Buy:Hiro11
09-28-04, 09:24 AM
For your reading enjoyment and from today's Daily Telegraph (UK):
A masterclass in mayhem
(Filed: 27/09/2004)
In the second extract from his groundbreaking new book, Tom Shone reveals how director James Cameron took on the studio system to make his thrilling sci-fi action movie 'Aliens' and how its fearless star Sigourney Weaver became the first million-dollar actress.
Most of James Cameron's friends tried to talk him out of doing a sequel to Ridley Scott's Alien. They thought it a losing proposition; if it was good it would be because Scott had made such a good film; if it was bad it would be his fault.
"Yeah, but I really like it," he would reply. "I think it'll be cool. Can't I just do it?"
His script for Aliens unfurled from a single, simple question that had nagged at him throughout Scott's original film: where had the alien eggs come from?
"They've seen the eggs, they've seen the parasite that emerges from the eggs, they've seen the embryo laid by the parasite emerge from a host person, and they've seen the embryo grow up into a supposedly adult form. But the adult form one of them anyway couldn't possibly have laid the thousand or so eggs that filled the inside of the derelict ship."
In the first film there had been a scene that showed the alien cocooning the captain Dallas, and Harry Dean Stanton, in order to turn them into eggs, but it had ended up on the cutting room floor.
"In my story," said Cameron, "the eggs come from somewhere else. At least that was my theory. So working from that theory acres and acres of these quite large eggs, two and a half to three feet tall I began to focus on the idea of a hierarchical hive structure where the central figure is a giant queen whose role it is to further the species."
Cameron wrote through the Christmas of 1984, before finally delivering his first script outline in January of 1985. "If you think of the first Alien movie as a fun house, Aliens is a roller-coaster ride," he told producers Walter Hill and David Giler.
Twentieth Century Fox, however, refused to believe that the film could be done for $15.5 million, as its producer Gale Ann Hurd said it could; a budget estimator at Fox put it at nearer $35 million, and the studio refused to finance the film. Cameron and Hurd (who were now romantically linked) both quit.
Fox's bluff was called, and by March the project was back on track again, only to hit another problem in the form of the film's star, Sigourney Weaver. Cameron had written the whole thing around Weaver's character without anyone contacting the actress, so he finally took matters into his own hands and phoned her up to talk her into it.
She was in France at the time, shooting Une femme ou deux, and at first she was a little nonplussed, thinking: "I can't believe why no one even mentioned it to me I didn't really want to do a sequel; I was pretty sceptical of what I thought was an attempt to cash in on the success of the original I thought, 'Why do something that has already been done?' "
She was suspicious that Cameron was doing it just to cash in, but the director pointed to the seven-year gap since the first film: didn't that indicate the film was being done for love not money? He told her that the story was focused dead-centre on Ripley, and that he couldn't do the film without her participation.
Weaver thought it showed "a loyalty that is quite unusual in this business" and agreed, but having received only $33,000 for the first movie, upped her demand to $1 million then unheard of for an actress. Fox put its foot down and told Cameron and Hurd: Do it without her.
"It was the amount Sigourney was asking," says Hurd. "They were considering writing a sequel that didn't include her, and Jim and I couldn't imagine what that movie would be. It all happened over a rather short period of time.
"We couldn't simply rewrite the script for someone else. It's not that easy, when the entire theme of the movie is all about facing your deepest fears. How do you do that when no one else survives?"
When things reached a deadlock, Hurd and Cameron quit for a second time - "We thought it was a dead issue at that point," said Hurd. "We thought the movie was off" - and flew to Hawaii in April for their honeymoon.
"Jim had to do this logical, cost-benefit analysis of why getting married would be a good idea," reported back Hurd. "We came out in the black."
When they returned in May, Aliens was on again, with Weaver on board for $1 million, a budget of $18 million, and a start date of September at Shepperton Studios in London, and a decommissioned electrical engineering station in Acton. Alien had been a hot, groggy shoot, taking its cue from the tension that hovered around Ridley Scott, but Aliens was shot during a dark, freezing British winter, warmed only by the blaze of Cameron's temper.
It proved a long and gruelling war of attrition between the American producers and the largely British crew, who were all Ridley Scott loyalists, highly suspicious of this young American hot-shot couple flying in to make a sequel to their beloved movie. They nicknamed Cameron "Grizzly Adams" and were openly contemptuous of Hurd, this dainty woman stepping across the power cables in her immaculate shoes.
"It was very up-front, their discomfort with women," says Hurd. "People would come in and sit down and would say, 'Who is really producing this film?' and I would say, 'I am really producing this film', and they would laugh and say, 'No, no, no, you're the director's wife, lovely to meet you, but who will I really be reporting to?' and I would say, 'Actually me.'
" 'Well, if that's the truth, I want to be completely up-front with you, I won't take orders from a woman,' " said one, according to Hurd. " 'Well, you clearly won't be working on this film.' I thought it might be an isolated occurrence, but it happened quite a few times."
Things finally came to a head over the endless breaks that the crew insisted on taking for tea, to go to the pub for lunch, for lottery raffles.
"It was union-regulated, whether you wanted it or not," said Giler. "If you murdered the tea lady, there'd be someone there the next day at the same time."
When one crew member took the opportunity to go around giving out tickets for a raffle, Cameron finally exploded.
"No, man, we're working here. Fuck the draw! There's a last shot we've got to get." He destroyed the tea trolley mashed it into a cube and called in the entire crew and told them: "If you guys don't shape up, we're going to go someplace else, we'll fire the whole crew."
"They were having a party," said Lance Henriksen, "and Jim was at war to finish this movie."
It was a gruelling shoot for Weaver freezing cold in a T-shirt for most of it, weighed down with her co-star, Carrie Henn, whom she had to carry in many scenes, and further loaded down with guns and ammo when she was a staunch opponent of firearms. She would stand there in daily handgun practice, loaded up to her eyeballs with ammunition, thinking, "Here I am a member of the gun control lobby in a picture where I do nothing but shoot guns."
"Part of the attraction of doing the film was that it was a design fest, an opportunity to do all sorts of wonderful hardware," said Cameron. "I like hardware a lot." He and production designer Peter Lamont lined his sets with the dismantled parts of old 747s, Canberra and Vulcan bombers, just being phased out of the RAF.
"I invented a pulse gun by combining a Thompson sub-machine-gun with a Franchi SPAS-12 pump-action shotgun; and there's a smart gun based on the Spandau MG42 with thermal imagery sights. And our artillery and aircraft are so advanced that we had to have help from the aerospace industries. They were just terrific."
"I knew we were playing into something trendy with Aliens," said Weaver, "the Rambo-commando complex where the hero single-handedly mows down his opponents. If I see my role as a Chinese warrior, or as Henry V, then I'm interested in it.
"It's a chance to do a classic part. If I see it as gunplay, I'm not interested. The use of weapons is always the least important aspect to me, even if it's the most effective with the audience. I tried to see Rambo, but I couldn't sit through it. I think I underestimated the degree to which Cameron would pay so much attention to guns."
Still, he was suitably deferential to his star, who had as great a claim on being the auteur of the Alien movies as anyone.
"I was the throttle, she was the brakes," said Cameron, who duly made note of every one of her detailed queries about the character of Ripley.
"Her script must have had five thousand notations in it," says Hurd. "It was all about, 'Ripley would not do this, she is working on a loading dock, she would be making every decision from a functional point of view, working on a loading dock you are not going to have long hair that gets caught ' Every intonation, every line, every motion came from a deep character place."
Sequels also have privileged access to a subject that is off-limits to most movies and virtually taboo in Hollywood: the passage of time. In a town that is unusually wrapped up in the blur of the present moment, sequels are one of the few forms to register the creaking weight of years. The first Alien film had a beautifully elastic sense of time, registering both millennia and milliseconds, and nothing in between, like all nightmares.
In the first of Cameron's masterstrokes, the action of Aliens picks up 57 years later, a long enough period of time for Ripley to have lost her daughter a heartbreaking blip, gone as soon as we hear of her and also to accommodate the audience's seven-year distance from 1979.
Aliens was thus the first blockbuster sequel to put the time between movies to good use, suggesting that, while our backs were turned and our attention was elsewhere (watching Ghostbusters, or whatever it was that we were doing), the forces of darkness had been steadily amassing, readying to strike.
Ripley, meanwhile, is a changed woman, wracked with bad dreams that leave her pooled in sweat, and about as keen to return to the fray as a cat to a bathtub.
"Just tell me one thing, Burke," she asks. "You're going out there to destroy them, right? Not to study."
A good question, and one that neatly divides Aliens from its predecessor, for Ridley Scott's film had been intent on a form of study, taking its slow, patient rhythms from the life-form at its centre. Aliens, on the other hand, has no time for Scott's air of forensic disquiet, and its creatures obey hokier, jack-in-the-box rhythms. It's a coarser film, but there is no resisting its headlong charge. Scott gave us a Freudian fever dream, Cameron a bruising martial epic. You take your pick.
Coming so closely on the heels of the release of The Terminator, Aliens suggested that Cameron was modelling his career on the progress of a large, angry rhino, although, for all the panting pandemonium of his style, Cameron's films are a masterclass in the fine art of audience orientation - the whys and wherefores of mayhem.
There are many explosions in his work but none that blow up out of nowhere, many collisions, but none that hasn't followed a carefully plotted course. And, while Weaver was right to be on his case about the guns she has always seemed one move ahead of her directors in the Alien films, warming up the chilly Scott, and tempering Cameron's steel she needn't have worried, for no director's work is as energised and perplexed by the problem of How the Mighty Fall.
What gives Cameron's plots their strength is that military might fails as much as it prevails. In Aliens, the marines descend to the planet's surface, only to find that their guns cannot be fired without triggering the plant's nuclear reactor, while the armour that once protected them now imprisons them. Hung heavy with hardware, their military superiority leads to a Vietnam-like rousting.
Despite Cameron's evident ear for the foul tongues of his grunts, he also has a fine tactician's eye, closer to that of a general or a chess player: the twist by which the aliens outwit the marines' motion sensors by approaching not head-on, but above, perpendicular to the expected attack line, is one of the great knight-takes-rook moves of modern cinema, one that gets even better when you remember that the aliens still have their queen to play.
And so, after all the escalation, reduction, attenuation. Ripley regroups the scattered marines around her in a formation more closely resembling a family with Hicks (her ally) as father, Newt as daughter, and the android Bishop as her one gay friend and takes on the queen alien with the skills she picked up in the docking bay, in what amounts to the mother of all movie climaxes, not least because it consists of two very angry mothers, bearing down over one frightened little girl.
Who would have thought it? One of the best action movies of the '80s and it's a maternity battle.
"Get away from her, you bitch!" screams Ripley, a line which confirmed the Alien films as doing for maternity roughly what the Godfather films did for paternity in the '70s, providing a scalpel-sharp disquisition on the matter of what it is to have a family and what it is to defend one the ties of blood and the letting of it. How much more could you ask for?
This may be a rather grandiose way of looking at a bunch of movies about space aliens, but then you could say the same thing about a bunch of movies about mafioso thugs. Coppola's mixture of aesthetic scruple and gangland violence has proven a far more winning ticket with critics the same ticket on which Scorsese and Tarantino have ridden to acclaim although the time may have come to question the rather dubious connection that seems to exist between film critics and the mafia.
On the basis of the narrowest strip-mining of a small patch of gangland America, Coppola's and Scorsese's reputations as critical darlings is all but unassailable, whereas the likes of Scott and Spielberg and Lucas and Cameron are seen as toiling away in the Twilight Zone, only to be praised when they recant, give up the spaceships and aliens, and come down to earth.
It's a more sophisticated version of the prejudice that grips the Oscar Academy for historical films over fantasy films for films about events that demonstrably did happen, as opposed to films about events that demonstrably did not. Weaver got nominated for an Oscar for Aliens, which was a considerable advance, but there was no way she could win.
Spaceships and aliens as opposed to blood oaths and horses' heads are definite proof that the events concerned demonstrably did not happen: absolute, undeniable evidence that someone, somewhere has been making this stuff up.
You might think this a pretty good way of judging how much creativity has been poured into a film how much stuff in it was made up. The time may have come to admit that The Godfather's status as mahogany-hued classic has always overlooked its roots in the roiling Guignol of Mario Puzo's imagination: like Corleone, Coppola reached for greatness, but his feet were mired in pulp.
That horse's head looked real enough, but Puzo made that stuff up, I'm afraid, just as surely as Ridley Scott made up all that stuff about aliens with retractable jaws falling out of airlocks. Coppola is often held up as the first casualty of the blockbuster age, and The Godfather a prime example of the Type of Film That Couldn't Get Made Any More the last Custer-like stand of all the darkness that was rudely expunged from American cinemas by the bright lights of Lucas and Spielberg in 1977 but the Alien films suggest otherwise.
Copyright © Tom Shone 2004. Taken from 'Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer' by Tom Shone, published by Simon and Schuster UK Ltd on Oct 4I want to get this book now.
A masterclass in mayhem
(Filed: 27/09/2004)
In the second extract from his groundbreaking new book, Tom Shone reveals how director James Cameron took on the studio system to make his thrilling sci-fi action movie 'Aliens' and how its fearless star Sigourney Weaver became the first million-dollar actress.
Most of James Cameron's friends tried to talk him out of doing a sequel to Ridley Scott's Alien. They thought it a losing proposition; if it was good it would be because Scott had made such a good film; if it was bad it would be his fault.
"Yeah, but I really like it," he would reply. "I think it'll be cool. Can't I just do it?"
His script for Aliens unfurled from a single, simple question that had nagged at him throughout Scott's original film: where had the alien eggs come from?
"They've seen the eggs, they've seen the parasite that emerges from the eggs, they've seen the embryo laid by the parasite emerge from a host person, and they've seen the embryo grow up into a supposedly adult form. But the adult form one of them anyway couldn't possibly have laid the thousand or so eggs that filled the inside of the derelict ship."
In the first film there had been a scene that showed the alien cocooning the captain Dallas, and Harry Dean Stanton, in order to turn them into eggs, but it had ended up on the cutting room floor.
"In my story," said Cameron, "the eggs come from somewhere else. At least that was my theory. So working from that theory acres and acres of these quite large eggs, two and a half to three feet tall I began to focus on the idea of a hierarchical hive structure where the central figure is a giant queen whose role it is to further the species."
Cameron wrote through the Christmas of 1984, before finally delivering his first script outline in January of 1985. "If you think of the first Alien movie as a fun house, Aliens is a roller-coaster ride," he told producers Walter Hill and David Giler.
Twentieth Century Fox, however, refused to believe that the film could be done for $15.5 million, as its producer Gale Ann Hurd said it could; a budget estimator at Fox put it at nearer $35 million, and the studio refused to finance the film. Cameron and Hurd (who were now romantically linked) both quit.
Fox's bluff was called, and by March the project was back on track again, only to hit another problem in the form of the film's star, Sigourney Weaver. Cameron had written the whole thing around Weaver's character without anyone contacting the actress, so he finally took matters into his own hands and phoned her up to talk her into it.
She was in France at the time, shooting Une femme ou deux, and at first she was a little nonplussed, thinking: "I can't believe why no one even mentioned it to me I didn't really want to do a sequel; I was pretty sceptical of what I thought was an attempt to cash in on the success of the original I thought, 'Why do something that has already been done?' "
She was suspicious that Cameron was doing it just to cash in, but the director pointed to the seven-year gap since the first film: didn't that indicate the film was being done for love not money? He told her that the story was focused dead-centre on Ripley, and that he couldn't do the film without her participation.
Weaver thought it showed "a loyalty that is quite unusual in this business" and agreed, but having received only $33,000 for the first movie, upped her demand to $1 million then unheard of for an actress. Fox put its foot down and told Cameron and Hurd: Do it without her.
"It was the amount Sigourney was asking," says Hurd. "They were considering writing a sequel that didn't include her, and Jim and I couldn't imagine what that movie would be. It all happened over a rather short period of time.
"We couldn't simply rewrite the script for someone else. It's not that easy, when the entire theme of the movie is all about facing your deepest fears. How do you do that when no one else survives?"
When things reached a deadlock, Hurd and Cameron quit for a second time - "We thought it was a dead issue at that point," said Hurd. "We thought the movie was off" - and flew to Hawaii in April for their honeymoon.
"Jim had to do this logical, cost-benefit analysis of why getting married would be a good idea," reported back Hurd. "We came out in the black."
When they returned in May, Aliens was on again, with Weaver on board for $1 million, a budget of $18 million, and a start date of September at Shepperton Studios in London, and a decommissioned electrical engineering station in Acton. Alien had been a hot, groggy shoot, taking its cue from the tension that hovered around Ridley Scott, but Aliens was shot during a dark, freezing British winter, warmed only by the blaze of Cameron's temper.
It proved a long and gruelling war of attrition between the American producers and the largely British crew, who were all Ridley Scott loyalists, highly suspicious of this young American hot-shot couple flying in to make a sequel to their beloved movie. They nicknamed Cameron "Grizzly Adams" and were openly contemptuous of Hurd, this dainty woman stepping across the power cables in her immaculate shoes.
"It was very up-front, their discomfort with women," says Hurd. "People would come in and sit down and would say, 'Who is really producing this film?' and I would say, 'I am really producing this film', and they would laugh and say, 'No, no, no, you're the director's wife, lovely to meet you, but who will I really be reporting to?' and I would say, 'Actually me.'
" 'Well, if that's the truth, I want to be completely up-front with you, I won't take orders from a woman,' " said one, according to Hurd. " 'Well, you clearly won't be working on this film.' I thought it might be an isolated occurrence, but it happened quite a few times."
Things finally came to a head over the endless breaks that the crew insisted on taking for tea, to go to the pub for lunch, for lottery raffles.
"It was union-regulated, whether you wanted it or not," said Giler. "If you murdered the tea lady, there'd be someone there the next day at the same time."
When one crew member took the opportunity to go around giving out tickets for a raffle, Cameron finally exploded.
"No, man, we're working here. Fuck the draw! There's a last shot we've got to get." He destroyed the tea trolley mashed it into a cube and called in the entire crew and told them: "If you guys don't shape up, we're going to go someplace else, we'll fire the whole crew."
"They were having a party," said Lance Henriksen, "and Jim was at war to finish this movie."
It was a gruelling shoot for Weaver freezing cold in a T-shirt for most of it, weighed down with her co-star, Carrie Henn, whom she had to carry in many scenes, and further loaded down with guns and ammo when she was a staunch opponent of firearms. She would stand there in daily handgun practice, loaded up to her eyeballs with ammunition, thinking, "Here I am a member of the gun control lobby in a picture where I do nothing but shoot guns."
"Part of the attraction of doing the film was that it was a design fest, an opportunity to do all sorts of wonderful hardware," said Cameron. "I like hardware a lot." He and production designer Peter Lamont lined his sets with the dismantled parts of old 747s, Canberra and Vulcan bombers, just being phased out of the RAF.
"I invented a pulse gun by combining a Thompson sub-machine-gun with a Franchi SPAS-12 pump-action shotgun; and there's a smart gun based on the Spandau MG42 with thermal imagery sights. And our artillery and aircraft are so advanced that we had to have help from the aerospace industries. They were just terrific."
"I knew we were playing into something trendy with Aliens," said Weaver, "the Rambo-commando complex where the hero single-handedly mows down his opponents. If I see my role as a Chinese warrior, or as Henry V, then I'm interested in it.
"It's a chance to do a classic part. If I see it as gunplay, I'm not interested. The use of weapons is always the least important aspect to me, even if it's the most effective with the audience. I tried to see Rambo, but I couldn't sit through it. I think I underestimated the degree to which Cameron would pay so much attention to guns."
Still, he was suitably deferential to his star, who had as great a claim on being the auteur of the Alien movies as anyone.
"I was the throttle, she was the brakes," said Cameron, who duly made note of every one of her detailed queries about the character of Ripley.
"Her script must have had five thousand notations in it," says Hurd. "It was all about, 'Ripley would not do this, she is working on a loading dock, she would be making every decision from a functional point of view, working on a loading dock you are not going to have long hair that gets caught ' Every intonation, every line, every motion came from a deep character place."
Sequels also have privileged access to a subject that is off-limits to most movies and virtually taboo in Hollywood: the passage of time. In a town that is unusually wrapped up in the blur of the present moment, sequels are one of the few forms to register the creaking weight of years. The first Alien film had a beautifully elastic sense of time, registering both millennia and milliseconds, and nothing in between, like all nightmares.
In the first of Cameron's masterstrokes, the action of Aliens picks up 57 years later, a long enough period of time for Ripley to have lost her daughter a heartbreaking blip, gone as soon as we hear of her and also to accommodate the audience's seven-year distance from 1979.
Aliens was thus the first blockbuster sequel to put the time between movies to good use, suggesting that, while our backs were turned and our attention was elsewhere (watching Ghostbusters, or whatever it was that we were doing), the forces of darkness had been steadily amassing, readying to strike.
Ripley, meanwhile, is a changed woman, wracked with bad dreams that leave her pooled in sweat, and about as keen to return to the fray as a cat to a bathtub.
"Just tell me one thing, Burke," she asks. "You're going out there to destroy them, right? Not to study."
A good question, and one that neatly divides Aliens from its predecessor, for Ridley Scott's film had been intent on a form of study, taking its slow, patient rhythms from the life-form at its centre. Aliens, on the other hand, has no time for Scott's air of forensic disquiet, and its creatures obey hokier, jack-in-the-box rhythms. It's a coarser film, but there is no resisting its headlong charge. Scott gave us a Freudian fever dream, Cameron a bruising martial epic. You take your pick.
Coming so closely on the heels of the release of The Terminator, Aliens suggested that Cameron was modelling his career on the progress of a large, angry rhino, although, for all the panting pandemonium of his style, Cameron's films are a masterclass in the fine art of audience orientation - the whys and wherefores of mayhem.
There are many explosions in his work but none that blow up out of nowhere, many collisions, but none that hasn't followed a carefully plotted course. And, while Weaver was right to be on his case about the guns she has always seemed one move ahead of her directors in the Alien films, warming up the chilly Scott, and tempering Cameron's steel she needn't have worried, for no director's work is as energised and perplexed by the problem of How the Mighty Fall.
What gives Cameron's plots their strength is that military might fails as much as it prevails. In Aliens, the marines descend to the planet's surface, only to find that their guns cannot be fired without triggering the plant's nuclear reactor, while the armour that once protected them now imprisons them. Hung heavy with hardware, their military superiority leads to a Vietnam-like rousting.
Despite Cameron's evident ear for the foul tongues of his grunts, he also has a fine tactician's eye, closer to that of a general or a chess player: the twist by which the aliens outwit the marines' motion sensors by approaching not head-on, but above, perpendicular to the expected attack line, is one of the great knight-takes-rook moves of modern cinema, one that gets even better when you remember that the aliens still have their queen to play.
And so, after all the escalation, reduction, attenuation. Ripley regroups the scattered marines around her in a formation more closely resembling a family with Hicks (her ally) as father, Newt as daughter, and the android Bishop as her one gay friend and takes on the queen alien with the skills she picked up in the docking bay, in what amounts to the mother of all movie climaxes, not least because it consists of two very angry mothers, bearing down over one frightened little girl.
Who would have thought it? One of the best action movies of the '80s and it's a maternity battle.
"Get away from her, you bitch!" screams Ripley, a line which confirmed the Alien films as doing for maternity roughly what the Godfather films did for paternity in the '70s, providing a scalpel-sharp disquisition on the matter of what it is to have a family and what it is to defend one the ties of blood and the letting of it. How much more could you ask for?
This may be a rather grandiose way of looking at a bunch of movies about space aliens, but then you could say the same thing about a bunch of movies about mafioso thugs. Coppola's mixture of aesthetic scruple and gangland violence has proven a far more winning ticket with critics the same ticket on which Scorsese and Tarantino have ridden to acclaim although the time may have come to question the rather dubious connection that seems to exist between film critics and the mafia.
On the basis of the narrowest strip-mining of a small patch of gangland America, Coppola's and Scorsese's reputations as critical darlings is all but unassailable, whereas the likes of Scott and Spielberg and Lucas and Cameron are seen as toiling away in the Twilight Zone, only to be praised when they recant, give up the spaceships and aliens, and come down to earth.
It's a more sophisticated version of the prejudice that grips the Oscar Academy for historical films over fantasy films for films about events that demonstrably did happen, as opposed to films about events that demonstrably did not. Weaver got nominated for an Oscar for Aliens, which was a considerable advance, but there was no way she could win.
Spaceships and aliens as opposed to blood oaths and horses' heads are definite proof that the events concerned demonstrably did not happen: absolute, undeniable evidence that someone, somewhere has been making this stuff up.
You might think this a pretty good way of judging how much creativity has been poured into a film how much stuff in it was made up. The time may have come to admit that The Godfather's status as mahogany-hued classic has always overlooked its roots in the roiling Guignol of Mario Puzo's imagination: like Corleone, Coppola reached for greatness, but his feet were mired in pulp.
That horse's head looked real enough, but Puzo made that stuff up, I'm afraid, just as surely as Ridley Scott made up all that stuff about aliens with retractable jaws falling out of airlocks. Coppola is often held up as the first casualty of the blockbuster age, and The Godfather a prime example of the Type of Film That Couldn't Get Made Any More the last Custer-like stand of all the darkness that was rudely expunged from American cinemas by the bright lights of Lucas and Spielberg in 1977 but the Alien films suggest otherwise.
Copyright © Tom Shone 2004. Taken from 'Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer' by Tom Shone, published by Simon and Schuster UK Ltd on Oct 4I want to get this book now.