The Big Picture - 4. Little by Little, We Went Insane | Do We Get to Win This Time?

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

‘Apocalypse Now’ closes out the 1970s with the most ambitious Vietnam movie yet: a big-budget spectacle that will bring moviegoers closer than ever to the madness of war—and nearly push director Francis Ford Coppola over the edge.  Other films we talk about in this episode include ‘Who’ll Stop the Rain’ (1978), ‘The Boys in Company C’ (1978), ‘Go Tell the Spartans’ (1978), and ‘Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse’ (1991). Host: Brian Raftery  Producers: Devon Manze, Mike Wargon, Amanda Dobbins, and Vikram Patel Sound Design: Bobby Wagner  Mixing and Mastering: Scott Somerville  All interviews for this series were conducted before the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everybody. Here at The Ringer, we're known for our talk shows, but you might not know we also have a whole slate of great narrative podcasts, all of them made for binging. If you're looking for an unmissable sports history show, you'll love Icons Club. It's a chronicle of the NBA told through the voices of legendary players, whose stories weren't blockbuster movies of their own. If you're a fan of culture podcasts, check out This Blew Up, an investigative story about how social media is inventing an all-new level of stardom, one that's not always as glamorous as it looks. There's also Gamblers, a show about people who make money betting on, well, pretty much anything.

Just don't bet on finding a better podcast about gambling, because you won't win. Thanks for listening. One Saturday night in 1978, not long before the opening of The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino received a visitor while staying in a New York City hotel, Francis Ford Coppola. Though only in his late 30s, Coppola was already a filmmaking superstar,

one in the middle of an amazing big-screen run. He'd co-written Patton, released in 1970, and had gone on to make two blockbuster Godfather films, as well as the hit drama The Conversation. He was about as mighty as a director could get. But by the time he knocked on Cimino's door, Coppola hadn't released a new movie in almost five years. He'd spent a lot of that time in the Philippines, working feverishly on his own Vietnam drama.

Apocalypse Now. The movie starred Martin Sheen as a jaded military man, Captain Willard, who's tasked with hunting down a former colonel who's been driven mad by the war and gone AWOL. Apocalypse Now starts with Willard already at the end of his rope. He's been in Vietnam too long, and he's holed up in a dark room, drinking and drifting. Saigon. Shit. I'm still only in Saigon.

And by late 1978, Coppola was still in Apocalypse Now. The making of the film had dragged on for years, as the director burned through actors, sets, and millions of dollars. Apocalypse was supposed to have been Hollywood's first big-budget Vietnam film. But Coppola had taken so long, that honor had instead gone to the deer hunter. Coppola even acknowledged Cimino's accomplishment while visiting him in the hotel that night. You beat me, baby, Coppola said. At least, that's what Cimino told the New York Times.

I would immediately bet you a hundred bucks and a good dinner at a restaurant of your choice in New York that that never happened. That's Tom Mount, the former Universal exec we met last episode. His experience with Cimino on The Deer Hunter taught him to be skeptical of the director's big claims. And as behind-the-scenes anecdotes go, Cimino's hotel story is a little too perfect. But it's just one of the countless legends about Apocalypse Now.

The movie was so potentially enormous, an iconic director taking on a once-in-a-generation war, that Apocalypse Now was inspiring myths before it was even released. And at the center of all those myths? Coppola himself. When you talk about stories that are almost too perfect to be true, consider this. Apocalypse Now is about a man who stays in the jungle too long and is driven to extremes by the madness of war.

And it was made by a man who himself had become lost in the wild and who'd returned, in his words, a little insane. I'm protected by an army of kids here. This is Coppola in 1979. The year Apocalypse now finally arrived. He's at a press conference where he looms over the room,

tall, dark-haired, and shaggy-looking. Next to him are his children, including Sofia Coppola, then barely eight years old. Because we are really in a jungle, I mean, human beings. This film just presents a very extreme case where one man goes off as the line is beyond the pale of normal human restraint. He goes too far. He's destroyed by it. At one point, Coppola extends a hand towards Sophia, who smiles as her father becomes more

animated. I wanted America to look at the face of it, to look at the face of the horror, and to accept it and say, yes, it is my face. And only then could they go beyond to some new age. It's not a movie, it's a trip, it's a journey. Apocalypse Now was a movie. Sorry, a journey like no other. A towering, hypnotic nightmare that would define the Vietnam War for millions of moviegoers,

especially those who grew up after the war. There are moments from the film so unforgettable, they've become go-to images of Vietnam. I mean, does anyone hear the sleepy guitars at the end by the doors? Without flashing to the image of trees being slowly napalmed into oblivion? And it's impossible to listen to Ride of the Valkyries and not immediately think of those apocalypse-now helicopters soaring low over the water. Those kind of moments were mesmerizing back in 1979, and they're just as powerful now.

Capturing them, however, would push Coppola so hard that by the time he returned to America, he believed he'd done more than merely recreate the Vietnam War. He felt he'd actually lived it. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery, and this is Do We Get to Win This Time? How Hollywood Made the Vietnam War.

As we've learned by now, most of the big Vietnam movies of the 70s took years to get made. But the history of Apocalypse Now goes back almost a century earlier, to a book written by Joseph Conrad in the late 1800s. The Heart of Darkness could be described as a deliberate masterpiece or a downright incantation. Its best aspects are an artful compound of sympathy for humankind and a high, tragical disgust. That's Orson Welles, introducing his 1938 radio adaptation of Heart of Darkness. Like many artists, he was fascinated

by Conrad's novel of power and madness. It follows a young sailor named Marlow as he travels up the Congo River to find a rogue ivory trader named Kurtz. The jungle has corrupted Kurtz, who's become adopted as a godlike figure among the locals and committed unimaginable acts of violence. When Kurtz dies, he become adopted as a godlike figure among the locals and committed unimaginable acts

of violence. When Kurtz dies, he mutters these final words. Conrad's tale was a grand adventure, and a brutal one. Which may be why, in the late 50s, the book found a fan in a teen delinquent named John Milius. At the time, Milius was attending a private school in Colorado, away from his parents, who feared he was getting into too much trouble. Even then, Milius loved tough guy stuff. Hunting, surfing, and of course, John Wayne movies. Milius had hoped for a military career, and when America began pushing into Vietnam in the 60s, he tried to enlist.

His goal? To die young. In combat. He shared his fatalistic plans in the 2013 documentary, Milius. I didn't plan on coming back. I was going to be a naval aviator, and I planned

that I probably wouldn't live past 26 because I didn't see any point in it. But Milius had asthma and wasn't eligible for duty, a fact that clearly pained him. I missed going to my war, he later said. Instead, Milius, who loved movies, enrolled at the University of Southern California's film program. He never graduated, but he spent four years there working on scripts and short films,

and became friends with a scrawny beardo named George Lucas. Together, they came up with an idea for a movie about Vietnam, one that Lucas would direct. It would be low budget and shot on 16mm. Milius even had a perfect title for it. Hippies used to wear buttons that said Nirvana now, and they had a peace sign on them. He modified one of the buttons so that the peace sign looked like a B-52 bomber. And put Apocalypse Now.

But Milius described his Apocalypse script, which he finished in 1969, as, quote, an anti-war statement. He told a reporter, I don't think the depiction of war should be gentle, and I've always felt that Americans are violent people. Look at our history. That violence found its way into his script, which incorporated war stories Milius had heard from friends of his who'd returned from Vietnam. Apocalypse also included some of Milius' personal obsessions. In one scene, U.S. troops take a surf break while storming a beach in North Vietnam.

If I say it's safe to surf this beach, Captain, it's safe to surf this beach! I mean, I don't have to surf this place! I'll say it's safe to surf this fucking place! Through Lucas, Milius had become friends with Francis Ford Coppola, who was looking to produce movies, and who bought the Apocalypse Now script for $25,000. But it languished, unmade, throughout the early 70s. Here's Coppola in an old interview, explaining how the project fell apart. We had some bad luck, and a lot of our projects, we couldn't get the money.

And so people were going off to do their own thing. Years passed. During that time, Lucas made Star Wars, and Coppola began his Godfather saga. Milius' script was just laying around. Until the mid-'70s, when Coppola, who'd just won three Oscars for The Godfather Part II, became interested in making it himself.

Gradually, I started to have my own ideas, and I thought, well, maybe I don't want to make it in 16mm, I want to make it in Omnimax. You always see war footage in 16mm. Maybe to see a movie in, like, Cinerama would be Vietnam, you know, with all this kind of hallucinogenic aspect. I thought that would be great. In late 1975, Coppola began putting together

what he described to the press as his orgiastic Vietnam film. But even in those early days, it was clear that making Apocalypse Now was going to be a monumental task. When a few big-name actors turned down the film, names like Pacino and Nicholson, Coppola became so frustrated that one day he threw his five Oscars out a window. Well, he was kind of known for these sort of

operatic outbursts. That was just sort of his nature. That's filmmaker Eleanor Coppola, Frances's wife of 60 years. She was on set during much of the production of Apocalypse Now and kept a running diary, which she published in a 1979 book called Notes. Essential reading, by the way. We cleaned it up. First of all, they're filled with kind of gray, bloody, sandy, kind of disgusting-looking stuff inside

that's just coated with gold finish. Oh, now I feel very deglamorized about the Oscars. So maybe I'll throw my five Oscars out the window too. Why not? So maybe a couple were scuffed, but the broken ones that were broken in half and the guts were pouring out. Frances' mother took them to the academy and she said,

my son's housekeeper knocked these off the shelf and what can I do? And she got them replaced. With his new Oscar safe and sound at home, Coppola flew to Manila in late 1975 to start scouting locations. He wouldn't return from the jungle for good for nearly a year and a half. The public first got word of trouble on the set of Coppola's film in the summer of 1976. That's when these wild stories about Apocalypse Now began appearing in the press. Stories about crew members bringing gallons of gasoline into the jungle to create the napalm

scenes. About Coppola firing Harvey Keitel, his first choice to play Willard, just as shooting began. And about Coppola borrowing helicopters from the Philippines government after being turned down by the U.S. military. Coppola was really pissed about the helicopter thing. The government had given John Wayne all sorts of military toys for the Green Berets,

but Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld refused to help with Apocalypse Now. Coppola took his complaints to reporters. With my film, he said, the department has done its best to turn its head. Quotes like that spread through newspapers across the country. You have to remember, Coppola, then in his mid-30s, was a rare superstar director, a swaggering genius whose self-assuredness was never in doubt. People were waiting for his next masterpiece or his first disaster. He would say, oh my God, he said,

I'm getting so much negative press and so many people are against this. I think those are the kind of things that motivated him to get more brash. Francis Ford Coppola wasn't just frustrated by all these nasty stories. He was confused by them. After all, he was an artist taking on a difficult subject. Shouldn't people root for him?

Here he is, making his case in a 2007 audio commentary for Apocalypse Now. I thought of myself as going off and doing a kind of heroic production using my own money, trying to make a film that was set in Vietnam, which, of course, no one had tried to do up until that time. About the money. Apocalypse Now was originally budgeted at $12 million.

But what had once been a four-month shoot was now plagued with delays. In May 1976, a typhoon crashed into the film's set, stranding Sheen and 100 other cast and crew members for days. They were eventually relocated to a hotel, where many of the Apocalypse team members came down with dysentery. Filming shut down for months, but things didn't get easier when Coppola picked it back up in July of that year. Sometimes, a $60,000 shooting day was lost

so Coppola could work on Milius' script, which the director was rewriting mid-production. United Artists, the company releasing Apocalypse, took out a loan of around $16 million to keep things going. As collateral, Coppola put up his house, as well as his future godfather earnings. No one knew how or when production on Apocalypse Now would end, partly because they didn't know how or when Apocalypse Now the movie would end. I mean, most of the stuff that was trickling back wasn't good news. That's Mike Medavoy, the former production chief at United Artists.

During the shoot, he was dispatched to the Apocalypse set to get an idea of just how screwed the production really was. I was in the Philippines having dinner with Francis. I said to Francis, when are you going to finish this film? And he looked

at me and he said, never. How much can you do at that point, visiting the set? You can't do much. Right. I mean, you can't kill Francis. Right. My feeling was that he was going to finish it. You know, he certainly had every incentive to do that.

You know, it was fairly crazy. I mean, the whole thing was crazy. I don't know. Adding to all that craziness, the fact that a different movie was being filmed at the same time, and by a different Coppola. Early on in the Apocalypse Now shoot, in March 1976, Eleanor Coppola arrived in the Philippines with her three children in tow.

She immediately felt out of sorts. Once I got there, I didn't realize how depressed I got because I was away from my projects. I was doing a lot of art projects at that point. And my friends and my community of art people, and I was the mom of three kids and the only mother there for a while. Martin Sheen brought his family at one point. But I was really lonely and Francis saw me

kind of sinking, I think. His solution? To recruit his wife to make a promotional film about the making of Apocalypse Now. Eleanor Coppola would have access to shoot whatever she wanted, collecting footage that could be whittled down to a quick five-minute publicity video. I had made some very short little art films in the early 70s.

We knew that I could get five minutes of something. So he got me a newsreel camera. I read the directions and went in the bathroom and closed the door and made it black and learned how to load it in the dark. I just started point one and I said, yeah, I think I could

get five minutes of material. We're going to be out here for a few months. She'd wind up filming for a little more than a year, taking occasional breaks to return home to America. Through her camera, Eleanor Coppola would witness the high-stakes lunacy of Apocalypse Now. One day, not long after arriving in the Philippines, she filmed a sequence featuring multiple explosions. Coppola quickly found herself in the middle of a hectic scene.

Fire was spreading around part of the set, causing paint cans to explode and filling her eyes with smoke. When she finally could see, Coppola noticed some of her equipment was melting. As she spent more time on set, though, Coppola realized that the spectacle of Apocalypse Now was nowhere near as compelling as the man in charge of creating it. And I was supposed to be getting helicopters blowing up and lots of action and fire and so forth, but I got more and more interested in Francis's creative process. And then when I realized that it was really about him, I kind of got a focus and could try to really capture more of that experience, his experience.

She wound up shooting about 60 hours worth of footage, some of which would find its way into a must-see documentary called Hearts of Darkness, A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. Co-directed by Eleanor Coppola, George Hickenlooper, and Fax Barr, Hearts of Darkness arrived in 1991, more than a decade after Apocalypse Now hit theaters. The documentary captures the excess and excitement of the film's production, and its star is none other than Francis Ford Coppola himself.

In some scenes, the director's frustration with Apocalypse Now is on full display. This film is a $20 million disaster. Why won't anyone believe me? I'm thinking of shooting myself. At other times, though, the documentary catches Coppola in the middle of a full-on artistic epiphany. There's also a fantastic scene of Coppola holding court in the jungle, tanned, bearded, and classically dad bodded. The sun is shining, birds are chirping, and Francis Ford Coppola is deeply, wonderfully stuck in his own head. Nothing is so terrible as a pretentious movie. I mean, a movie that aspires for something really

terrific and doesn't pull it off is shit. It's scum. And everyone will walk on it as such. And that's why poor filmmakers, in a way, that's their greatest horror, is to be pretentious. So here you are, on one hand, trying to aspire to really do something. On the other hand, you're not allowed to be pretentious. And finally you say, fuck it. That whole fuck it attitude would keep Apocalypse Now alive through all of its stops and starts.

In March of 1977, Sheen suffered a heart attack that would take him out of the production for weeks. He later claimed the high-stress atmosphere wasn't the cause, but Sheen had put himself through hell to play Captain Willard. Months before his heart attack, Sheen had filmed a scene in which a drunken, naked Willard goes berserk in his Saigon hotel room, where he starts practicing karate. Sheen, who'd been drinking heavily that day, wound up breaking a mirror and slicing up his hand. As the actor explained to Bob Costas in 1991, by that point in filming, he was putting his own struggles up on the screen.

I bled quite a lot, and Francis tried to stop the scene. But Sheen wanted to stay in the moment. And I said, please, I must do this for myself. Coppola agreed and kept the cameras rolling. And he allowed me to wrestle, in a sense, with some demons

that I had been wrestling with for quite a while. What they captured that day, Sheen says, was a deeply personal performance. I had done that scene in bars. I'd done that scene at home, you know, in my drunkenness. I'm an alcoholic, you know. And I had to come to grips with it.

I had to exercise that. When Coppola wasn't tending to Sheen, he was trying to manage his other stars, like Dennis Hopper, who'd ask Coppola for an ounce of cocaine for each week of shooting so that he could play a manic American photojournalist who's fallen under the spell of Kurtz. In this scene from the final act of Apocalypse Now, Willard asks Hopper's character for some help. Could we talk to Colonel Kurtz?

Hey, man, you don't talk to the colonel when you listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet, warrior in the classic sense. I mean, sometimes he'll... Well, you say hello to him, right? And he'll just walk right by you and he won't even notice you.

And then suddenly he'll grab you and he'll throw you in a corner and he'll say, do you know that if is the middle word in life? Then there was Brando. Who'd shown up to the set overweight and, according to Coppola, underprepared, having not read Heart of Darkness. Shooting once again stopped so the two men could talk about Brando's character. Hopper explained this surreal situation to documentarian Mark Cousins in 2001.

There wasn't any end to the movie. There was no character for me to play. Then Brando and Francis go off on a boat because Francis wants to read Marlin, Heart of Darkness, and 900 of us are sitting there, crew and cast, are sitting waiting for them to come back. When Brando returned, he was finally ready to film. But he didn't want to work with Hopper.

The two had gotten into a ridiculously complicated fight earlier in the shoot. I can't explain it all here, but it involves a Philippines boxing match, James Dean's bongo drums, and a late-night screening of The Seven Samurai. Anyway, the tension between Brando and Hopper was a problem, since they were supposed to appear on screen together. A compromise was struck. Tommy Shaw, Former Baseball Pitcher You'd do his scenes and I'd come in the next night and do mine.

And so at one point they'd come in and they said, well, you know, Marlon called you a whimpering dog last night and like threw bananas at you. So all night I've got this guy Tommy Shaw as an ex-baseball pitcher, as a prop guy, throwing bananas at me. You know? Which is totally insane. Because Brando was only supposed to work for three weeks, Coppola had to quickly throw together the movie's ending.

A showdown between Kurtz and Willard, the man sent to kill him. It included long speeches by Kurtz on the insanity of war. To create that dialogue, Coppola spent five days listening to Brando improvise lines, then combine them with material from Conrad's book. I've seen horrors. Horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that. But you have no right to kill me. You have a right to do that.

But you have no right to judge me. For the Apocalypse Now team, the horrors of moviemaking finally ended on May 21st, 1977, the 238th day of filming. Coppola told the press, quote, I've never seen so many people so happy to be unemployed. It had been 17 months since he'd first gone to scout locations in Manila. Now, Coppola was returning to his home in San Francisco with more than a million feet of film to cut down into a movie.

He would have to work fast, because Apocalypse Now already had a rapidly approaching release date, Christmas 1977. Coppola wouldn't return from the editing room for nearly two years. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started.

When Francis Ford Coppola announced Apocalypse Now in late 1975, he had the war all to himself. At that point, the deer hunter hadn't been dreamt up, and coming home was stuck in limbo. As Coppola told reporters that year films about vietnam have been a hot potato in the movie industry no one would touch them with a 10-foot pole i guess because americans felt guilty apocalypse now was supposed to have been hollywood's first big pedigree vietnam drama since the war's end but coppola took so long slogging it out in the ph the Philippines that a few small but still important films managed to get underway first.

Movies like Who'll Stop the Rain, a 1978 action flick slash romance set amid the California counterculture, starring Nick Nolte as a Vietnam vet who smuggles heroin back to the U.S. That same year also saw the release of The Boys and Company C A funky combination of combat film and hangout flick That followed an oddball group of marines from basic training to the battlefield But one of the late 70s most intriguing Vietnam films Was a low-budget drama that would take years to find an audience This one's a sucker's toy Going nowhere

Just round and round in circles. Burt Lancaster in Go Tell the Spartans. Directed by Ted Post, who spent seven years trying to get it made, Go Tell the Spartans is set in 1964, when America still had a relatively small presence in Vietnam. It stars Lancaster as an aging military man and World War II vet named Asa Barker. Asa Barker! Again, we used to have such great character names. Anyway, he's assigned to defend an obscure outpost in South Vietnam.

But as he and his team struggle with bad intel, and even worse morale, the emptiness of their efforts begin to eat away at them. Before the film's downbeat climax, Barker tells a young draftee that America's efforts in Vietnam are destined to fail. You know what you are, Corsi? You're a tourist. Too bad we couldn't have shown you a better war,

like hitting the beach at Anzio, or smashing through the Bastogne with Patton. That was a tour worth the money. Speaking of which, money was a big issue on the set of Go Tell the Spartans. For a war movie, the budget was tiny, just under a million dollars or so, and Lancaster himself had to kick in 150 grand to get it over the finish line. To keep costs low, filming took place in the California hills behind an amusement park, meaning the cast and crew sometimes heard screams from a nearby roller coaster.

The Spartan shoot was quick and very intense, especially for some of the film's extras, which included South Vietnamese refugees who'd made their way to the U.S. and were struggling to find work. The producers gave them black smocks and fake guns and asked them to help recreate the war that had driven them away from their home. One night during filming, a former South Vietnamese major stood and watched as the filmmakers burned down a hut. He told a reporter, it makes you remember. You remember your friends who were killed. Like the other extras, he was paid $35 a day. Go Tell the Spartans was dumped in the theaters over the summer and fall of 1978.

It was marketed as a macho adventure film, not a sobering war drama. And it didn't help that it looked like it was shot on the set of M.A.S.H. So the movie got lost, at least until the 80s, when critics like Siskel and Ebert took up the cause. This back and forth has been lightly edited for brevity. Here's a film that shows early on this country was making huge mistakes in Vietnam Siskel and Ebert took up the cause. This back and forth has been lightly edited for brevity. Here's a film that shows early on this country was making huge mistakes in Vietnam, that it had no clear sense of what it was trying to do there,

that it had no real interest in the South Vietnamese people. This film is poetic, grand, and sad, and I'd like to see it again anytime. I enjoyed it too. This film was basically just a war story. People maybe just thought it was old-fashioned. Maybe Go Tell the Spartans was a bit too square for the time. But back in

1978, it was clear that any movie dealing with Vietnam would forever live under the shadow of a much bigger film. One that nobody had seen yet, and which around Hollywood had inspired a cruel new nickname. Apocalypse When? They started arriving the morning of Friday, May 11th, 1979.

Hundreds of young movie fans crowding the block outside the Westwood Bruin Theater in Los Angeles. Some would be in line for more than 10 hours, eating pizza and reading scripts. They'd been lured by an ad that had appeared in the LA Times just a day before. It invited moviegoers to check out a work in progress from director Francis Ford Coppola. The name of the film wasn't disclosed, but the people swarming the Bruin knew what was happening. They were finally going to see Apocalypse Now.

By that point, it had been two years since filming wrapped. During that time, Milius had gone on to write and direct his surfing drama Big Wednesday, which also touched on Vietnam. And Brando had enjoyed a huge hit with Superman. But Coppola had been consumed by editing Apocalypse Now, watching release dates come and go as he tried to cut his more than one million feet of film into a cohesive story. By comparison, Steven Spielberg shot only half a million feet of film into a cohesive story. By comparison,

Steven Spielberg shot only half a million feet of film on Jaws. That night, the Bruin audience, which also included executives and movie stars, would witness the result of all of Coppola's work. A hypnotic two-hour, 20-minute epic. Apocalypse still wasn't finished. Coppola, who'd been testing the film over the last year, even handed out questionnaire forms, asking viewers to suggest changes. But the Bruin audience got an early look at sequences that would soon be burned in the moviegoers' minds.

Like the fiery helicopter assaults led by Kilgore, a keyed-up lieutenant colonel, played by Robert Duvall, who blasts Wagner from the air, and who, after storming a beach, utters one of the film's most unforgettable lines. You smell that? You smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. Come on, move, move, move, move! I love the smell of nap pump in the morning. Then there were the nightmarish scenes in which Willard and his Navy escorts journey upriver to find Kurtz. At one point, against

Willard's urging, the boat's chief petty officer, played by Albert Hall, stops to inspect a small wooden boat called a sampan. It's a noisy, confused, harrowing moment. And it ends with all the Vietnamese aboard being brutally gunned down, without any of them being given more than a few words of dialogue. Bring her on board. We're taking her to an arvin. Look at her. What are you talking about? We're taking her to some friendlies, Captain. She's wounded. She's not dead. The book says Captain... The crew looks on in horror at what Willard's done.

I told you not to stop. Now let's go. During the final moments of that apocalypse screening, viewers also got their first real look at Brando. Bald, sweaty, and sometimes inscrutable as the murderous Kurtz. When Willard finds him, Kurtz is being treated as a lord of the jungle, a madman whose many followers are convinced of his powers. But Kurtz is wise enough to know that Willard's there to kill him. Are you an assassin?

I'm a soldier. You're neither. You're an errand boy Sent by grocery clerks To collect a bill After the Bruins screening finished There was some polite applause According to an LA Times report One of the attendees that night was Siskel Who talked to Coppola afterward After the Bruins screening finished, there was some polite applause, according to an LA Times report.

One of the attendees that night was Siskel, who talked to Coppola afterward. The director told him the message of Apocalypse is that, quote, we are all straddled between good and evil, and we make each decision as we go along. Coppola also made a joke, I think, about just how dearly the last few years had cost him. My bank account, he said, is empty. The endless production of Apocalypse Now had clearly taken a toll on Coppola. Financially, to be sure, but also emotionally. After one negative screening, in 1978,

a despondent Coppola wrote a note to himself, saying, My nerves are shot, my heart is broken, my imagination is dead. Around that same time, rumors had begun to swirl that Coppola was comparing the making of Apocalypse Now to Vietnam itself, that he believed his movie was now as out of control as the war. That may explain the infamously disastrous press conference Coppola held at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1979,

the one you heard at the beginning of this episode. This all happened just a few days after the Bruin premiere. It began with Coppola, fed up with years of negative Apocalypse Now coverage, attacking American reporters for being deceitful and corrupt. Then, in front of a global audience, with cameras rolling, Coppola made a remark that would follow him for decades. Eleanor Coppola captured the wild scene in Hearts of Darkness.

My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too many or too much money, too much equipment. And little by little, we went insane.

That moment, which still goes viral every once in a while, has become part of the apocalypse mythos. To some, it's proof that Francis Ford Coppola was out of control. But according to Eleanor Coppola, it's not that simple. His film wasn't finished and he was trying to get support for it. A lot of people who thought it was a disaster, you know, and he was kind of doing his show, I think, to say he was in control and it was exciting and it was different and wasn't just some old fashioned war movie. When people watch that scene, when they hear that statement, they do hear hubris or they hear overconfidence or they hear grandiosity. I mean, do you think that's unfair or what do you hear when you hear that? Well, Francis has that side of him.

You know, he sees things big. He sees things his way. That's what a visionary kind of, in my experience, makes them different from other people, would be polite and not say anything like that. Coppola wasn't the only one making grand pronouncements about his apocalypse experience. Though Brando spent just a few weeks on set, playing Kurtz had a deep impact on the actor.

In the early 80s, Brando struck up a relationship with Frank Snepp, the former CIA analyst we met a few episodes back. One night, Snepp learned just how far Brando's method acting approach had taken him. We're together in the Halcyon Hotel in London. And the Halcyon Hotel is a no-name hotel where celebrities stay. And I wasn't staying there. I wouldn't stay near Marlon. He drove me crazy.

Talk eventually turned to Brando's Apocalypse Now performance. He said, you know, Frank, I've never killed anybody. But I know what it's like to kill somebody. And that's where I was with Kurtz. I went through the bloody roof. I said, I was in this war for nearly six years. I was in very hot zones. I was in the worst firefight of my life six days after I arrived in Vietnam. People were killed all around me. There's no way you can think your way into this. And we had serious falling out that evening.

Brando apologized to his friend the next day. But the process of making Apocalypse Now had clearly unsettled the film's biggest star, as well as its director. Now, it was time to see how the film they made affected moviegoers. Apocalypse Now finally opened in August 1979. It was a cautious rollout for an otherwise out-of-control film. United Artists wanted theaters to agree to show Apocalypse for 10 weeks, a huge commitment for some bookers, who took a wait-and-see attitude. And even if a theater owner did want to play Apocalypse, many lacked the proper equipment. This was a movie

full of explosions, gunfire, and loud music from the doors. It was meant to be seen and heard in the most high-tech room in town. Apocalypse soon rolled out in the major cities, and film critics quickly swooped in. Their response was mixed. In Time magazine, Frank Rich praised its visuals, but found Apocalypse Now, quote, emotionally obtuse and intellectually empty. Vincent Camby of the New York Times was impressed, though he noted the film ended not with a bang,

but with a whimper. There was no clear consensus. Siskel and Eber were so divided over Apocalypse Now, they'd argue about it for years afterward. We strongly split on Francis Coppola's Vietnam film Apocalypse Now. Roger thinks it's a brilliant film on the Vietnam War. I think it's a big disappointment, a film that loses its clarity and conviction at the very end.

Roger says yes, I say no. Years later, Siskel would change his thumbs-down review to a thumbs-up, a rare switcheroo on his part, and proof of just how overwhelming the movie could be. It's the kind of film you need to experience multiple times in order to fully absorb it all. But even the critics who didn't care for Apocalypse Now made one thing clear. It was a movie you just had to see to believe.

It has been called a masterpiece. A nightmare. Horrifying. Electrifying. Beautiful. had to see to believe. It has been called a masterpiece, a nightmare, horrifying, electrifying, beautiful, terrifying, mystical, magical, incredible. Over the next year, Apocalypse Now brought

in about $100 million worldwide. It also earned eight Oscar nominations, winning for sound and cinematography. But the movie would grow even more popular in the years ahead. In the 80s, Coppola's company was inundated with requests from colleges, asking to show Apocalypse Now on campus, and theaters held sold-out repertory screenings. Then came the 90s, and the release of Hearts of Darkness, a filmmaker's apocalypse.

The movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, despite Francis Ford Coppola's objections. He was frustrated by scenes in which he came off as uncaring or out of control. And look, this movie is not easy on him. Coppola even joked that it should have been titled Watch Francis Suffer. You know, he was really down on it. Thought I'd exploit it. I don't know what he was really down on it. Thought I'd exploit it. I don't know what he was, what it really was. The bottom line is he was embarrassed.

He thought people would think he was going over the edge or something. Gone too far. Him personally and all that. So that was really on his mind. But Hearts of Darkness only deepened moviegoers' obsession with Apocalypse Now. So did a 1996 cover story in Film Threat magazine that revealed the existence of a five-hour bootleg cut. That news was perfectly timed. The movie nerds of the 90s were fascinated by the movies of the 70s, especially the kind of big gamble, big-scale films that were becoming increasingly rare. And no movie embodied that bigness like Apocalypse Now.

The movie became more mythic than ever, and more popular. And in video stores, Apocalypse Now became a right of passage rental for young movie fans like myself. Even on a crummy 80s TV, it was hard not to be awed by its sheer size. The battle scenes that seemed to swallow the whole screen, the jungle sequences featuring hundreds of extras. It's spectacular and exhausting. To the 80s and 90s viewers who'd largely missed the Vietnam War,

Apocalypse Now lingered. Sometimes for different reasons. I probably saw Apocalypse Now when I was about 11 or 12, and probably during the weekend when I was home alone. I was always home alone because my parents were living the refugee life and just working constantly. And so I was home reading inappropriate books, watching inappropriate movies.

That's Viet Thanh Nguyen, the author and scholar we met in episode one. He was living in San Jose, California in the early 80s when his parents bought a VCR. Somehow, he got his hands on a copy of the R-rated Apocalypse Now. And so it was not a war movie like any war movie I'd ever seen. And it was deeply perplexing and deeply, deeply disturbing. And at a certain point in the movie, I realized it was about people like me, that is Vietnamese people. And that was the moment when the American soldiers or sailors massacre these Vietnamese people on a sampan. And they realized immediately that they have done the

wrong thing. And that was so deeply disturbing to me that I never forgot it. Many years later, in college, Nguyen was taking a class on Asian American film. He was asked to name a film scene that was important to him. The first thing that came to my mind was Apocalypse Now. Unbidden, it leapt into my mind, that moment of the massacre of the Vietnamese on the Sanpan. As he described that moment to the class, Nguyen had a physical response. I found myself shaking in rage and anger. If you are a part of a majority where all the stories serve you or represent you,

maybe you don't really understand this. Because if there's a bad story about someone like you, you're like, whatever, it's just a story. Because literally there's a thousand other stories about you. But when you're a so-called minority and the one story about you murders you, rapes you, silences you, and so on, it's not just a story. It's incredibly violent. And I understand that Apocalypse Now is criticizing that violence, that it's criticizing American racism. But in doing so, it also continues to silence Vietnamese people, which is its own form of racism. That's part of the complexity of Apocalypse Now and a lot of other really well-done Vietnam War movies. They can both be great works of art and also incredibly racist at the same time. Apocalypse Now left a powerful

impression on Nguyen, one that stayed with him for decades. Over time, he became something of an expert on the movie, thanks to research he did for his 2015 novel The Sympathizer. It's about a Vietnamese-American double agent who winds up on the set of a gigantic Vietnam War film being directed by an egomaniacal, temperamental American filmmaker. Those similarities were not coincidental. In The Sympathizer, there's the making of this movie that looks suspiciously like Apocalypse Now, because it is like Apocalypse Now. Today, Wynn teaches his own students about the film, and its impact. He shows them a scene from Jarhead,

the 2005 movie about the Persian Gulf War, based on the best-selling book by Anthony Swofford, whom we'll be hearing from later in the series. At one point in Jarhead, a group of young Marines, including Jake Gyllenhaal, pump themselves up by watching Apocalypse Now. The Marines sing along with Wagner and cheer as the U.S. helicopters decimate a Vietnamese village. The reason why I show my students this is for them to understand that Hollywood's spectacular machinery can overwhelm the message of the movie,

not just Apocalypse Now, but other ones. And so it's very important to pay attention to the spectacular quality of these Vietnam War movies, that no matter what they say about saying war is hell, in the end, they continue to reinforce formally the fact that war is a lot of fun. Apocalypse Now still looms large, the subject of numerous re-releases and reappraisals. It's a behemoth of a movie,

not just in terms of the combat images Coppola put on screen, but in how those images were imitated, parodied, and referenced in so many movies that followed. And the lore behind Apocalypse Now is so rich and so wild that it's almost as heavily scrutinized as the film itself. How have your feelings and Francis' feelings about Apocalypse Now changed over the last several decades? I mean, are you able to look back and kind of marvel at the whole experience? Does it still feel very intense and painful in some ways? Well, I don't know. I think all the edges are softened. He's gotten so much praise because it was such a financial down dog at the time.

He had to end up really financing. So now we own it and it's paid off nicely for all these years. So you can't be too mad at it. He's gotten much more. He brags about my film now and tells people I did it. You know, he's shifted his perspective. And yeah, no, I thinkola invented a new kind of Vietnam film. The genre had grown tremendously in just a few short years. It had gone from down-and-dirty combat flicks...

From the hood of death. ...to dark, slow-burning tales of soldiers driven to the brink... Taxi driver. Rolling thunder. ...to deeply personal relationship dramas like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter. When Apocalypse Now arrived, it closed out the 70s with a grand saga that somehow combined elements from all of these genres, and then blew them up into something bigger. It was an anguished and unavoidable reminder that the war was going to be with us for a long time. But a new decade was about to start, and many Americans' feelings about Vietnam and the people who'd fought and died there were about to change. Those attitudes would be reflected

in the words of a new president. And what can I say to our Vietnam veterans, but welcome home. And in the anger and anxieties of a new kind of big screen Vietnam hero. Sir, do we get to win this time? This time it's up to you. The 80s were coming, and so was John Rambo. This is Do We Get to Win This Time? How Hollywood Made the Vietnam War. Written and reported by me, Brian Raftery.

The executive producers are Bill Simmons, Juliet Littman, and Sean Fennessy. Our story editor is Amanda Dobbins. The show was produced by Devin Manzi, Mike Wargon, and Vikram Patel. Fact-checking by Dan Comer. Copy editing by Craig Gaines. Talent booking by Kat Spilling.

Sound design by Bobby Wagner. Mixing and mastering by Scott Somerville. The music in this series comes from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Art direction and illustration by Davis Shoemaker. Thanks for listening.