Notes
2. Figueroa, Joey and Zak Knutson, Milius. Chop Shop Entertainment and Haven Entertainment, 2013.
3. Along with the live, on-set improvisation, that occurred—as captured in the documentary film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper and Eleanor Coppola 1991)—Francis Ford Coppola’s approach to improvisation also encompassed workshopping new ideas with actors, which “provided the basis of many of the scenes I would write out late at night.” Coppola, Francis Ford. “Introduction,” in John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola. Apocalypse Now Redux. London: Faber and Faber, 2001: viii. This approach was pioneered by independent filmmaker John Cassavetes, who encouraged improvisation during his films’ rehearsals “so that the actors had considerable input and helped to shape not only the actual script but the final film.” Murphy, J.J. Rewriting Indie Cinema: Improvisation, Psychodrama, and the Screenplay. New York: Columbia University Press: 48.
4. Additionally, Peter Cowie points out that, upon his decision to direct the film in 1975, Coppola asked Milius to revise the screenplay and bring it closer to its source material of Conrad’s novella. Revisions to the screenplay resulted in a further nine drafts that year, with the last dated 29 June 1976, three months after shooting had already commenced. Cowie, Peter. The Apocalypse Now Book. London and New York: Faber and Faber, 2000: 7 and 43. That the filmed set-piece sequences described earlier largely align with Milius’ 1969 draft further speaks to the way that the changes, first through attempted redrafts and then on-set improvisation and extensive post-production work, specifically relate to a rethinking of the overarching narrative structure and themes of the story.
5. Milius, John. “A Soldier’s Tale,” in Rolling Stone: The Seventies, eds. Ashley Khan, Holly George-Warren and Shawn Dahl. Great Britain: Simon & Schuster, 1998: 273.
6. Milius, John. “Apocalypse Now.” First draft 12/5/1969. San Francisco: American Zoetrope, 1969: 41. Quotations given in italics relate to scene descriptions and direction from the screenplay, while quotations that do not feature italics communicate dialogue from the screenplay. No italics feature in the original screenplay but such formatting has been employed here to help the reader to differentiate between quoted descriptions/direction and quoted dialogue.
7. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 42.
8. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 42 and 43.
9. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 43.
10. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 26 and 48.
11. Milius, “A Soldier’s Tale”: 273.
12. Pure Frustration Productions, “Between the Lines,” 2008. Accessed 06/20/20 http://www.betweenthelinesfilm.com/
13. Ponder, Ty and Scott Bass. Between the Lines: Surfers During the Vietnam War. Pure Frustration Productions, 2008.
14. Ponder and Bass, Between the Lines, and Jake Newby. “Pensacola documentary 'Back to China Beach' chronicles Vietnam War surfing club,” Pensacola News Journal, Dec 11 2019. Accessed 06/26/20 https://eu.pnj.com/story/news/local/2019/10/11/pensacola-documentary-back-china-beach-chronicles-vietnam-war-surfing-club/3928878002/
15. Newby, “Pensacola.”
16. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 6.
17. Ponder and Bass, Between the Lines.
18. Ponder and Bass, Between the Lines.
19. Ponder and Bass, Between the Lines.
20. Ponder and Bass, Between the Lines. At a screening of Between the Lines at the Alma Surf Festival, in Sao Paulo, Brasil, co-director Ty Ponder recounted another such story—an American soldier who caught “a glimpse of the Viet Cong with his AK-47s while he waited for the waves on a deserted beach, but who went through the experience unscathed.” Ricardo Calil, “Surf in the Apocalypse,” Trip #170, February 2 2009. Accessed 06/27/20. https://revistatrip.uol.com.br/trip/surf-no-apocalipse
21. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 16. [return to page 2]
22. Cowie, The Apocalypse: 42-43.
23. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 99.
24. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 100.
25. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 101.
26. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 43.
27. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 62-4.
28. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 93.
29. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 130.
30. Paglia, Camille. “Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. Third Series, Vol. 10, No. 3, Winter, 2003: 86.
31. Norris, Margot. “Modernism and Vietnam: Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 44, No. 3, Fall, 1998: 730.
32. Norris, “Modernism”: 730.
33. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 1.
34. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 3-4.
35. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 4.
36. In their 2018 survey of a nationally representative sample of Americans, Ronald R. Krebs and Robert Ralston found that “roughly half” of the 2,451 respondents still believe “service members join the military primarily out of intrinsic motivations: because they are sincere patriots who love their country or because they are good citizens who see it as their duty to serve,” despite the expectation of military sociologists and historians that “the mythic tradition of the citizen-soldier” would be destroyed within “the mind of the U.S. public” once the U.S. “abandoned the draft and replaced conscripts with paid professionals,” rendering military service “just a ‘job’.” Krebs Ronald R. and Robert Ralston. “Patriotism or Paychecks: Who Believes What About Why Soldiers Serve,” Armed Forces & Society. April 2020: 2. For his part, Milius claims that among his friendship group “I was the only one who wanted to enlist” to fight in Vietnam, though his asthma meant he “washed out,” and his admiration for the figure of the U.S. soldier is evident throughout his Rolling Stone article. Milius, “A Soldier’s Tale”: 272.
37. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 49.
38. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 116
39. Paglia, “Cults”: 90.
40. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 110.
41. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 110 and 113.
42. Lachman, Gary Valentine. Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius. Basingstoke and Oxford: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2001: 6.
43. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 90.
44. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 107.
45. Booth, Douglas. “Surfing Films and Videos: Adolescent Fun, Alternative Lifestyle, Adventure Industry,” Journal of Sport History, Fall, Vol. 23, No. 3, 1996: 320.
46. Prodanovich, Todd. “60 Years of Getting Weird,” Surfer. Spring 2020. Reprinted online. Accessed 07/31/20 https://www.surfer.com/features/surfer-magazine-60-year-anniversary-reenvisioning-classic-surfer-covers/
47. Laderman, Scott. “A World Apart: Pleasure, Rebellion, and the Politics of Surf Tourism,” in The Critical Surf Studies Reader, eds. Dexter Zavalza Hough-Snee and Alexander Sotelo Eastman. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017: 49.
48. Laderman, “A World Apart”: 59.
49. Surfer Intern. “John Milius: A Brief QnA with the Narrator of "Between The Lines,” Surfer. July 22 2010. Accessed 06/27/20 https://www.surfer.com/features/milius-qna-btl/
50. Booth, “Surfing Films”: 320. [return to page 3]
51. Surfer Intern, “John Milius.”
52. Milius, John. Big Wednesday. A-Team Productions, 1978.
53. Milius, Big Wednesday.
54. Milius, Big Wednesday.
55. Milius, Big Wednesday.
56. Milius, Big Wednesday.
57. Warren, Andrew and Chris Gibson. “Soulful and Precarious: The Working Experiences of Surfboard Makers,” in The Critical Surf Studies Reader, eds. Dexter Zavalza Hough-Snee and Alexander Sotelo Eastman. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017: 342-3.
58. Milius, Big Wednesday.
59. Hough-Snee, Dexter Zavalza and Alexander Sotelo Eastman. “Consolidation, Creativity, and (de)Colonization in the State of Modern Surfing,” in The Critical Surf Studies Reader, eds. Dexter Zavalza Hough-Snee and Alexander Sotelo Eastman. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017: 84-108.
60. Milius, Big Wednesday.
61. Paglia, “Cults”: 81.
62. Milius, Big Wednesday.
63. Figueroa and Knutson, Milius.
64. Segaloff, Nat. “John Milius: The Good Fights,” in Backstory 4: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1970s and 1980s, ed. Patrick McGilligan. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2006: 276.
65. Leotta, Alfio. “‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’: violence and nostalgia in the cinema of John Milius,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, No. 57, Fall 2016. https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc57.2016/-LeottaMillius/index.html
66. Laderman, “A World Apart”: 48-9.
67. Laderman, “A World Apart”: 49.
68. Couldwell, Andrew. “Surf Nazis,” Club of the Waves, June 2 2019. Accessed 12/21/20 https://clubofthewaves.com/feature/surf-nazis/; Duane, Daniel. “The Long, Strange Tale of California’s Surf Nazis,” The New York Times. Sept 28 2019. Accessed 04/12/20 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/28/opinion/sunday/surf-racism.html
69. Milius, “A Soldier’s Tale”: 273
70. “Charlie doesn’t surf” in the original script. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 30.
71. Patterson, Thom. “‘Apocalypse’ writer: Most scripts today ‘are garbage’,” CNN. 9th March 2009. Accessed 08/03/20 http://edition.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Movies/03/09/john.milius.movies/index.html
72. The Vietnamese dialogue fits with Coppola’s characterization of the conclusion to the screenplay: “a comic-strip resolution. Attila the Hun [i.e., Kurtz] with two bands of machine-gun bullets around him, taking the hero [Willard] by the hand, saying, ‘Yes, yes, here! I have the power in my loins!’ Willard converts to Kurtz’s side; in the end, he’s firing up at the helicopters that are coming to get him, crying out crazily. A movie comic.” Marcus, Greil. “Journey Up the River: An Interview with Francis Coppola,” Rolling Stone, November 1 1979. Reprinted online. Accessed 07/11/20 https://greilmarcus.net/2014/07/04/journey-up-the-river-an-interview-with-francis-coppola-1979/
73. Leotta, “‘I love’.”
74. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: n.p.
75. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: n.p.
76. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: n.p.
77. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: n.p.
78. As Martin Scorsese recalls in Figueroa and Knutson, Milius: “I heard that he referred to himself as a Zen Anarchist.” The phrase appears throughout many print and online texts regarding Milius (e.g. Leotta, “‘I love’”), though the original source is never credited. In any case, it’s a widely known attribution that at the very least is part of the public persona that Segaloff and others suggest Milius actively encourages.
79. Surfer Intern, “John Milius.”
80. Maysles, David, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin. Gimme Shelter. Maysles Films Inc., 1970. [return to page 4]
81. McMillian, John. Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011: 1
82. Rubin, Martin. “‘Make Love Make War’: Cultural Confusion and the Biker Film Cycle,” Film History, Vol. 6, No. 3, Exploitation Film (Autumn) 1994: 355-6.
83. Poole, Buzz. “What happened to Rock and Roll After Altamont?” Literary Hub, December 6 2019. Accessed 07/24/20 https://lithub.com/what-happened-to-rock-and-roll-after-altamont/
84. Paglia, “Cults”: 62.
85. Paglia, “Cults”: 91.
86. See, for instance, The Rolling Stones’ psychedelic long-player, Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967), and songs such as Sympathy for the Devil (1968). The band’s sources of occultism were two filmmakers—Kenneth Anger, for whom Mick Jagger, the lead singer of the Stones, wrote a soundtrack (Invocation of my Demon Brother [1969]), and Donald Cammell, in whose directorial debut Jagger starred (Performance, co-directed by Nicolas Roeg, filmed in 1968 and released in 1970).
87. Lachman, Turn Off: xvii and 5.
88. It’s worth pointing out that while the mainstream press, once it had actually caught up with what had really occurred that day, would come to repeat the “death of the sixties” motif in regard to Altamont, the underground press, written by and for participants of the counterculture—“many New Leftists never bothered to read daily newspapers, at least not when they wanted to know what was going on in their own milieu”—responded in much the same way. McMillian, Smoking:3-4. McMillian cites a lead article in the Berkeley Tribe, written in the immediate aftermath of the event, that he believes encapsulates “the trope [that] arose in the underground press” in response to what had happened: “Altamont . . . exploded the myth of innocence for a section of America. […] Our one-day micro society was bound to the death-throes of capitalist greed. […] Clearly, nobody is in control. Not the Angels, not the people. Not Richard Nixon, or his pigs. Nobody.” McMillian, Smoking: 2.
89. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 118.
90. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 123.
91. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 126.
92. Paglia, “Cults”: 63.
93. Francis Coppola, Apocalypse Now. Omni Zoetrope, 1979.
94. Hellmann, John. “Apocalypse Now Redux and the Curse of Vietnam,” in The United States and the Legacy of the Vietnam War, ed. Jon Roper. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007: 67-8
95. MSNBC. “NBC News Report on the Manson Family's Arrest,” 1969. Archive footage posted by True Crime Magazine on YouTube, August 14 2017. Accessed 07/25/20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8IQB4OcUrc
96. Bugliosi, Vincent and Curt Gentry. Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders. London: Arrow Books, 1974; 2015 edition: 45.
97. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 107.
98. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 108-9.
99. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 112.
100. Vincent, Alice. “A Beach Boy's deal with the devil: when Dennis Wilson met Charles Manson,” The Telegraph. Nov 20 2017. Accessed 10/08/20 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/beach-boys-deal-devil-dennis-wilson-met-charles-manson/
101. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 115 and 119.
102. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 111.
103. Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter: 319.
104. Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter: 320.
105. Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter: 320.
106. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 108.
107. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 114.
108. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 114.
109. George-Warren, Holly. “Preface,” in Rolling Stone: The Seventies, eds. Ashley Khan, Holly George-Warren and Shawn Dahl. Great Britain: Simon & Schuster, 1998: 3.
110. See, especially, Part II of Melnick, Jeffrey. Creepy Crawling: Charles Manson and the Many Lives of America's Most Infamous Family. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2018.
111. Albright, Brian. Wild Beyond Belief! Interviews with Exploitation Filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s. Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, 2008: 65.
112. Ponder and Bass, Between the Lines.
113. McMillian, Smoking: 173.
114. Hellmann. “Apocalypse”: 68.
115. Paglia, “Cults”: 64.
116. Spann, Michael. “Acid Fascism,” in Death Cults: Murder, Mayhem and Mind Control, ed. Jack Sargeant. London: Virgin Books, 2002: 87-96.
117. Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter: 57.
118. Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter: 89.
119. Paglia, “Cults”: 65.
120. Stone, Robert. Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties. New York : HarperCollins e-books, 2007: 202.
121. Milius, “Apocalypse Now”: 114.
122. Milius, “A Soldier’s Tale”: 273.
123. As Michael Richardson writes, Coppola’s filmed version of Apocalypse Now “succeeds in being the Vietnam War film, while in a real sense not being about Vietnam at all,” which is to say that “Apocalypse Now is a film about the United States written, like a palimpsest, across the landscape of Vietnam.” Richardson, Michael. Otherness in Hollywood Cinema. New York and London: Continuum, 2010: 138-9. [return to page 5]
124. See Arellano, Jerónimo. “The Screenplay in the Archive: Screenwriting, New Cinemas, and the Latin American Boom,” Revista Hispánica Moderna , Año 69, No. 2 (December 2016): 114, for a brief overview on the relatively recent emergence of screenplay scholarship across the past two decades.
125. Korte, Barbara and Ralf Schneider. “The Published Screenplay—A New ‘Literary’ Genre?,” AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik. Vol. 25, No 1. (2000): 96 and 89.
126. Arellano, “The Screenplay”: 116.
127. This text is translated by Louise K. Barnett and Ben Lawton and was originally published in 1965. Citations here lack reference to pagination due to its being accessed via online research repository ProQuest. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. “THE SCREENPLAY AS A "STRUCTURE THAT WANTS TO BE ANOTHER STRUCTURE". The American Journal of Semiotics; Kent Vol. 4, Iss. 1/2, (1986): 53-72. ProQuest. Accessed 09/15/21 https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/screenplay-as-structure-that-wants-be-another/docview/213747053/se-2?accountid=14987
128. Pasolini, “THE SCREENPLAY.”
129. Pasolini,“THE SCREENPLAY.”
130. Pasolini, “THE SCREENPLAY.”
131. Pasolini, “THE SCREENPLAY.”
132. Pasolini, “THE SCREENPLAY.”
133. Pasolini, “THE SCREENPLAY.”
134. Pasolini, “THE SCREENPLAY.”
135. Pasolini, “THE SCREENPLAY.”
136. Pasolini, “THE SCREENPLAY.”
137. Pasolini does not explicitly state whether what applies to the screenplay-text applies to theatrical/play-texts but, given the rootedness of the latter in the literary tradition, one could reasonably assume that theatrical scripts privilege the grapheme and the phoneme in the written-spoken language system, rather than partaking in the coordination of the kineme such that it produces an im-sign that connects the screenplay to the cinematic. Pasolini, “THE SCREENPLAY.”
138. Pasolini, “THE SCREENPLAY.”
139. Pasolini, “THE SCREENPLAY.”
140. Korte and Schneider, “The Published Screenplay”: 90
141. See Ted Nannicelli, “Why Can't Screenplays Be Artworks?,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Vol. 69, No. 4 (FALL 2011), pp. 405-414
142. MacDonald, Ian W. Screenwriting Poetics and the Screen Idea. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013): 4
143. Erebus LLC. “Apocalypse Now - like Fallout: New Vegas on acid in Vietnam (Canceled),” Kickstarter. Accessed 10/10/21 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fringerider/apocalypse-now-the-game/?ref=kicktraq
144. MacDonald. Screenwriting Poetics: 6 and 4.
145. The examples given here encompass officially authorized variations on released movies, and exclude the unofficial re-edits or remixes created, for instance, by the Fan Edit community (https://ifdb.fanedit.org/), or leaked (unofficially released) workprints of films.
146. There are some filmmakers who state the theatrical version of their films are the “final,” or only, cuts. However, the example of the three versions of New York, New York (1977) by Martin Scorsese, who has repeatedly expressed such a position, shows that the release of a variation is not always their own decision but that of the studio, producer, or rights holder.
147. Nannicelli, “Why Can't Screenplays”: 409.
148. Korte and Schneider, “The Published Screenplay”: 91.