The film opens with the strange distorted
sounds of a helicopter passing as we fade-in on a tree-lineâ the entrance to the jungle
and the "heart of darkness," so to speak. The beginnings of a song titled 'The End'
by The Doors plays. This iconic opening was actually something Coppola stumbled upon during
the edit (Commentary). Coppola had visited the editing room on the last day of one of
his editors, Barry Malcolm, before he had to leave for another project (Commentary).
Coppola noticed barrels of film that were the beginnings and ends of footage from the
five cameras that photographed the napalm tree-line explosion from the end of the Flight
of the Valkyries battle sequence. These beginnings of the takes before the explosion
happened had been discarded into the barrels (Commentary). So, what you are looking at
is footage meant for the trashcan of the camera rolling and just waiting for the large explosion
to blow up the trees. I've always kind of imagined that the camera wouldnât have panned
if the shot had been planned from the start to open the movie. Coppola thought that the footage looked interesting
and unusual and then he went through a bin of music and said, âWouldnât it be funny
if we took a song called âThe Endâ and put it at the beginning of a movie?â (Commentary).
Coppola said that, if he hadnât been there on that particular Saturday, the movie wouldnât
have begun this way (Commentary). John Miliusâ first draft dated December
5th, 1969, begins with an authorâs note telling a story of newly enlisted soldiers
waiting to leave San Francisco for Vietnam. The line of new paratroopers are approached
by a couple of hippies handing out anti-war pamphlets and one of the soldiers takes off
his helmet and bashes one of the hippies. A sergeant yells, âWhich one of you bastards
hit this boy?â And the entire company responds in unison, âI didâ sir!â After which,
another hippie remarks, âJust think what theyâll be like when they come back.â Miliusâ screenplay then begins with the
narrator reading an Army memorandum and what follows would have been this familiar image.
The description reads: âIt is very early in the dawn - blue light
filters through the jungle and across the foul swamp. A vague mist clings to the trees.
The SOUND of crickets and jungle animals is playing undisturbed. TILT DOWN into tepid
water. Suddenly but quietly a helmet emerges - the water pours off REVEALING a set of beady
eyes just above the water. Printed on the helmet, clearly visible in the dim light,
are the words âG*** Killerâ written in a psychedelic hand. The head emerges REVEALING
that the tough looking SOLDIER beneath has exceptionally long hair and beard. He has
no shirt on, only bandoliers of ammunition â his body is painted in an odd camouflage
patternâ (Screenplay). A draft of Miliusâ screenplay rewritten
by Coppola dated December 3rd, 1975, cuts the memorandum and has the movie open directly
with this iconic shot. This shot was ultimately reincorporated into
the climax of the film. That said, it seems that shortly before the inspiration to start
the film with the napalm explosion, Coppolaâs idea was to open with a black screen and slowly
the sounds of the jungle would come out of the darkness [quote] âbefore any images
are seen on the screenâ (Coppola 282). Imagine an overture of insects. The idea was to bookend the film with these
sounds over black, opening and ending the film (Coppola 282). In the final film, the
Doors' song sort of bookends the movie as it opens with âThe Endâ and climaxes with
âThe End.â Something a little bit more like the opening
in the final film appears in a Coppola rewrite from June 29th, 1976 where he describes the
opening as [quote] "A Simple Image of Trees: coconut trees being VIEWED through the veil
of time. Occasionally colored smoke wafts through the frame. We HEAR music suggestive
of 1968, psychedelic . . . Perhaps the Moody Blues' "Knights in White Satin", or The Doors'
"The End".' Willard is seen asleep in Saigon, after making love to a whore"Â (Cowie 45). So it seems like Coppola already had a vague
idea of what this would be like when he stumbled upon the footage in the barrels. Apocalypse Now has more of a connection to
The Doors than just the songâ Doors frontman, Jim Morrison and keyboardist Ray Manzarek
met at UCLA film school while Coppola was attending (Travers 4). Morrison said, âThe
good thing about film is that there arenât any experts⌠Thereâs no authority on film.
Any one person can assimilate and contain the whole history of film in himself, which
you canât do in other arts. There are no experts, so theoretically, any student knows
almost as much as any professorâ (Travers 42). By the way, some of their teachers during
this time included âStanley Kramer, Jean Renoir, and Josef von Sternbergâ (Travers
42). Â Morrison was particularly influenced by Josef von Sternberg and German Expressionism
and this influence would carry over to The Doors (Travers 42). Morrison made a very avant-garde student film
with tons of bizarre imagery including Morrison smoking a joint and winking at the camera
while an atomic bomb explodes (Travers 45). âHave you ever seen God? Mandela. Symmetrical
angel.â âItâs bombastic.â Apparently it was enough for some of the faculty
members to â[call] it the worst student film ever,â which, if youâve seen many
student films, is kind of impressive (Travers 45). âHey, Morrison. F*** them, man. Itâs great. Itâs
non-linear. Itâs poetry. Itâs everything good art stands for.â After the negative feedback, Morrison and
Manzarek and another friend named John Densmore decided to drop out of their universities
and start The Doors (Travers 4). âI quit.â And the connection doesnât end with UCLAâ
Jim Morrisonâs father, George Stephen Morrison, a former World War II fighter pilot, served
as an Admiral [quote] âin command of the carrier division during its pivotal role in
the Gulf of Tonkin incidentâ (Travers 41). Wikipedia describes the Gulf of Tonkin incident
as [quote] âan international confrontation that led to the United States engaging more
directly in the Vietnam Warâ (Wiki). Admiral Morrison would go on to be âin charge of
all U.S. Operations in Vietnamâ after following âPresident Lyndon Johnsonâs orders to
âgive me my damn warâ" (Travers 1). Originally, the entire soundtrack was going
to be songs by The Doors (Cowie 101). Â Editor Walter Murch said, "We tried many, many songs,
but anything we put on the film seemed to be so apt that it was wrong, it hit the nail
so firmly on the head that it seemed sophomoric. There was no connection other than a very
deep bond between the psyche of Jim Morrison and the psyche of this filmâ (Cowie 101).
Murch also saw the opening image of the exploding tree-line as [quote] âemblematic of the whole Vietnamese
experienceâ (Cowie 101). If I had to guess what he means means by this, I would probably
say that itâs something similar to these images in Stanley Kubrickâs Full Metal Jacket. The North Vietnamese making small bold strikes and the US unloading massive amounts of expensive bombs and ammunition and not necessarily hit
anything. âYou know, one time we had a hill bomb for
twelve hours and when it was all over, I walked up. We didnât find one of them. Not one
stinking Dink body.â Once the decision was made to use the Doorsâ
song in the beginning, editor Walter Murch created an avant-garde sequence of our protagonist,
Willard, thinking about the jungle (Commentary). Coppola wanted to show what was inside Willard
before the story begins and, here, we see what is inside his mind, soon weâll get
a glimpse into his soul (Commentary). Like the opening shot, the beautiful connection
of the helicopter to the ceiling fan was also not planned. Coppola had gotten a shot of
Willard on his back, so naturally he got a shot of what Willard would be looking atâ
the ceiling fan, but Murchâs idea to combine it with the sounds of the helicopter blades
really shows us how much the jungle is a part of Willard and itâs done in a purely cinematic
way (Commentary). Murch said, "I remember vividly the moment
when I made the connection between the sound of the helicopter rotors and visual of the
fan. Willard was filmed upside down like that originally. The shot of the Buddha at the
right of frame was part of the idea of forecasting the end at the beginningâ (Cowie 100). Here, we actually see part of the end of the
film with Willard about to kill Colonel Kurtz, but we donât know it. It just appears as
a surreal look into Willardâs primal psyche. Sound Re-Recording Mixer Richard Beggs put
the track of the Doorsâ song over the opening, but when Murch requested the track from the
record label, they accidentally sent the master tracks, so the mix in the movie sounds different
than the mix on the album (Wiki). One thing that was changed was part of Morrisonâs
vocals repeating âf***â over and over as part of a reference to the story of Oedipus
where he⌠you know, accidentally kills his father and marries his mother⌠He seemed pretty upset about it. I mean, he
gouged his own eyes out⌠âHey, Josephus!â âHey, Motherf***er.â Anyway, Morrisonâs vocals in that part were
essentially buried on the track. Beggs said, "They sent me the four-trackâŚÂ a direct
copy of the original master they had made for the song, and in that version Morrison
kept saying âF*** yeah! F***! F***! Yeah!â but it was never in the album, so I incorporated
it into the picture. It was like finding some buried treasure!â (Cowie 100). That said, screenwriter John Milius had always
wanted the movie to open with the Doorsâ Light My Fire, which he considered to be
better than The End  (Cowie 100). In this episodeâs Companion PDF, I go into
more detail about Jim Morrison and The Doorsâ connection to Apocalypse Now. You can get
it for just $1 and it really helps the channel out. âThe manâs enlarged my mind.â There were actually several very different
openings that had been written into the various script rewrites. The first opening that was
written depicts a Montagnard attack on the Vietcong followed by the introduction of Willard
on âluxury cabin cruiser" in Marina del Ray (Cowie 44, Screenplay). Here, Willard
is a bodyguard for âthe head of a large American Corporationâ (Screenplay). He thinks
about Vietnam and tells a woman that âLos Angeles⌠was once one of the dark places
of the earthâ and this opens up a dialogue between the two where the woman says, âYouâre
going to tell me about the horrors of warâ and Willard replies, âThe horror? Would
you really listen if I told you? I mean, about the real horror?â (Cowie 44). Willard telling his story would be a framing
device similar to the one in Heart of Darkness. The novella has its protagonist telling his
story to fellow sailors aboard an ivory trading companyâs steamboat (Wiki). Another draft
of the Apocalypse Now script, from January 1976, opens with the military finding Willard
sharing war stories at a bar in Danang (Cowie 44). âGo f*** yourself.â Milliusâ versions of the screenplay always
seemed to put Kurtz at the beginning of the film and it is here where we can really see
Miliusâ idea of what Kurtz and his army are like. First, an ambush of Vietcong soldiers
by Kurtzâ army shows Americans who have embraced the jungle and have become part of
it. Miliusâ screenplay reads:Â
âOur VIEW TURNS as the men around us are thrown and torn, screaming and scattering
into the jungle. More AMERICANS appear, unexplainably, out of the growth. It is now that we fully
SEE the bizarre manner in which they are dressed. Some wear helmets, others wear strange hats
made from feathers and parts of animals. Some of them have long savage-looking hair; other
crew-cut or completely shaved; they wear bandoliers, flack jackets, shorts and little else. They
wear Montagnard sandals or no shoes at all, and their bodies and faces are painted in
bizarre camouflage patterns. They appear one with the jungle and mist, FIRING INTO US as
they moveâ (Screenplay). Shortly after this, the soldier whose head
had slowly peeked out from the water now emerges, dripping with mud, and firing a machine gun (Screenplay). Kurtz is soon shown as a John Wayne-type with
a description reading âHe wears a green beret and he has close-cropped hair and a
tough jutting jaw (Cowie 38). It is easy to see the connection to John Wayne
when you look at Wayne's 1968 anti-communist Vietnam War movie, The Green Berets. Wayne
is depicted as the ultimate American, stomping out Communism. In the margins of Miliusâ draft, Coppola
writes, âWhat am I saying about him?â (Cowie 38). Miliusâ scene continues:Â
âThe massive stone gateâthe patrol passes under it in triumph â men displaying scalps
hanging from their M16âs â they hold up captured AK 47âs â dope â rice and other
booty. Wild-looking Montagnards CHEER and cackle with delight. The Colonel turns and
crosses his arms, standing majesticallyâ (Cowie 38). Coppola writes, âAgain, this
must not appear funny. But itâs as though we have come upon a view of something unlike
[anything] we have seen beforeâ (Cowie 38). Eventually these openings were scrapped in
favor of something simpler. Coppola said, "Marty's character was coming across as too blandâŚÂ I
tried to break through it. I always look for other levels, hidden levels in the actor's
personality and in the personality of the character he plays. I conceived this all-night
drunk; see another side of the guyâ (Travers 117). The narration, which weâll talk about more
in another video, orients us. He has divorced his wife, he canât stop thinking about getting
back to the jungleâ heâs only been back in the civilized world for a week. Itâs
obvious that he has some kind of PTSD (or post-traumatic-stress-disorder), which had
a devastating effect on many veterans of war. I think, perhaps, the most striking bit
is when he says: âEvery minute I stay in this room, I get
weaker. And every minute Charlie squats in the bush⌠he gets stronger.â âCharlieâ is referring to Victor Charlie
â part of the NATO phonetic alphabetâ Victor for âVâ and Charlie for âCâ
â âVCâ, which stands for Viet Cong (Wiki). What Willard says here is sort of similar
to that motivational saying that the people you are competing againstâ in business,
in art, in a trade, or whateverâ they are hustling harder than you and they arenât
taking breaks. But in this case, the subtext is a little stronger in that the Viet Cong
have more at stake and the jungle is their home. Willard has to keep his edge, not just to
fight the Viet Cong, but to fight his own demons. Whatâs interesting, is that they
would provoke a drunk Martin Sheen on his 36th birthday to wrestle with his own demonsâŚ
on camera. This would result in an injury to Sheenâs hand as well as a scene that
blurs fiction and reality where a character and an actor bares their soul for the audience
at the same time. This episodeâs companion PDF features some
more detailed information on Jim Morrison at UCLA, some interesting quotes by Walter
Murch and Coppola on the use of The Doorsâ music in the film, as well as a playlist of
music that Coppola noted or wrote into the script, but didnât end up using. Download
it now for just one dollar. And if you support me on Patreon at the $5
level, youâll get access to all the companion PDFs I make for this series. Thanks for watching!
One of my favorite movies of all time. Love how they mix the song in with the bombing