Vitals

Martin Sheen as Captain Benjamin L. Willard, U.S. Army Special Forces officer

South Vietnam to Cambodia, Summer 1969

Film: Apocalypse Now
Release Date: August 15, 1979
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Costume Supervisor: Charles E. James
Costumers: Luster Bayless, Norman A. Burza, Dennis Fill, and George L. Little

Background

Francis Ford Coppola’s controversial war epic Apocalypse Now was first released 45 years ago today on August 15, 1979.

Shooting had started more than three years earlier in March 1976 with an initial plan to release on Coppola’s 38th birthday, April 7, 1977, but the production was delayed by logistics problems, unpredictable weather, and personnel issues ranging from Marlon Brando’s mercurial temperament and Martin Sheen’s stress-induced heart attack to grave-robbers attempting to sell actual human corpses to the production.

“We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane,” Coppola recalled in an interview used to begin the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse that chronicled the film’s troubled production.

After filming wrapped in May 1977 (more than one month after the original intended release date), Coppola busied himself on editing over a million feet of film as the already bloated budget continued to swell and the released date was pushed farther ahead. Coppola debuted the work-in-progress at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where it was met with prolonged applause and was awarded the Palme d’Or.

Three months later, the freshly completed Apocalypse Now finally landed in North American theaters, albeit only three at first—the Ziegield in New York City, the Cinerama Dome in L.A., and the University Theatre in Toronto—until it would be released in over 300 more theaters by October. The $9 million spent on advertising increased the final total budget to $45 million… considerably higher than the $2 million that Coppola, John Milius, and George Lucas had estimated to spend on it back in 1971.

The project had dated back even four years before that to 1967, when Lucas and Steven Spielberg had told Coppola’s then-assistant Milius to write a film about the ongoing war in Vietnam. Following Coppola’s direction to “write every scene you ever wanted to go into that movie,” Milius ultimately wrote ten drafts that blended contemporary anecdotes around the Vietnam War with allegorical inspiration from Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. Once Coppola took over directorial control from Lucas, he also incorporated elements from Werner Herzog’s 1972 epic Aguirre, the Wrath of God and the legend of the Fisher King.

The story that emerged on screen centered around U.S. Army Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen), a troubled but talented paratrooper dispatched by the Studies and Operations Group (MACV-SOG) to assassinate the renegade Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a power-mad colonel ruthlessly commanding a rogue force of American, Montagnard, and local Khmer militia troops who view him as a demigod. Without the four-person crew being aware of his classified mission, Captain Willard joins a U.S. Navy patrol boat that takes him up the Nùng River to Kurtz’s outpost at a Khmer temple in Cambodia, where he has been ordered to “terminate the Colonel’s command… with extreme prejudice.” Continue reading →