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And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show from Apocalypse Now to Zoetrope. Today on the show, we have our first ever edition of The Big Picture Book Club. We have read, and we'll be digging into the Hollywood historian Sam Wasson's psychological episodic portrait of Francis Ford Coppola in The Path to Paradise, a Francis Ford Coppola story. We'll talk Apocalypse Now, The Godfather films, Hollywood in the 70s, and one of the most fascinating minds in movie history.
But first, let's dig into the latest from another great mind of the movies, a Coen brother. And joining us to do so is the great Adam Naiman. Adam, how are you? I'm well.
How are you guys? I'm Dandy. How are you, Amanda? I'm delighted to see Adam again.
Hello. I'm delighted to see you guys. Adam, you're here because you are the rabbi of the Coens. How do you define yourself when it comes to Coen brothers' projects?
I learned about their movies yesterday. I went on Reddit. No, I wrote a book about the Coens a few years ago, which I plan to hopefully make more complete in the event that they make more movies together. It was called The Bookway Ties the Films Together.
And I also teach a course on them at U of T, which is really quite wonderful to put their films in front of undergrads who haven't seen them before and draw connections between them. But like you, I'm also just a fan. Yes, I'm a fan. I love their movies very much.
They mean a lot to me. And so writing about them and teaching about them is also just part of enjoying them. So you'd think that the arrival of a new film from a Coen brother would be greeted with great fanfare. And yet here we are in the midst of February, and a new movie called Drive Away Dolls is coming to us in movie theaters.
It is directed by Ethan Coen, but without his brother Joel, of course. It is co-written by Ethan and his wife, Tricia Cook. And it's a bit of a romp. It's a comic romp starring two young women portrayed by Daryl Dean Vesmanathan and Margaret Qualley.
And it's a movie that has been in development, I would say, for a great number of years that Cook and Coen have been working on it. They first were to draft back in the 90s. They tried to get it made in the late 90s, early 2000s with Alison Anders, the great independent filmmaker, and could never get it off the ground. Once upon a time, its title was, quote, Drive Away Dykes, which is alluded to in the future.
And this movie was supposed to come out last fall and got pushed back because of the WGA and Saks Ricks. And so here it is, arriving at what is commonly known as Dumpy Wary. And I wonder, Adam, expert that you are, does this feel like a Dumpy Wary release to you? I mean, it feels like a Dumpy Wary release in terms of how it's been handled.
And I think that, you know, a time when it's harder than ever to not just get eyeballs, but like brain cells directed towards movies that don't come pre-sold, you know, with festival laurels or whatever, I think it's going to be a hard movie to turn into a conversation point. In terms of content, I don't think it's Dumpy Wary at all. I'm hoping that people will watch it and write about it and think about it as being, if not directly part of, close and adjacent to one of the great bodies of work in American cinema. And to me, a more interesting thought experiment or critical experiment than the movie signed by Joel Cohen.
They're kind of photo negatives of each other, too, in terms of what is good about them and in terms of what is, you know, ambiguous about them, let's say, or that I'm indifferent about. I have some questions about that, actually. I wonder how much we can psychologically read these two brothers, these critical minds of the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century of cinema. So the movie itself is set in 1999.
It's a comic caper. It follows these two women who are looking for an adventure, essentially. The Vespanic character is kind of uptight. Margaret Qualley's character is the free spirit.
And they're looking to just get out of town, to get away from the northernmost eastern coast and to get down, hopefully, to Florida. And so they sign up for a driveway car, essentially, an opportunity to, you know, deliver their package or vehicle down south. And in doing so, there's a mix-up. And the car that they take turns out to be a car that is owned and operated by some sort of criminal organization.
And this leads to hijinks. Very simple framework. I would argue slightly underbaked framework for a movie. That didn't take away from my enjoyment of the movie.
So I'm kind of curious, Amanda. We sat beside one another. You crashed my Valentine's date with my wife, Eileen. I crashed the second half of it.
The second half of it, yes. And I was invited by someone who was a VO, just to be clear. Right. And I did offer to sit directly in front of you guys in the other reserved seating if you wanted to keep the date going.
That would have been wildly strange. So we sat. I was in a sandwich between you and my wife. What's in the movie?
I thought some of the funny parts were very funny. It's not an unsuccessful movie. As you said, the premise is light, if a little zany, but it narratively carries it from start to finish. And they get into some funny situations along the way.
It does feel a little bit like half of a Coen Brothers movie. And it is very recognizably in tone, and to some extent in set-up, but certainly the feel of the comedy and even the types of characters you encounter and whatever Margot Pauly is trying to do with that voice. Which, as a Southerner, that was just very tough for me. But you feel whatever heft or strangeness or spin that gets put on it in a Coen Brothers movie.
And I does feel a little bit unfair to say, you know, people are allowed to make things by themselves and you don't really know what alchemy and who contributes what in a partnership. But it did feel incomplete. Yeah, so that's my question for you, Adam, because you've got The Tragedy of Macbeth, which came out a couple of years ago from Apple, which was the film that Joel Coen directed, starring his wife Frances McDormand. And that was a fairly straightforward black and white adaptation of Shakespeare.
I thought beautifully shot and interesting, but not my favorite Coen Brothers movie. And then you've got Drive-Away Dolls, which is this zany kind of raising Arizona sequel that's kind of raising Tallahassee. That kind of like that peppy, goofy, like high goof, you know, the high goof that they do, the Coen Brothers so well. Obviously informed in part by Tricia Cook's point of view, which is, they have a unique arrangement, I would say, Ethan and Tricia, in that they are married, but Tricia is queer and out.
And they have kids together and they raise their kids together, but they also have partners outside of their marriage. So they have a unique situation. And so this movie clearly is very personal to Tricia, but it has what feels very clearly like Ethan's tonality or what we can survive as his tonality. So it's an odd duck of a movie.
What do you make of it? The movie clarifies a certain thing about from which wing of the Coen Brothers partnership certain props and ideas in other of their movies may have come from, for instance, if you've ever wondered while watching Burn After Reading where the George Clooney dildo chair came from, Dragway Dolls will offer some hints. I think it's case closed, right? But I'd say this, I actually had the chance to interview the Ethan-Cohen-Tricia Cook filmmaking partnership, not about this film, but about a film that hasn't really seen much, much exposure, which is a doc they made together by Jerry Lee Lewis.
I won't spend much time talking about a film that the audience can't see, except to say their process of making and editing that seemed very interesting seemed very equal. And I think that it's important that, you know, they're seen as co-authors of this movie because the sensibility, while recognizably Cohen asks, stems from her. She's quite funny. And, you know, as the writing around the film is saying, you know, quite out and quite vocal about wanting to make a movie that has a kind of, you know, zany, sensual, queer, female pleasure to it, which I think the movie succeeds at with a little bit of hiccups.
The part that I'm interested in is how political a movie it is, which is something that is not always part of the Coens. It's always part of their work, but it's always interpreted very strangely. People are like, they're conservatives and reactionary and they're right-wing. This movie seems to clear that up, too, or at least the angling of this particular story.
But it's also like a fantasy at a time when there were Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. as opposed to something else. It's very, very importantly set on the edge of that 2000 election. You have a character talking about working for Nader.
There's a politician figure I would never dream of spoiling who plays him, but who very much sort of seems to belong to a different kind of moment of right-wing conservatism in America, not a MAGA figure, you know, at all. And because I take the Coen seriously and take their comedy seriously, I think it's as a kind of a political film and a cultural film that I'm most interested in because as Amanda said formally, it is not fully baked, which is also kind of what I like about it. If you were to say, like, a Coen brother made a slovenly 80-minute movie that feels padded out to reach feature length, if I'd be like, what happened? But I found that preferable to the fussiness in Macbeth, which is so accomplished and a little stiff, you know?
Yeah, I, gosh, the film's only 84 minutes. Barely 84 minutes. Yeah, it's about 78 and a half minutes, which obviously for a studio release movie is unusually short, especially if it's not animated. And it feels a bit like a sketch, but it also feels a bit like a time capsule piece.
It feels like a movie that was written 25 years ago. That's not necessarily a bad thing because there are Coen brothers movies from 25 years ago that I like quite a bit. I mostly like the performances, but I also kind of started with Margaret Qualley trying to do Fast Talking Game and Loose Girl Who Leads the Adventure. You know, she's kind of, she's making a choice and I always appreciate when she makes choices as an actor, I'm a big fan of hers.
Didn't quite get to where I wanted it to be, personally. She has such a presence that at some point I was like, okay, I guess you're just not gonna lose this accent and I'm just gonna have to keep going with it. Or I became used to whatever she was trying, both energy-wise. So I'm still a fan of hers.
But, you know, she's Margaret Qualley. Like she is very of right now and of Gen Z and so is Beanie Feldstein, who's in a very, in a supporting role. And as you noted, it's like, you know, a very memorable part of Booksmart, which is a very generational thing, whether you like or hate that generation, it's not up to me to decide. But, so that took me out of the 99, messed up it all a bit.
And there was for me just a kind of stuck between the two time zones of the movie. And I wonder whether like the tone and the politics are also slightly stuck between where it's set and when it's being released. Yeah, and can I frame the five B's for you? The five B's of young, contemporary, female-led comedies are Bottoms, Booksmart, and Bodies, Bodies, Bodies.
Right. And this movie's kind of, this is a double D, but it's kind of in that zone, but also not in that zone because it's made by people in their 60s. Well, made by people in their 60s, but also not made on autopilot or like on the other end of some mandated contract. I mean, one of the things about the Coens that I'll always say about them is they've never made a movie that they didn't have to.
And even when there's been an aspect of obligation to it, they've always personalized it. Like, I think it's interesting that tonally this one is close to Burn After Reading, which is the closest thing you'll find to an impersonal Coen Brothers movie, but they sort of rescue it just through sheer talent. And what I sort of liked about this movie, not to be all, you know, loosey-goosey and then shifts to critical goalposts is I liked how unimportant it was. I liked how unimportant it was.
I liked how casual it was. I liked that there's like weird psychedelic fades and dissolves between sequences. I liked how mismatched the acting was. It felt relaxed.
And it felt like something that the two people who made it, who I'd like to think are a happy couple in their configuration, like that they had fun making it. It's like they're clearing their throat. You know, if this was life's work, I would feel differently. But as a, not a throwaway, but as an exercise, it's charming.
But it does make me feel the lack of that incredible polish and visionary, you know, the visionary direction you get when the two of them work together when Joel's behind the camera because he's always been the film school guy. The same way, Macbeth lacked any sense of humor. Anything. Did you ever get like, like just human life, really, it was very, very sewn up.
So, you know, you being more of an expert on them than Amanda or I, is that known? Is it known that Joel was bringing the dramaturgical power and the filmmaking and that Ethan was the zany madcap guy and together they made something special? Well, I love the end. I mean, you know, Joel was supposedly, not supposedly, I mean, you know, that the story is that he's the film school guy and the guy who met up with Sam Raimi and kind of, you know, cut his teeth on that DIY thing and Ethan was at Princeton.
There's the story where he talked about how he couldn't turn in an assignment because he had his arms eaten by a bear and he was like talking to the dean with both arms at that point. I mean, I've always been of the mind from what I've read and from my experience interviewing them and certainly writing about them. I think they operate on a form of telepathy, which is why I want to grant the same partnership to Ethan and Trisha Cook, like not see it solely as an Ethan Coen movie. It's directed by him solely the way that all the Coen brothers movies were directed by Joel solely.
But I would say watching this, I mean, it's not a joke. There's more marital aids in this movie than any other American movie ever made. But it clarifies just that certain things might seem to be of interest to him, not that they're not of interest to Joel. And one of the other ones I think is very funny in this movie is the extent to which it's kind of a statement against nihilism or kind of a statement against a lack of pleasure in life.
Like it's got these very discount Fargo goons in it, you know, which are very 90s post-Tarantino characters, but their running argument is just like enjoying life. And if you sort of treat people like an asshole, you'll be treated like one and if you're nice to people, you get what you want. And I found that funny because I see that in so many of their movies, these dueling pairs or these kind of bankotomous pairs of worldview. So it's not like they've just completely gone out of the comfort zone, you know, thematically with Joel gone.
But I do think Joel's the camera guy. So those two guys who are played by C.J. Wilson and Joey Slotnick who are pretty classical Cohen supporting characters in terms of the kind of character that you might find to play them are just two of an unusually star-studded by me standard of supporting characters that includes Coleman Domingo, currently Academy Award nominated, Pedro Pascal, who is very briefly in this film, but is, you know, you can see more of his face in the Mandalorian, that's for sure. Bill Camp, the homie, the homie Bill Camp, thriving.
Adam, do you ever see Sound of Freedom? You know, it's on the queue. Okay. Because I think it's going to really speak to me and determine, you know, my activities in the next year.
I can't wait to watch it. I feel very strongly about this. It's worth it for the Bill Camp. Yeah, I'm sure.
Yeah, he's very good. He's doing something exciting in one of the craziest parts of a long time. So you saw Sound of Freedom? Oh, I thought you were talking about this.
No, I thought you were talking about Sound of Freedom. Oh, okay. No, I never saw Sound of Freedom. Also, Miley Cyrus.
I'm going to watch it and do whatever it tells me to. I think it's just scan a QR code. I think that's what the strikes and ability to promote it. Should we just say the man's name?
No, no. Is it also not fair to say that this is sort of the reliable surprise movie star? Yeah. Yes.
This is usually the guy who if you don't know he's in the movie, then he ends up being in the movie. Right. Correct. I think that's what I said.
You know what I said? There was another version of that that just came out today. A young star who does this in a forthcoming film. I don't know if either of you haven't had to spoil for you yet.
But the surprise cameo from the well-known person is something that we used to have a lot of and I want to have more of. I want to bring it back. And I feel like this movie and now this other movie that's coming up very soon also is bringing this trend back. It's a really great specific writing.
Like we were taught, you know, in grade writing class. I always use... Sometimes you have to seed clues for the audience at home. So Driveway Dolls, do you recommend this film now?
Yeah, I recommend it. I think I'm going to write for it for your site soon. That seems to be the plan and to talk about its cohenness or lack thereof. But I would recommend it and I think it's just one of those fates of distribution that it seems to be coming out very close to Love Eyes Bleeding, which I haven't seen yet, which was at Sundance, which is almost like built for a joint review, right?
Yes, they're very different and very similar. Love Eyes Bleeding rocks very hard. I would say significantly harder than Driveway Dolls, but I don't think that's Driveway Dolls' intention. As you said, Driveway Dolls is a romp and the crowd that we saw it with, we saw it in a big theater.
They were hooking on it. They liked it. It is something maybe to be seen with other people. So just to put a cap on that, as I said, this was the day before Valentine's Day.
My wife and I had a Valentine's Day date. We went out to a local eatery, had a few drinks, had a meal and my wife sat with us and watched the movie and when the movie movie ended Amanda just darted out of the movie theater like into the night sky and Eileen and I took our time and as we were walking out Eileen turned me and she said I fucking loved that movie I cannot remember the last time Eileen said that to me about a movie and she immediately after that said now I have had two drinks but I loved it and if you're looking for a fun time I think it's a fun time with the movies I think so too and I think that it'll be interesting as their career continues because it will hopefully and there's rumors that the rumors are kind of from one of those sites where they can't actually write about things remember people who posted some of these sites I'm like they haven't actually gotten anything right but that said you know they are going to work together again I wonder how Macbeth and this will be seen whether they'll be seen as sweat notes or separate chapters I think with this thing as a book author because you want to know what to do with them but I kind of wish that this would at least get the same level of analysis and exegesis that Macbeth is just Macbeth was positioned as an Oscar movie and this is being positioned as the opposite and I just like I want some of our good people on this you know you're the guy you're the man for the guy I want people to write about it interestingly I'd like to read you know critics write about this movie I want Richard Koch's authorship to be you know part of the bargain because even if it's a bit of a throwaway I don't want it to be like disposed of right do you should I see if um my wife can write a 5,000 word essay about the film that would be good because it would be taking money to work directly out of my mouth that would be great uh but I I'm gonna go now and watch down to freedom okay thank you and I'll let you know but I think I can't wait Adam you're the best thank you so much for joining the show uh yeah it's nice to see you guys take care of yourself okay we're talking about men now we're talking about what men do what do men what do men like Francis Ford Coppola do they make a lot of promises and and try their best but don't always deliver so let's let's foreground our discussion of this this new book by Sam Watson with some of your experience recently uh working in the podcasting industry well you you were one of the producers of Brian Rafferty we get to win this time yes and so you have now I think a much deeper understanding of the history of Hollywood's relationship to Vietnam Apocalypse Now perhaps being the pinnacle of that experience one of uh interesting a multi-pinnacle yeah I mean it depends on whether it's a filmmaking perspective whether it's a political perspective whether it's a I mean you know history changes over time but continue damn right you're really an emotionally sophisticated person uh and so you know going into this book obviously Apocalypse Now one of my favorite movies of all time a movie that is much covered in the annals of Hollywood history in part because Francis Ford Coppola is such an amazing subject he's such a showman in the way that he talks about his work and the way that he imagines movies and what movies mean to us and what they mean to him and what they meant to his life so when I got this book which I was really looking forward to and Sam Wasson has written some of the better Hollywood books in the last 10 years I think this is his eighth book and I was a very big fan of The Big Goodbye Chinatown in the last years of Hollywood I think that's his most exciting book but he wrote a hugely acclaimed Bob Fosse biography which was ultimately adapted into Fosse Burden on FX he wrote a book about the making of breakfast at Tiffany's he most recently wrote an oral history of Hollywood with Ginny Basinger the long time um Wesleyan professor who's you know one of the most wizened people about the history of business very experienced guy but come to my open the book this book is really using Apocalypse Now as the sign through which to tell the story now on the one hand it makes a lot of sense yeah the production of Apocalypse Now was very very complicated torturous and can be seen clearly as a metaphor for the way that Coppola pursued projects on the other hand we know a lot about the making of Apocalypse Now so what did you think when you when you opened what did you think it was gonna be what did you think when you started going through it I was slightly surprised and I remember texting you about it just because you know in addition to having worked on that podcast which is from Brian Matthews wonderful podcast I hope everyone listened to um you know I have seen Hearts of Darkness which is the 1991 documentary co-directed by Eleanor Coppola um Christopher Coppola's wife and someone we talked to um when do we get to one this time uh about the making of Apocalypse Now and I am also a giant fan of Eleanor Coppola's book Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now and also for a second book Notes on Life which are both memoirs about I mean in the first case the making of Apocalypse Now and Hearts of Darkness she reads excerpts on it um but are about a marriage or about uh being a creative a woman and a person in marriage but also a creative person and career and family you know it's it's really rich interesting stuff written I like I think with a lot with a lot of insight um and also like a lovely like very spare style I really recommend those books so I was like I kind of know most of this already and the choice to write in what I would call a very close third person which I think is trying to evoke this this style and the grandeur of Francis Coppola who is like one of the great living characters um and I'm not you know I've only seen video of him speak but every piece you read about him everything that you hear him say even his Instagram account is just it's like a hoot he is he's a force he draws you in he is a raconteur in like the greatest sense so that so it's like trying to communicate that but not in his voice I thought that was a pretty difficult task to set up for yourself well so I think one of the things that I think the reason this book exists and I don't know if it would make sense for it to exist without this is that Watson had incredible access to Coppola's archives yeah so that includes all kinds of communications from the production company and studio that he oversaw from in the years American Zoetrope that includes communicates to family members to colleagues to studio executives over the years that includes personal diary entries and that also includes access to and interviews with many many many people reportedly hundreds of people or reportedly hundreds of interviews of people were close to Coppola across roughly his childhood through the present day but for the most part focusing on I would say 1968 through 1982 is kind of like the primary time of coverage so in those years you have it's really just the most remarkable film career even including Steven Spielberg including George Lucas including Martin Scorsese what Francis Ford Coppola accomplished and the rise and fall arc of his career across those years and what he aspired to and what he was able to pull off there's no blueprint for it no one's really ever done it quite in the same way that he did you know I wouldn't believe it if someone tried to do it now he seems like a madman all the time when you hear about things that he did so because he had access all of these people all of these you know these telexes and these letters and all of this material the author is attempting to do is doing what you're describing which is almost trying to narrate without subjectivity it's like there is an all-knowingness but the all-knowingness is emanating from the same all-knowingness that Francis Ford Coppola communicates with you know that he is such a he's so self-aware that when he gives great speeches he says some people would say that what I'm saying is pretentious and maybe it is but here's why it's not like that's the kind of thing that he would be willing to say and the movie has I would assume the book has the same tone a little bit of an alienating tone over 350 pages so if you combine that tone with the apocalypse now coverage I didn't really love that part of it I would say almost everything else in the book I thought was fascinating totally and I do also understand why you know practically the apocalypse now section which includes flashbacks to his childhood and making of both godfathers um and the conversation and kind of like all that all the high stakes up until apocalypse now um which includes just like a tremendous amount of like real estate I mean it's just absolutely dizzying the number of places that are owned and sold and where everyone's living especially if you live in Los Angeles and you're like wow that seems really nice the 60s were way different and 70s um but so there's the apocalypse now section and then there is the one from the heart section and more time is spent in apocalypse now but I understand why because one is the big gamble and the descent into insanity that paid off and then that fuels the next big gamble that just that does not pay off whatever you think of you know one from the heart artistically or you'll talk about the re-release because you got to see it but I mean his production company uh was sold and the movie bombed so yeah I think for the listeners at home if you whether you read the book or not it's probably important to put some context around American zoetrope and what it was that Coppola attempted which was and we've seen artists do this over the years in fact United Artists the movie studio was founded on this premise that studios should be run by the creatives and they should be artists led they should be led by filmmakers in 1970s American filmmakers more than ever were granted a kind of power to take bold chances that led to my favorite period of movie history but in the process of doing that Coppola who was a musician son from Long Island middle class family a guy whose dad never quite was able to accomplish what he wanted to and that colors a lot of his point of view um has big big big dreams and big ambitions in that classical I will improve upon my father's legacy kind of way and one of his big ambitions was to start a studio that would operate outside of the Hollywood system be managed and operated by filmmakers and particularly by him but he has this because he when he went to Hofstra and then later UCLA where he studied film has this powder familiar style he's a big guy big voice that great rock and so like you said people would follow him so the George Lucases the John Miliuses of the world he befriended Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese and all the people who became his peers he always kind of felt like the older uncle in that crew and his dream was to make movies with this cohort with this generation of people at his studio which would be located outside of the walls of Hollywood and wouldn't operate the same way financially and would just create artistic brilliance but over time as he has more success and failure and success and failure as is the arc of his life it becomes increasingly about him and about what he's doing and so the book paints this very complicated portrait of a wild egomaniac and also an empathy machine and there's like two personas that are at war with each other and they're probably best represented by those two movies that you just talked about where Apocalypse Now is the movie that seems like it's the movie made by the egomaniac evil madman but then was an incredible success and paves the way for a portraiture of love in a complicated time made with a group of people who are desperately trying to hold this company together and then it fails miserably and I feel like there's a bitter lesson about what people want from the world and what they're willing to accept and I he's just um his ambitions obviously are often beyond his grasp but it's so cool to watch the details of someone trying and to me I wish the book was more of and does ultimately become about in the second half what American Zoetrope was as opposed to the makings of the movie I love books about the makings of the movie but I have watched so much about the makings of the movie I will say in the defense of it does a lot on American Zoetrope and it does a lot on like the 18 other iterations of a studio or a production company or something that he tried to start before there are a lot of sections um of Francis's just like big idea you know including like electronic cinema which I've read a lot about and you're still gonna have to kind of explain to me what that vision really was because he is he's thinking so boundlessly I don't understand yeah I don't either and a really interesting thing about the book and really anytime you're interacting with Coppola's work is like just the nature of artistic genius and the nature of creativity and it can seem just really really out there and unmanaged until the plane lands and sometimes the plane lands and sometimes the plane doesn't um but I just did read a lot of business plans you know and he had many he had many technological plans he had many sorts of things that I don't my eyes started to glaze over anyway so I don't know whether I would have wanted to go any further well I think when I say American I'm more interested in American Zoetrope yeah I think what I'm interested in is what the book is ultimately not that interested in which is the movies that were ultimately made at that studio yeah and there were a handful of really interesting movies and there were a lot of movies that were made and we can talk about them because they're all kind of if not just incidental critical to the story of this book but when it was a production company it produced The Ring People which is this important transitional movie for Coppola starring Shirley Knight then THX 1138 George Lucas' debut feature and of course The Godfather and American Graffiti and The Conversation and The Godfather too and then they start distributing international cinema sort of like a page taken out of one of his mentor Roger Corman strategies who famously licensed world classics and found a way to sell them to audiences in interesting ways but by the time he gets to the mid to late 70s he starts to get interested in platforming Carol Ballard you know who made The Black Stallion he gets interested in working with Kurosawa he gets interested in working with Jean-Luc Godard like these people start coming to him after the guy who made The Godfather and Godfather 2 The Conversation Apocalypse Now is like I'm a mogul now and then he greenlights movies by um Finn Vendors he greenlights a movie uh by Caleb Deschanel who's best known as a cinematographer but the lone movie he directed The Escape Artist and these movies are all like they're kind of like the A24 neon movies of their time they're the cool indie movies some of them are good some of them are not so good some of them are forgotten to time um but like I wanted pages and pages about that and what the movie industry was at that time and the book is not interested in that and so I can't criticize the book for not being what I wanted to be but I think I expected it to be something a little different and there are even like glimmers of it even you know because they would throw huge parties on the studio lot every Friday night even though they owed millions of dollars to like eight different conglomerates and as you said everyone like wanted to be there and wanted to hang out with him you know like Godard and like Gene Kelly who's an advisor on like uh One from the Heart like they're just like wandering around all the time and you get little glimpses of what a magical place it seems like even though it also seems like just absolute it's just not how I make it. It's financial chaos. It is financial and also like efficiency there is no efficiency chaos.
I'm glad you brought this up I want to talk about this I think you and I probably do not relate to Prince of Coppola at all. No. Obviously we don't have his talent. I do have a copy of the Telex that he sends asking for supplies to the Philippines.
So one case of Grunard Champagne one case of Witch Hazel one case of Ozium parentheses a bug repellent one case of specific cigarette papers I mean I can go this is like four pages long and this is the kind of primary sourcing I want you know like which can tomatoes and which champagne do you need to ship to you because you can't get them in the Philippines. So that I relate to. There are times when he seems like a demanding tyrant and there are times. That's called having taste.
Sure. And then there are other times where he seems like a very sweet ship boat captain you know where everyone's sort of working towards what the captain really wants to get us to save harbor whether it be through the production of the film or the execution of a large company. One copy of Hemingway Short Stories in our time or any of the quote mixed stories. Complete set of all Bob Dylan records.
Jackson Brown, Grateful Dead, Tom Sternberg might be able to get all those for free by calling those people. Really good. Copy of Paperback Shogun. Like what a legend.
These are all just things that he wanted whilst making Bob Dylan in the Philippines. I mean this is the upside of having access to all of those documents is that we know the true details of why he needed every Bob Dylan recording which frankly shout out to Francis Ford Coppola for having tremendous taste. The book itself has a very unusual structure in that it kind of pings around chronologically and I would say sometimes it's very successful and sometimes it's not. The ways in which it is successful is that you do get this long and deep exploration of the production of One from the Heart and the failure of American Zoetrope as a company.
All of that was fascinating to me especially just having seen One from the Heart reprise reprise reprise. That's like a new cut of the film which is just reissued in theaters around the country. It's not so successful when we get like two-thirds of one chapter on the making of The Godfather which is again also a story that I don't need an entire book on based on how much I've consumed around it but to just tease out like Watson is really good at understanding the thematic correlations of how Coppola is choosing to tell stories at a certain stage of his life and during The Godfather the reason that movie is unlocked is because he sees this potboiler that is a very clear metaphor for America but also a very clear metaphor for what he's going through as a family man at this point in his time. Those characters are so rich because he's Michael and his older brother who we learn about in the book is funny and so when you get that kind of psychological clarity about a person or you know assume clarity because I don't know Francis Ford Coppola officially co-signed every word that Watson wrote here but he seems to have a real insight into the psychology and then just jump back to something you know again like more than a third of the books now fair to say yeah so sometimes it's helpful to go to the childhood but as soon as you get away from it you're going back to something or at least i felt like i was going back to something that is well covered around and i don't know that i necessarily know how i would have adjudicated this right but it didn't feel totally right to me i agree and you know some of that is just when you're reading a book about a filmmaker who you really admire and whose films you really admire like yeah you want some more stuff on the dot bother you know like rumblefish thing i think it's like one paragraph yes it's like not even talked about as a movie it's just kind of which i understand why you know you have to make decisions as a writer but it basically elides 1984 all the way till 2023 yeah there's nothing about it and that's okay it's okay because i think it's very purposely a you know a time capsule of that era but if you wanted to hear the way that he like took paycheck jobs in the 80s to then rebuild and then hold up his winery over time and why he was directing jack with robin williams in 1996 like none of that is here that's not what the book is not interested in that it's only interested in the madman building his empire and that of course has come back because the book is being released and clearly was approved by the coppola estate because of megalopolis this movie that is in theory coming out later this year starring adam driver that reportedly francis four coppola has put 100 million dollars of his own money into and the book kind of ends on this cliffhanger of sorts about the production of this movie um but yeah i think i would liked an entire chapter about the making of the conversation um and that's not here um godfather 2 possibly the greatest american film ever made not a lot of time spent on that one in this book and i do also i sorry to say this on a film nerd podcast but like coppola the man this book is interested in certain aspects of coppola the man but i'm certainly interested in coppola the person and that person talking and um and his grandeur and his you know flights of fancy and wild associations i mean every profile including one that my husband zap baron wrote um that was 2021 i think yeah was it that long yeah it was it was because it was right before my son was born and francis was like please let me know when he's here because i really like babies which is just an incredible thing it is in the book and i was very excited to see that the other thing that he told my husband was that he was just gonna like roll down to the local napa um like movie theater and introduce steven spielberg's west side story like no one asked him to do that he was just gonna show up on friday night and be like let me tell you about my friend steven which is awesome you know that's just legendary one of one stuff and you do want a sense of that person like that is part of the myth too right and that's infused into the movies and it's certainly infused into that's part of the reason that so many people stick around at zoatrip studios even when they're like literally not being paid i thought that you know that entire segment about everyone who's just like sure we'll stick around through financial ruin because we like working here was a testament to the power of his person like a cult of personality so you want a little bit of a sense of that i think that one thing that has clearly communicated is that he was very good he's always been very good since college at getting people to believe in his vision yeah into getting on board and for a couple of like burned out cynics like us that's that's a skill you know to get to get people who are in working day jobs to follow you to the ends of the earth to make one from the heart which is a perfectly fun it's remarkable and that is communicated really well over and over again in the book there are times where again i felt like wasson is incredibly good at class by clarifying the unique psychological tension between francis and his father carmine who's you know an aspirant composer and their uneasy relationship and francis's kind of adulation for his older brother but also realizing he's very much kind of a run-to relative to his older brother who's this aspirational figure and we get that you know roughly a third into the book it starts to go back to his childhood and then it kind of goes and we get like callbacks to a time again of course like carmine plays a really significant role in the godfather co-composing with hino rota and he later composes a new score for a screening of abel gans's napoleon in 1980 i think which has become like a big movie event of the year according to vincent candy but i would have liked to have known like what were the conversations like between carmine and francis in 1980 i don't really have a feel for that you know i mean so it is very it picks and chooses where to dive deep and where not to dive deep and so it is still uh it's a refracted portrait it's not the definitive account i'm not sure how do you feel about that kind of a biography it is up front about that as well and i think even like the subtitle is uh francis fort coppola story because it is such a life and you know so many rises and falls and you have to make choices when you're doing anything so well if you're saying what's your last book was 600 pages yeah why not the 750 page doorstop definitive biography francis fort coppola he doesn't want to do it because you couldn't get it done by the time megalopolis is gonna come out no offense i mean and that's fine you know it's important to that's making hard on the meaningfulness of megalopolis well the book does i mean it really sets up that third section which is very short but it's like 30 years ago she started writing megalopolis yeah yeah and and from what we know megalopolis it is very tied into watson's idea of what both what one from the heart and zootrop studios meant to coppola in terms of like building his new like film utopia his new way of doing things which is like again i haven't seen or read that megalopolis but it's like the text of megalopolis and also the text of how he's financing it and he's building a whole new thing in peachtree city georgia yeah so coppola's big concepts and american zootrop is defined by this is effectively community oriented and what he does is he looks at the building of social structure society cities as pathways to a more convenient efficient and meaningful life for people and that can be a lot of things can mean the proliferation of the family can mean a robust arts experience it can mean you know commerce and making money and being employed i mean a lot of different things for his purposes about making movies but he's always very community oriented megalopolis you know of course like is a mega city and the idea of that movie is a mega city and one from the heart in its way with its crafted soundstage approach to one of the most iconic cities in the world las vegas is about this kind of recreation outside of the experience of a normal city of a normal movie going experience and so that movie is such a there are a lot of movies that are like this but not not so many with the same level of mythology where the conception and the idea and the person talking about the making of it is inherently more interesting than the movie itself and the movie itself is almost a rebuke to its ideas yeah because of how stripped down it is and it's a simple love story about a man and a woman who don't seem to have a lot of chemistry who are like in love or at least together and then they decide to break apart and they're away from each other for a while then they come back together that's basically the whole story it's a sort of jukebox musical entirely soundtracked by songs written by tom waits it starts right before us and terry garr and it takes place in the sound stage to las vegas environment it is created sort of electronically as you suggested i don't totally understand some of the filmmaking methodology that he was applying though it is described in detail in the book um but it comes on the heels of that mega bet that he makes on himself to make apocalypse now which pays off because the you know effectively the rough cut of the movie plays canon wins the palm d'or and then goes on to be a mega financial success in one of the most remembered american movies and then work comes out a couple years later and flops the hardest movie can flop after he's poured over 20 million dollars into a movie that when you see it you will have a hard time locating 20 million dollars um i think i saw the ria show which car is about 15 minutes out of the original and it is significantly more light on its feet so to speak some really good performances ral julia is magnificent in this movie um terry garr even better like screen presence dancer um romantic figure than i had remembered uh it's it's a it is like to use your phrase it is a flight of fancy of a movie it's not an event yeah it's a pretty small movie an intimate movie sincere almost achingly sincere but for his dream to have kind of died on this movie's hill is the weirdest bitterest possible ending and i guess he's haunted by it i don't really know like what do you think when you get to the end of the production of this movie which we hear about in great detail in the book i still don't totally know how he feels about it i don't i don't either and i think the missing piece from it which like and i don't blame wasson for this because it comes in bits and pieces but one turn the heart is also very clearly inspired by or is coppola trying to get his arms around some aspect of his marriage as well and it's made during one of like what seemed to be and what eleanor coppola says as well but like many fraught times in their marriage and the book does kind of get at that um and it uses i guess you know i don't think that coppola was particularly faithful nor was that a secret and so it makes reference to that but it's never like the main text and eleanor coppola's books also talk about that about about the difficulties in their marriage so it's not like it's avoided but it's never dealt with head-on and you know can you ask anyone to like deal with whatever in their marriage that they're still in amazingly however many years later you know people come to all sorts of whatever's between two people is between two people but i don't know if you can get them to you as a third party can get them to face it and be able to articulate it and if the movie's so tied up in that on top of everything else it's like a you know i don't know whether anyone's ever gonna get there well the book is simultaneously very direct and circumspect about the nature of the infidelities and what happens between eleanor and francis you understand why because we just said people are not gonna go on the record and talk about how they work through the challenges of their marriage but when you have an artist who is so clearly working through you know wasson talks about how when francis was a kid he was like a bit of a technological problem solver you know very much like his friend ryan de palma kind of a gadget kid understood how things worked and you can see the conversation in his concepts of surveillance and kind of the tools we use to track each other you could see himself in that story you know godfather 2 where you're kind of becoming the great leader and what does the dark side look like who you betray in the face of that if you've had this extraordinary success you can feel francis in the movie one from the heart is a movie where like it's very clear that someone was unfaithful in the relationship and then the other person can't forgive him until they do yeah and then they get back together spoiler alert for one from the heart just 41 years old at this point um and so it's a tricky thing like it's a tricky thing to write so mythologically and esoterically while also including telexes about how many crates of champagne should be delivered to the philippines you know they're in contrast with each other they have such amazing detail but then for him to just very quickly say and on the set of apocalypse now francis for coppola had an affair with a playboy buddy and that's the last we ever hear of that ever again and you know why because he has respect to the artist respect to the man doesn't want to exploit you know that memory doesn't want to hurt owner coppola but if you're gonna say it then your mind starts racing you're like i want to know more about this and the illusion of those things is really complex so it's a weirdly incredibly satisfying and deeply unsatisfying book at the exact same time which is actually how a lot of francis for coppola but i don't know if we like totally wrapped our arms around it but it's what we got was invigorating and fascinating yeah yeah i agree with you what um was there something you wanted more of something you want to hear more about um well i always want more sophia um some cute cameos yeah that's okay it's mostly about how she got to stay up late like run back and forth between stuff um and obviously like she has her own career that reflects everything that went on in this book and everything that goes on in her mother's books and she has an archive of her own exactly yeah she has an archive of her so you know is that the book for you what do you mean would you write the path to paradise 2 sophia story sure you would but it would be i would have to do so much filling in because she is such the opposite of francis where he i mean you know it's like that thing they say about the younger children that don't have to like learn to talk until much later because the older siblings just did all the talking like her father has done all the talking for her entire life so she does other things interesting would you like would you like to meet that challenge again i don't like to meet anybody that i admire so you met her yeah over zoom and it was very stressful um she's very nice no she's really nice she's great i just would feel self-conscious i'm like wouldn't feel cool enough it's weird that in these environments that are portrayed in the book that she's not insane yeah because these are very stressful environments that their family has been exposed to and everybody raises their family differently i don't really know the right way to do anything but i would say the making of apocalypse now seems unhealthy in a variety of ways right sure yeah so she's kind of great i think she learned to adapt she went to a lot of different places you know she talks about how they you know were like a circus they went everywhere because he didn't want to be away from his family so i don't know you get put in a lot of different situations you learn how to talk to people do you feel that at this stage that we no longer need to mythologize these 70s filmmakers anymore i mean who are we gonna mythologize instead john mctiernan i think he mythologized himself right into federal penitentiary so um that's like that's true also cold was still going like that's amazing you know so he took a long break but yeah well but i mean i think like the medallopolis at all i mean it could be completely mystifying but there is just something about taking this like big swing and extending his own mythology that is exciting where does he sit for you among those guys who were featured so prominently in this book so just within this book yeah i guess among his generation his cohort not like of all time i mean you have to respect the game you know like the godfather godfather 2 the conversation something i'm forgetting apocalypse now that's the 70s i mean when you wrote patent which came out right of course right that's that's insane yes like who will ever and so you know i feel like i'm about to like be built you know making up some sort of rubric or something but like nobody's had nobody's had a run like that in that way that's amazing i agree what is your favorite post-apocalypse now francis or coppola movie probably rumblefish or you're not an outsider's person well i guess i am but rumblefish is more stylized yeah i see him adaptations black and white a lot of dutch angles a lot of shadow and light yeah i don't know i think i saw it at a time when slightly slightly more pretension appealed to me you know you can always tell something interesting about a filmmaker when you look at the distributors of their various movies and he's worked for them all i said the rainmaker because my favorite some people might say that i haven't seen the rainmaker in some time i will tell you i acquired a japanese import of the blu-ray because it's the only way i get my hands on the blu-ray oh wow okay is it available on tbd it is yes okay but you need a blu-ray i like blu-ray yeah it's a much better format so but will you have like regional formatages no i have a region free player oh i can play how much more does that cost 20 bucks what so why is everyone getting a region only wonderful question people get really mad about that i know i know i used to before i realized how easy it was to acquire a region free player but i've got one all right um it takes five minutes of googling figure out how to get one not very hard okay you can't just go on amazon well they can be acquired there yeah you gotta figure out make sure you're getting the right one though okay what's your favorite poster pop glyph now what one movie um i don't know i i have a similar place in my heart for the outsiders you have rumblefish meaning i saw it at a young age obviously introduced us to a lot of young actors so i really really love quite a bit i've got a little little corner in my heart for gardens of stone which is like his least seen movie um stars my guy james conn in a very very interesting complicated performance very quiet very slow movie kind of the anti-copla in a lot of ways but clearly a very personal one for him i mean dracula still rips pretty hard you know that's like a paycheck movie that he absolutely crushed and was a huge hit and i think that's how sofia meets keanu reeves yeah sure makes sense and then they dated so that's cool okay that's your lasting memory i don't know the 90s are important i'm also team godfather 3 is kind of good yeah i was listening to that rewatchable fairly recently and it's like nobody's wrong about Sophia's performance but the Venom you know CR's Venom it's like it was his decision to put her in it you know like we need to blame him as much as Luke and Sophia I don't disagree imagine that movie that was one of the writer yeah it's a significantly better film it is I'll tell you what most of the movies are good I think the Tetra Twixt era is interesting I think those movies are worth seeing seems like they'll be more influential on the look and style of Megalopolis than say Gardens of Stone or Godfather 3 but it's been pretty checkered that's why when you say the 70s is so remarkable and then you look at the 80s and the 90s which has movies that people like people certainly like Peggy Sue Got Married I think that's a real sentimental favorite for people we're gonna do we'll do a Hall of Fame when Megalopolis comes around it's kind of weird because like can you get to 10 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and yeah you could kind of right on the line there yeah you could it's not like doing Scorsese where you're like what the fuck am I gonna do which is interesting because he's you know obviously George Lucas has even fewer than that but what he contributed you could argue how do you feel George Lucas comes out in this book the same way he does in everybody yeah it's true that he is a geeky reserved but a very principled person who feels that he's right about a lot of things but also is willing to be the kind of like maitre d to his heroes all the way up until the moment when he was not and then as soon as he doesn't have to be that anymore he's on his own but you know I love that thing about I'll direct Apocalypse Now and if I die George Lucas will take over and if George Lucas dies John Milius will take over I love that Coppola can never not see Lucas in that way even though Lucas is just about to release Star Wars which will literally change movies forever and he has that paternalistic approach to his friends which is getting bad and I wonder against whom it shakes because you've got to imagine that some of these guys are like alright Francis you haven't made a good movie in 25 years no one checked with Steven Spielberg to see if Francis wanted him to introduce West Side Story at the local Napa Theatre no but it's nice that he's supporting Steven I like that they could do that for each other is there a filmmaker that you want to see this kind of book about?
I mean the first person who jumped into my head and this is I mean the import is not the same but I'm just really waiting for Nancy Meyers to write a book yes I don't know I don't know what she's doing but you know but that would be as much about the 80s and 90s big studio era and she was a major part of from like Private Benjamin on and her marriage and working with her husband and then ex-husband and you know that one is important to me I'm trying to think of you know respected old-timer people because I feel like everyone's gonna be like oh of course she said Nancy Meyers yeah I understand why you said it I'm sure she's got great stories yeah she's also a writer so I'd like that I think I would like a first person like a memoir or a yeah I know that they're unreliable they withhold way too much way too much yeah but they also give on the other side you know you need to have lived an interesting life like you don't have to be a good person either like John Landis has had a very controversial career he's also been at the helm of some of the most memorable movies of the 70s and 80s and like the Sam Watson approach to the John Landis story would be really interesting obviously it wouldn't be as net as kind of iconographically as Coppola is right but it's interesting I don't know I mean honestly like do I want this kind of thing for the QTs of the world yeah of course but I also feel like I've been reading them real time very closely for the last 30 years this is one where I was like I wasn't there when one from the heart flopped so it's fun to understand everything that went into it I wasn't there when they sent telexes do you wish you were do you wish you lived in a different time I mean I kind of feel like we did for the first 20 years of our life because we didn't have cell phones on the internet do you think we are the last great generation for that reason yeah I do you do because we were not born with the internet it's over for everyone after us I don't believe that I believe in the future that's really beautiful I believe in my young child and your young child thanks and everything that they'll make do you think they have a bit of the madman philosopher in them maybe together they do Knox has the madman and Alice has the philosopher so it's good for one of them I'd love to see their film any closing thoughts on Francis Ford Coppola I'm excited for Megalopolis of course I am too I'm excited for the people of Peachtree City I don't understand so he's taking over the city no but it's just like a suburb of Atlanta like an exurb I guess and it used to be his claim to fame is that you just drove everywhere in gallcarts it was like one of those cities yeah yeah it's like a retirement community in Florida and then I don't know he took over some hotel and is purportedly building like his own production facility with like everything you need for posts and places for everyone to stay and sort of like a whole because there's a lot of production in and around Atlanta now because of the Georgia tax credit so he's like it's like his field of dreams but in Atlanta for filmmaking would you recommend Paradise to movie fans? yes if you're a Coppola fan yes absolutely yeah I would too it's very interesting it's my own personal perspective that I think has shaped a little bit of some apprehension around certain aspects of the story but it's really well done and it does capture a couple of moments in movie history that have never been seen quite through this prism so it's worth checking out well thanks to Adam Damon thanks to Amanda thanks to our producer Bobby Wagner for his work on this episode next week we'll be back we're gonna break down the SAG Awards the Producers Guild Awards the Independent Spirit Awards oh and we're gonna do Oscars we'll do one last best picture remember when I told you right before Drive Away It All started what did you tell me? about the dream I had that Coleman Domingo won the Oscars yes that was so weird it was a real dream I had so we haven't even been doing Oscars I know but it's just on my mind it lives inside you yeah so that's what people have to look forward to on our next episode do you think that's gonna happen? no but what if it does?
what if I'm Adam Webb? okay now we're talking we'll see you next week