what I look like?” she asked. He did, and he stuck to his choice.

Coppola took the bull by the horns and bypassed the agents of the experienced actors he wanted for supporting roles and contacted the actors directly. He phoned Julie Harris and Rip Torn and his wife Geraldine Page himself and coaxed them into reading the script. Geraldine Page spoke for the others when she said, “I get scripts daily, but this one really made me laugh.” She thought Coppola was a marvelous young talent and trusted him implicitly.
⁵
(She eventually got an Oscar nomination for playing the hero's dotty mother.) When all of these distinguished actors agreed to be in the movie, Warners-Seven raised Coppola's budget to eight hundred thousand dollars, still a meager budget by studio standards.

Some Hollywood insiders thought the studio was imprudent in bankrolling Coppola's film. One publicist described Coppola's conferences with the studio officials this way: “All these stuffy executives were sitting around a conference table, offering the moon” to this kid “with a beard and blue jeans.”
⁶
In actual fact, Warners-Seven was wise to finance Coppola's picture, since allowing the twenty-seven-year-old aspiring director to make a low-budget film for a mainstream studio would enable him to demonstrate what he could do. In addition, a young talent, anxious to prove himself, would not command a large salary but would very likely finish the film on time and on budget.

Coppola had always been fascinated by the young people, called pages, who get books for patrons at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue by sailing down the eighty miles of library stacks on roller skates, and so he gave that job to his hero rather than making him a shoe clerk as in the novel. But library officials were not pleased that Coppola had inserted into the script the suggestion that the library had a secret vault stocked with exotic pornographic books and
objets d'art
. They also feared that Coppola and his film crew would interrupt the library's daily routine. After the library board denied him permission to film on the premises, Coppola pointed out to Mayor John Lindsay that Lindsay had a policy of encouraging film crews to work on location around New York City as a goodwill gesture to the film community. Lindsay acquiesced and issued a permit for Coppola to shoot in the library, overruling the library board's veto.

In Coppola's screenplay Bernard Chanticleer (Peter Kastner) works in the stacks at the New York Public Library, where his father, Humphrey Chanticleer (Rip Torn), is curator of rare books. Bernard's raffish friend Raef (Tony Bill), who also is employed at the library, often attempts to make the naive Bernard a bit more worldly in his outlook on life. Humphrey Chanticleer, over the protests of his wife Margery (Geraldine Page), decides that Bernard should move out of their Long Island home and into an apartment of his own in New York City. Bernard apologizes to “Mummy” and “Daddy” for his failure to live up to their expectations in the past, thereby indicating that he is still in essence their little boy—he is not a big boy yet.

The apartment house Mummy and Daddy choose for him is presided over by the sexually repressed Miss Nora Thing (Julie Harris), who readily agrees to Margery's request that she report to Bernard's parents any partying Bernard indulges in with the opposite sex. Another tenant is a burly cop called Francis (after the young director), who likewise keeps a suspicious eye on Bernard, whom he views as a young punk. As things develop, Bernard becomes interested in Amy Prentiss (Karen Black), a co-worker at the library. But he soon transfers his attachment to Barbara Darling (Elizabeth Hartman), one of the library's patrons. Given the fact that Barbara is a go-go dancer at a Greenwich Village discotheque and an actress in offbeat, off-Broadway plays, it is hard to imagine her as a regular library patron—but no matter. In any case, the promiscuous Barbara eventually sheds Bernard for the more attractive Raef.

To his dismay Bernard learns that his father, who maintains a respectable facade, is really a lecher who has made a pass at Amy and has even endeavored to work his wiles on Miss Thing when he corners her in the secret library vault he has filled with erotic art. Disenchanted with his father,
Bernard defies Humphrey by stealing a prized Gutenberg Bible from his father's rare book collection. After a chase led by Humphrey through lower Manhattan, Bernard is captured and jailed—and bailed out by Amy.

Benedictus's novel concludes with Bernard having lost both Barbara and Amy, but Coppola's screenplay reunites Bernard with Amy. Benedictus points out that his book concludes with Bernard living a solitary life, whereas Coppola supplied a happy ending: “Instead of being scarred for life by this sadistic Barbara Darling, the young hero will get a nice girl in the end…. Still I think there have been fewer concessions to public taste than in most American films.” As a matter of fact, Coppola's script does have a serious dimension underlying the plot, despite the happy ending. Like the novel, the script presents a young fellow on the brink of manhood who matures by finally summoning the gumption to defy his overbearing parents and outgrow their influence.

Coppola prepared a rehearsal version of the screenplay and had the actors rehearse in a Manhattan warehouse without benefit of scenery or costumes as a way to familiarize them with their roles. This procedure was a carryover from his days rehearsing plays at Hofstra. After ten days of rehearsing with the cast, Coppola explains, “We played the entire script all the way through before a live audience.” In this manner the actors were able to evolve their roles to performance level, “and I was able to get a sense of what my picture was going to look like before we started shooting.”
⁷
(In the years ahead Coppola would continue to hold rehearsals prior to the start of principal photography.) Coppola then gave the actors a final shooting script just before filming commenced.

It is true that Coppola had already gained some experience in directing by making a low-budget film for Roger Corman. Nevertheless, he was still diffident at the prospect of shooting the present film on location in New York City with some gifted and well-known character actors, with a real union film crew, and on a limited schedule. He was scared when he walked on the set he had never seen before on the first day of shooting, and when cinematographer Andrew Laszlo inquired what the first camera setup would be, Coppola froze. He looked at the nine actors and the crew of forty and abruptly decided to dismiss them for half an hour, while he blocked out the scene. He could not function with forty-nine people watching to see if he knew what he was doing.

When he was shooting on location in the streets of New York, Coppola utilized Eastman's high speed color film, which enabled him and Laszlo to film with natural light, even at night. One location sequence recalls an incident from Coppola's youth: after he had run away from military school,
he wandered around Manhattan trying to summon the courage to go home and face his parents. Similarly, in the film, Bernard roams around Broadway and Times Square just after he moves into his own apartment. The scene is photographed with documentary-like realism as Laszlo's handheld camera follows Bernard while he is window-shopping around the 42nd Street porno shops and penny arcades.

This sequence reaches its climax when Bernard drifts into a peep show parlor. While looking at a raunchy filmstrip, Bernard gets his tie caught in the rickety viewing machine. Amy, who happens to spot him from the street and follows him into the store, snips his tie off with fingernail scissors she is conveniently carrying. The wholesome Amy, of course, represents a marked contrast to the lewd creature in the filmstrip that Bernard had been watching. In fact, the awkwardness Bernard displays in the porno emporium he visits implies that raw sex is not really attractive to him—he is looking for love. This scene accordingly prefigures how Bernard will ultimately prefer love with Amy over a mere sexual relationship with Barbara.