Take One (Mar-Apr 1973)

Columns Outs You don’t make your first movie and _ wonder, at the same time, who will see it. You just want to get it made. The wondering, and the worrying, come later. At least, they ought to. The business of American filmmaking makes it happen quite another way. Films, in ‘the industry”, are called “projects” when they're in the planning stage, “shows” while they're being worked on, and — often — “product” once they’re finished. The industrial metaphor can be extended a little further, too. | went to a screening recently where a press agent confided that the movie | was about to see hadn't opened in New York yet, but “was playing in at least a dozen markets around the country.” “Swell,” | said. “Next time try it out in theaters.” The press agent looked blank, and | let it pass. Nothing gets made because it's good, at least not in Hollywood. First, and always uppermost, everyone figures the odds on breaking the bank. Merit is no matter. A friend of mine had a fine idea some months ago to make a movie, set in the early '20s, about baseball. He had good credentials — his second, studiobacked movie was about to come out, word on it was good, and his first film had gotten nice reviews. He was listened to attentively, with the kind of edgy friendliness, casual and forced at the same time, that generally goes down in these “story conferences.” My friend spun out a spare outline of the idea, tried to get a little of its color and ambience across, then sat back and got told (on several different occasions, by executives at several different studios) that his idea was unworkable. Sports movies have never made money, he heard. Also, sports movies are expensive to make, especially in period, and they have no sale value in Europe, where audiences are baffled by the intricacies of the game you're trying to dramatize. My friend argued that he wasn't trying to make a training film for international Little Leaguers, that he had no intention of “dramatizing” baseball, but only using it as a background, sort of a mythic backdrop. No use. Fine kid. What else you got? The only way to go up against the studio battery of formulas, forecasts and predispositions is to have had a monster success. Then, the reasoning runs, you can do just about what you want to. But by that time, it’s very often too late. Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin have each enjoyed that kind of success. The Godfather bankrolled Coppola so that he could make The Conversation, something he’d been trying to get on ever since he arranged a deal between American Zoetrope, his platoon of young Turks, and Warner Brothers. George Lucas made THX 1138 under that arrangement, and Warner Brothers didn’t like it. They didn’t like any of the other American Zoetrope ideas, either, so the studio packed it in. Warners, Coppola likes to say now, missed out on getting The Conversation and American Graffiti, which were part of the Zoetrope parcel. For their part, Warners is probably shedding no tears over The Conversation, which is not, as Variety likes to put it, this year’s b.o. champion. There is probably some dark muttering over Graffiti, though, which turned out to hit that happy and elusive combination, good reviews and big audiences: prestige and money all in one jolly bundle. In any case, without The Godfather, The Conversation might well still be a script on Coppola’s desk corner. What may be even more important, though, than Coppola getting to make what he wanted is the fact that he chose The Conversation to do. He took his Godfather grubstake and spent it on a difficult, risky subject, all about an unglamorous (hmmm...) man (well, better than woman), whose job has. bitter moral (oh, Jesus) and political (forget it) implications. The film is flawed, although not significantly, and it asks — as well as deserves — a certain patience, but it is a movie, too, made with intelligence and with great enterprise, intricate and urgent and immediately important. Coppola has a dedication to filmmaking, to moulding mainstream films into a more intimate personal expression. He does not think ahead to bookings and projected grosses. Making the movie is what matters most to him. In this he is like feistier, young filmmakers such as Marty Scorsese, Terry Malick or Brian DePalma or Robert Altman, and much apart from his own contemporaries (and partners in The Directors Company), Friedkin and Bogdanovich. In the name of affection and regard for the past, Bogdanovich has been refurbishing and regurgitating the old styles, the old genres, reconditioning antiques in the cause of homage. He has dropped “Orson’s” name in his columns like punctuation, and has talked so much about Ford and Hawks and Hitchcock that Bogdanovich’s own movies have been compared with their work. Often the comparisons were unfavorable, but more often they weren’t even deserved. The fact that Bogdanovich could get them made at all was a sort of victory for him. He wrote a lot, talked a lot, about his love for Hollywood as a place and as a style, and by doing so has constructed a whole aesthetic out of commerciality. Friedkin is even more forward about his general contempt for anything that doesn't turn a strong buck. In her fine, fierce review of The Exorcist, Pauline Kael quoted Friedkin as_ saying that whenever he hears that a_ director doesn't want to make audiences laugh, or cry, or be scared, than he ‘smells art”. He sounds like some _ fastidious father whose child has just had an unscheduled bowel movement. There is a tone of vague impatience in what he says, as well as a strong current of condescension. Coppola is free of this, and free too, probably, of whatever self-consciousness or shame is its root. People like Terry Malick and Robert Altman make Friedkin look bad, but these are the directors Coppola allies himself with, at least aesthetically. That he should choose to do business with Friedkin and Bogdanovich, on the other hand, is an indication not only of Coppola’s complexity, but of a shrewd business instinct that insures his own survival. So even though Coppola and several others have the financial foundation to enjoy freedom of choice, most of their contemporaries don't. They have to scuffle, make serious compromises or become (like Altman) the complete maverick. | value Altman above all for his independence, for his insistence on going his own way, wherever it may lead. He, too, has had one huge finantial success (M*A*S*H) and_ several other films that had modest financial returns but significant critical support (McCabe and Mrs. Miller being the most prominent of these). Altman is inconsistent, in all the best and many of the worst ways, but M*A*S*H won him the right to be. Most of the younger American filmmakers are shooting for just that kind of combination, money and reviews, and generally come up with one without the other. With a good set of notices you can keep cooking for a while longer, but you need the big success in order to make your own choices, make your movies your way. To get the success that makes choice possible, compromises usually have to be made, compromises that can work changes. If you win the right to freedom you may not, after the dust settles, know what to do with what you've got. Success has a soothing effect. It’s a tonic, not a stimulant, and is not easily risked. You. start worrying about the “bankability” of your stars, the audience potential in your new project, once you're on top. It’s a kind of altitude sickness, and it seems to come with the territory. You don’t want to blow your success by putting it on the line. That’s why it doesn’t do Friedkin or Bogdanovich any real good to have their freedom and make their own choices. They’d make the same movies with freedom or without it. Jay Cocks 35