A Talk with Nicolas Cage

My short conversation with Nicolas Cage was conducted over the phone, while I was sitting in the Atlanta offices of my school's newspaper. Cage, meanwhile, was in New York City, filming another of his most unusual roles as the bloodthirsty lead of Vampire's Kiss. The Georgia State University Signal published my interview with this newfound star on March 1, 1988, in connection with Norman Jewison's Oscar-winning comedy hit Moonstruck.

Nicolas Cage can color himself lucky on all counts. After all, when an aspiring actor has Oscar-winning director Francis Coppola as an uncle, Oscar-nominated actress Talia Shire as an aunt, and Oscar-winning composer Carmine Coppola as a grandfather, he can do nearly no wrong on the path to success. Knowledge of the twenty-three-year-old actor's family tree conjures up images of Cage as a coattail rider, but that's an insult to his innately unique talent. Even so, Cage still can't keep from admitting that the connections have helped in his progress. As one of Judge Reinhold's co-workers at a fast-food parlor in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Cage was virtually invisible (his part was edited down drastically, he says). And, in spite of trumped-up screen time, his work in a television movie called The Best of Times went totally unnoticed.

It was only in 1982, when Francis Coppola was casting parts for Rumblefish that Nicolas Cage got his first real break. "He gave me a job reading for other actors for the film," Cage says. "As it turned out, I got a large part, but I don't think Francis liked what I did in Rumblefish. Now he does but, at the time, I think he thought I was too stiff as an actor."

Valley Girl is the picture that really opened the industry's eyes as to Cage's onscreen value. As a beach-hopping punk rocker who falls in love with a spoiled San Fernando princess, Cage stole the show. Even now, more than five years after the film's release, Cage recognizes his debt to his first big hit. "Things didn't really start clicking for me until that film. It really surprised me. Going in, I thought it was just going to be another teen exploitation movie. I had no idea it was going to be as poetic a picture as it was. I guess I owe a lot to Valley Girl.''

Indeed, since it grabbed his uncle's attention and respect. "Francis saw it and decided that it was good work, so he agreed to have me continue to work with him." As a result of Valley Girl, Cage has worked with Coppola three additional times, playing Richard Gere's crazed brother in The Cotton Club, Kathleen Turner's doo-wop singing husband-to-be in Peggy Sue Got Married, and a small role in last year's Gardens of Stone.

Given the curvy twists he has given to these roles, as well as to such parts as Sean Penn's insensitive friend in Racing With The Moon, as a love-struck rower in The Boy in Blue, and as a scarred GI in Alan Parker's much-acclaimed Birdy (a role for which Cage pulled out two of his own teeth and wore bandages on his face for five weeks as mental preparation), one has to wonder what attracts the actor to certain scripts. Cage is quite confident when faced with the question. "I'm drawn to anything that's different from the last thing I've done, simply because it keeps me from being bored," he says. "I'm always looking for something new. And then I guess the other factor is whether or not the part seems real to me, if the character reads well on paper or is someone I can really identify with. Reality is the foundation to everything, I think. If I can take that reality and play with it, make it bigger or smaller, then I'm interested. But if it doesn't seem real to me, then I'm gonna be on a tightrope and there isn't gonna be any net under me."

1987 turned out to be an especially lucrative year for Nicolas Cage. After being served with mixed reviews for his wonderfully eccentric performance in 1986's Peggy Sue Got Married, he emerged with Raising Arizona, his most acclaimed work to date. In it, he plays H.L McDonough, a small-time crook who finds it difficult to change his wronging ways when he gets married to a policewoman (played by Conyers native Holly Hunter). When faced with the fact that his wife cannot have children, the couple puts into action a plan to steal a single infant from a set of quintuplets born to  furniture magnate Nathan Arizona. What follows is a side-aching, side-winding, and often strangely touching comedy about the joys and pains of parenthood. Cage himself thinks is perhaps his best work yet, crediting a great deal of the film's quality to brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, who wrote, produced, and directed the film.

"It was a luxury to work with them on that script," Cage says. "They had it thought out the way they wanted it. They really took a lot of care with the plot and the words." Cage also take measure to dispel any image of the Coen brothers as pure technocrats (as their products are so ultimately flawless visually). He says that they go to great lengths to make sure their actors are comfortable but are, at the same time, extremely clear on what they want from a performer. "They're instinctive about directing actors. They give you a two-week rehearsal period and, during that time, they toy with anything they might want to alter. But when they get on the set, they're pretty instinctive. They just go with what they feel, with what makes them laugh."

Cage also says that it was the broad, physical strokes of comedy that were called for in the Coens' script that attracted him to Raising Arizona. "It's almost like slapstick has become taboo in cinema, that people like Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy have become antiques. But I think there's a lot to be learned from what they did. To make that kind of wild behavior seem real is what I really want to do. I don't want to put any limitations on myself and Raising Arizona gave me the opportunity to be as big as I wanted."

This actor's one-two punch continued in December when Norman Jewison's Moonstruck opened in New York to rave reviews. Since its debut, the film has garnered six Oscar nominations, yet he was passed over in the Best Actor category (he was nominated for the Golden Globe, though), Cage has received glowing notices for his portrayal of Ronny Cammareri, a one-handed Italian baker who falls for his older brother's outspoken fiancee (Best Actress frontrunner Cher). Though he was taken with playwright John Patrick Shanley's well-crafted screenplay, Cage admits he had certain misgivings about playing an Italian in this very ethnic-flavored film. “I am Italian," he says, "and I find that, in American cinema today, there seems to be a stereotype of Italians, with the hand gestures and the thick accents and this whole mobster image. Just one big-cliche. So when I decided to do Ronny, I also decided I wasn't going to get caught up in any of those claptrap images that Hollywood drums from Italians. I really tried to give the character some dignity."

His character in Moonstruck is a passionate but chronically depressed baker whose impending marriage was destroyed when his character's butchering duties were distracted by the dramatics of older brother Danny Aiello, leading to the loss of Ronny's hand in an automatic meat slicer. With this bizarre chain of events, Cage says his character was exceedingly difficult to work out. "I wanted to keep him from seeming too selfish or self-pitying. It's hard to play a character that talks about all the hardship and suffering he's been through without making him into a wimp."

Still, Nicolas Cage got it down pat. Now, he says, he couldn't be happier with the final product. "Hopefully," he says, "the movie will make people want to fall in love again, want to be with each other, want to work it out. It could be a medicine for couples that are falling apart. They would see Moonstruck and say 'See? It's alright to be angry with one another, it's alright to argue.' Love is not just about holding hands, y'know.”

A Talk with Arnold Schwarzenegger

In celebration of the 30th anniversary of John McTiernan's sci-fi/action classic Predator, I'm reprinting the interview I conducted with Arnold Schwarzenegger in late May 1987. We met in his suite at the Atlanta Ritz-Carlton. He was dressed casually in a floral shirt, and had his trusty cigar always nearby. Shaking hands with the man was a memorable moment--I don't remember being intimidated by his height, but his width was certainly commanding, and his meathook of a hand crushed my own mitt with gentle confidence. He was kind and low-key, and he later signed my Predator one-sheet while puffing on that cigar. The interview appeared in the June 23 1987 edition of Georgia State University's Tuesday Magazine:

It seems strange to say, but it's the truth: Arnold Schwarzenegger's acting has, on the whole, been getting better and better ever since he first broke into movies back in the mid-1970s. He's may be no Olivier, but he's proven wrong those who once claimed this hulking man was nothing more than the post-1950s version of Steve Reeves, the screen's most famous Hercules. Schwarzenegger admittedly took a little time to bloom, but bloom he did, emerging tall above the star most often cited as his closest rival, Sylvester Stallone. While Sly takes himself and his movies with utmost seriousness, Arnold strikes a humbler stance, realizing what he provides audiences with is entertainment, and not necessarily great art (though, even as mere entertainment, his works approach artfulness often enough).

Schwarzenegger has been primed for success from the beginning, as unlikely as his success once seemed. A native of Austria, he began body-building before he hit age twenty. By the time he retired from the sport in 1974, he'd won the prestigious Mr. Olympia title an astounding and unsurpassed seven times. He was and still is an astonishing example of human construction and precision. But, more importantly, he's a model of determination, dedication, and willpower. "My decisions have always been, with certain things, to say 'Okay, I'm going to start at the beginning, down at the bottom, and I'm going to shoot for the top.' When I shot for the top in body-building, I was thinking of my idol, Reg Park, who was a three-time Mr. Universe. He had done several Hercules movies and opened up a chain of gymnasiums and so forth. I thought 'That's exactly what I want to do'--not just win the title, but use it as a means to an end. Have some fun, maybe get into some movies, get into the business and all those things." In 1970, Schwarzenegger even took up the beloved Hercules mantle in a little-seen B-movie called Hercules in New York, pairing him with nasal comedian Arnold Stang and too cleverly renaming Schwarzenegger as "Arnold Strong." The movie currently resides in the dustiest of video store shelves.

It was during one of the Mr. Olympia competitions that Schwarzenegger saw the materialization of his first shot at cinema greatness. Documentary filmmakers George Butler and Robert Fiore were so taken with the bodybuilder and his pursuit of what would be his final Mr. Olympia title that they decided to film the competition in full (including visitations with Arnold's closest rival, Incredible Hulk star Lou Ferrigno). Once released, the documentary Pumping Iron was a critical and box-office smash, with audiences taking note that Schwarzenegger was no mere muscle-bound freak of nature, but instead a very human being replete with wild charisma, bright humor, and a booming sense of self-confidence--traits that usually translate well to the big screen.

Once Schwarzenegger decided he'd accomplished everything he could in the world of body building, it was time for a change-up. So, with 1975's Pumping Iron garnering raves, he turned his eyes to acting. At first, no one took him seriously. He showed up in a bit role as a bodyguard in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, but was constantly being shrugged off by agents and directors because of his thick Austrian accent, immense size, and formidably long name. But these obstacles didn't sway him, of course; he immediately began to take acting lessons and speech training. In the meantime, he made a few small but significant television appearances--significant because it was one of these assignments that helped net Schwarzenegger a role in a film by acclaimed director Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens). All of the sudden, in Rafelson's Stay Hungry, Schwarzenegger was performing opposite acting heavyweights Sally Field and Jeff Bridges—and, amazingly, Arnold held his own, shining in a smart, well-observed look at the Alabama body-building scene. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association saw such merit in his performance they awarded him a 1977 Golden Globe for Best Newcomer. It's still his most personally insightful role.

The next few years, though, were relatively dry for Schwarzenegger. Demand for an actor with his imposing physical stature was then so low, so he had to stoop to appearing in such disappointing fare as Hal Needham's embarrassingly silly 1979 western spoof The Villain playing the white-suited "good guy" to Kirk Douglas' Wile E. Coyote-like title character (he did get to sport Ann-Margret as his female lead, which he recalls with a toothy smile). He landed a plum dramatic role in the TV-movie version of The Jayne Mansfield Story, cannily well cast opposite Loni Anderson as the blonde superstar's muscle-bound husband Mickey Hargitay. Even by 1982, when he starred in director John Milius' hugely popular adaptation of Robert E. Howard's Conan The Barbarian, it was apparent he hadn't yet found his niche. The film was a gigantic hit, but his performance was rather stiffly mannered in comparison to his earlier work. Still, Schwarzenegger himself can't deny the impact Conan The Barbarian and its sequel, Conan The Destroyer, had on his career. "That gave me the chance to launch an acting career that lifted me above a lot of the other guys and put me in a certain category," he says.

But Schwarzenegger's real big break--the one there was no retreating from once it dropped--came in 1984 when relative newcomer and Roger Corman protege James Cameron cast him in the diabolical title role of The Terminator. The film was an unexpected fall season sleeper--a remarkable combination of non-stop action, fresh characterizations, fast-paced direction, and mindbending science-fiction that owed much of its effectiveness to Arnold Schwarzenegger's frighteningly taciturn performance as an unstoppable killer cyborg from a decimated future. That year, The Terminator adorned many "Ten Best" lists and, with over $100 million in box office grosses, led the National Association of Theater Owners to name Schwarzenegger the International Star of 1985.

Since that film, Schwarzenegger has smartly developed a screen persona that can only be described as decidedly tongue-in-cheek. With movies like Commando and Raw Deal, two of the biggest hits of the past couple of summers, he's successfully blended his comedic, dramatic, and ass-kicking chops to create for himself a natural and engaging image for himself, comparable to the places top stars like Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood had secured for themselves decades earlier.

This summer, Schwarzenegger has delivered again. In Predator, he plays Major Dutch Schaefer, the leader of an elite rescue unit whose members, sidetracked on a mission in the South American jungle, are being picked off one by one by a crafty alien hunter. The film is a relentlessly taut science-fiction tale that Schwarzenegger strongly contends is, along with The Terminator, his best to date. "What I liked about this film, specifically," he says, "was that it was a team effort—an ensemble--rather than me coming out right on top, with the first scene establishing me as the lead character. Here, I try to blend in with a team of guys. I mean. I'm the leader of the rescue team, but everyone in the film gets the same amount of screen time until guys start fading away and being killed. Then I emerge as the lead. This is, again, a whole new concept that I'd never dealt with before." The film's director, John McTiernan, is a new name in the film business; his first film, Nomads, was released in 1986 to mild critical notices and less-than-outstanding public recognition. Yet Schwarzenegger maintains McTiernan is very much like Cameron in ability. "When I think about the way they work, the way they move the cameras, the way they visualize ahead of time what a film is going to look like after it's been edited, I am amazed at how incredible the similarities are," he says. "Cameron is a genius and I think McTiernan's a genius, too."

Even so, Schwarzenegger says he ran into a little bit of trouble with McTiernan (as he does with all of his directors) when he wanted to add certain elements of humor into Predator's most dire sequences. "For instance," he offers, "I fight with the creature at the end. I improvise on these things. I just go along with my feelings. So I said 'Wait, this thing just took his helmet off and it's fucking ugly!' And I just thought I should say that, that it would amuse the audience in this really tense moment. And John says 'Arnold, come over here. I don't want to make a big scene in front of all these guys but do me a favor: don't do this because you'll really fuck up the momentum of the whole picture.' And I said 'I realize all this, but I think it is more important to throw the humor in there because, by now, they are all very tense in the theater and now we throw in the comic relief and it makes them breathe a sigh of relief.' "

Ultimately, Schwarzenegger's instinct won out--this and a few other carefully-placed jokes were dutifully fit into Predator's final running time, to the delight of the test audiences which whom he's viewed the film; he says each gag is unfailingly greeted with gales of laughter. One may ask "If Arnold Schwarzenegger has such a gift for making people laugh, why doesn't he develop it?" He says he plans to in the near future. "Eventually, I will be doing a straightforward action/comedy. A lot of the time what happens is that ninety percent of the stuff I want to do is rejected by either the director or the writer. They think 'Wait a minute. You can't be in the middle of this battle in this village and have humor. You are there to do this job.'  So I say 'Yes, you're right. But I'm Arnold. People don't mind if it doesn't quite fit in. If Joe Blow does it, then it wouldn't work.' It's like Eddie Murphy in The Golden Child. Any other guy who might have done that film would've played the part as seriously as possible, because it was a serious matter. But he clicked in and bubbled off his stuff and was Eddie Murphy. People laughed. No one said 'That humor didn't quite fit in there.' It was enjoyable. That's why that movie--which was actually pretty crappy--did $70 million at the box office."

Although his movies are popular with audiences, they always spark a certain level of controversy due to radical on-screen violence (Commando, in particular, with its crotch stabbings and buzz-saw attacks hit a new high in this department). For that reason, his films, like Stallone's, constantly spark boycotts from concerned parents and church organizations alike (not to mention they're constantly being looked down upon by more high-brow film artists and moviegoers). Arnold has an assured mental outlook on this harshness, though. "You never worry about what people say because, remember, whatever you do, you will always have a certain percentage of people not liking your stuff and a certain percentage of people loving it. You just have to realize you're not out to win a popularity contest. You're just trying to do your best work possible."

In order to be attracted to a role, Schwarzenegger says the part must highlight a previously untouched aspect to his personality. "Every film I do, I try and reach out and find other things I haven't done yet.” And though his past performances may generally belong in the same ballpark, they indeed do each show us a new side to the actor: from the Bond-like sophistication he displayed in Raw Deal and the paternal instincts he showed off opposite Alyssa Milano in Commando ("Working with a child brings out a whole new you. You have to relate to a kid in your work and in your real life, so your whole personality changes—you become kind of cute”), then to the cog-in-the-machine feel he lent to his roles in Predator and his mechanically emotionless performance as The Terminator. "With each movie," he says, "I want people to go back and look over the entire portfolio I've collected, and feel certain that I've reached out for and hit my different emotional obligations."

Schwarzenegger has a plethora of emotional, artistic, and financial goals to live up to as well. His much-publicized marriage to journalist and Kennedy clan member Maria Schriver has just hit its one-year mark. Later on this summer, he will be seen in an adaptation of Stephen King's short story The Running Man, playing a contestant in a futuristic TV game show (hosted by kissy Family Feud scion Richard Dawson) where the object of the game is simply to survive. And, in the following months, he'll be toiling away on a Terminator sequel, reteaming him with director James Cameron.

As if that weren't enough, he'll continue putting time into his own businesses (he's a renowned real-estate developer, mail-order businessman, and art collector). Still, his first love will be acting, with body-building coming in a close second. When he looks back on his early career as an athlete and compares it to the present stage of his output, he sees very little difference. "I work as hard now as I did then. I did exactly the same things as in bodv-building. To be a good actor, you analyze what you need: you go to acting school, you go to speech training and so on. It's the same thing as having to work more on my deltoids, except now I have to work more on something like my accent. You pick certain things that are your weak points and the harder you work, the faster you grow up and the faster you can make it."

A Talk with Spike Lee

This is a reprint of my interview with Spike Lee, printed in the Georgia State University's newspaper The Signal (as part of their features section Tuesday Magazine) on February 9, 1988. The interview was part of a promotional tour for Mr. Lee's then-new film School Daze, which was filmed in Atlanta, GA. The interview itself was conducted on a cold January day in a suite at Atlanta's Ritz-Carlton. 

Those who expect Spike Lee to be like Mars Blackmon, the affably clownish character he played in his directorial debut She's Gotta Have It, would be in for a jolt were they to come face to face with him. In reality, Lee is a reserved man on the sharp edge of cool. He makes few jokes and the laughs he does reach for come not from snappy one-liners, but from organic facial expressions, personal swagger and, occasionally, a juicy slang word.

Not that the 30-year-old Lee is sedate; he is simply considerate--a thinker. He sits back and lets ideas wash over him. If he doesn't agree, he'll speak his mind, but without raising his measured voice. He's shrewd enough to know that the first man who raises his voice has already lost the argument. He was also shrewd enough to realize, back in 1984 that, where black people were concerned, there was a bottomless void in the film industry. With few exceptions, their stories were not being told on cinema screens.

A year after he had graduated from New York University with his master's degree in film and a Student Academy Award for his thesis short film, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, Lee began to get antsy--he hadn't picked up a camera for months. So he cranked up the gears and began courting financiers for one of the two screenplays he'd written. When plans fell through for Messenger, a film about a Brooklyn bike courier's family life (possibly his next project), Spike Lee started over, swallowing the bitter hurt along with the weeks of intense rehearsal time he and his cast had spent on the movie.

Next time around, he penned a script he thought might be more appealing to investors--one that dealt with sex and the crippling double standard men place on women in that realm. That film, She's Gotta Have It, took six months to write. During that time, Lee was obsessed with getting the $175,000 he needed to complete the film. "It was a struggle trying to raise the money," Lee says. "I always had a lot of people telling me I could never do it, so I had to keep myself pumped up all the time." With a great deal of help from a number of New York arts councils and Island Films, the company that distributed the completed picture, Lee put the final touches on She's Gotta Have It on his 29th  birthday. That same day, he was invited to Director's Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, where he was given the prize for Best New Director.

Now Spike Lee has finished his second feature, a musical comedy-drama titled School Daze. Shot entirely on the campuses of Atlanta University, Morris Brown College, Clark College, and Lee's own alma mater, Morehouse College (where he graduated with a degree in mass communications), the movie follows an ensemble of black students through homecoming weekend at the fictional Southern black institution called Mission College. Lee has no problem admitting the autobiographical nature of the film, which he wrote right after leaving NYU. "School Daze is my four years at Morehouse in a two-hour film. But the film is not really about Morehouse as much as the whole college experience."

Fraternities and sororities are part of that experience but Lee's portrayal of Greeks in School Daze is far from adoring. In the film, Lee plays Half-Pint, a scrawny Gamma Phi Gamma pledge who is made to endure a slate of degrading humiliations before being accepted by the Gammas and their leader, Julian "Big Brother Almighty" Eaves (Giancarlo Esposito). Through this probing, Lee gets to vent his ill feelings about the Greek system. "The whole concept and meaning of fraternities--I'm talking specifically about black fraternities because that's what I know--has been corrupted over the years. I mean, what do fraternities do? These people, they're full of shit. Y'know, they say they're supposed to do all this community work. My experience is, the only community work they ever do is they might collect a couple of cans at Thanksgiving. And that was it." The filmmaker doesn't even agree with the conviction--at least, not in principle--that fraternities give certain social advantages to those who pledge. "I think a person's gonna have to try to find in themselves the things that will make them a better person and not go looking in a an organization or another person. I mean, you think because now you're wearing purple and gold because you're an Omega or black and gold because you're an Alpha or red and white because you're a Kappa, all of a sudden you're a better person? That's a fuckin' lie."

In spite of his innate feelings towards the Greeks, Spike Lee (who, of course, never pledged a fraternity) made a concerted effort to be fair in the film. He even went so far as to hire what's billed as a "Fraternity Life Technical Advisor” ("His name is Zelmer Bothic III--Z-Dog," Lee says, smiling. "We had a mass communications class together at Morehouse and I remember him not being able to sit down in class because he had hemorrhoids from all the paddlings. He also has twelve Omega brands on his body.") Clearly, to Lee's thinking, the attempts at even-handedness panned out. In fact, the director thinks his treatment of the Greeks in School Daze might even be a bit lenient. "There was a lot of stuff we put in this film about the nasty stuff they do, but we left it out. You got guys tying other guys up to chairs and pushing them down stairs and all that kind of stuff. I mean, that shit's crazy."

But while part of the controversy surrounding School Daze is directed towards the film's anti-frat attitude, the more potent portion of criticism will probably be pointed towards Lee's exploration of the differences that separate blacks from other blacks--those of a financial, class-based, educational or political nature. And, yes, it's the internal schisms related to skin color that will most likely inform white audiences and inflame black ones. Lee wrote two rival groups into the film: the Greek-oriented, blue-eyed, light-skinned blacks called the Wannabees, and the independent, nappy-headed, dark-skinned blacks called the Jigaboos. The former represents the black person's striving for success in a predominantly white world, even if that success means giving up authentic beliefs and background. The latter reflects the mirror image of that attitude: the retaining of the black heritage, even at the expense of mad economic success. Lee kept the actors playing the Wannabees and the Jigaboos in separate hotels during filming “so they wouldn't get chummy with each other." The tactic worked; an on-screen fight between the two factions was totally spontaneous.

Perhaps the film's most amazing feature is its refusal to take sides, regardless of its subject matter and the strong opinions of the man behind the camera. Lee, however, says that he, himself, does take sides. "I just don't put it up on screen. I don't hate anybody, either." Still, he believes that School Daze is going to upset a lot of black people. "We touch on taboo things that a lot of people think shouldn't be discussed, especially not in a film for the whole world to see."

That, in fact, is exactly the attitude that the Atlanta University Center administration took when they decided to bar Lee from filming on campus a few weeks after production had begun. The now-retired president of Morehouse, Hugh Gloster, had heard rumblings that the film was derogatory towards black colleges and contained, as Lee says he called it, "the M-F word." Gloster called Lee into his office and delivered an ultimatum: either he let him read the script or risk being thrown off the campus. Lee, thinking it would be futile to let Gloster judge his screenplay, refused. The production promptly ground to a halt long enough for a shift to Atlanta University, which was the only campus that had signed a location agreement. Lee says that the decision hurt him "but only for a minute." He then had to get down to the nagging business of finishing the film. Months later, he regards the decision with a mixture of humor and puzzled anger. "What they really wanted me to do was a documentary about black colleges that would have no cursing, no sex, students who look like they just walked out of Mademoiselle and GQ, talking very proper. That's not the school life. President Gloster really showed me how much he was out of touch with reality and with his students for him to think that students don't curse. And to think that parents wouldn't send their children to Morehouse just because they heard “motherfucker” in School Daze! I don't understand that kind of thinking. It's backwards."

At present, Spike Lee is trying to build up a new relationship with the AU Center's faculty. Nonetheless, he still harbors ill feelings towards many administration officials. "The woman who was acting president of Spelman last year was so ignorant, she wouldn't let us set foot on Spelman's campus. She hadn't even seen She's Gotta Have It 'cause people told her it was pornographic.” Even the students at AU Center now incur Lee's wrath. "They're asleep, for the most part. They didn't say nothin'. When I went there, if a young black filmmaker would've come to Morehouse and the administration shut them out, we would've had a fit. But people were a lot more active then. Right now, it's just about graduating, getting a corporate job, getting an M.B.A., a BMW, and making $35,000 a year."

Spike Lee carted School Daze to Columbia Pictures during producer David Putnam's short but productive reign as its chairman. Independent outfit Island Pictures was originally set to finance and distribute the film, but the financially-troubled company pulled out when budget estimates for the film zoomed towards $6 million. In his move to the Columbia roster, Lee brought with him two of his longtime collaborators, photographer Ernest Dickerson and jazz artist Bill Lee, who also happens to be Spike's father and, by admission, one of his top influences (Spike Lee doesn't acknowledge any filmmaking mentors, though he does admire Martin Scorsese's style). Lee is quite adamant, but still realistic, about his relationship with both artists. "I've done small stuff without Ernest," he says, "but I'd be very leery to do a feature film without him. We were classmates at NYU and, since we met, he's shot all my stuff, plus Brother From Another Planet and Raw. He's a fine cinematographer. Now, my father I want to use as much as I can, but there's going to be times where the type of music that he does best won't be the right music for that film. He's a jazz purist. He won't do any kind of electronic or rap music at all." It's Bill Lee who provides most of the music for his son's newest movie, including the exuberant songs that are performed by the young cast (although the movie's hit party song "Da Butt" is not an example of his work--that spirited number was penned and performed by Experience Unlimited, aka EU).

Spike also brought to School Daze an energetic cast, divided evenly between veteran actors--like Ossie Davis, Art Evans, Samuel Jackson, Joe Seneca, and Larry Fishburne--and newly minted performers. Lee was especially eager to work closely with his actors. The 15-day shooting schedule for She's Gotta Have It was usurped with technical problems, so time spent with the cast was strikingly limited. As a result, Lee thinks the acting in that film was "a little shaky in spots." Now, with the luxuries of Columbia's time and money, Lee was finally able to bear down on directing his actors. That explains his enthusiasm for the performances in School Daze. "I don't think there's a weak one in the movie."

Since he's currently filling that abyss-like lack of black-oriented movies, Lee is naturally more concerned with how this movie is going to hit black audiences. For years, he's been disgusted at the treatment black stories have gotten from white writers and filmmakers (one of his most abhored  targets has been Steven Spielberg's 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, with Richard Attenborough's Stephen Biko biopic Cry Freedom standing as a new offender). Yet, Lee still speaks encouragingly when advising white screenwriters or directors on making films about black people.

"I think the number one dilemma that a lot of filmmakers have to face is the fact that you shouldn't write or make a film about something you don't know. If you know the subject and you know the people, go ahead and do it. And if you don't know about it, learn all that you can. That knowledge will be exemplified in the work. But if you don't know it, black audiences just sit there and go 'Black people don't speak like that'--'Get off my back, you jive turkey.' You hear dialogue like that, you know no black person wrote that. Just be truthful and you'll be all right."

Even though whites often achieve accurate portrayals of blacks in films, Lee says that often the converse of that statement is not true. "I think every black person is qualified to talk about white people because that's all you see all your life—in television, movies, commercials--everything. Yet you really can't say the same thing goes the other way around." Lee says he's considered doing a film dealing exclusively with white people, but that the right script has not come along yet.

But the black audience, and black stories, are still Spike Lee's main focus. He walks the high wire hoisted between activism and dispassionate observance. That's the limbo he's been caught in ever since he first rampaged onto the cinema scene two years ago. It's also an attitude with which he's soaked every frame of School Daze. He's hoping that that attitude will payoff when audiences of any racial background leave the stunning final scenes of his new film. "I think there's going to be a lot of conversation about the film, pro and con, which is good. Today, there's an awful lot of films, you sit there for 90 minutes or two hours, and it might even be a good film and you might laugh, but it's so generic that five minutes later you don't even remember what you just sat through. If you can make a film that raises some issues and gets people to talking, then you've done all you can do."

TOP GUN and Tom Cruise: A Look Back

In celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the release of Top Gun, I am reprinting my interview with Tom Cruise, which was conducted in May 1986 at the UN Plaza Hotel in New York City, the day after the film premiered for press at the Paramount Theater. The article originally ran in the May 20th 1986 edition of the Georgia State University Signal's Tuesday Magazine: 

Tom Cruise is neither as arrogant nor as innocent as he may sometimes seem on screen. He constantly walks a tightrope between the two extremes, yet he recklessly does so in a way that could make one think he could flip-flop at any moment. He could probably make a person feel indispensable one minute, then turn and intimidate them with his own assuredness. He doesn't seem like the type of person who would actually do that. But he could if he wanted to.

That strength of personality has afforded Cruise the opportunity to tackle a variety of roles in his five-year film career. He has moved swiftly from the pathological Red Beret in Taps to the naive high school student in Risky Business to the ambitious football player in All The Right Moves to the heroic hermit Jack O' The Green in Legend and has approached each role with vitality and a total commitment to purpose. Perhaps that is why he was the first actor to pop into the minds of producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer (Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop) when it came time to cast their newest film Top Gun. The producers knew they had to have an actor that could express an exceptionally vigorous love for his (and for the lead character's) profession, so Simpson and Bruckheimer agreed Cruise was their man.

In the film, Cruise plays Lieutenant Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, one of the finest fighter pilots enrolled in the Navy Fighter Weapons School, a training program set up for the Navy's most expert and elite pilots--a program more popularly known as "Top Gun."

In an interview conducted on a sunny May day at New York's UN Plaza Hotel, I found that, as he does with much of his acting, Cruise puts force behind his words and beliefs, not solely because it's his job, but because he himself wouldn't have it any other way. It would be unwise just to write off what he has to say about his acting and his films as a con--he speaks that intensely. It would be simple to flick his emphatic stance away and to disregard it as a fervent performance given by an expert salesman. But Cruise, dressed modestly in a pair of fashionably worn cowboy boots, an over-sized brown wool sweater, some slightly baggy white pants, and with a then-unoccupied pierced left ear, is not a salesman; he may sport that brand of tenacity, but he speak with a clear-eyed honesty.

For instance, he doesn't hesitate to admit that, while he was taken with the film's script from square one, he had his reservations about agreeing to star in Top Gun when the producers first offered it to him. "I didn't want to make a war film. I was more interested in making a piece about character. Luckily, [Simpson and Bruckheimer] didn't want to make a war movie, either. If we had wanted to make that type of film, we would've opened with MiGs blasting out and put explosions all the way through it. We could have done that," Cruise says, smiling at the thought. "But we were careful to stay away from it. "

The actor maintains that, in keeping an open mind about the military, he learned a few things about it if which he previously (from working on Taps back in 1981) only had inklings. "The thing that I understood prior to Top Gun was that the military was just a tool of the government. You're not making policy, you're enforcing it. I got involved five months prior to the shooting of the film. I did a lot of research, going down to San Diego, spending time at the Top Gun base in Miramar, spending time looking for what it was about this character that makes him what he is. Going into the film, I had, maybe, this idea of the fighter pilots themselves, even when I was getting involved with them and spending a lot of time with them. In doing that, I met these great old fighter pilots from World War I and World War II. Talking to them, I got the feeling--especially from the older guys who flew the B-51s--of their passion for flight and their love of competition. I found that, among these pilots, there's a camaraderie, a great and equal respect for any man who's brave enough to go up and fly in these jets. It's a whole different world, a different reality."

Even so, Cruise notes, there is a darker, colder, heavier side to the military that he had also never fathomed before: namely, its effect on men as individuals, not as just pilots or officers. "The thing they say," Cruise remembers, "is if they had wanted you to have a family and a wife and kids, they would've issued them to you. So it's tough. I mean, we lived on a carrier for four days and I was thinking the whole time I was going through it that these guys are on there for nine months at a time. Nine months of their lives. They kiss their wives goodbye, maybe she's two months pregnant and they come back and there's a baby that's a couple of months old." Shaking his head, thinking back on his experiences, Cruise says "Living on a carrier, it's prison with the threat of drowning. That is definitely not a nice environment."

Though Cruise is still very much the actor, he inevitably has been bitten by the production bug. Like many actors, he has his own production company set up in Los Angeles, with six projects in development, both for himself and for others. Top Gun, he says, was useful in his filmmaking education, as it finally gave him the chance to study what goes on behind the camera. "It was my first time in getting involved that strongly on the production side of it," he says. "Getting that whole different point-of-view [producers] Don and Jerry really shared a lot of that with me: the development of the piece, breaking it down. Some films come in and they're three or four hours over their projected length and you've got to cut them and reshape the whole film. These guys are very sound with what they do because they start out with a lean script and they decide what kind of picture they want to make prior to the shoot. Every scene that we shot," he says pridefully, "is on the screen. There's no excess."

Overall, the actor adds, he is pleased with Top Gun as a final product. The film is everything he expected it to be, especially when he takes into consideration how difficult the extensive aerial sequences were to shoot. Cruise feels that the combined effects of the air story and the ground story are going to be well received by audiences. "My little sister at in the theater, watching the film, and I was right behind her," Cruise says, trying to control the grin that begin to curl at his mouth. "I watched her and her head, every now and then, would go like this..." Cruise ducks his head violently, then laughs. "So I felt satisfied with the film."

One interesting thing about Cruise's latest effort are their directors. Top Gun, on one hand, was director Tony Scott's follow-up to The Hunger, an immensely popular cult film starring David Bowie as an aging vampire. Legend, on the other hand, was directed by Tony's more famous brother, Ridley Scott, who has given us such visual masterpieces as The Duelists, Alien and Blade Runner. In tone and in visual style, the Scotts' films are peas in a pod, particularly in their smoky cinematography. However, Cruise finds it difficult to compare their directorial methods without being unfair. "They're two different people," he says. "Their common interest is one of wanting to make different, interesting, bigger-than-life films. They're ambitious filmmakers. But it would be unfair to compare them because of the different types of films. If I had worked with Ridley on a character piece like Top Gun, or possibly even Alien, then I would be able to make a comparison. But as it stands, they were two totally different films."

Legend, in release for over a month now after being shelved for a year by Universal Pictures, has received fairly lukewarm notices, with most of them praising Ridley Scott's technical acuity rather than Cruise's acting, which has gotten, for the first time in his career, roundly slammed. Cruise is not bothered by the critical reaction to the film, though, just as he won't be bothered by the reception of Top Gun, whether it be good or bad.

"If I did let things like that bother me, for the rest of my life and career, I'd go nuts. I knew exactly what I was getting into with Legend. In the future, I'm going to take a lot of risks. And there are going to be other films people are not going to like. It's going to be that way. But it's the process and the actual making of the work that is the challenge, or at least most of the challenge. I mean, I want everyone to love my movies and everyone to go see them and to get great notices, but that can't be the reason for doing them."

Cruise is one of a handful of very successful young actors today that is not a member of the so-called "Brat Pack." However, he still takes offense when the term is dredged up. He feels that it is not only an insult to the actors to whom the label is aimed, but is, in reality, an insult to all actors, including himself. When asked why he hadn't done a film with the actors more famously included in "The Brat Pack," he struck back, not with aggressiveness, but with a modicum of irritation in his voice.

"First of all," he said, "using that phrase, I think, is such a cop-out for the press. There's no such thing as 'The Brat Pack.' It's such a writer's device, y'know? It's really... cute. People who write that kind of stuff, it makes it very secure for them. Then they don't have to deal with the actors as individuals. Anyway, I've been offered those films and other things--I don't want to get specific--but I didn't look at the scripts in terms of how they were going to affect my image. When I read a script, I look at it in terms of 'Okay, what is this script saying? What would I want to say with this piece? What would I be communicating?' and then approaching it on that level." In spite of the success he's so obviously reached, Tom Cruise still has a healthy attitude about being a celebrity and an admired actor. With the most modest of airs, he says "I'm always up-and-coming as far as my work goes. You look at Paul Newman, in his early 60s. He's still growing as a person and an actor. The roles that he's played, he just keeps getting better and better."

Cruise mentions Newman, he acknowledges, mainly because he just finished filming a movie with him in Chicago. Titled The Color of Money, the film is a sequel to Robert Rossen''s masterful 1961 film The Hustler, starring Newman as “Fast Eddie” Felson, a hot-shot pool shark. “It's a movie that stands on its own,” Cruise says. “If you haven't seen The Hustler, it's not going to make any difference when you see this film. It's Eddie Felson 25 years later. He hasn't played pool in all that time, and I'm this comer, this naive but arrogant pool player. It's interesting. For his character, his whole philosophy is 'Money won is much sweeter than money earned.' My character is 'I don't care about money, I just want a guy's Best Game. I just want the best game I can get.' He just wants the challenge. So, throughout the film, Eddie wants to take me on the road, to take me to Atlantic City—we got six weeks—and it's just this conflict of the young and the old. It's almost like the cleansing of Newman's character and the corruption of mine.” Cruise also notes that he did learn to shoot pool for the film, working for many months with pool champion Mike Segal. “Newman and I make every shot in the movie,” he says.

Cruise admits that doing the Scorsese movie was quite a different experience from making Top Gun. “My involvement with Top Gun was much greater. When I came on to The Color of Money, Paul and Marty had already developed the script with the writer, Richard Price. I come off Top Gun, you know, carrying the picture, and then, with Marty and Paul, I was, like, this...kid.” He chuckles now about the experience indicating that it perhaps brought him down a notch. Still, he is close to being speechless when asked to describe working with these two cinematic legends. Acting with Newman was, “exciting—really terrific” while taking direction from Scorsese was a heartfelt “Great!”

But, in all ways, Tom Cruise displays an adventurous streak that, in the past, has usually proven crucial to being a movie star. At no time in our talk did he let this attitude peek through more clearly than when asked about his aggressive style of acting. “I guess I identify with Maverick in the sense that I feel it's unhealthy to just think in terms of only wanting to be the best. I think you should be the best that you can be. If I woke up in the morning and didn't have that feeling that 'Today, I want to do the best that I can possibly do, emotionally or physically, in any situation,' I wouldn't even get out of bed.”

I should note something about my meeting with Cruise that I didn't detail in this article. After our interview, I tried to get him to sign my All the Right Moves poster, but I didn't bring a workable pen. So he kindly told me to bring it back up to his room later on and, then, he would sign it for me. After some frantic searching, I found the correct pen and brought the poster back to his room hours later. He was just then getting ready to leave the UN Plaza Hotel, so he invited me downstairs where he was going to wait at the bar for his car to arrive. We talked for a bit in the elevator, and he asked where I was from. When he found out I was from Atlanta, he perked up because he was getting ready to join Paul Newman at the Atlanta Speedway (where he would get a race-car-driving bug from Newman, which led to his film Days of Thunder, and further, to his marriage to co-star Nicole Kidman). At the bar, he had a cranberry juice and I a beer, and he dutifully signed my poster. We talked a bit about the state of the film industry in Atlanta, and before I knew it, he was flashing that famous grin and shaking my hand as we parted. Even today, I still recall his surprising kindness and generosity.

For BACK TO THE FUTURE Day, my 1985 interview with Robert Zemeckis

In the celebratory spirit of this unique moment called October 21, 2015, I thought I'd reach deep back into my past and unearth the interview session I had with Robert Zemeckis, director and co-writer of Back to the Future. Appearing originally in the July 23, 1985 edition of Georgia State University's newspaper The Signal, this talk was conducted in Atlanta, GA as part of Zemeckis' press tour in support of the film that would arguably emerge as his most widely-valued contribution to the popular art of movies:

If there's one phrase applicable to Robert Zemeckis, the director of Romancing The Stone and this summer's hit Back To The Future, that phrase would be "All-American.” Donned with large spectacles, his husky form and reddish-to-blonde mop of hair, the 34-year-old director certainly looks the part. And, as for his audible self, it's not so much his nasal West Coast accent that reveals his American roots; it's what he has to say about himself and his profession.

Zemeckis' very career--and the turns it's made since his days at the University of Southern California's film school more than a decade ago--is a prime example of what some people would consider the perfect Hollywood through-line. As a kid, he confesses to being struck by some typically American influences. "War movies...my favorite movie when I was 13 years old was The Great Escape," he says. "That was the greatest movie I had ever seen. And television. You know, I grew up in front of a television set. Then, any movie with monsters in it fascinated me. I remember being six years old and making my father take me to see The Blob. I had to see that, along with all those great William Castle movies--House on Haunted Hill, 13 Ghosts. Those were my kid movies.”  

Taking a more serious tone, Zemeckis lists weightier factors that compelled him to become a filmmaker. As far as directors go, he highly praises the influential talents of contemporaries George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Coppola. But he admits to being beholden more to cinematic legends like Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, and Billy Wilder. "I think that Americans make movies better than anyone else," Zemeckis states. There exists, though, "a traumatic movie" that made him decide instantly upon his career. "I remember I was in high school and I saw Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde. Before then, I had always gone to movies and enjoyed them for the stuff that was in them. Then, all of the sudden, I was this high school sophomore and I realized what films were all about. That scene when Gene Hackman gets shot and dies right in front of us...it was like 'Wow, someone is manipulating my emotions here!' It was very powerful; I felt terrible. I remember walking out of that movie saying 'There's something more here than just stunts and action to films. I gotta check this out!'"
 

Despite the fact that many consider Zemeckis' career a model success story, he would be the first to say that his has been a less-than-smooth ride to the top. He left USC in 1973 having made a series of well-received student films, one of which, Field of Honor, gathered a multitude of film festival prizes. "It was a very, very black comedy, inspired by A Clockwork Orange, a movie that was out about the time I was in school. It was very dark and people were getting killed all over the place and it was very funny.” He laughs about it now. “My wife hates it. It has won all of these awards and my wife can't stand to look at it. She says, 'I can't believe you! You are sick!' But I made it when I was a restless young man, when I didn't hold anything sacred, when I thought anything could be lampooned."

The young Zemeckis had enough confidence in the film to show it to fellow USC graduate John Milius (Red Dawn, Conan the Barbarian, Apocalypse Now). Milius liked the film so much that he asked Zemeckis and his writing partner, another USC graduate named Bob Gale, to write a screenplay for him. That screenplay ended up being the first draft for Steven Spielberg's 1941. Zemeckis remains good-humored about that film's famous drubbing at the box office. When asked if, in the future, he would like to do either a monster movie or a war movie, he cheekily replied "Well, I did write 1941. That could be considered a monster movie and a war movie." He is also genuinely protective of the $40 million Spielberg film. "I like it a lot. I'm very proud of that movie. I think it will be rediscovered someday. I mean, how can I be less than proud? Here I am responsible for writing a screenplay which puts Toshiro Mifune, Christopher Lee, and Slim Pickens all in the same scene together. Gosh, I'm very proud of that.” He can joke about it now, but it's a sensitive point that obviously stings. “Actually, I think the end situation was that the budget was reviewed more than the movie was. It wasn't some crime against nature like some of the press made it out to be."

While Spielberg was directing 1941 ("Probably something he regrets," Zemeckis adds), Zemeckis cemented a deal with Universal for which he would write (again with Bob Gale) and direct I Wanna Hold Your Hand, a sweetly raucous comedy about a carload of 1964 Jersey kids willing to do absolutely anything to get in to see The Beatles' first American appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Zemeckis' new deal insisted that Steven Spielberg overlook the project as executive producer. The film got a majority of very good notices but a minority of viewers—an extremely sad outcome for such a brilliantly funny movie. Even so, Zemeckis leapt into another vehicle almost immediately: a pitch-black 1980 comedy entitled Used Cars, starring Kurt Russell as an underhanded used car salesman cleverly navigating a bitter rivalry with another neighboring car lot controlled by Jack Warden (who plays two radically different parts in the film). Vulgar and crude, but in a lovingly agreeable way, it elicited favorable responses from the trade (especially from New Yorker critic Pauline Kael), but it too was a box-office failure.

Just recently, however, both I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Used Cars have acquired cult status after becoming mainstays on pay cable channels like HBO. Zemeckis finds solace in that fact. "They're both movies I'm extremely proud of. I'm really happy that they're finally getting seen now. I just wish to hell all these people that love 'em now would've loved 'em when they came out," he says. But Zemeckis is careful not to be downtrodden about his financial failures; at the same time, he's also quite adamant about the success of his films. Making quieter, little-seen films is not his ideal place in the filmmaking universe. "It's okay as long as the film don't get lost," he says. "As a writer and director, you don't want to make movies that people don't see; there's no point in that. I was hoping when I made Used Cars that it was going to be a wildly successful film. I didn't want it to be a low-profile movie."

After Used Cars, Zemeckis was out of work for three years, in what was probably a welcome respite. It was during that time that he and Gale penned three screenplays, one of which became Back To The Future. After his box-office score with last year's extremely popular Romancing The Stone, Zemeckis felt it was time to rediscover one of those scripts and bring it into production. "There was a lot of pressure—the kind I'd never felt before--about what the next move was going to be," Zemeckis says. "It has to be the right one, so Back To The Future became the obvious choice because it was a story that I had wanted to do for so many years, something I had been very passionate about."' 

The film is a crowd-pleasing romp that follows Marty McFly, (played by Michael J. Fox of NBC's Family Ties), a teenage boy living in a broken-down home with his broken-down parents (played superbly by Lea Thompson and the wonderful Crispin Glover). An apprentice to local nut case Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd), Marty assists the doctor in the testing of a time machine built, amusingly, into a DeLorean. But, when trouble strikes in the form of determined Libyan terrorists, Marty is forced to escape the scene using the newly-built vehicle. A minute flashes by, and the kid finds himself roaming the promising rural roots of his hometown, circa 1955. There, he meets up with his teenaged parents: his father is a lanky, greasy and painfully shy nerd (playd perfectly by Crispin Glover), while his mother is a popular and extremely cute schoolgirl. This wouldn't be a problem, except that Marty's future mother (in another superb supporting performance by Lea Thompson) takes a sudden romantic interest in her future son, thereby threatening Marty's very existence. It's a remarkably clever movie, written to maximum effect by Zemeckis and Gale.

 
Science-fiction is not one of Zemeckis' pet genres, as one familiar with Back To The Future might think. In fact, he avidly dislikes it because of its penchant to overcome and even disguise the plotline with technology and hardware. "The problem I have with science fiction is that, in predicting the future and describing other worlds, you're completely at the mercy of the writer or the filmmaker. This is his vision of what an alien is going to look like. If I agree with it, that's fine; if I don't then what? I'm left nowhere. That's why I enjoyed doing Back To The Future so much. With this story, I was locked into the past and I couldn't tamper with it." Instead of centering in on its sci-fi elements, he prefers to focus on the movie's more personable points. "What we set out to do was to make a human, fun, comedic, dramatic story and the idea of time travel was going to be used just a devise to tell that story. I think that's what helps to separate it from other time travel movies--it's not about time travel, it's about this young man's dilemma."

Zemeckis has not been fazed a bit by the press's view of his partnership with Spielberg. He says he would feel "uneasy," though, if people started thinking that Spielberg directed the film (as they have in the case of Tobe Hooper and 1982's Poltergeist). He says his collaboration with Spielberg "has been very comfortable and supportive. It's a small price to pay to be asked if I'm concerned about living in the shadow of Steven Spielberg—it's a small price to pay for what I ultimately got for that, which was the ability to make Back To The Future the best it possibly could be under the best possible conditions.” 

The filmmaker is, however, set on doing a project without Spielberg's assistance. "I think it'll be healthy for both of us." he says. He has plans to adapt the old radio program The Shadow for the screen. Even so, he knows he's at a major crossroads. "I'm really in a quandary as to where I'm at in this point in my career. That's why I want to take some time off. I don't want to get serious about making a movie for a while. All I've been doing is working and I haven't had the chance to live a little life. You know, I just want to go home and wash my car. I know it sounds ridiculous, but the idea of cleaning my garage? I mean, I'm really looking forward to those things."

When my interview with Robert Zemeckis was finally over, I hung back and asked if, in his days at USC, he ever dreamed he'd be associated with the elite of filmmaking so early in his career. He, of course, gave a true-blue American reply: "Did I dream it? Yeah, every day!"

A Visit with Francis Ford Coppola

The notice landed in my e-mail inbox a month or so ago. "Francis Ford Coppola," it read, "invites you to join him for an evening celebration of wine, friends and family as he offers a glimpse into the great passions of his life." The event was to be held on March 3rd, the day after the 2014 Oscars, at the Egyptian Ballroom, an impossibly elegant space connected to the regal Fox Theater in Atlanta. This was the same venue in which I saw Abel Gance's Napoleon for the first time back in 1981, with Francis' father Carmine conducting the orchestra, so I saw this opportunity to explore a warm, intimate side of the Coppola family as a completion of an improvised circle. It's one that's not entirely adrift from Mr. Coppola's film accomplishments (which are, as we all later learned, inextricably linked to his vino endeavors), but one that's instead interwoven with the very bloodline of his accomplished family.

And with the addition of cigars, pasta, and numerous resorts (in California, Belize, Italy, Guatemala, and Argentina) to his product line, one could surely say that these once side-glance concerns have supplanted filmmaking as the primary artistic endeavor in Coppola's life. Now, for this great writer and director, it is moviemaking that has become the hobby, and now I realize he's deeply involved in the process of enjoying life, and hoping we can share that with him through wine, food, movies, and music. This refocus--decades in the making--has turned into the softest of mattresses. You sense he's been very happy for a long, long time now. Is this where he was meant to be? Maybe so. Most surely, though, he is first a family man; it's obvious his connection to his forebears and progeny are at his core. We can hear it in his his tenor, in his decisiveness and reverence. It's all quite clear. All of this drama--all of the movies and the debt, the squabbles and fooferall, the art and the commerce--it's all always been about the love for his family. Actually, he may have said it all in his most famous movie...

I arrived at the ballroom along with my friend, journalist and wine expert Jane Garvey, only ten minutes before Mr. Coppola was set to speak. That left me just enough time to nab a glass of his Cabernet Savignon (which was delicious), and grab a seat on the second row. The lights went down soon enough, and on screen came the helicopters whirring past those reddened palm trees in Apocalypse Now's opening shot. Then a thoughtful selection of clips from The Rain People, Tetro, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, One From the Heart, Rumblefish, The Outsiders, Youth Without Youth (which is, I realized, along with Finian's Rainbow, The Bellboy and the Playgirls, and the most recent Twixt, amongst the few Coppola's films I've yet to see).

The clip reel finally moved into The Conversation, and then, of course, to The Godfather. It was with Nino Rota's iconic theme music that Mr. Coppola delicately approached the stage with a jovial wave to the audience. Handsome and nattily dressed, with a plaid tie, he took a seat at a microphone equipped with a tiny monitor with which, in sure directorial fashion, he deftly kept up with the video presentation he was narrating (though he didn't mind sifting through the index cards in his hands for reference).

Francis Ford Coppola at The Fox Theater's Egyptian Ballroom (photo: Atlanta Event Photography)

"Wine is an ancient food," he began. "For Italian families, and for many European families, it's considered an essential part of a meal." As burnished photos of his ancestors hit the screen, Coppola began by talking about his grandfather, Augustino, and his experiences with his seven sons during the days of Prohibition. "At that time, the government allowed European families, or families who'd customarily included wine with their meals, to make one barrel of wine right in their homes. So there was a collection of people who participated in buying a boxcar of grapes, sent all the way from California to 110th Street and Lexington." The supplier of those grapes, Coppola theorized, was Cesare Mondavi, the father of Robert Mondavi, the pioneering winemaker who popularized California's Napa Valley region as a hub of the vineyard community. Though he has deep respect for Mondavi, he amusingly admitted he'd heard this crude home brew was "terrible wine."

It was in 1975, right before the production of Apocalypse Now was to overtake his family's life, that Coppola first visited a property in the Napa Valley. Intended as a summer home, this plot included a late-19th Century structure known as the Niebaum Mansion, after its former owner, Finnish-born shipping magnate Gustave Niebaum. The Coppola family fell in love with the estate, which included 1400 acres of prime vineyards--ground zero for America's greatest contribution to winemaking. At this point, the screen behind Coppola featured a drive-up to the mansion's inviting facade, and a panoramic view from the steps leading up to it (including a 380-year-old tree looming over the front yard, its branches idyllically adorned with a shabby, single-person swing that's been dangling there for a century or so, and which Coppola has watched his children, grandchildren, and will watch his great-grandchildren play on, "I hope").

The Niebaum Mansion -- photo by John Storey, SF Chronicle

After much haggling, and being faced with the prospect of the countryside being spoiled by real estate developers bent on dotting the surrounding mountains with mansions, the Coppolas dug into their pockets and purchased the property. Soon after, Robert Mondavi visited and joyously confirmed that this was the prime piece of land for the growing of those essential grapes. Deemed Inglenook (which was Gustave Niebaum's tribute to the property's former owner, a Scottish businessman named William Watson), the land enabled the production of the famed Inglenook label (which Coppola now owns and says it cost more to buy that label than it did to buy the original property).

In fact, upon Robert Mondavi's arrival to the mansion, Coppola's wife Eleanor reminded her husband there were still dusty, aged bottles of Inglenook wine in the cellar. "We found one bottle, from 1890, and we opened it up and as we did that, the perfume of it started to pervade the room. Mr. Mondavi got all excited and started jumping up and down, and said 'See, I'm right. Napa Valley wine, if it's aged correctly, can be as good as any wine in the world.'" Coppola was still elated by this memory. But he also remembered the gathering storm clouds.

Photo by Time-Life/Getty Images

"Apocalypse Now was a very troubled production and, in fact, in order to do it, I had to finance it myself because no one else was interested. I had made The Godfather, The Conversation, Godfather Part II. I had won Oscars and had success. But Hollywood, then as with now, was not interested in something that was...interesting. [a big laugh from the audience here] To do something about the Vietnamese War was somehow taboo. But I was able to sell it to a distributor as something like A Bridge Too Far, as an action war picture. So I got a distributor to give me money, but indeed I was taking on a lot of debt myself. In those days, interest was 17%, in the era of Carter and the gasoline shortages and so forth. But we had this house in the Napa Valley and it was sort of like a dream to me, having dinners there and meeting the neighbors. Eventually, though, I worried so much because, as the project went on, we were getting deeper and deeper in debt, and the outcome became very uncertain. I remember when the film was done, I showed it to the distributor and they said 'It isn't like A Bridge Too Far at all.'" Coppola then recalled summoning his editors for an emergency cutting session, and rallying them with a song, which he then performed for us, on stage:

A director, we haven't got
A good movie, we haven't got
A good screenplay, we haven't got
Whadda we got?
We've got heart! 
Miles and miles and miles of heart...
(referencing Adler and Ross' song "Heart" from DAMN YANKEES)

"It did okay at the box office," Coppola continued, "and it was nominated for a few Academy Awards--it was Kramer Vs. Kramer that won Best Picture that year. But the funny thing about Apocalypse Now is that it wouldn't go away. People kept going to see it, and it's still like that to this day. So I was able to go back to my beautiful Napa Valley home." Around that time, Coppola explains, numerous wineries began approaching him, vying for a contract to use the fruit from his vineyard. While the reps from these labels toured the acres of trellised growth, Coppola had a thought. "Eventually, I said to my wife, 'Gee, if our grapes are so good, why don't we just make wine?' And she said 'What? You don't know anything about making wine,' and I answered 'Hey, I don't know anything about making movies, but that's never stopped me.'" The absurdity, and the truth, of this statement got an enveloping laugh from the audience (as screenwriter William Goldman once said, "Nobody in Hollywood knows anything").

With Mondavi's enthusiasm as a major encouragement, Coppola said that he was "sold" on the idea of creating the brand. He borrowed $30,000 from his family for winemaking equipment, and then had to navigate the requirements of California law in regards to what constitutes "California wine." Based on the ruby red color of his first batches of the stuff, made in 1977 with grapes stomped by he and his children, he renamed the Niebaum property "Rubicon Estate" and, over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, has grown the brand into a vast number of varieties. We're all familiar with the Coppola-stamped bottles that we've seen in our grocery stores and such. But I was surprised to discover there's a great deal more to this winery than I was aware, all of which have unusual labels designed by the Coppola family and art director Dean Tavoularis.

Tavoularis (pictured at left, with Coppola) has been involved with Coppola productions since 1972's The Godfather. He won an Oscar for designing its sequel, and has been nominated for Apocalypse Now, Tucker, Godfather III, and William Friedkin's The Brink's Job. His work with the director goes way beyond that, though, with the spare look of The Conversation; the astounding Vegas dream world of One From The Heart; the beautifully retro feel--each of them completely unique--of Hammett, The Escape Artist (which is not a movie that takes place in past decades, but sure feels like it is), Peggy Sue Got Married, The Outsiders, and Rumblefish; the realistic 60s visage of Gardens of Stone; and the comedy stylings of Jack. Tavoularis' work with Coppola's wine making has not been limited to just their labels, either. When Francis opened a winery and vacation spot near Geyserville, CA in the early 2000s, he had his art director design the entire layout, complete with bocce ball courts, performance spaces, cabins, sections devoted to Coppola's film work, and a movie theater.

"I’ve always been influenced," Coppola writes on the website, "by the idea of Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, which was the inspiration for ultimately all modern amusements parks. I remember the beautiful theater pavilions with the curtains painted with peacock feathers that had little ballet performances. At Tivoli, there were rides, but more important than the rides were the cafes and the refreshments, and just the sense of being in a children’s garden, a ‘pleasure garden’ for all people to enjoy – which perhaps is the best phrase to describe what we’re creating here. This vision was replicated at places on Coney Island, like Luna Park, and George C. Tilyou’s Steeplechase Park, or Palisades Park.

"These were basically wonderlands, and I thought Francis Ford Coppola Winery could become such a park for the family to go and enjoy, where there are things for kids to do, so they can be close to their parents who are sampling wines and foods.  I’ve often felt that modern life tends to separate all the ages too much. In the old days, the children lived with the parents and the grandparents, and the family unit each gave one another something very valuable. So when we began to develop the idea for this winery, we thought it should be like a resort, basically a wine wonderland, a park of pleasure where people of all ages can enjoy the best things in life – food, wine, music, dancing, games, swimming and performances of all types."

Now looking at images of the locale, and of its more movie-centric features, it seems like the perfect spot for a film geek's--or a wine enthusiast's--dream vacation:

Francis Ford Coppola Winery, in Geyserville, CA (Photo: Chad Keig)

Only a small portion of THE GODFATHER display... (Photo: Chad Keig)

...which includes Don Corleone's desk and chair.

Eiko Ishioka's Oscar-winning costumes for BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA. The giant martini glass in the background is the one in which Nastassja Kinski writhed in ONE FROM THE HEART. (Photo: Chad Keig)

One of Mr. Coppola's two Tuckers is on display as well...

Coppola's voluminous awards collection is on display, including five Oscars, two DGA awards, five Golden Globes, the Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival, and one of his two Palme D'ors from the Cannes Film Festival (photo: Chad Keig)

The band pavilion is a replica of the one seen in GODFATHER II's Lake Tahoe sequence.

 ...And then, of course, there is the wine! (Photo: Chad Keig)

I'm by no means a wine expert, but Coppola's output, stewarded by Director of Winemaking & General Manager Corey Beck, is extremely impressive. There a higher end product, sold at first only to restaurants, called Directors Cut (the complex wraparound label demanded a change, and afterwards it was available to stores). Then there's a champagne designed and inspired by his daughter Sofia (with her high-end tastes, she insisted on the pink cellophane wrapping, Coppola says), another designed by his wife Eleanor (which Coppola says might be his favorite of the entire line), and another by his granddaughter Gia (she's the daughter of the late Gian Carlo Coppola, who died at the young age of 22 in a boating accident, and who has just recently entered into the filmmaking frey with Palo Alto, based on the short stories of James Franco). The vast number of choices the Coppolas and Mr. Beck have come up with are kind of mindboggling. 

Hearing the man talk about all of these varieties, which are so intimately connected with his family, was just astounding. After experiencing this, I had to conclude--even more strongly than I had before--that the Coppola clan is simply one of the greatest American success stories out there. His immigrant grandfather Augustino was involved in the creation of Vitaphone, the first sound system for movies; his father Carmine was a member of Arturo Toscanini's NBC Orchestra and went on to compose score for The Godfather Part II (for which he won an Oscar), The Black Stallion (my favorite of his scores), Abel Gance's Napoleon, Apocalypse Now, The Outsiders, and The Godfather Part III; his wife Eleanor made one of the great filmmaking documentaries with Hearts of Darkness; his daughter Sofia (Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, Somewhere, The Virgin Suicides, The Bling Ring) and son Roman (CQ and the screenplay to Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom) continue to create notable films; and now his granddaughter Gia is in the mix. Add to that his sister Talia Shire, his nephews Jason Schwartzman and Nicolas Cage, his cinematographer brother-in-law John Schwartzman, and you're left admiring a remarkable family tree--five generations--of filmic ability. Only the Huston family, with Walter, John, Anjelica, Danny and Jack, can come close to rivaling it in longevity and cultural impact.

Francis Ford Coppola, with his daughter Sofia

When it came time for the Q&A section of the program, Mr. Coppola was extremely giving in both his reception of the questions, and in his answers. There was reluctance in the audience--which I understand. How does one address a legend such as this, even one who's obviously so social and hearty? I had a few questions of my own, though I held back and waited for others to break the ice. "You can ask me anything," he eventually asked the audience (though there were really no shortage of questions at the event). Right now, I kind of wish I had asked him some different questions.

I wish I would have asked him something fun. Something like "I know that Marlon Brando had some unusual acting methods. First, is it true that Brando used to stick his lines on tiny sheets of paper everywhere? Second, where was the most unusual place he ever hid these bits of paper? Third, do any of these still survive in you archives?" Or I could have asked him something deeper, like "What is it that you've gotten out of the other ventures you've delved in that you haven't gotten out of filmmaking?"  As much as I respected his delving into the wine industry, I felt I had to go up and ask some film geeky inquiries, though. Luckily, after a few wine-centric inquests, an Italian journalist piped up with five challenges of his own.

On the first, Coppola revealed that he's working on a screenplay that might be expanded into four separate movies, though he was not forthcoming on what those pieces were about. On another, he revealed his feelings about the previous night's Oscar ceremonies (pleased with the winners, he added "I think they should go back to five Best Picture nominees," he said. "I believe that's the influence of the Golden Globes, which have two Best Picture categories, but I think the Oscars should be more exclusive than that. But then, I think there are too many awards ceremonies, just like I believe there are too many film festivals"). Someone asked him his feelings on Spike Jonze's win for his Her screenplay, and Coppola was magnanimous there, reminding us Jonze is his former son-in-law (he was married to Sofia from 1999 to 2002), and that "even though he's no longer part of the family, that doesn't mean I don't like him anymore. He's extremely gifted and kind, and I'm happy for his success." 

My friend Jane Garvey got up to the microphone and, having just completed an excellent cover story for Georgia Magazine on the booming film industry in this state, encouraged him to consider Georgia for any future filmmaking (he directed her to give a copy of the magazine to his assistant). And finally, I got up to the microphone. Emboldened by that journalist who asked five questions, I decided to simply look towards the future. I wanted to know what was happening next for him, moviewise.  But first, strangely, I wanted to look to the past--not only to the cinema's past, but to his family's past. I have to admit, up at that microphone, my voice cracked for a second, overwhelmed as I was with emotion at talking to one of my moviemaking heroes. I first let him know that, back in 1982, I attended the Fox Theater--the theater we were in--to see his father conduct his orchestrations for Abel Gance's Napoleon. 

Carmine and Francis Ford Coppola, after their 1974 Oscar wins for THE GODFATHER PART II.

"Oh, Napoleon played here? Wow..." I told him it was an event that changed my life and, pleased to hear this, he probably anticipated my question. Gance's film has long been unavailable for viewing, and has yet to be released on digital because of disagreements between the head of the film's reconstruction, Kevin Brownlow, and Coppola (both of whom, ironically, won special Academy Awards in the same year, 2011). Coppola said that 40 additional minutes of Gance's film have been uncovered, and that his team was deep in the process of further reconstructing Napoleon, and digging deep into Carmine Coppola's archives for pieces of music that could be blended with his father's 1981 score to make a "final cut" of the film, which he said has been contracted for release by The Criterion Collection. He characterized Brownlow's cut as a "competing version," and left it at that. I thought "Anything that leads to Napoleon being seen again, that's great news in my book."

I then asked him about the screenplays he's working on, and I wondered if they had anything to do with his long-gestating project Megalopolis, which was scuttled not long after the 9/11 incident, reportedly because it involved a similar catastrophic NYC event. Coppola answered "No, that's a project that I just cannot get financing for." I then asked, given that his current project seems to be headed for a cumulative 8-hour running time (over four separate films), if he would consider approaching a TV network for financing and distribution. "That's an intriguing possibility," he said. "Our idea of what cinema is is undergoing a radical change these days--and I'm including television in this as well--so I'm not ruling that out."

Later, another audience member asked if he'd been watching any of the TV productions that have captured the public imagination. "You know, a few months ago, I finally sat down to watch The Sopranos. It took a week--binge-watching, y'know. But I went through all 90-some hours of it, and I liked it very much. It wasn't all great, but there was greatness throughout. And then I took another week and went through Breaking Bad, and I felt very much the same way about that." He seemed encouraged about the detailed storytelling potential with which television work is now finding success, and this impressed the audience as a whole. (Incidentally, they cooed when he mentioned  Breaking Bad; not so incidentally, is Breaking Bad the new Godfather?).

Mr. Coppola with his creations, at his winery in Geyserville, CA (photo: Russell Yip, SF Chronicle)

It was also fascinating to learn of Coppola's 80s and 90s work as being something that he was contractually bound to do given that, in order to keep the winery going, he had signed for a bank loan that required him to make one movie a year until the money was paid back. Coppola said, on some of these projects, he found it difficult to find his way into the heart of the story. Peggy Sue Got Married, he said, was a particularly tough nut to crack, but he found a pathway into engagement when he considered the reaction he might have if he had the opportunity to revisit his own lost family members, just as Kathleen Turner's character does in the film. He also admitted that 1990's The Godfather Part III was a picture he would have never made if the requirements of running the winery had not necessitated it. "I always looked at the first two Godfather movies as a stand-alone tale, like Hamlet. And there was no Hamlet Part II..."

One of the highlights, in a night full of them, was the revelation of Coppola's musical abilities. He, of course, come from a musical family (on Inside the Actor's Studio in 2003, he told James Lipton his favorite sound was the flute, which was the instrument that his father played). He admitted to having no real musical teachings himself (though he did take co-writing credit with his father for the Apocalypse Now score). Yet he played for us a song that he'd written for his grandchild Romy Croquet (Sofia's first daughter). Lush, like a Nelson Riddle piece by way of Michel Legrand, with a full orchestra and with Coppola singing quite surely of his love for her, it was a brilliant bit of bravery for Coppola to feature this as part of his presentation (though he has nothing to be ashamed of; that song was gorgeous, and his singing was pitch perfect and, dare I say, rather Sinatra-like). "I knew I had let myself in for it, because I knew the other grandchildren would want their own song, too," he said, and so he dutifully played another he had written for Sofia's second child Cosima (another beautiful piece), and finally one he'd written for Gia when she was in her 20s (this one was different--a raucous tarantella bemused by Gia's honesty and talent for making Francis laugh).

My final comment to him--this man that had moved me to such intensity with his films--was to compliment him on his singing, and to thank him for taking the time to visit Atlanta, which we found was the first stop on a multi-city tour promoting his winery and its yield. His spry talk with us was wonderfully cozy, enlightening, and even gave us a glimpse into his firm but affable directing style, since it was obvious every move in the presentation was by his design. It was easy for all in the room to see how any collaborator, whether a family member or a fellow artist, or even a fan, would go to the earth's edge to garner his favor. Francis Ford Coppola is the kind of person you would just naturally want to please, because he's so pleasant, and so demanding of himself.

Francis Ford Coppola in Atlanta, February 2014. (photo: Atlanta Event Photography)