Gene Hackman and John Cazale in Coppola, Guerra, Bond and Antonioni’s The Conversation (1974), Johnny Carson Interviewing Hackman on The Tonight Show about the Picture, and Guerra, Bond, and Antonioni’s 1966 Masterpiece, Blow-Up (Videos, Videos, Videos!)

[“The Masterpiece which Inspired a Masterpiece”: See Guerra, Bond, and Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), Which was Re-Made by Coppola as The Conversation, Complete, Free, and Without Commercial Interruption, at the WEJB/NSU Theater!]

Gene Hackman and John Cazale in Coppola, Guerra, Bond and Antonioni’s The Conversation (1974), Johnny Carson Interviewing Hackman on The Tonight Show about the Picture (March 21, 1974), and Guerra, Bond, and Antonioni’s 1966 Masterpiece, Blow-Up (Videos, Videos, Videos!)

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“in memory of the great Gene Hackman. Francis Ford Coppola’s provoking mystery-thriller stars Hackman as Harry Caul, an expert surveillance man. a routine wiretapping job turns into a nightmare when Harry hears something disturbing in his recording of a young couple in a park. his investigation of the tape and how it might be used sends Harry spiraling into a web of secrecy, murder and paranoia.”

When I first saw this picture, it was at the Lido Theater in my hometown of Long Beach. There were maybe three people in the entire theater. The picture bombed, big time. At the climax, I jumped out of my seat, and gasped loudly enough to be heard throughout the empty theater.

Circa 2008, I found a dirt-cheap DVD in a flimsy package for a song at a local drug store chain store. For a year or two, the DVD was virtually always in our DVD player. After viewing it with his old man, my eight-year-old future chief of research must have watched it another 40 times. For many years, it was his favorite picture.

In my undergrad acting textbook, Respect for Acting, by the legendary German actress, Uta Hagen, Hagen spoke of the two extreme types of theatrical performers, Italian Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) and French Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923). La Duse was the ultimate internal actress, while Bernhardt was the ultimate external actress. Hackman was both. You didn’t see much of the internal Hackman, but one picture was all Duse. In The Conversation, as private intelligence operative Harry Caul, the best in the business, he played a man who is terrified of the world eavesdropping on him. And with good reason.

Once, Harry pulled off the impossible. The crooked, top two officials of a labor union would go fishing in a rowboat, so they could have private conversations without being eavesdropped on. Without being anywhere near them, Harry managed to somehow record their conversation.

It was bloody murder, and Harry has been paranoid and guilty ever since. Except he’s not paranoid.

In contemporary San Francisco, where Harry lives, a corporate CEO (Robert Duvall) hires Harry to surveil his pretty, young wife (Cindy Williams) and the young executive in the husband’s firm (Frederic Forrest, with whom Coppola became obsessed), with whom the wife was having a scorching hot love affair.

One day, while Harry follows the couple around alternately with his operatives, an obnoxious mime in grease paint working the area stalks Harry for a bit, while off-camera, another girl sings Harry M. Woods’ huge 1926 hit, “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along,” accompanied by a live band.

That night, Harry visits his pretty, young, blonde lover (Terri Garr) in her apartment. He has refused to tell her his real name, give her his address, or even his phone number. And yet walking around the apartment, she sings to herself, “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along.” It’s impossible for that to be a coincidence!

The Conversation bombed (I watched it in the virtually empty Lido theater in my hometown of Long Beach), but such was the esteem in which the Motion Picture Academy held Coppola, then the King of Hollywood, that it nominated him for Oscars for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, and Walter Murch and Art Rochester for Best Sound.

But the academy slighted Hackman, who had given the performance of the year, not even nominating him for Best Actor. (It gave an extremely sentimental Oscar—call it The Honeymooners Oscar—to Art Carney, for Harry and Tonto, about an old man, who travels around the country, with his grandson and his cat, Tonto.)

Coppola lied, in asserting that he was inspired to make The Conversation by Watergate burglar and former FBI/CIA agent, James McCord, when McCord came out in 1973 and blew up the Watergate case. And indeed, Hackman vaguely resembled McCord! There was the same General Issue London Fog raincoat, the same dark mustache, the same bald head with hair slicked back on the sides, the same cheaters, about the same height. But Hackman gave an interview on The Tonight Show in 1974 (see video below), in which he said that Coppola had made the picture before The Godfather (1972), and had written the screenplay circa 1970.

Ah, Coppola. He’s one of Hollywood’s great “raconteurs”! Why did Coppola lie about the inspiration for The Conversation? Because Tonino Guerra, Edward Bond, and Michelangelo Antonioni would have sued him for plagiarizing Blow-Up!

Coppola was improperly nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, for the script for which Bond and Guerra had already been nominated. He should have been up for Best Screen Adaptation. The Academy has often been confused between “original” and “adapted” screenplays, and as Collingwood observed in The Principles of Art (paraphrased, 1937), artists are a bunch of thieves, to begin with!


Gene Hackman and John Cazale in Coppola, Guerra, Bond and Antonioni’s The Conversation (1974)




Gene Hackman on The Tonight Show, Starring Johnny Carson, March 21, 1974