Suitedjustice's Ongoing Mid-life Crisis
02-02-2022
, 08:22 AM
02-02-2022
, 03:00 PM
02-10-2022
, 11:13 PM
Apocalypse Now Commentary
Part III: The Psychedelic Soldier
Having posted two long parts of these commentaries here, along with supplemental posts, all of them touching frequently on the differences between the screenplay for Apocalypse Now and its filmed version, it fell upon me to finally read John Milius' screenplay for Apocalypse Now.
The version I found is credited to Milius, but is also marked "This draft by Francis Ford Coppola." It's dated December, 1975, almost 4 years before the movie came out. As far as I can tell from other sources, Coppola had left most of Milius' original script in this draft.
An AMERICAN wearing a jungle hat with a large Peace Sign
on it, wearing war paint, bends TOWARD US, reaching down
TOWARD US with a large knife, preparing to scalp the
dead.
OUR VIEW MOVES AWAY, along with the running sandals of a
Vietnamese soldier, MOVING FASTER AND FASTER, only to be
stopped by still another of the savage-looking AMERICANS
with primitive ornamentation, wearing only a loin-cloth
and green beret. He opens his flame-thrower directly ON US
and the NVA soldier and we are incinerated in flame,
bright psychedelic orange-red flame. Outrageous, loud,
electric ROCK MUSIC OVERWHELMS the SOUNDTRACK :
MAIN TITLE : APOCALYPSE NOW
2 TITLE SEQUENCE
The CREDIT TITLES proceed as the FLANE CONSUME US,
growing more intense, brighter, more vivid, purifying;
transforming into an intense white heat that we can barely
look at, like the sun itself.
Then it EXPLODES, breking apart, and shattering once
again. It begins to cool, as the TITLES CONTINUE. It
is as though WE ARE MOVING through the white center of
cooling flame, forming a spinning web, and becoming more
distant. The TITLES CONTINUE.
**** yeah.
Coppola chose to start the movie a few pages after this, with Willard our protagonist in Saigon--so as not to have a 4 hour long movie, I would guess.
Milius' original title for the movie was The Psychedelic Soldier. There are several indications that he meant for this to be ironic; our title credits soldier scalping us while wearing a peace sign and war paint being just one example.
Milius' has talked about how in the late 60's the hippies around him were wearing peace symbols and throwing around the motto, "Nirvana Now." He envisioned his soldiers mocking that sentiment with "Apocalypse Now," and thus came the title of the movie.
When it came time to film, Coppola took the psychedelic appellation at face value, and I believe that this shift in tone from irony to sincerity--in terms of the hallucinogenic dissociation of the events and the characters--is the second main departure point between Coppola's and Milius' approaches to the film--the first crux being Milius' relentless focus on the American soldiers, versus Coppola's occasional sympathetic forays into Vietnamese points of view, as I discussed in Parts I and II.
The third and final departure point between Milius and Coppola lies in the structure of the movie, with Milius' mirroring Willard and his journey with that of the Roman Trireme captain from Marlowe's early analogous conjecture in Heart of Darkness; sailing up a river through a fractionally conquered land, being confronted with and overcoming obstacle after obstacle through using his military training and talents for directed violence and canny trickery. This can be contrasted with Coppola's Willard: who is more of an observer type on a journey back in time and into deepening madness and disassociation.
I'll discuss this third departure point in Part IV of this commentary. For now, let's get back to the drugs, man.
In the screenplay, Lance is sober for the set piece below, but quite far from it in the movie version.
You might notice that the music on the cassette player in the bunker sounds almost, but not quite, like Jimi Hendrix. This is because Coppola hired a Hendrix impersonator and told him to play something that sounded like Jimi.
This clocks nicely with the tone of the second half of the movie, which plays almost, but not quite, like an acid trip. Coppola said that he was shooting for that sort of tone for large parts of the second half, though he himself had never indulged in psychedelics.
As someone who picked up more than a little acid experience as a young man, I think Coppola pulled it off all right. He certainly beat the standard square-person's riff of lining up young folks to dance around in colorful outfits in front of parti-colored sets under flashing lights.
For the rest of the film, Lance doesn't come down from his trip, which is lucky for him, as it serves as sort of a charm or a shield, leaving him in a blissed out, almost non-vocal state, but also seeming to disassociate him from the war and its deadly consequences.
Aside from Willard, Coppola's Lance is the only other crew member to survive the movie. Clean, their gunner, is shot down in an ambush on the river. Chief, the captain of the boat, is run through with a thrown spear, the same fate as Marlowe's Congolese helmsman in Heart of Darkness, and Chef, who's motto is "Never get off the boat," is dragged off the boat and beheaded by Kurtz's tribesmen, in order to prevent him from calling in an airstrike on Kurtz's compound.
In the movie version, Marlon Brando's Kurtz ends up depositing Chef's head in Willard's lap, letting him know that his pending airstrike has been cancelled, much in the same way that Coppola cancelled Milius' cataclysmic hellfire ending.
KURTZ
You know what you're doing?
You are interfering with my
plans !
He crawls in pain toward the canteen Willard watches
him impassively.
KURTZ
(continuing)
This water's got Moonby's acid
in it --
He drinks sloppily from the canteen, water spilling all
over. Then he throws the canteen to Willard.
KURTZ
(continuing)
Drink it -- drink it for tonight.
Think of it. A whole regiment
of those shitty little Cong --
War. Total war -- war like you've
never known it. It's beautiful
-- you'll love it. Trust me.
Milius' ending, then, sees Kurtz, Willard and Lance dropping acid, then grooving to the Doors' Light My Fire while expending a massive amount of high tech American ordnance in a festival of carnage, fending off a full scale attack from NVA and Vietcong regiments.
The battle ends when Willard calls in a massive air strike on Kurtz's compound after the enemy has overrun it.
275 FULL VIEW - THE FORTRESS
The air strike hits with all its force. Balls and rain
of fire sweeps down on the temple, the enemy, everything.
It is the biggest firework show in history.
The wall Kurtz was standing on, and he falls with it.
Willard sees this and makes his way toward him as the
air strike continues. All around us is a spectacle of
MUSIC and light and fire and overwhelming color.
276 TRACKING SHOT ON WILLARD
following Kurtz's trail in the mud. He has crawled on
all fours back into the jungle to die. He stalks Kurtz
into the jungle ; moving around and cutting off the
crawling Kurtz
KURTZ
Go away -- hide yourself.
WILLARD
What are you doing?
KURTZ
Going back - to the jungle to
die.
WILLARD
I'm taking you back. You can
still live.
KURTZ
I had immense plans.
WILLARD
I'm gonna get you out of here.
KURTZ
I was on threshold of great
things.
Willard slings Kurtz's bleeding body around his neck,
holding his hand, dragging hom through the jungle. The
spectacle continues in the b.g.
277 EXT. THE P.B.R. - THE RIVER
This wreck of a boat is still afloat. Willard crawls
out of the jungle, carrying the dying Kurtz and manages
to get him onto the boat.
278 EXTREME FULL SHOT
The spectacle of total psychedelic war: the fortress of
Nu Mung Ba.
Milius' Lance is killed in the final battle; Kurtz dies soon afterwards, mumbling "The horror, the horror." Willard pulls out with the boat, but then he fires at the American helicopters assigned to extricate him. After which--offscreen--he's somehow brought back in without further incident, and rehabilitated.
Coppola was having none of that ending, for reasons that I'll discuss in Part IV, and this was a big problem for him, because by the time he came to this conclusion, he had already filmed a the first two acts of the movie, on location in the Philippines, over the course of many grueling months, and he'd already spent millions of dollars of his own money. He had paid $100,000 just to have the Kurtz compound set rigged with explosives for the final airstrike, before he decided not to use them.
On top of that, Coppola had signed a contract with Marlon Brando, giving the actor $3 million to come out to the Philippines for 3 weeks, and Coppola had no idea what to do with him. Brando arrived topping the scales at well over 300lbs, looking nothing like a battle-hardened Army colonel, and set up digs in a houseboat just off the set, and he did nothing for the first week of his contract. He seemed content to sit there for another two weeks and run out the clock, going home $3 million richer, with no footage of him as Kurtz having been shot.
Meanwhile, back home, the Hollywood gossip and trade papers were already calling Apocalypse Now a bloated disaster, well before Coppola had even gotten the third act into the can. If you remember all the kerfuffle over the Titanic movie production and how it was supposedly spinning out of control and hemorrhaging money, Coppola's movie was the precursor to that in terms of garnering the same sort of breathless schadenfreude calamity coverage.
What to do? Coppola was stumped, on the brink of bankruptcy and artistic failure, about to become a permanent laughingstock, the butt of a cautionary tale warning against the hubris of becoming an egomaniacal auteur/director/producer/investor.
If I were him, I would have given up and just filmed Milius' ending. It's a big, loud, extravagant, exciting war movie ending, albeit with some haphazard hard drug use thrown in.
He'd already filmed a number of grand, bombastic war scenes in the first half, so what if he'd wandered away from that a bit in the second and third acts: When all else has failed, go with the BOOM, CRASH, RRRRRAOWW, KABOOM! Shoot it as written then roll the ****ing credits.
I would have been wrong, I think. Coppola stayed true to his vision, but he needed help sussing out the ending, and he needed it quick, before the time on Brando's brief, expensive visit ran out.
Maybe another filmmaker could add some insight here? Someone with experience covering both the psychedelic movement and the profound impact of All-American violence?
Next: Part IV: The Final Departure
Part III: The Psychedelic Soldier
Having posted two long parts of these commentaries here, along with supplemental posts, all of them touching frequently on the differences between the screenplay for Apocalypse Now and its filmed version, it fell upon me to finally read John Milius' screenplay for Apocalypse Now.
The version I found is credited to Milius, but is also marked "This draft by Francis Ford Coppola." It's dated December, 1975, almost 4 years before the movie came out. As far as I can tell from other sources, Coppola had left most of Milius' original script in this draft.
An AMERICAN wearing a jungle hat with a large Peace Sign
on it, wearing war paint, bends TOWARD US, reaching down
TOWARD US with a large knife, preparing to scalp the
dead.
OUR VIEW MOVES AWAY, along with the running sandals of a
Vietnamese soldier, MOVING FASTER AND FASTER, only to be
stopped by still another of the savage-looking AMERICANS
with primitive ornamentation, wearing only a loin-cloth
and green beret. He opens his flame-thrower directly ON US
and the NVA soldier and we are incinerated in flame,
bright psychedelic orange-red flame. Outrageous, loud,
electric ROCK MUSIC OVERWHELMS the SOUNDTRACK :
MAIN TITLE : APOCALYPSE NOW
2 TITLE SEQUENCE
The CREDIT TITLES proceed as the FLANE CONSUME US,
growing more intense, brighter, more vivid, purifying;
transforming into an intense white heat that we can barely
look at, like the sun itself.
Then it EXPLODES, breking apart, and shattering once
again. It begins to cool, as the TITLES CONTINUE. It
is as though WE ARE MOVING through the white center of
cooling flame, forming a spinning web, and becoming more
distant. The TITLES CONTINUE.
**** yeah.
Coppola chose to start the movie a few pages after this, with Willard our protagonist in Saigon--so as not to have a 4 hour long movie, I would guess.
Milius' original title for the movie was The Psychedelic Soldier. There are several indications that he meant for this to be ironic; our title credits soldier scalping us while wearing a peace sign and war paint being just one example.
Milius' has talked about how in the late 60's the hippies around him were wearing peace symbols and throwing around the motto, "Nirvana Now." He envisioned his soldiers mocking that sentiment with "Apocalypse Now," and thus came the title of the movie.
When it came time to film, Coppola took the psychedelic appellation at face value, and I believe that this shift in tone from irony to sincerity--in terms of the hallucinogenic dissociation of the events and the characters--is the second main departure point between Coppola's and Milius' approaches to the film--the first crux being Milius' relentless focus on the American soldiers, versus Coppola's occasional sympathetic forays into Vietnamese points of view, as I discussed in Parts I and II.
The third and final departure point between Milius and Coppola lies in the structure of the movie, with Milius' mirroring Willard and his journey with that of the Roman Trireme captain from Marlowe's early analogous conjecture in Heart of Darkness; sailing up a river through a fractionally conquered land, being confronted with and overcoming obstacle after obstacle through using his military training and talents for directed violence and canny trickery. This can be contrasted with Coppola's Willard: who is more of an observer type on a journey back in time and into deepening madness and disassociation.
I'll discuss this third departure point in Part IV of this commentary. For now, let's get back to the drugs, man.
In the screenplay, Lance is sober for the set piece below, but quite far from it in the movie version.
You might notice that the music on the cassette player in the bunker sounds almost, but not quite, like Jimi Hendrix. This is because Coppola hired a Hendrix impersonator and told him to play something that sounded like Jimi.
This clocks nicely with the tone of the second half of the movie, which plays almost, but not quite, like an acid trip. Coppola said that he was shooting for that sort of tone for large parts of the second half, though he himself had never indulged in psychedelics.
As someone who picked up more than a little acid experience as a young man, I think Coppola pulled it off all right. He certainly beat the standard square-person's riff of lining up young folks to dance around in colorful outfits in front of parti-colored sets under flashing lights.
Spoiler:
Spoiler:
For the rest of the film, Lance doesn't come down from his trip, which is lucky for him, as it serves as sort of a charm or a shield, leaving him in a blissed out, almost non-vocal state, but also seeming to disassociate him from the war and its deadly consequences.
Aside from Willard, Coppola's Lance is the only other crew member to survive the movie. Clean, their gunner, is shot down in an ambush on the river. Chief, the captain of the boat, is run through with a thrown spear, the same fate as Marlowe's Congolese helmsman in Heart of Darkness, and Chef, who's motto is "Never get off the boat," is dragged off the boat and beheaded by Kurtz's tribesmen, in order to prevent him from calling in an airstrike on Kurtz's compound.
In the movie version, Marlon Brando's Kurtz ends up depositing Chef's head in Willard's lap, letting him know that his pending airstrike has been cancelled, much in the same way that Coppola cancelled Milius' cataclysmic hellfire ending.
KURTZ
You know what you're doing?
You are interfering with my
plans !
He crawls in pain toward the canteen Willard watches
him impassively.
KURTZ
(continuing)
This water's got Moonby's acid
in it --
He drinks sloppily from the canteen, water spilling all
over. Then he throws the canteen to Willard.
KURTZ
(continuing)
Drink it -- drink it for tonight.
Think of it. A whole regiment
of those shitty little Cong --
War. Total war -- war like you've
never known it. It's beautiful
-- you'll love it. Trust me.
Milius' ending, then, sees Kurtz, Willard and Lance dropping acid, then grooving to the Doors' Light My Fire while expending a massive amount of high tech American ordnance in a festival of carnage, fending off a full scale attack from NVA and Vietcong regiments.
The battle ends when Willard calls in a massive air strike on Kurtz's compound after the enemy has overrun it.
275 FULL VIEW - THE FORTRESS
The air strike hits with all its force. Balls and rain
of fire sweeps down on the temple, the enemy, everything.
It is the biggest firework show in history.
The wall Kurtz was standing on, and he falls with it.
Willard sees this and makes his way toward him as the
air strike continues. All around us is a spectacle of
MUSIC and light and fire and overwhelming color.
276 TRACKING SHOT ON WILLARD
following Kurtz's trail in the mud. He has crawled on
all fours back into the jungle to die. He stalks Kurtz
into the jungle ; moving around and cutting off the
crawling Kurtz
KURTZ
Go away -- hide yourself.
WILLARD
What are you doing?
KURTZ
Going back - to the jungle to
die.
WILLARD
I'm taking you back. You can
still live.
KURTZ
I had immense plans.
WILLARD
I'm gonna get you out of here.
KURTZ
I was on threshold of great
things.
Willard slings Kurtz's bleeding body around his neck,
holding his hand, dragging hom through the jungle. The
spectacle continues in the b.g.
277 EXT. THE P.B.R. - THE RIVER
This wreck of a boat is still afloat. Willard crawls
out of the jungle, carrying the dying Kurtz and manages
to get him onto the boat.
278 EXTREME FULL SHOT
The spectacle of total psychedelic war: the fortress of
Nu Mung Ba.
Milius' Lance is killed in the final battle; Kurtz dies soon afterwards, mumbling "The horror, the horror." Willard pulls out with the boat, but then he fires at the American helicopters assigned to extricate him. After which--offscreen--he's somehow brought back in without further incident, and rehabilitated.
Coppola was having none of that ending, for reasons that I'll discuss in Part IV, and this was a big problem for him, because by the time he came to this conclusion, he had already filmed a the first two acts of the movie, on location in the Philippines, over the course of many grueling months, and he'd already spent millions of dollars of his own money. He had paid $100,000 just to have the Kurtz compound set rigged with explosives for the final airstrike, before he decided not to use them.
On top of that, Coppola had signed a contract with Marlon Brando, giving the actor $3 million to come out to the Philippines for 3 weeks, and Coppola had no idea what to do with him. Brando arrived topping the scales at well over 300lbs, looking nothing like a battle-hardened Army colonel, and set up digs in a houseboat just off the set, and he did nothing for the first week of his contract. He seemed content to sit there for another two weeks and run out the clock, going home $3 million richer, with no footage of him as Kurtz having been shot.
Meanwhile, back home, the Hollywood gossip and trade papers were already calling Apocalypse Now a bloated disaster, well before Coppola had even gotten the third act into the can. If you remember all the kerfuffle over the Titanic movie production and how it was supposedly spinning out of control and hemorrhaging money, Coppola's movie was the precursor to that in terms of garnering the same sort of breathless schadenfreude calamity coverage.
What to do? Coppola was stumped, on the brink of bankruptcy and artistic failure, about to become a permanent laughingstock, the butt of a cautionary tale warning against the hubris of becoming an egomaniacal auteur/director/producer/investor.
If I were him, I would have given up and just filmed Milius' ending. It's a big, loud, extravagant, exciting war movie ending, albeit with some haphazard hard drug use thrown in.
He'd already filmed a number of grand, bombastic war scenes in the first half, so what if he'd wandered away from that a bit in the second and third acts: When all else has failed, go with the BOOM, CRASH, RRRRRAOWW, KABOOM! Shoot it as written then roll the ****ing credits.
I would have been wrong, I think. Coppola stayed true to his vision, but he needed help sussing out the ending, and he needed it quick, before the time on Brando's brief, expensive visit ran out.
Maybe another filmmaker could add some insight here? Someone with experience covering both the psychedelic movement and the profound impact of All-American violence?
Spoiler:
Spoiler:
Next: Part IV: The Final Departure
Last edited by suitedjustice; 02-10-2022 at 11:42 PM.
05-08-2022
, 03:05 PM
05-17-2022
, 07:41 PM
05-17-2022
, 07:56 PM
05-18-2022
, 10:37 AM
All the power to you friend 
05-18-2022
, 04:57 PM
05-19-2022
, 01:28 PM
EXTREMEN AMOUNTS of meditation was my tool to acquire sobriety and deal with my depression/anxiety, but I can picture becoming a gym rat as an excellent way to keep anxiety in check, lose weight (and thus gain more self-confidence) and increase those dopamine levels that are naturally quite low the first year of sobriety... We are all strongly rooting for you friend 
05-24-2022
, 06:23 PM
I want to thank everyone very much for your kind words. They mean a lot to me, and they've been very helpful.
FWWM: I'm looking forward to seeing you again in Las Vegas.
You guys mentioned walking and hiking. I do enjoy that. Or I hate it a lot less than other types of exercise. Daily walking in Las Vegas helped to keep my weight down and to keep me in good health, for the most part.
Last Tuesday night, after I posted, I went for walk. I had intended to retrace a 4-mile route that I had walked once 3 weeks before. This time however, I found myself out of breath almost from the get-go. I had to stop and rest 3 times within the first mile. Something was wrong. My fitness had been heading steadily downhill for a while, but there was no way that I had deteriorated this badly in only 3 weeks.
At the mile mark, I turned around and headed home, dismayed. On my second break of the return trip, my friend Will texted me with the news that he and his wife had tested positive for Covid. And I had spent the weekend at their house.
I had two Covid tests at home; I took one that night...negative.
Wednesday morning I woke up with minor cold symptoms. I took the other Covid test, and it came positive.
I started my quarantine on Wednesday morning. My parents dropped off a ton of groceries for me, and I settled in with minor symptoms and my naturally lazy disposition. On Thursday night I ran out of booze. I decided not to place other people's lives in danger in support of my habit, and I haven't had a drink since I ran out, unless you count a shot of Nyquil for the first 3 nights of quarantine.
Presently I'm fine. I went to work yesterday and today, masked. I'll wear the mask in public for the rest of the week, per the CDC guidelines. I'm just a little irked that I got caught this late in the game. I feel like Covid hit a two-outer on me on the river. But then I realize that it would have been a lot worse for me to have gotten it before the vaccines came out, and then I don't feel so bad.
What's next? I don't know. I might start on that last part of the Apocalypse Now review, if there's any interest. I'm not checking the new likes feature; I use the slick skin and likes don't work for that. Hopefully they update that at some point.
FWWM: I'm looking forward to seeing you again in Las Vegas.
You guys mentioned walking and hiking. I do enjoy that. Or I hate it a lot less than other types of exercise. Daily walking in Las Vegas helped to keep my weight down and to keep me in good health, for the most part.
Last Tuesday night, after I posted, I went for walk. I had intended to retrace a 4-mile route that I had walked once 3 weeks before. This time however, I found myself out of breath almost from the get-go. I had to stop and rest 3 times within the first mile. Something was wrong. My fitness had been heading steadily downhill for a while, but there was no way that I had deteriorated this badly in only 3 weeks.
At the mile mark, I turned around and headed home, dismayed. On my second break of the return trip, my friend Will texted me with the news that he and his wife had tested positive for Covid. And I had spent the weekend at their house.
Spoiler:
I had two Covid tests at home; I took one that night...negative.
Wednesday morning I woke up with minor cold symptoms. I took the other Covid test, and it came positive.
I started my quarantine on Wednesday morning. My parents dropped off a ton of groceries for me, and I settled in with minor symptoms and my naturally lazy disposition. On Thursday night I ran out of booze. I decided not to place other people's lives in danger in support of my habit, and I haven't had a drink since I ran out, unless you count a shot of Nyquil for the first 3 nights of quarantine.
Presently I'm fine. I went to work yesterday and today, masked. I'll wear the mask in public for the rest of the week, per the CDC guidelines. I'm just a little irked that I got caught this late in the game. I feel like Covid hit a two-outer on me on the river. But then I realize that it would have been a lot worse for me to have gotten it before the vaccines came out, and then I don't feel so bad.
What's next? I don't know. I might start on that last part of the Apocalypse Now review, if there's any interest. I'm not checking the new likes feature; I use the slick skin and likes don't work for that. Hopefully they update that at some point.
05-25-2022
, 12:51 AM
Take it very very easy. I had something a couple of months ago. I was sure it was Covid, and still am. I went to the clinic every day for the first 9 days and tested negative every time. It took about 4 weeks to get over it. Until then, it was 0 energy and constantly draining sinuses.
Give yourself a month, at least, to get back. Right now I'm considering wearing a mask for the rest of my life. I probably will when I play poke or fly--any time I'm compelled to be around disgusting people.
Watch movies. Get ideas for your script. Let people bring you groceries.
Give yourself a month, at least, to get back. Right now I'm considering wearing a mask for the rest of my life. I probably will when I play poke or fly--any time I'm compelled to be around disgusting people.
Watch movies. Get ideas for your script. Let people bring you groceries.