Apocalypse Now

August 21, 1979. In just a week I'd be headed off to college for my freshman year, so I'm sure I was equal parts excitement and anxiety. I was spending a listless, job-free summer mooning over a girl that was out of my league. But on that day I had what I think was the most awesome movie-going experience of my life. I saw Apocalypse Now.

I hadn't seen too many films that couldn't be characterized as family friendly. My parents, as if taking orders from Jack Valenti, did not allow me to see R-rated films before I turned 17. I had seen a few since that birthday: An Unmarried Woman was the first, if I recall correctly, and I saw The Deerhunter in my local multiplex (only four screens). That April I had seen Manhattan, which had blown my mind. I had also been catching up with some of the great films of the earlier 70s on HBO, which at that time was a new thing (in those days they didn't operate twenty-four hours a day--they came on at about three in the afternoon).

I had not yet seen a film in New York City. In fact, I had never been to New York without some kind of adult chaperon, either my parents or a school trip. My friend, Bob (who is still my best friend), had seen in the paper that Francis Ford Coppola's long-awaited and much-anticipated film Apocalypse Now was going to open at the Ziegfeld Theater. Tickets could be ordered by clipping out a form in the paper and mailing it in (ah, the world before the Internet). We picked a good day and he sent it in with the money, and the tickets dutifully came.

Bob and I were, and still are of course, major movie geeks. In those days we used to talk movies non-stop (except when we were talking about baseball). We were certainly the only two kids in that high school who could name all of the Oscar-winning Best Pictures, and could name more than one movie directed by Orson Welles (not that there would have been too many who could name even one).

We took the bus into New York. He was an old hand at visiting the city, and we made our way to the Ziegfeld, which was (and still is, I believe) the largest theater in New York that regularly showed films (Radio City Music Hall is much larger, but no longer had a regular movie schedule). We got our programs (Apocalypse Now had no opening or closing credits) and settled in.

From the opening moments I was a goner. The sound of a helicopter flitted around our heads. Apocalypse Now was the first film to use stereo surround sound--a quadrophonic, six-track soundtrack that was the forerunner of today's 5.1. It was an instantly mesmerizing experience, especially when the music of The Doors kicked in, and the jungle foliage went up with napalm. Then, fading into Martin Sheen in that hotel room in Saigon, with the rotors of the helicopter intercutting with the blades of the ceiling fan. I was gobsmacked.

Then came the helicopter attack sequence, accompanied by Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries." Is this the most impressive ten-minute sequence I've ever seen? There is some competition, even from Coppola himself, such as the baptism scene in The Godfather, but that scene isn't nearly as long. Watching the film yesterday, even on my twenty-six-inch TV, still gave me goose pimples, as the copters come in over the waves, and the music pounds. I was amazed but not surprised to learn while watching the extras on the DVD that that scene took a year to edit, and had 130,000 feet of film (the entire film was 1.5 million feet of film).

I hadn't read the source material, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (I still haven't), but I could pick up the literary themes, especially that Sheen's journey was similar to Dante's Divine Comedy, a passage into the bowels of Hell. The crew of a patrol boat escort him, and they are in many ways the typical war-film types: the stern but kind Chief (Albert Hall); the unstrung Chef from New Orleans (Frederick Forrest); the surfer (Sam Bottoms); the kid (an unnervingly young Lawrence "Larry" Fishburne, only fourteen when filming began). As they make their way along the river, toward Sheen's assignment (the insane Colonel Kurtz) they encounter increasingly disturbing and hallucinatory scenes of warfare. The Playboy Bunny show. The bridge, where there is no commanding officer. The sampan, where people are slaughtered over a puppy.

Apocalypse Now was a major Hollywood news story, mostly for all the trouble it had gone through. Much of this is documented in Eleanor Coppola's documentary, Hearts of Darkness. The film had major cost over-runs, and was way behind schedule. The casting had major hiccups. Steve McQueen and Al Pacino turned down the part that Sheen would take, and then Harvey Keitel would be cast but then fired by Coppola. Sheen would have a heart attack during filming. Storms would destroy sets. Most figured it was a major boondoggle, but Coppola would screen an unfinished version at Cannes in May, '79. It was sensation, and share the Palm D'Or (with The Tin Drum). When it was released in August, it would do pretty good business, and end up being nominated for Best Picture, and win for Best Cinematography (Vittorio Storaro) and Sound (Walter Murch).

Ah yes, the sound. The legacy of this film, it turns out, is in the area of sound design. Most of the extras on the DVD are devoted to the sound, and how extraordinary it was. The film took nine months to mix, and was incredibly innovative. For all of its stunning images, Apocalypse Now is really a movie that rides on the crest of its sound.

The movie isn't the greatest I've seen--I don't think at the time I even considered it as such. In 2002 Sight and Sound magazine named it the greatest film of the last twenty-five years, and last year the London Film Critics called it the greatest film of the last thirty years. I would disagree, mostly because a great two-hour film was hijacked in its last forty movies by Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz.

Brando was paid an unheard of 3.4 million for about twenty days' work. He showed up grossly overweight, with a shaved head. Coppola and Storaro worked around this by shooting him mostly in the dark, with only his face illuminated. Some of his dialogue, echoing the poetry of T.S. Eliot, is riveting, but it grinds the story to a halt, and one gets the sense that everyone involved has no idea how to end it. Brando ends up like a kooky uncle giving an inebriated toast at a wedding, embarrassing everyone.

A few things I've learned in the last few days: the germ of the film came from co-screenwriter John Milius, who first had the idea in the 60s. The original title was The Psychedelic Soldier, but he changed it to Apocalypse Now as a reaction (Milius is a bellicose fellow) to the hippie slogan, "Nirvana Now." The original director was to be George Lucas, who finally passed on it to make Star Wars. What he would have done with it is a pretty tough thing to wrap one's mind around.

Coppola did make it, though, and he hasn't made anything since that approaches its brilliance. As for me, it marked a turning point in my attitudes about movies. As I've mentioned before, once I started at college I saw as many great movies as I could. Apocalypse Now, in some ways, was the start of it all.