Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

  Coppola’s faith in technology is a way of bypassing the Hollywood moguls, who, he feels, have been isolating him. If The Cotton Club is a hit he will again be Storm King of the Mountain. But the box-office failure of his last three films has forced him into a corner, feinting at shadow and substance alike. He aspires to make the moguls irrelevant, an appealing prospect for any American innovator, and if he succeeds, film will move in a new direction.

  Still, I don’t think any number of movies (pick a number) will convey the complexity of life-through-language Joyce achieved.

  About the second week in August, Coppola dropped on my desk a copy of our Estimating Draft of August 8 with a cover message from Robert Evans. “Dear Francis” came the Evans voice in large scrawl.

  You asked for my comments, my first one is the Cotton Club script of August 8th is on the way to being not good—but great. Spent much, much time—on both the structure & text of the enclosed further comments—Hope they are of some help. At least you know I’m not “just another pretty face” but rather just trying to do the best I can. Love ya, Evans. Please accept both dialogue & structure as my only interpretation for your eyes only—and only to be used as a possible springboard for the “Coppola” pen. E.

  Reading this, a question arose in my mind about the Kennedy pen. It wasn’t mentioned, although every version of the script carried the joint byline of William Kennedy and Francis Coppola. Soon after, the movie trade publications reported on the start of shooting, listing Coppola and Mario Puzo as the writers.

  Elaborate feature stories, arranged by Evans’s minions, appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, none mentioning my pen. I knew I was really in trouble when the film production’s phone directory was printed. The apprentice editor and the trainee director were listed, but I was not. Michael Daly told me that when he started reporting on the film for his lively New York magazine article last spring he was told by Evans’s publicity man that I was just a “script consultant,” and his impression was that I was not important to the film.

  Evans resented the radical script changes that followed my arrival. Coppola told me Evans was saying I had Coppola in my power. I had met Evans when he passed through our office. “Loved your book,” he said, not specifying which one. Daly said he later spoke to Evans about me and he recalled Evans remarking: “Who is he? He wrote some book.…”

  My presence also fouled Evans’s fund-raising efforts. His pitch to the press, and therefore to prospective investors, was that The Cotton Club was being made by the same trio that had created The Godfather—Evans, Coppola, and Puzo. Coppola’s view of Evans’s contribution to The Godfather is somewhat different. “What Evans did on The Godfather,” said Coppola, “was like what five other executives did.”

  Anyway, I was the Invisible Writer. Arguments on behalf of my visibility were raised with Evans by my agent, my lawyer, by Coppola’s people, without effect. Evans was quoted in December by The Wall Street Journal as saying, after I’d been on the project six months, that Puzo’s script had gone through fourteen versions. But Puzo was never on the set, had nothing to do with this deception. Evans wasn’t on the set either. He stayed home, enraging Coppola with his long-distance second-guessing of the production. In anger Coppola refused to let him view the rushes.

  When Evans sent in another set of notes on our script, Coppola threw them in the wastebasket and told the man who’d delivered them: “I don’t want his notes. He’s double-crossed me thirty-three times, and anybody who double-crosses me thirty-three times I don’t want anything to do with.”

  I asked Coppola what he perceived as a double cross, and he replied: “He never gave up on the fact that he wasn’t directing, and that he wouldn’t hover and second-guess me. I said, ‘If I’m the captain of the ship I don’t want you behind me telling me what to do.’”

  The film had the hovering disease from the moment Coppola signed on to direct a production crew he hadn’t hired. The nay-saying to everything he did or said was endemic. It first came to a head the day he told me he might quit the film that night and go to Paris. A meeting followed with money men, Evans, production honchos, and Coppola. I was in the next room working. After an appropriate amount of screaming back and forth, Coppola said he’d be on his way to Paris at five o’clock unless it was put in writing that he was in absolute control.

  “Settled,” said Evans.

  “I want a deal today,” said Coppola.

  “I apologize,” said Evans. “I didn’t know …”

  “By five o’clock,” said Coppola. “Call the lawyers.”

  “Settled,” said Evans.

  “Yes or no today or I’m gone,” said Coppola.

  “You’re a stand-up guy,” said Evans.

  “I’ve got a ticket,” said Coppola.

  “You’re a stand-up guy,” said Evans.

  Though Coppola won the day, the nay-saying continued. Also, the working out of Coppola’s financial deal dragged on until he actually did walk off the set and go to London for two days. Contention ended the day he fired eighteen people, most of the production department.

  The feud with Evans went to court eventually, and Coppola won the right to keep artistic control. Evans won the right to see the film at long last. He didn’t like it, and wrote Coppola more notes. Coppola said the only changes would be in response to preview audiences’ comments.

  “Evans won’t even be told where the preview is,” Coppola said. “And if he finds out, he’ll have to pay admission to get in.”

  Evans’s word was, at this point, that the film was an expensive flop.

  “He saw the second-to-last cut of The Godfather,” said Coppola, “and he said the same thing.”

  By mid-August 1984, Evans and another investor had sold their shares of the film. Evans’s buy-out figure was $6 million. Total control went to the principal investors, Edward and Fred Doumani, Las Vegas casino owners who have $30 million invested; to Barrie Osborne and Joey Cusumano, who had been the line producers from October 1983 forward; and to Coppola, who at last became director-without-kibitzer.

  The cost of the film was said in court in Los Angeles to have reached $58 million, but that was anti-Coppola hyperbole that included the interest cost on the Doumanis’ investment, which is not borne by the production. The money angle is invariably overstressed in any Coppola venture. He’s been bad-mouthed as a director whose excesses cause the production great expense, and the uncertainty in his working method does feed into that. But on The Cotton Club Cusumano sees it differently.

  “They pissed away ten million dollars,” he said, recounting astronomical featherbedding, overcharging, and luxurious excesses outside Coppola’s control. “Francis was instrumental in saving money in this film,” said Cusumano, and he cited cutting of the work force by sixty people at Coppola’s urging (not including the eighteen Coppola fired himself), a saving of almost $2,000 a week for each worker.

  As to the script, ours was a relentless effort to cut costs. Our early, uninhibited draft would have cost $50 million, to the shock of us all. Within days we had another draft costing a mere $27 million. I like to think that, if only for a little while, I helped save somebody $23 million.

  The length of the script was also a problem. The magic number was 120 pages, a minute a page. Our draft was 130 pages and worrisome. So late one night I pruned dialogue and description, excised widows, adjectives. No scenes were lost, and in the morning even Coppola didn’t know what was gone, but the script was 120 pages. The cutting meant nothing to the length of the movie, but people stopped worrying about the length of the script.

  I’m probably exaggerating only slightly in saying that at the outset many people viewed the script as an execrable document, and the film as an unredeemable disaster. That I never felt that way is the result of my enduring faith in the rewritability of anything. It also reflects my escalating belief that Francis Coppola was really going to do what he said he was going to do.

  As people
viewed the rushes—the lush photography, assorted beautiful people, talented singers and dancers, those curiously funny and virulent gangsters—a tonal change became evident: hey, this still needs a miracle, but maybe it’s gonna work.

  Then came the first cut of the film: stunning, but draggy. At the second, much tighter cut, cheers went up. Coppola went west to visit and showed the film to George Lucas (who liked it). In New York he showed it to the Doumanis and the executives of Orion Pictures, the studio distributing the film.

  Coppola had cut it to two hours flat for the Orion screening, and when it ended, the Orion moguls and the Doumanis smiled, nodded, and walked away. Coppola, confused, furious, took this as high ungraciousness. A meeting followed immediately in the Orion boardroom, and the moguls by then had had the chance to construct a response to this nonpareil artifact: Too much tap dancing. It goes too fast. Needs some air. Love Gere, love Diane Lane. Let’s have more love scenes. Where’s those scenes I loved in the rushes? What the hell are you gonna do about that crazy ending?

  I thought this the weakest version I’d yet seen, and by then I’d seen four. Coppola was worried that if the film ran too long, exhibitors would be limited to one showing a night, halving the revenue. But by the end of the Orion meeting he knew he’d cut too much.

  The next day in the editing rooms Coppola and Barry Malkin, his editor and former schoolmate, to whom he listens faithfully, plus Malkin’s assistant, Bob Lovett, and myself, went through the film and voiced a communal response to each scene, suggesting elisions, transpositions, restorations. By day’s end there was a new cut with eleven minutes added, which made all the difference, for when I spoke to Coppola a week later by phone and asked him how the second showing for Orion had gone, he said it was “a big hit, definitely an up reaction. Everybody’s happy. They’re sending me telegrams and baskets of food.”

  The cut was soon locked, and the early mixing of sound and image began, the aim being to ready the film for Christmas 1984. The word of mouth was invariably positive; even those who had hedged their views were falling through their hedges onto Coppola’s increasingly greening pastures. Some were saying it might even be a great movie.

  Coppola cooked dinner at his New York apartment one night, and I put him through an after-dinner quiz on his willingness to direct by consensus, for he had, indeed, heeded many people’s reactions.

  “It’s like a violinist who responds to the pressure of the string,” he said. “Is he or the string making the note? The answer is, both.… If I were more satisfied with my vision of the piece in the first place I wouldn’t be as susceptible to the other creative people. But I’m the one holding the yes and no functions.”

  He spoke of three elements—the script, his own research, and the actors. “All give you a direction as to how to go, and these are fused in the alchemy of the production.… You think as you go, following the instincts of the individual artists.… You base it on the original script, but you don’t deny what you fall into.… It looks like chaos, but it’s actually a logical process … in which you observe very carefully what happens when you add a new given.

  “I specialize,” he said, “in being the ringmaster of a circus that’s inventing itself.”

  During the trial in Los Angeles over control of the film, the judge opined that the arguments in the case reminded him of Rashōmon—multiple private, conflicting perspectives on reality. Dick Sylbert told me a story—an old one, I think, but no less funny for that—about a production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. The bit actor playing the doctor who escorts Blanche DuBois to the asylum was asked about the plot. “It’s about this guy who carts a lady off to the nuthouse,” he explained.

  Any single view of the bizarre phenomenon called The Cotton Club is subject to similar limitations. Coppola may have the widest perspective, since he was the epicenter. “My life is like this every day,” he said one night as he was homogenizing assorted flavors of frenzy. But then, who in such “a position as his can take a long perspective on anything?

  And so I offer the following conclusions as a particular angle on events by a newcomer to the game. I came on as a short-timer but saw more than I expected. Coppola gave me the option to follow the film to the end, and I took him up on it. Not since I helped establish a daily newspaper from scratch has immersion in the raw experience of communal creation had such appeal to me. The pay wasn’t bad either, and I’ve got a novel in my head in which moviemaking is part of the story. So I stayed on, writing scenes in dark saloons and in automobiles and in frantic production offices. I stayed on even to rewrite the Looping Script, because about 90 percent of the dialogue had to be lipsynched and rerecorded. Flat ad libs (lots of those) were upgraded, dead lines excised, and Richard Gere’s role was enhanced.

  What seems unusual about the final product is the combining of two nontraditional versions of two genres: the musical comedy and the gangster film. In the musical comedy (“an idiom,” said Coppola, “I had been imbued with by my father since I was a kid”), the song-and-dance numbers are not story stoppers but weave through the fabric of the film. Realism segues into Expressionism, the gangsters emerging as genuine brutes as well as comedians. The narrative musical ending turns the film on its ear, giving it an unexpected dimension, yet confirming what we’ve suspected all along: that this is not a historical tale, it’s a fable. And that ending was Coppola’s vision from the outset. The film celebrates black beauty, black talent, black private life (i.e., just people: no pimps, no whores, no junkies, no race riots), and black love, the likes of which hasn’t been seen on-screen in recent memory, if ever.

  It will further popularize Ellington, Calloway, tap dancing, and black performers in general. My guess is it will make stars of Gregory Hines, Lonette McKee, Diane Lane, James Remar, Bob Hoskins, and maybe others. Richard Gere’s price will go up.

  I haven’t seen the ultimate version of the film. Coppola went west again, this time with the Lock Cut, presumably untouchable. But he found a way to pick the lock, and changes continued, with old scenes restored, John Barry’s underscoring largely purged of violins in favor of saxes, Bob Wilber recreating the original sounds of Ellington and Calloway. And so some surprises are in store for me. The greater surprise will be the critical and public response. If it’s a hit, that will be quite nice. If it flops, some of us will take the rap.

  My critical apparatus says it will be well received, but what do I know? I’m only the writer. However, I am no longer the Invisible Writer. I am pleased to report that Coppola and I will share “story by” credit with Mario Puzo, and Coppola and I, alone, will share screenplay credit. My open letter to Bob Evans on this point is this: “Dear Bob, You didn’t ask for my comment on this topic, but here you have it anyway: Go poach yourself. Love ya, Kennedy.”

  Having said this, I now begin the reimmersion in fiction, which is to say language, the thing I missed most in my year at the movies. Coppola said more than once that he thought I’d be directing my own films in four or five years, but I think not. He’s suited to the ringmaster role, but I believe I would gnash my teeth to cinders in a matter of weeks. Autonomy is more my style, and solitude. And so now I’ll get back to that. The limo is waiting downstairs to take me to work.

  1984

  The Making of Ironweed

  It is raining on Finny’s car, a shell of a boxy old Hudson sedan that rests wheellessly on blocks in a vacant lot on Colonie Street in Albany, just west of the railroad viaduct over Broadway. Two men, fat and filthy Finny, and tall and filthy Michigan Mac, are asleep in the car. Finny is alone in the back seat as Helen and Francis arrive, their breath visible at this witching hour of Halloween, 1938. Francis opens the curtain that serves as the car’s window.

  “Hey, bum, you got a visitor,” he says.

  “Who the hell are you?” Finny asks as he wakes up.

  “It’s Francis. Move over and let Helen in. I’ll get you a jug for this, old buddy.”

  Finny smiles through his rot
ten teeth.

  “Yeah, sure,” he says, and Helen reluctantly climbs in and sits beside him.

  “Don’t be scared,” Francis tells her.

  “It’s not that,” says Helen.

  “She knows,” Finny says with a leer that gives new meaning to the word “pervert.” “She’s been here before.”

  Francis and Helen say their farewells as Helen settles in for the night, her last refuge from the soul-chilling weather, and Francis walks up Colonie Street, heading vaguely toward the home he hasn’t seen in four years, hasn’t lived in for three decades.

  It’s peculiar, this reality. Synchronous. Colonie Street, one block west of the set, is where my maternal grandfather’s large family flourished for two generations; and it was in their house that as a child I began to study their lives. Forty years later, pieces of their reality, much transformed, emerged onto the pages of two of my novels. There never was such a figure as Francis Phelan in our family, which is perhaps one of the reasons I could invent him so freely.

  Whatever his origin as a creation, Francis entered the imagination of film director Hector Babenco, and so now, on this simulated Halloween in the spring of 1987, Francis Phelan is fully fleshed in the person of Jack Nicholson; and his paramour, Helen Archer, is incarnate in Meryl Streep. These two illustrious actors, with supporting actors of fine verve and talent, James Dukas and Jeff Morris, plus Babenco, in yellow slicker and railroad conductor’s cap on backward, are all reconstituting imaginary history on a street where it truly might have come to be.

  How this began, Babenco recently recalled in conversation. He had heard about my writing, and when he saw a copy of Ironweed he bought it. Raised in Argentina, later resident in Brazil, Babenco is multilingual, but Ironweed was the first book he had ever read from beginning to end in English.