In preparation for my July 4th and 5th backyard screening of Apocalypse Now Redux on, (cough) 16mm, I decided to pick up and read The Apocalypse Now Book by Peter Cowie. I’ve already seen the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Fimmakers’ Apocalypse (1991), so I thought I’d freshen up for the film using a different source. Cowie’s book came out in 2000, and includes “exclusive detailed descriptions of material restored by Coppola for Apocalypse Now Redux (2001).”

In theory, my screening was a quality-control inspection on the letterboxed 16mm print that our Film Studies Program has for Apocalypse Now Redux, and a noisy and extended July 4th weekend seemed the right time to do that if I was going to show it in my backyard. (I had to split the screenings into two parts so as to not keep my neighbors up long past their bedtimes.) I say “in theory” only because that makes the whole thing sound like work, and I still have a hard time labeling the fun I have at my job as “work.”

Beach attack.

Let me be the first to acknowledge some amount of surprise that a 16mm print of Coppola’s 2001 release and “director’s cut,” which is 49 minutes longer than the original version and weighs in with a 202-minute-long total, exists at all. I’m going to guess that any of the filmmakers involved in this mammoth production that took over three years to make would be horrified to think of their masterpiece being experienced via 16mm mono, especially since it was (as Cowie points out) “one of the very first pictures to deploy split surround.” Or, as film editor Walter Murch emphasizes (p. 104): “Actually it was a quintaphonic soundtrack because there were three channels of sound from behind the screen and two channels emerging from behind the audience – a left rear and a right rear.” Having seen Apocalypse Now Redux on 70mm upon its release in 2001, I was fully aware how the awesome sound design would be lost when shown in 16mm mono. But, like a phantom limb, and thanks in part to having seen the film so many times, my mind was able to fill in some of the blanks. The fact that we could see and hear fireworks going off all around us during eerily appropriate moments when the action on the screen was also awash in flares and explosions provided its own form of sensory split surround that helped augment the mood.

Hopper's character was partly inspired by Vietnam legend Sean Flynn, son of Errol Flynn (Sean would disappear in the jungle)

Back to The Apocalypse Now Book: it’s organized into two parts. “Part One” covers the genesis of the project, dating back to the moment “in a schoolroom in Colorado in 1962, where a seventeen-year-old John Milius heard his English teacher, Irwin Blackler, extol the splendour of (Joseph) Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness,” and continues on up through the assemblage of the work crew, pre-production, work on the script, the first shooting phase (“from Keitel to Sheen”), the second phase (“from Brando to Playboy”), the third phase (“Riding the Edge”), post-production, and then the theatrical adventures that ensued. “Part Two” discusses “The 5 1/2-hour cut and discusses the French Plantation scene in more depth, as well taking a view of its literary source and the various characters involved.

I was struck by a quote from Coppola wherein he discusses how the Conrad book provided an incongruity between “the starched shirts” of the colonialists deep in the jungle of Africa and how he mirrored that in his film with depictions of his soldiers in the jungle of Vietnam: “The colonialists always take their civilization with them. Here it’s surfboards.” Recent descriptions of the bubble created by the Coalition Provisional Authority inside Iraq’s Green Zone clearly illustrate how this recurring pattern continues today. And, of course, stubborn colonialism that doesn’t want to change is what the French Plantation sequence is all about. Cowie adds that “Its significance stemmed from Coppola’s belief that the journey up river was indeed ‘a journey going back in time, and Willard and his crew start leaving contemporary time and they pass momentarily through the 1950s and then they’re in prehistoric times.’” (p.73)

Fascinating ruminations abound in the book. Consider this: Apocalypse Now was influenced by America’s misadventures in Vietnam. A key player in the war in Vietnam was Richard Nixon. And “President Nixon, at the height of the crises of 1968-69, insisted on viewing Patton over and over again, telling his aides that the World War II general had never paid heed to his critics. Patton was scripted, of course, by none other than Francis Ford Coppola, who would reject the accusation from Cuban critics, for example, that in Apocalypse Now he should have chastised the United States for its crimes in Vietnam. ‘I said that I love America, and I’m not going to get dogmatic about it.’” (p. 150).

And with that thought in mind, along with an outdoor screen that reflected many a rocket’s red glare, I can’t help but think, yes, it was a perfect film for the 4th of July weekend.

Willard (Sheen), about to fulfill his destiny, influenced by Coppola's reading of The Golden Bough.