The first movie I actually watched at the Telluride Film Festival was one I’d seen many times already. They showed Apocalypse Now with a panel that included Francis Ford Coppola, Walter Murch, Vittorio Storaro, Fred Roos and John Milius in person. Milius had not yet regained full speech since his stroke, so he represented his screenwriting on the film by his sheer presence alone, and sitting on the panel in person certainly spoke volumes.
There’s very little about the film’s storied and well documented production that has not already been reported, but here’s one that was new to me. Apparently, Marlon Brando auctioned off his Apocalypse Now and Godfather scripts with all of his script notes for over a million dollars. Coppola revealed that Brando was not actually an actor to mark up his scripts, so those were added for resale value after the fact.
“I know that his Godfather script had next to nothing in it,” Coppola told the Telluride audience. “I also know that he wrote a whole bunch of things in it so he could auction it in order to have money for his kids. He sold that script for a million and a half dollars but I know what his script had in it. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a genius. He’s one of the five geniuses I’ve met in my life, a brilliant man and a very affectionate man, but he could be like a kid. He could be very irresponsible.”
Coppola also dispelled the rumor that Brando had not actually read the novel Heart of Darkness on which Apocalypse Now was based. He said it turned out Brando had lied about reading the book before he got to set, but read the book one night before filming. So he had read Heart of Darkness and only agreed to shave his head to play Col. Kurtz after reading it and realizing it was necessary.
If this new DCP of Apocalypse Now plays in rerelease, I highly recommend seeing it. It still looks like the film we remember with that permanent jungle haze, but seeing Brando weave in and out of pure blackness is astounding.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
