Cindy Williams, Francis Ford Coppola, and Michelangelo Antonioni (Videos)

By Nicholas Stix


Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation


There’s an interview with Gene Hackman from the early-to-mid-1970s, posted somewhere on yt, in which he says that Coppola had made The Conversation, which was released in 1974, before he made The Godfather (1972), in 1972, and had written it in 1970. (I found it!)


Gene Hackman Discusses The Conversation with Johnny Carson, on The Tonight Show, March 3, 1974




And yet, when The Conversation was released, Coppola told interviewers that he had been inspired to make it by James McCord, the spook and Watergate burglar who, some time after being arrested for the break-in (in 1973, I believe), publicly said he wanted to come clean.

Well, Hackman’s Harry Caul does vaguely resemble Jim McCord—the London Fog rain coat, bald head with hair on the sides—but many years later, I learned something about Francis Ford Coppola, and something about The Conversation. While he’s one of Hollywood’s most entertaining raconteurs, Coppola is also one of its most shameless b.s. artists. You never know when to believe him! James McCord was most definitely not the inspiration for The Conversation. That was Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966).

In Blow-Up, a photographer stumbles onto a murder in a public park, involving a “honey pot,” a six-foot-tall stunner, who entices an important, middle-aged man to his death. (Vanessa Redgrave, who played the honey pot, suddenly lost her looks around the time she turned 30, but was only 24 when she made the picture, and was still a breath-taking beauty.)

The photographer had no idea what was going on in the park, but later in his dark room, he developed the film and blew up one frame after another, and the reality became horribly clear.

In The Conversation, a corporate CEO hires Caul and his team to tail and record a lunchtime conversation in a public park between the CEO’s wife (Cindy Williams) and the young executive (Frederic Forrest) she’s been shtupping.

Afterwards, Caul replays the tape over and over again, refining it, tuning out static and background noise, until he comes to a horrible realization about what the conversation was about.

Coppola’s cover story about Jim McCord was surely because he was afraid that the truth would have gotten him sued by Antonioni for copyright infringement.