It's an absurd fest of the worst of Hollywood excess. Copolla was a spoiled fool at that point and the movie is a string of gross self indulgences one after the other. Most beer swiling dolts remember the dumb macho-bravado flight of the valkyries/napalm-in-the-morning scene with patriotic sentiment, but the rest of the movie, they don't even get it. Brando agreed to do one month of "work" on the film for $2 million and 10% of some royalties (which worked out to $9 million). In today's dollars, that's 43 million. They couldn't even film him except in shadows because he was massively overweight. There was no room in the plot for a 350 pound Colonel Kurtz with type II diabetes. He certainly didn't earn 43 million dollars for his acting in the movie. Coppola downplayed Brando's weight by dressing him in black, photographing only his face, and having another, taller actor double for him. The whole mystical shroud around Kurtz's character is basically because $43 million was only enough to get Brando on the set, not to give a flip about making the movie.
Brando wasn't the only catastrophic disaster in making that movie. Hurricane Olga destroyed the sets and they had to be rebuilt. Martin Sheen, who was like the 47th choice to play Willard suffered a heart attack during production and his brother had to fill in to do the voice overs. I'm not criticizing the film for these unfortunate disasters, but they did exacerbate the prodigious budget overruns.
Repeatedly, the film went way over the budget only to have Copolla invest more of his own money to save it. Copolla himself is said to have described it this way: "We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane"
When I see it, I just see gross self-indulgence for no good cause. The film doesn't say anything meaningful about Vietnam -- it was never about Vietnam -- and it doesn't contribute anything artistically. It's not art. It's just a bunch of rich ass hats displaying their ineptitude and jerking themselves off by stroking their egos. If you want to watch a couple of fat fcuk Hollywood [bleep] spluge all over themselves, watch Apocalypse Now. There's even several versions because they think their chits artistic Cannes film crap that people will keep paying more money for them to reissue.
Born in '51.
Lets just say that a number of movies, (quite a few watched during an altered state of consciousness) had different emotional effects.
Most do not have the impact now that they did at the time, as everything was new back then.
In an absolutely random order......
Easy Rider
Aldous Huxley's "The Devils"
A Clockwork Orange,
The Deer Hunter,
Once Upon a time in the West
Billy Jack
Deliverance
Tommy
Jesus Christ Superstar
Thief
Dr. Strangelove
Dr Zhivago
Last Tango in Paris
Cool Hand Luke
The Godfather
Midnight Cowboy
The Point
Taxi Driver
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (read the book first along with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test )
Little Big Man
Three Days of the Condor
Papillion
Straw Dogs
could go on and on but methinks I'll do that a bit later once I'm wrapped in the arms of Bacchus
ya!
GWB
