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AN AUTEUR IN THE JUNGLE




 

Nowhere has the age-old conflict between High art and commerce been so effectively dissolved as in Hollywood. Few film directors in Tinseltown have any pretensions to being artists (except popular ones), and virtually all ol those who do are deluded.

 

Francis Ford Coppola is an exception. With The Godfather, Mr. Coppola produced that Hollywood rarity: an aesthetically ambitious highbrow movie that also earned stacks of cash. Then he did it again – in a sequel, no less.

 

But Hollywood cares little for auteurs. even profitable ones: especially when they start to make demands of its tolerance, patience and money. Struggles between obsessive film-makers and controlling studio bosses have, at times, escalated to mythic proportions. Orson Welles, who battled furiously with the studio system (and lost) after his early triumph, Citizen Kane, is one legendary example.

 

Another is Mr. Coppola and his ordeal over the making of Apocalypse Now, a Vietnamized version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. That ordeal is the subject of a new documentary called Hearts of Darkness: a Film-maker's Apocalypse.

After considerable acclaim at the Cannes and London film festivals and a successful run on an American pay-tv channel, the film has recently been released in cinemas. Even casual fans of Apocalypse Now will find it engrossing. It is sharp, funny, and full of revealing amateur footage shot by Mr. Coppola's wife, Eleanor. More than that, it is critically acute, presenting Mr. Coppola and his films as object lessons in why Hollywood does not trust visionaries.

 

Apocalypse Now began filming in the Philippine jungle in 1976. It took 238 days on location to complete, not including time lost to a massive hurricane, which destroyed the film's sets, and a massive heart attack, which nearly destroyed its lead actor, Martin Sheen.

 

Three years and $35 million (a huge sum at the time) later, when Apocalypse won the top award at Cannes, Mr. Coppola said of the experience: 'My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. The way we made it is the way Americans were in Vietnam. We had too much money, access to too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.'

 

Mr. Coppola is not exaggerating. Performing one early scene, Mr. Sheen is drunk to the point of an emotional breakdown. Mr. Coppola rewrites the script each night. The ostensibly liberal film-makers pay Filipino workers a dollar a day to build an elaborate temple brick by brick. And when Marlon Brando arrives, he is a temperamental, corpulent mess - hardly the embodiment of Conrad's 'long gaunt figure of Kurtz.'

 

1) If you have pretensions, you try to make people think you have qualities you don't really have. If you are deluded about something, arc you mistaken?

 

2) If something is a rarity, do many of them exist?

 

3) If something escalates, does it get less intense?

 

4 ) Is a triumph a) a major success, or b) a minor one?

 

5) Do people have an easy-time during ordeals?

 

6) If you are casual about something, you don't give it a lot of thought. If something is

engrossing, it is certainly not b _ _ ing.

 

7) Arc acute observations stupid?

 

8) An informal word for insane is c _ _ _ y.

 

9) If you exaggerate, do you overstate things?

 

10) If something is ostensibly true, it looks as if is true, but is it necessarily true?

 

11) Temperamental people have a lot of different m__ _ s .

 

12) Are corpulent people gaunt?

 


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