May 31, 2010

I didn’t watch all that many Disney cartoons when I was a kid, not that I was dead set against them. I was simply more in tune with Droopy’s monotone drolleries than with high-falutin’ Oscar-grabs full of painstakingly rendered displays of “beauty” and “magic.” Even today, I can’t imagine choosing Cinderella over the mean dog’s eyes bugging out when a stick of dynamite blows up under his ass, and if you can pancake-flatten a character with a steamroller, I say go for it. Later for gasping at how convincing the dew drops look on the flora.

My mom, though, would occasionally regale me with her childhood memory of seeing “Pinocchio” in an ornate Cleveland movie palace back in the '40s. As the years wore on, she repeatedly returned to the memory of that scene where Pinocchio and Geppetto are trapped inside the whale’s belly, and the whale delivers an aria that makes his massive tonsils jiggle. Mom must have mentioned this in passing at least 30 times while I was growing up, so, when “Pinocchio” was re-released in 1984, I promised her I’d take her to see it during my college Christmas break.

We saw it a couple weeks later, and, I have to say, it was fun to experience the movie on a big screen. But that whale, who definitely swallows Pinocchio and Geppetto, never sang a goddamn note. He didn’t even clear his throat like he was planning to sing. He was just, you know, a whale. A plot device.

For several years, I assumed Mom made the whole whale-tonsil thing up out of thin air. But I’ve since discovered she was earnestly mis-remembering a 1946 animated short called “Willie the Operatic Whale,” which very much does not contain a wooden puppet who transforms into a little boy then runs around with a top hat-wearing cricket...although there’s a woman in north Alabama who might try tell you otherwise.

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Actually, I had the same sort of experience with a movie myself. Incredibly enough, it pertained to my first-ever viewing of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” in October of 1979. My recollection, however, was eventually vindicated.

I had known that Coppola and his crew were trapped in some kind of horrible, money-sucking production vortex out in the Philippines while shooting “Apocalypse Now,” and that critics who had already seen the picture were at odds over whether it was a masterpiece or a conceptual failure boasting several brilliant, free-standing sequences and an almost unheard-of degree of technical skill. So, anxious to cast our own judgment, my friends and I excitedly hopped in the car and made a beeline for the Madison Theater in Huntsville, AL the night the movie opened.

As I recalled that apocalyptic evening over the ensuing decades, we managed to slip into the theater while we assumed the credits would be rolling at the end of the previous showing, and were flattened by what we were seeing and hearing. Rather than a mere roll call of technicians’ names and maybe a song playing in the background, we were transfixed by an acid-fueled rendering of some kind of jungle compound bursting into flames.

There weren’t any credits at all, just seven or eight minutes of hallucinatory footage - all searing yellows, oranges, and reds - accompanied by a troubled angelic chorus, tribal drums, and occasional squalls of Hendrix-style electronic feedback. I sat there with my jaw hanging open, completely enveloped by whatever the hell it was I was seeing. By the time the hallucination ended and simply faded to black, I felt like I had already watched a visionary piece of filmmaking.

Then, after a couple trailers for upcoming pictures that seemed exceptionally anemic given the circumstances, I watched “Apocalypse Now.” Imagine having no clue that there’s a helicopter attack or a Do Lung Bridge sequence in the movie, then sitting in a darkened auditorium with the images exploding in front of you, and Walter Murch’s astonishing sound design rolling around in a swirl of auditory hyper-load. It remains one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever experienced in a movie theater.

At this point in my life, I can find a lot of flaws in “Apocalypse Now,” most of them having to do with a script that seems glued together with pretentious spit and a dream. But there are still sequences in the movie that boggle my mind.

There's a moment in the "Beatles Anthology" video where Paul McCartney is talking about the rather commonly-voiced opinion that the White Album would have been a lot stronger had it only been honed down to a single record, instead of being released as a messy two-record set with several dispensable tracks, and the Cute One finally says, “But come on— it’s the bloody Beatles’ White Album!” Well, “Apocalypse Now” might be something of a mess, too, but come on— it’s bloody Francis Ford Coppola’s ”Apocalypse Now”! Sure, it’s fun to imagine what could have been, but I’m just fine living with the disarray.

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Anyway, over the next several years, I easily saw “Apocalypse Now” fifteen or twenty times, in the theater, on videotape, and on broadcast television, and not once did it close with a phantasmagorical carpet bombing.

When I worked behind the counter at the legendary New York video pit-stop, Kim’s Video, in the early 1990s, I asked practically every film geek I talked to (including the jazz saxophonist-actor John Lurie, who was a regular) if he or she had ever seen what I saw, and they all looked at me like I was cracked. “Apocalypse Now,” they’d say, ends with feint jungle music and credits appearing and disappearing down in the corner of a black screen, or sometimes it’s just a black screen with no credits. But it certainly isn’t anything to talk about.

Still, whenever I had a chance to watch the picture in a different format, I’d hold my breath at the end, hoping to re-experience that magic night from 1979. But no luck. All I got was credits. There came a point where I really felt I had imagined it, that my little adventure in mind-blowing light and sound was nothing more than a singing whale’s jiggly tonsil. We Tataras, after all, are known for our fertile imaginations, so maybe I created the sequence in my subconscious out of my initial shock over the movie as a whole. It didn’t seem likely, but that was the only answer I had for myself.

Then, the Gods smiled on Paul Tatara. In 1999, Paramount released a remastered, widescreen dvd of “Apocalypse Now” that included a bonus segment called “destruction of Kurtz compound,” and, if you wanted, you could watch its 6-minutes with audio commentary from Coppola! So here it is, with St. Francis himself explaining how and why he made me feel like I was possibly losing my mind, but just for a couple of decades.

Essentially, then, “Apocalypse Now” is flawed because Coppola couldn’t figure out what he was trying to say with the movie, and I only got to see this sequence in a theater one dreamlike time because he didn’t want people to think he was saying something he wasn’t saying, so he withdrew the picture and cut it out. And then no one could figure out what he was saying anyway!

Come on, though— this is better than any movie I saw last year. If only today’s filmmakers, including Coppola himself, were cranking out pictures with this kind of dispensable footage! Those very special directors’ cut dvd’s might actually be worth the money.

Paul Tatara