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Francis Ford Coppola

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Francis Ford Coppola and the Underground Corporation

"This playground is no place for permanency." —Michael Pye and Lynda Myles, The Movie Brats

Because in most accounts Francis Ford Coppola is a governing force behind the New Hollywood, it seems that people can't help referring to him as the "Godfather," whether it's to recognize his patronage (his associate John Korty calls him "the impresario, essentially the Godfather"), or the network formed around him (Steven Bach calls Coppola, George Lucas, Walter Murch, and others the "Mill Valley Mafia"), or even his personal manner (a Vanity Fair profile likened him to one of his onscreen Mafia dons). The term suggests itself, such is the strong identity in the public mind between him and his famous movie franchise. If the term is anything more than cliché, it might illuminate the extent to which Coppola has been the maker of his own informal economy. This economy, we might say, is a shadow economy of Hollywood, where once moviemaking had been arranged like clockwork.

"Clockwork" describes not only the production rate of the Old Hollywood studio system, where the integrated majors had turned out movies one a week, but the U.S. economy in general, as throughout the first half of the twentieth century it fell under the sway of scientific management. In production of this kind, labor was treated in terms of quantity, not quality. Hollywood movies might protest this, as did Modern Times (dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1936), which opens on the image of a clock face and shows the laboring Little Tramp dominated by its accelerated tempo; but Hollywood was itself known, often in the person of Irving Thalberg, for cutting its production process to this measure. Placing the creative labor of moviemaking on the same foundations as any manufacture, though, had a twofold effect of rendering the movies suspicious as an art form, because they were too much an industry, and of forcing would-be advocates of the seventh art into curious theoretical defenses against its industrial character. "The only great films to come out of Hollywood," claimed the postwar intellectual Dwight Macdonald, "were made before industrial elelphantiasis had reduced the director to one of a number of technicians all operating at about the same level of authority." The great directors, for Macdonald, were "Griffith and Stroheim," since they were able to make movies before investment banking had made their art so capital-intensive that the efficiency movement had to take note. When it did, Stroheim famously had his wings clipped by management-minded Irving Thalberg.

Macdonald's view is instructive, in that its reworking as the "auteur theory" would let those coming of age in the 1960s cast the terms of art and industry in more complex relationship. If, for instance, film became art only by fully vesting authority in the director—as "was so in the pre-1930 cinema," according to Macdonald—then any theory of film art applied to Hollywood might also double as a theory of its industrial reorganization. This was true of auteur theory, I argue, as its main tenet—that certain Hollywood directors had sensibilities bold enough to neutralize industrial hierarchy in the name of creativity and self-expression—turned out to have similar prescriptive force in postwar business culture. Hosannas to unruly sensibility, though in cultural memory they belong to the counterculture, arose too in a business world wishing itself rid of a company-man ethos. In short, business wasn't scandalized by the 1960s and the style of the counterculture; it learned from it. The entrepreneurial culture that became the basis of the New Economy bears much of the counterculture within it.

Francis Ford Coppola's career should be understood in this context. Taking a page from his mentor Roger Corman—who "had a great knack," it's said, "for finding talented people who were willing to work for practically nothing"—Coppola gathered his film-school friends to form American Zoetrope, an off-Hollywood production firm that, like American International Pictures (AIP) before it, would make its way by setting up operations beyond the reach of the regulatory controls that had frozen young talent out of Hollywood. Unlike AIP, though, American Zoetrope was underwritten by a Hollywood studio. When the return on investment of Easy Rider (dir. Dennis Hopper, 1969) suggested to studio Hollywood that there was money it didn't know how to make, and that there were audiences that it didn't know existed, Warner Bros. turned to Coppola because, as John Milius jokes, he had "a beard" and knew "hippies." Coppola chose San Francisco for Zoetrope's base, indeed, because it was an epicenter of the counterculture, and he wanted "bohemian life," he says, to pervade the corporation. And it did. Its brash colors showed in the décor of Zoetrope's Fulton Street headquarters, and its celebrities—Jerry Garcia, Bill Graham (the concert promoter), and others—were drawn to Zoetrope as a center of gravity. "It was all extremely exciting," Walter Murch says, Zoetrope for him being "a professional extension of the film school ideal."

However, what kept Zoetrope from being another experiment for what Fred Turner calls the New Communalists, common enough then in and around San Francisco, was that the device organizing the endeavors of these like-minded friends was the corporation. They bent the device to their own ends, no doubt, but the effect was that corporate form partook of the informal energies on which the art world runs. Contrary, then, to many film historians who place American Zoetrope outside the bailiwick of Hollywood commerce, as a short-lived refuge for film art, I see it as an agent of renewal in corporate history for the way it formed a micro-economy—a place apart, with codes all its own—that nested inside the economies of scale of the conglomerated corporations.

Coppola has shown an unusually sophisticated sense of the part he had in economy and that it had in him, and not only in his initiative to self-operate through Zoetrope. His movies read as declarations of New Economy, as chances to allegorize in film form the social relations that have permitted their making. Consider the final scenes of Tucker (1988), which use the same technique of parallel montage on display in the climax of The Godfather (1972). In The Godfather, we see Michael Corleone's (Al Pacino) power consolidated by way of intercut images of his baptismal observance and his authorized murders. In one set of images, Michael says vows as his nephew is baptized into the church; in the other, his henchmen kill rival mob bosses so that power is Michael's alone. The tension lays between his public standing in the community and the behind-the-scenes machinations that underwrite it. In Tucker, however, while we find dirty work hidden behind the rituals of community life, it is of a different sort. There, we watch Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges) stand trial for alleged fraud, but as he is detained in the courtroom, the workforce of Tucker Motor Company is at his factory assembling the last several cars that they are accused of having no intention to build. The tension, once more, gathers in the mismatch between professed norms and actual practices. Hypocrisy is the effect produced by the crosscutting technique in both movies.

But in The Godfather, if it seems hypocritical that Michael denounces Satan's work inside the church but executes it outside its walls, it's a hypocrisy that everyone has fully internalized. Connie knows the price of her family's power. The community accepts their don's protection. Theirs is a polity within the larger polity, and informal law is all they can institute for themselves. Kay cannot live with the hypocrisy, of course, because as an East Coast WASP she enjoys full membership in the larger polity and need not find recourse in the informal law of the smaller, ghettoized polity. In Tucker it is much different. The hypocrisy is not that Preston Tucker says one thing in the courtroom, for show, but then does the opposite on his personal time. He says the exact same thing in both circumstances. What first strikes the viewer as hypocritical, rather, is a national ideology that exalts a man like Tucker, a rugged individual, while a federal court is stacked against the actual flesh-and-blood Tucker by the Big Three automakers and the politicians effectively on their payroll.

Despite producer George Lucas's wish that the movie have a Capra feel, with a little guy taking on a corrupt system, Tucker is a story of another kind. What we see in the Tucker factory cuts against our normative view of labor: four men throwing in together, working around the clock not for overtime but for no pay at all, the work issuing from their hands rather than specialized machines—they present an image of heroic labor, as it were, a holdover from an age of proud craftspeople. Their work is motivated by love, not by baser incentives. "Won't be the first time we've worked for free," one employee jokes. On meeting their contractual quota, they embrace each other and toast champagne. This is not a lone instance of alcohol on the shop floor, as beer-drinking has been part of their work culture. And not as contraband, for no line divides licit and illicit work behavior other than the one they themselves decide to draw.

It's not even clear where the borders of the shop floor might lie. Tucker has built his workshop, the Ypsilanti Tool and Machine Company, a stone's throw from his home. When asked to describe the company's factory, a witness replies, "What factory? It's a barn." The prosecution claims that for Tucker's engine, "most of the work had to be done on a kitchen stove." These claims, they believe, prove that Tucker did not carry out his work with serious intent. The only proof of that, though, would be a poorly made car, or no car at all, but the coup de grâce for the defense is that a fleet of stylish, roadworthy Tucker 48's has been parked curbside outside the courtroom windows. What the prosecution has proven, instead, is that a premium car has been produced by labor unregulated by the juridical standards of the land. Seeing the ineluctability of this logic—namely, that labor might self-organize, without any intervention from the state—the prosecution can only assert the nonexistence of Tucker's cars. There is physical evidence for their existence, of course, and it lies in plain view of the jury. But it cannot constitute juridical proof: the cars are inadmissible in the hearings, for reasons the plot leaves unclear. Once acquitted, Tucker baits the court by inviting the jury to "take a ride in one of those Tucker cars that don't exist."

Willed blindness of this kind typifies informal economy as a concept, Manuel Castells and Alejandro Portes say, noting Spain's practice of exporting "millions of dollars worth of shoes and other articles produced in factories that do not legally exist." The hypocrisy, if we should stick with that term, is that formal law cannot recognize the growing presence of an informal economy that threatens to upset all it had held in place. Such recognition, in particular, would throw into crisis what is known as the "liberal consensus," the Keynesian détente that had been struck between business and labor, with the state its mediator. This equilibrium was considered the great, if volatile, achievement of postwar political economy.

Because the industrial arrangement in place characterized not only the postwar car industry but Hollywood too, it's easy to take Tucker as Coppola's midcareer reckoning with the conditions in Hollywood as he once found them, then changed them, and now experiences them once more—again as oppressive—in the wake of his changes. Latter-day critics tell the story of Coppola's entry into the industry as if he were some striding colossus—"the rebel envoy," as John Milius called him, in "the walled city." The hagiography of Coppola, and others in his generation, was prepared by the auteur theory, the critical approach Andrew Sarris adapted from the French New Wave that suggested that any Hollywood (i.e. mass-produced) art must come from "a few brave spirits" who have "miraculously extracted" it from their "money-oriented environment." But Tucker undoes the simplistic dyad of individual contra industry that had given auteur theory its broad appeal. It is the group spirit, finally, that compensates Tucker's individual failings ("He just doesn't understand how a corporation runs," says a board member, "and he's not much of an engineer, either") and lets the Tucker company realize their prototype design. The men in the plant build the car, after all, while Tucker is a courtroom spectacle; this is what the cross-cutting has told us. Coppola himself would downplay the auteur theory. "Every element, when you're lucky, comes together," he says of The Godfather, recognizing the "wonderful composer," the "great photographer," the production design, and so on. When people ask him what role he had, given all their talents, he responds, "Well, I chose them."

If Tucker does not support auteur theory, neither does it dispel it altogether. The movie takes Tucker's name for its title, after all, as does the car his company built, suggesting an essential function left to the individual signature. When a promotional film is being made for the Tucker car, and its filmmaker needs personal footage of Tucker, they explain that in order to sell stock they need to sell Tucker as a person, "an image." This might let us think Tucker is but a cynical backward glance at Hollywood's auteur phase: it advertised individual glory, briefly, so its massified audience would more gamely consent to its culture-industry vassalage. This, indeed, is auteur theory understood from the standpoint of circulation. And though any interpretation of Tucker needs to make sense of its style, which is clearly a pastiche of gaudy marketing effects, a good-faith reckoning with the movie requires that we consider its interest in the production process. Whatever the downstream fate of goods—the cars that may one day become collector's items, the movies that may one day ride high on American Film Institute lists—this is nothing but the afterlife of production.

In this regard, the movie makes the case, as Coppola will do frequently elsewhere, that auteur theory is a form of business-management theory. Consider several scenes from the movie. When the car designer Alex Tremulis (Elias Koteas) overrides an idea in Tucker's original model, Tucker tells him, "You ever do that again, something I told you not to—so help me, I'll give you a raise." Tucker sought the better idea, the movie insists, no matter where it occurred in the hierarchy. Coppola's modest claim that his role as director is limited to choosing personnel is here complicated by the fact that choosing talent is itself meaningless if one doesn't also construct the environment in which talent might realize itself. Tucker, we see, gets his employees to work at full capacity by spreading his dream of self-realization to them. The site of labor becomes for them the arena for the whole self. This cuts against the doxa of scientific management, a.k.a. Taylorism, which coordinated the total operation of a plant precisely by disaggregating the individual into a set of functions, energies, and skills in order to recombine them at a higher level. Tucker's style, in contrast, sets loose the creative energy in those around him, and leads to the absolute trust of his team. Abe Karatz (Martin Landau) confirms as much when asked under cross-examination if, as an ex-convict, he expects one person to believe what he's saying, and he responds, "One," while locking eyes with Tucker. The corollary to absolute trust, finally, is absolute commitment. When, after working around the clock, Eddie Dean falls asleep in a chair, a coworker rouses him and reminds him of their deadline the next day. The managerial function, we see, has been democratized throughout the shop floor, such that, in essence, the voice of management is one's own.

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Excerpted from Francis Ford Coppola by Jeff Menne. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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