With its themes of technology and privacy, Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Conversation” grows more relevant
Starting Feb. 4, city dwellers will have a rare chance to see one of the quintessential San Francisco movies on the big screen. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 masterpiece “The Conversation” plays at the Embarcadero Cinema for a week, through Feb. 10.
Made, incredibly, between Coppola’s first two “Godfather” films, “The Conversation” begins in Union Square, looking quite different then than it does today. An average couple (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) wander around the square, talking about seemingly nothing. Nearby, sound expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) records them.
Later, as he tweaks and adjusts the recording, Harry begins to feel that something sinister is going on and becomes obsessed with learning more. Unfortunately, someone now seems to be watching Harry.
Harry starts the film as a paranoid, solitary character, wearing a weird translucent raincoat with his droopy mustache and unstylish glasses. His apartment, located, according to reelsf.com, at 700 Laguna St., is a barren place. He owns no telephone and only uses payphones (remember them)? And when a neighbor leaves him a birthday present, his reaction is not surprise or gratitude, but rather rage that she entered his apartment.
Coppola, in a 1999 interview in Scenario Magazine, which analyzed the screenplay, said he shot Harry’s apartment as if with a surveillance camera. “That’s a motif of the film; you see him, and then he just walks out of the frame. The camera doesn’t follow him. Then he walks back in. [We wanted] this theme of intrusion on personal privacy to be constantly present.”
Meanwhile, Harry’s assistant Stan (the great John Cazale, who also played Fredo in the “Godfather” films) wants nothing more than Harry’s appreciation or friendship, but never gets it. Another wiretapper, the obnoxious “Bernie” Moran (Allen Garfield) can only get Harry’s attention by secretly recording him and playing it back. Not even Harry’s kinda-sorta girlfriend Amy (Teri Garr) knows much about him.
Harry’s workshop (1616 16th Street) is also the ultimate in paranoia. It’s a huge, unoccupied warehouse space, with Harry and Stan socked tightly into a little cage at the far corner.
Another key scene is set at, of all things, a wiretapper’s convention, which Coppola said was the real thing; only a few extra touches were added. The sequence was shot inside the St. Francis Hotel, on the mezzanine level, and in the Colonial Room.
Also in the cast are two huge stars in small roles, Robert Duvall, as the mysterious “Director” who hires Harry, and up-and-comer Harrison Ford as the Director’s assistant. (Ford chose to play his character as gay, which must have been a daring choice at the time.) Their office was located at One Embarcadero Center, and some of the backgrounds still look the same. A security desk was placed right in front of one of the structure’s famous spiral staircases, which is still there.
Coppola found inspiration for the film in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow Up,” released in 1966, about a photographer who believes he has inadvertently taken a picture of a murder. Coppola wrote “The Conversation” soon after, but couldn’t find anyone interested in producing it.
But after the massive, world-changing success of “The Godfather” in 1972, Coppola found he had a great deal more clout, and Paramount agreed to make the film.
Following the shoot in San Francisco between December of 1972 and February of 1973, Coppola was forced to go to work preparing “The Godfather Part II,” leaving “The Conversation” in the hands of the genius sound man and editor Walter Murch.
With an entire year to tinker with the film, Murch perfected some of his groundbreaking layering techniques, and turned in an intricate, precision film.
It was Murch who realized that there was no satisfactory ending for the film.
“You do not see or hear or know anything that Harry Caul does not also see or know or hear,” said Murch in an interview in the same issue of Scenario. “This was especially tricky, because at the end, we were obliged to indicate what actually happened, but only insofar as Harry understood it. We couldn’t simply jump into the third person at that point and wrap it all up.”
His discovery of a particular line reading that changed the nature of the mystery saved the film’s ending, kept Harry’s point of view and leaves everything off with a tingling bit of ambiguity.
Murch also received the gift of having the music score — performed on a single piano by David Shire — finished before shooting even began, which is far from standard practice. “Usually, the final score comes at the last moment and it’s spray-gunned onto the movie,” said Murch.
“Francis played the music for the actors — that way they knew what they were acting against,” Murch said. “We also ran the piano through a synthesizer, and the amount of processing depended on what was happening in the scene. If the music will be doing this, I can go out on that limb. You could take more risks.”
Of Murch, Coppola said, “He really was a collaborator on the film. He didn’t work on the script with me, but in the final cut he made a big contribution.”
“The Conversation” was released on April 7, 1974. Critics responded to how timely the film seemed, especially tied to the news of the day, about wire-tapping and the Watergate break-in.
“I remember we were shooting, and the news on the break-in happened. We said, ‘Hey isn’t this weird? This is sort of what we’re about.’ But I didn’t approach it that way,” Coppola said.
The film received critical acclaim. It won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and received three Academy Award Nominations, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Sound Design. Ironically, it competed against Coppola’s heavily-nominated “The Godfather Part II.”
Yet it had very little impact on the box office, grossing only $4.2 million against a $1.6 million budget. By comparison, according to the-numbers.com, “The Godfather Part II” grossed $57.3 million, while the top earners of the year were “The Towering Inferno” and “Blazing Saddles,” both breaking $100 million.
Yet “The Conversation” has endured, and its themes of technology and privacy have only grown more relevant.
“It’s probably the best of all my films,” Coppola said in 1999. “But I don’t see my own films. When my films are done, it’s like they’re really done.”
IF YOU GO
“The Conversation”
When: Feb. 4-10
Where: Embarcadero Cinema, 1 Embarcadero Ctr, S.F.
Tickets: $12.50 -$16
Contact: (415) 352-0835; www.landmarktheatres.com
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