Going for the Cheeky Gamble

By John Skow.

Coppola previews his new film and puts his studio on the line

Our story so far: daredevil film maker (Apocalypse Now, the Godfather films) and presumptive bankrupt Francis Ford Coppola had just fired himself out of a cannon wearing a fine black beard and a jaunty smile but perhaps (there was a lot of public relations smoke) no leotard. Would he land in a bed of rose petals thrown by critics enraptured by his new film One from the Heart? Would his feud with Paramount Pictures, which had rescued his Zoetrope Studios from financial disaster a year ago, bring down ruin on his head? Or would he succeed in his cheeky gamble of personally hiring Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall for the first public showing of One from the Heart, without informing Paramount, which was supposed to distribute the film? Would Coppola have to hock his car?

Thus matters stood last week: Coppola hurtling through space with the Zoetrope mortgage in his teeth as 6,000 New Yorkers--1,000 freebies and 5,000 paid-squelched through hock-deep gutter slush into the theater. There was a satisfactory array of the famous on hand, and the famous-for-being-famous, somewhat too swaddled against the cold to glitter: Arlene Francis, Paul Simon, Norman Mailer, Mrs. Frank Sinatra, Adolph Green, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Andy Warhol, Christopher Walken and Liza Minnelli. It is important at such events that especially celebrated ladies be whisked quickly through the crowd before the groundlings can become unruly in their worship, and Nastassia Kinski, one of the film's stars, wanly beautiful in a white coat, was duly whisked. On the most elementary level, Coppola's risk of $24,000 for a Sunday New York Times ad and something more than $20,000 to hire the Music Hall had paid off; he had 6,000 seats available for each of two showings, and virtually all of the seats had bottoms in them.

For the moment it did not matter whether, as Coppola claimed and Paramount denied, the film company owed him $1.6 million in completion money for the film, whose budget had ballooned to the astonishing sum of $26 million. Coppola had been distressed last August when Paramount showed an incomplete print to distributors and some critics; last week he explained his Radio City gamble by saying that he simply "wanted to see the film clean one time before it went into the funnel" of the distribution system. As the preview deadline neared, Coppola made last-minute changes in the film and sent them from his studio to Rome, where they were incorporated into the master print. A courier with the final print arrived in New York on Thursday at 2:30 p.m., 29 hours before show time. The night before in San Francisco, Coppola was still working on the final sound mix, and special "double system" projectors, which synchronize sound and film as the movie is shown, were being trucked down from Boston.

Now, as the film began to roll, and this knowledgeable audience of show people and film buffs clapped for each name in the cast, it began to seem clear why Coppola had chosen this huge, lavishly decorated, old, art deco movie palace for his showdown. His film is a romantic comedy as stylized and as grandiose in its decorative effects as the Music Hall: cinema deco. But as One from the Heart wound its way through Coppola's impressive catalogue of effects, it was clear that the audience found a chilliness in its lovingly polished style. Applause was steady but no more than polite.

At a press conference after the first showing, Coppola took the first question square in the face and bled as if it had been a brick. A radio reporter said cruelly that everyone he had talked with, "14 or 15 people," had disliked the film. The director replied that people had seemed attentive, that only a few had left early, and that the audience had responded well at the end. Sounding tired, he said: "I'm very proud, and I imagine that years from now, just as with my other films, people will see something in it. It was an original work. It's not a copy of anything. And by the end, you're supposed to feel something -- something innocent, something sweet, something romantic."

Asked whether Zoetrope Studios could survive if the film did not succeed, Coppola answered with a quiet no. He said there was no deal with Paramount for distribution (and thus no date for theater showings), although he hoped that both could be agreed on. When someone said with little tact that his close friend Director George Lucas (Star Wars) could easily bail him out, he roused himself to say that he needed no bailing out and that Lucas would help him in other ways, maybe by driving him to the airport some day if he needed a ride.

Later, musing almost more to himself than to the press, he said: "Why don't we all cheer the film makers on? And when they make mistakes, what is it a shooting gallery for? What the hell are we here for, to be your enemies?"--By John Skow.

Reported by Peter Ainslie/New York

With reporting by Peter Ainslie/New York

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