Apocalypse Then
Tune in to see the movie FFCoppola was ripping off.
In and of itself it's ripping off Orson Welles (w Akim Tamiroff. Welles wanted to film Heart of Darkness before Citizen Kane).
Hardly "ripping off," since both are based on separate Conrad novels.
"I just speak GOODER than you!"
Actually, Coppola did rip it off. In the Apocalypse Now documentary Hearts of Darkness John Milius comments that when Coppola first approached him with the project Coppola mentioned all the people who tried to do the project and failed, including Richard Brooks, the director of Lord Jim (the implication being that Brooks "failed" with Lord Jim).
Brooks drastically changed the setting of Lord Jim from the novel. Conrad set it in the Malaysian archipelego and had the population mainly Muslim. Brooks, with the Vietnam conflict heating up, moved the story's climax to French Indochina and made the population Buddhist. Coppola likewise took Conrad's African setting for Heart of Darkness and exchanged it for one in Vietnam.
In a similar manner Brooks took a minor, easily dismissed character of Conrad's in Lord Jim, Sherif Ali, and replaced him with an avatar of Kurtz from Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Eli Wallach played the role to the hilt as the ruthless French "General."
In the documentary Hearts of Darkness Coppola laments that he expected the trim, authoratative Marlon Brando, but instead got an obese Brando who was constantly bugging Coppola with questions about Kurtz's motivation. On the spot Coppola decided to go another direction and have Kurtz portayed as a guy who had let himself go in every sense of the word. Reading between the lines here, it seems clear that Coppola originally wanted a performance along the lines of Wallach's- the cold, stern warlord who survives by being more barbaric than the barbarians around him, instead he and Brando portayed Kurtz as a man whom "the horror" had caused to totally degenerate.
Coppola also ripped off much of Brooks' imagery- dissolving shots of Angkor Wat-style ruins with eerie "native" music playing. Brooks had the major confrontation between Jim and the General (with the General torturing Jim) intercut with a scene of a ritualised martial-arts bout set to music while an an attendant crowd of locals watch. Coppola has the climactic scene where Willard kills Kurtz intercut with a scene of a water buffalo being ritually slaughtered before an audience while the Doors' "The End" plays.
I get the impression that a young Coppola saw Lord Jim and while he loved the setting and Brooks imagery, he hated the sappy dialogue and romance. That Brooks' imagery had a powerful effect on Coppola is visible in the way Coppola inserted shots and scenes that were almost direct parallels to those in Brooks' Lord Jim.
"Ripping off" implies criticism, and I don't really mean to criticise Coppola. Film, like any art, is constantly evolving as new artists look at what has come before and adapt elements from previous works.
I think it is fairly obvious that Apocalypse Now is an infinitely more powerful film than Lord Jim, but to a certain extent Apocalypse Now was able to reach the heights it did because Lord Jim, even if it did not fully succeed, did indicate what could be achieved in shooting a Conrad tale set in South East Asia.
I don't know if it is justifiable, especially without deeper research, to say that Apocalypse Now would not have been made or would not have been as good a movie without Lord Jim to precede it, but I'd definitely argue that Lord Jim was an important source of inspiration for Coppola, as much for its failings as for its successes.
Mostly I'm replying because the title, "Apocalypse Then" was clever, cute,
and right on.
But I would draw the line at calling Apocalypse Now a rip-off of this film.
That one seems to follow the other is really just due to the euro-centric view
of Western Film Makers who suddenly have to show "Asian-ness" in a way that is
both seemly genuine, entertaining, and profitable at the same time. Hollywood
is an **industry** after all. We're dealing with SE Asia so(to use the racist
terms) it can't be "Chinese" "Jap", "Flip", or "Packie/Sahib" as the viewers
already know THOSE aren't from SE Asia. So,...? We end up with Gamelan music
(probably Javanese), Giant Stone Buddha Heads(Angkor Wat), and a female lead
who is actually Isreali(ravishing too!). Voila! instant, mysterious SE asian
set ready to film. Don't forget some elephants too. At least Coppola said no
to elephants - unless there's some trivia I missed on that. But kinda hard to
get a elephant in Marcos' Philipines.
And let's not forget that neither film is in any way faithful to the stories.
They represent the director's vision. To Brook's credit, he went there first.
But Coppola's dreams were far more profound and more successful as well.
FWIW,
Andrew
P.S. No harm intended by national nicks, just making a point on Hollywood.
Alan,
Nice post. I recently caught Lord Jim on TCM, not having seen it in a long time, and now with the benefit of a long held admiration for Apocalypse now as a framework. OF COURSE FFC took inspiration and then some from Lord Jim. Yes, he music and even the overall feel of the Kurtz compound seem to come straight out of Lord Jim. And while I am leery of concluding that FFC would not have taken liberties with the original text, meaning as much as he did, he did have Brooks's even if less than successful example to work from. The parts of Lord Jim which seem something less than successful do not, by and large, include what FFC got from it as inspiration for AN.
It is interesting to me as a Conrad fan that while Conrad did not set Lord Jim specifically in SE Asia, so much of his work was set, including Lord Jim, in that general if you will part of the world. Conrad of course had a preference for island settings, I think it fair to say, what with Allmacher's Folly, Victory, Outcast of the Islands as examples. In fact the feel of the Lord Jim novel is very close to those of his island settings, with emphasis on the exotic settings usually alongside or journeyed to by the sea, including Nostromo, Lord Jim itself, The Arrow of Gold, and of course Heart of Darkness itself. Then there were the sea stories, of which of course the first half of the novel of Lord Jim was one, including Typhoon, Chance and Narcissus. Perhaps as you suggest it was somewhat opportunistic for Brooks to set the story in Cambodia, and you are correct in saying there is a certain paternalistic and racial attitude in too easily equating one SE Asian setting with another. But of course Conrad himself did not put all that much stock in distinguishing one of his settings from another (even a story explicitly set in Central America, albeit a fictional country, which is the excellent Nostromo to my mind had a feel not unlike his other works, and ftr I am not complaining).
In short I do not think it was all that much a stretch, for whatever reason, racial or timeliness, for FFC to move the story from central Africa to SE Asia. But you are correct than in Brooks he had an example of that to at least consider.
Again, nice post.
Marlon Brando needed to look just how he did for the movie. He was a man at the end of the river. End of the line. Brando fit to a tee.
My Cinema Site at www.cultfilmfreaks.com