Ida Z's Film Class Notes: Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola
1) Mast and Kawin explain that Francis Ford Coppola is central to the American film industry during
the Hollywood Renaissance period.
2) Coppola began as an assistant to Roger Corman before writing scripts for other directors such as
Patton in 1970.
3) He founded his own independent company, American Zoetrope in 1969 and began to direct his own
features in the late 1960s.
4) He is perhaps most well-known for his films of the 1970s including:
The Godfather (1972),
The Godfather Part II (1974),
The Conversation (1974)
Apocalypse Now (1979).
5) For a time, The Godfather was the highest grossing film ever made
a)Won three Oscars in 1972 for Best Picture
b)Best Actor (Marlon Brando)
c) Best Adapted Screenplay.
6)Although gangster films had been made before, no one treated characters with the psychological depth
and complexity that Coppola does in the first two Godfather films.
7) During the 1980s, Coppola made some modest films that allowed him to experiment more with film
style.

Rumble Fish (1983)
1) Coppola directed Rumble Fish in 1983, based on the novel by S.E. Hinton.
2) The film is notable for its avant-garde style with a film noir feel.
3) Rumble Fish is shot on stark high-contrast black-and-white film
using the spherical cinematographic process with allusions
to French New Wave cinema and German Expressionism.
4)The film is about two brothers (Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke) involved in gangs while living a
Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Writer Glenn Kenny recounts the history of the film (Rumble Fish and The Outsiders) :
"Rumble Fish (1983) is a movie that is almost painfully personal, in ways both direct and indirect. It was a companion film to the higher-profile one that preceded it, The Outsiders—the two were shot practically back-to-back. But for followers of Coppola’s work, both projects were almost entirely unexpected, unlikely literary adaptations of young-adult novels by S. E. Hinton.

The Outsiders is based on Hinton’s first novel, about alienated boys in the Midwest fighting and loving and losing and finding themselves. Hinton wrote it in 1965, before YA fiction was a thing—and she did it while she herself, for “S. E.” stands for Susan Eloise, was still a teenager. As a result, The Outsiders resonates with a kind of plainspoken sense of both romantic yearning and confusion; it’s a book that doesn’t have everything figured out. That’s a salient feature of all Hinton’s early work.

What brought Coppola to it? He took on The Outsiders, he has frequently recounted, after it was suggested to him by a group of middle-schoolers. Certainly, for a filmmaker who had earlier adapted the best-selling writer Mario Puzo and the classic chronicler of colonialism and its discontents Joseph Conrad, Hinton did not seem an author he would turn to entirely of his own volition. But the affinity was there, and the deeper affinity was there with Rumble Fish, which he decided to make while he was still shooting The Outsiders. According to Jon Lewis’s valuable Coppola book Whom God Wishes to Destroy . . ., he once described Rumble Fish as the carrot dangling at the end of the stick that he came to see The Outsiders as.

Out of Hollywood
The work on both films got him out of Hollywood (figuratively), San Francisco (where he ran his Zoetrope Studios), and, yes, himself, in a sense. Just before, he had made One from the Heart at his facility, and it was an unexpectedly troubled production; in this period he had also worked himself into a frenzy over Wim Wenders’ Hammett, which he executive produced and which underwent considerable reshooting. (The experience was harrowing for Wenders and inspired his 1982 movie about moviemaking, The State of Things.)
“It was chaos incorporated at Zoetrope,” Coppola told New York Times writer Aljean Harmetz. “Like fighting a war.” The extent to which his crises were of his own making is arguable; in any event, he was once again, as had been the case after Apocalypse Now, in dire need of respite. “I used to be a great camp counselor,” he joked to Harmetz, “and the idea of being with half a dozen kids in the country making a movie seemed like being a camp counselor again. It would be like a breath of fresh air. I’d forget my troubles and have some laughs again.”

Rumble Fish
1)Rumble Fish is a movie that takes place in the past, the present, and the future.
2)Its visuals are defined by that.
3)Time is always on its mind and not on its side.
4)(Clocks are often prominent in this homage to youth,
5) a nice rhyme with their near omnipresence in Ingmar Bergman’s film on old age, Wild Strawberries.)
6)Shots in the opening scene include fast-motion views of clouds passing in the sky,
7) the sun speeding across the skyscrapers of the part of Tulsa none of its characters ever get to.
8)The movie is full of ghosts.
9) In the diner/pool hall called Benny’s Billiards, the boys—Rusty-James, his tough-guy pals Smokey
and B.J. (Chris Penn), and the more straight-arrow Steve (Vincent Spano), who wants to be the gang’s
Homer—hop and jump and slide around on the furniture like phantoms, or maybe wannabe
phantoms (the drive to self-destruct is strong in adolescents), or maybe future members of a modern
dance troupe.
10)The proprietor, Benny (Tom Waits), admonishes them to watch their language;
11)his voice is strangely disembodied, like maybe he’s not even there, and for all the attention the boys
give him, maybe he’s not.
12)In strides a tall fellow named Midget (Laurence Fishburne, the boy gunner of Apocalypse Now, all
grown up and rather intimidating) to announce, “Biff Wilcox is looking for you, Rusty-James.”
13)The dialogue seems as ritualized as the movement: “Bring it down, bring it down, cool it off.”
14) Fugitive shadows of West Side Story accompany Rusty-James and his sad little gang to the rumble,
where Rusty-James gets a Christlike wound in his side."