Coppola's _The Conversation_

You should be duct-taped to a fire-hydrant favored by weak-bladdered dogs and forced to watch "Booty Call" until your eyes bleed, you slack-jawed heretic.

this explains the "adjoining hotel rooms" visions, i guess.

according to IMDB, his name was meant to be "Call", but homynyms & Freudien slips are funny, ain't they?

Michael Bay did more harm than he'll ever know.

Hmm, true. Less a shout out than a beery fart, likely enough.

(xpost)

It's pretty good but no classic; haven't seen it in awhile, but the church confession scene particularly annoyed me. SEE, HE'S FULL OF INARTICULATE GUILT.

I prefer Tucker: The Man and His Dream.

watching enemy of the state--solid fuckin flick, holds up well

i think the slowness is just frank aiming for 'serious auteur' art-movieness.

This is a deeply irritating statement, but never mind.

ive probably mellowed in the intervening seven years (dats a pretty typical ilx thing to say, c. 2003), but it's not my favourite failure-of-communication movie. probably should give it another go, since i haven't seen it since ooh 1998.

watching enemy of the state--solid fuckin flick, holds up well

― rip dom passantino 3/5/09 never forget (max), Sunday, June 7, 2009 11:47 PM (8 months ago) Bookmark

^^^ also kind of an ilx thing to say. don't really agree with this tho.

best eugene hackman movie

yeah. great haskell wexler opening shot.

remember this as wonderful, kind of afraid to go back to be honest. lotta films like that from the student days, though.

i still prefer 'blow up' but maybe it's because im a londoner.

kingston-upon-thames is in london right?

blow-up has way more hotter chicks that's for sure!

huh I guess I should see this eh

blow-up has way more hotter chicks that's for sure!
this is true, but young teri garr in the conversation ain't bad.
love Harrison Ford in this. He shoud be more like this in other movies.

yes!

he is in the movie star bizness, no characters plz

very ILX of everyone above to be so allergic to something "deep."

anyway, aside from all that, i think what will stick with me from this movie is yes the editing but also some lovely moments--that strange slow swooping movement the camera makes (i think) three times as Hackman gives that monologue to the blond woman in the green dress. and him riding the subway alone with the recurrent musical theme.

this flick owns

Seeing it (again) tonight as part of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival. I was baffled too...Coppola? No, don't think so, and Harry Caul's a devout Catholic. It's David Shire, the composer, who'll be talking and performing afterwards.

Well, I guess the score is quite central to it, but yeah, a tad tenuous.

He was great--lots of stories, and he sat and played The Conversation's main theme. Didn't even clue into the fact he was Talia Shire's husband, nor did I realize that he did the piano work on Zodiac (hired because Fincher had The Conversation in mind), and that it's him playing overtop that amazing overhead Library-of-Congress shot in All the President's Men.

interesting stuff here from an interview with Terri Garr http://www.avclub.com/articles/teri-garr,2390/

man, that's a great interview. thanks, piscesx.

They're showing this at a beer theater in Portland in the next few weeks. Should be good.

weird, just watched this for the first time a couple weeks ago

like it? i think it's kind of the perfect 70s movie.

yeah def dug it. It does encapsulate a lot of different 70s tropes in a great way

One thing I learned last night that surprised me was that Hackman played all his saxophone parts himself. Coppola would be after him to go over lines, and he'd be off in a corner practising B-flat scales.

I'm tempted to say that nobody has ever so completely disappeared into a role as Hackman does here, but thinking about it, Hackman's impish humour does surface in some of his banter with Allen Garfield.

Can't prove a thing, nor does it matter, but David Shire's score is to my ears deeply indebted to Emahoy Tsege-Maryam Guèbrou:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFE2ycYOmik

I can hear some similarity--that's before '74, I assume? He said his main inspiration was a late-night DJ he used to listen to who'd accompany himself on piano underneath his patter. I asked him in the Q&A if there was any Scott Joplin influence, because I always thought I heard some of The Sting theme in there (which would have been a year earlier). He gave one of those polite "Maybe"s that really meant "Not at all," and now that I've relistened, I see what he means--they're not really similar at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DogQt0WJJkI

haw, it'd be pretty wild if shire was listening to that in 1974 (though i see what you mean).

i'd say "strikingly similar", before "deeply indebted", if i didn't know better (and i don't)

Check the rest of that album out, it's uncanny! And Guebrou wasn't unknown in the early 70s. "Strikingly similar" for sure. I guess saying "indebted" suggests plagiarism, which isn't what I meant.

i do want to hear the rest of the album now, as that one minute snippet is great

also..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6wGzJ8PP7k

weird, just watched this for the first time a couple weeks ago

snap, put it on telly as a late movie last Sunday and stayed up to watch it

this film is pretty hard to love IMO

I’ll always welcome an excuse to see this again.

So: You hear the key line four times in the film, the first three times as "us," the last as "us."

1) Harry alone in his workshop; Stan has just cleared out after their argument. (Stan never hears the key line.)

2) With Meredith, the night of the party. Not like I described above, when they're dancing; it's after everyone else has left, after Harry gets angry at Moran's pen-recording. Meredith is coaxing Harry into bed, agreeing with everything he says; there's nothing that indicates how she's hearing the line (if she's paying attention at all).

3) With the director and Martin Stett, when Harry picks up payment. Early on, the suggestion is that "us is how Stett and the director hear the line too--the director's "You want it to be true" only makes sense if he thinks he's the target--but when the line actually comes, and Harry asks what he's going to do to them, the director doesn't respond; he doesn't say anything that indicates he's hearing the line differently than Harry.

4) In Harry's mind, after the murder, as he pieces everything together.

I don't think there's anything that contradicts the interpretation I give above. I think that's the only logical interpretation, underscored by that Murch clip. I don't know why Coppola second-guessed himself; thematically, it'd be a less interesting film if the same inflection were used the whole way through.

Plenty to chew on here!

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/540b22a1e4b0d0f549866135/t/58fe57799de4bb6494158e2d/1493063553867/The_Conversation_SCREENPLAY.pdf

my favourite part was

CLOSE VIEW OF THE MUSICIANS 4
on!Q& hem puts down his instrumen and does a ?
ro licb.ng tap dance. DllNGeK o« D1tNcG D itriEC rDlf ·

Just skimmed that screenplay--looks like the order of things was radically changed.

The American Zoetrope-related films had a real murderer's row of film editors!

Use to have a friend, or acquaintance at least, that worked there for a bit/pvmic

No saxophone playing in the final shot of that screenplay!

I think there's a thread on ILM somewhere for movies with playing-records scenes; I can rattle off a dozen or two. Add The Conversation; first time Harry plays sax in his apartment, there's a shot of his turntable and the record he's playing along to.

That scene does appear in the screenplay, it seems stranded without the "payoff" at the end.

If only they'd had the technology back then Murch could've done a Yanni/Laurel thing with the key line

"He'd kill us if he had the chance... MACLUNKEY!"

What was happening outside the window behind Caul, when he’s gotten home and is calling his landlady? This is near the beginning.

Saw this again on the big screen tonight.

It was a different film this time (this was the 4th or 5th time I saw it and the second time in a theater) - more about a wounded man trying so hard to control and hide himself from the world around him that the world wounds him (as opposed to a sinister conspiracy or a surveillance fable).

Poster I made up for my second attempt at launching a Film Night in my small town. The first night--Sweet Smell of Success--one person showed up! (Me plus one other person, just to be clear.)

https://phildellio.tripod.com/conversation.jpg

great movie, and very cool you’re doing that! i’d suggest using an image from the movie though. at first glance this flyer looks like it’s advertising social media platforms

Thanks. I did one with the original movie poster, too--with the screening details in a little box in the corner--and that's the one I posted around town. This was just an extra thing I linked to on FB, trying to explain why I thought the film was a relevant as ever.

It's really hard to launch this kind of thing in a small town. This Thursday I have to compete with the annual library book sale and a small get-together for the tennis club (which will be attended by all of 10 people or so--but cost me two people who said they'd be there).

If you go from an audience of one to an audience of two, is that incremental or exponential growth? It's both--I love math!

Having seen this so many, many times, something I think I noticed for the first time tonight (and only because it's the first time I've ever watched it was captions--it'd be easy to miss otherwise): Nixon is mentioned by name once, at a crucial moment.

was = with

Just noticed it was #72 on the directors' list, so that's heartening.

Nixon is mentioned by name once, at a crucial moment.

Oh yeah ... I remembered that bit from the first time I saw it, but then I kinda associate this film with Nixon and that era of "paranoid film" ... I think I probably saw it for the first time in a thematic week along with All the Presidents Men so ... (I think I've only seen it 4-5 times though)

The image flashed by quickly, but I think it might have even been Coppola himself who says it (although not having come across mention of this before seems unlikely).

hey clemenza, thanks for your email! I appreciated it!

You knew what thread I'd open for sure.

From Sam Wasson's The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story (which I'm not especially liking--for the 57th time, Coppola the crazed genius lost in the jungle):

The first cut of The Conversation was extremely long, close to five hours.

I usually name The Conversation as the closest any film has ever gotten for me to perfection. There's one of Elizabeth MacRae's lines that always sounds off to me, otherwise there isn't a line or a moment elsewhere I'd change. So in no way would I expect longer to be better, or even close. But if this cut still exists--highly doubtful--I sure would love to have a chance to see it.

Half the cut footage is different readings of <the line> and the other half is Gene wailing on sax.

I saw a bunch of people on Twitter saying how unnecessary the sax scene at the end was and finally lost my last bit of faith

I'm thinking of "These pretzels are making me thirsty from Seinfeld"; every possible permutation of "He'd kill us if he got the chance."

Yeah, that's bizarre--that final scene is so crucial. Makes me think of Google/Facebook when I watch it now.

Move that end quote...