Apocalypse Now (Zoetrope, 1979), Francis Ford Coppola First Revision of John Milius Original Screenplay (ca. 1975)....

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Apocalypse Now (Zoetrope, 1979), Francis Ford Coppola First Revision of John Milius Original Screenplay (ca. 1975). Apocalypse Now had been on Francis Ford Coppola's mind for years before the film went into production. Inspired by Orson Welles' failed attempt to adapt Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness into his first film, Coppola merged Conrad's novel with the Vietnam War, creating the journey of Willard, a soldier tasked with traveling upriver to assassinate the reclusive Colonel Kurtz. Once a decorated officer, Kurtz had gone rogue, embedded himself with the local population, and become a god-like figure, abandoning the war entirely. To bring this vision to life, Coppola enlisted screenwriter John Milius (Conan the Barbarian) and asked his protégé, George Lucas, to direct. Milius, drawing from stories of drug use, failed missions, and atrocities told by friends returning from the war, synthesized these elements into an early screenplay. According to Lucas, Milius' script originally called for the cast and crew to travel to Vietnam and shoot with a 16mm camera amid the ongoing conflict -- an idea the studios refused to support. Lucas recalled, "We were going to do it in 16mm in Vietnam." He added, "I was going to be the person who had to do that." Studios, fearing for the crew's safety, rejected the idea outright. As Lucas later put it, "Warner Brothers finally backed off on it because they figured most of us would probably be killed... because we were so stupid." He concluded that "studios would not finance a film about the Vietnam War," a stance emblematic of Hollywood's aversion to the subject at the time. The project was shelved until Coppola's massive success with The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, which earned him eight Academy Awards. With the clout gained from those films, he revived Apocalypse Now as the first production under his ambitious new company, Zoetrope Studios. One of his first decisions was to revise Milius' screenplay himself. Offered in this lot is Coppola's first revision of Milius' screenplay: a studio-bound, bradded 153-page (as paginated) script with Apocalypse Now hand-printed along the spine in blue marker and "3" handwritten in graphite on top right of cover. It features a red cardstock cover with the title embossed in black ink. Dated December 3, 1975, the title page reads, "This draft by Francis Ford Coppola." While retaining many elements from Milius' version, Coppola removed Milius and Lucas's original ending, where Willard and Kurtz join forces to triumphantly repel an attack by Viet Cong soldiers. Coppola's version instead opens with a striking new scene resembling the film's iconic imagery of Willard rising from the water, accompanied by "savage-looking AMERICANS with primitive orientation, wearing only a loincloth with green beret." This scene was ultimately shifted to the film's finale and replaced at the beginning by Walter Murch's haunting montage set to The Doors' "The End." The script includes the completed dialogue for the surfing sequence with Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, including the iconic "Charlie don't surf" line (spoken by Willard in this draft) and Kilgore's legendary line, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," found on page 53. It also features the French Plantation scene, which Coppola filmed and later restored in the Redux and Final Cut versions of the film. Coppola experiments with narration in this draft, writing some of Willard's voiceover as taking place aboard a yacht and told in the past tense, echoing the literary framework of Conrad's novel. This version also includes a scene in which Willard visits Kurtz's widow to explain how her husband died, and it features the now-famous line, "The horror. The horror." This script, along with lots 38418, 38419, 38420, and 38421, reveals the many changes and creative decisions that shaped the film before it reached its final, celebrated form. Script exhibits production wear and age, with a bent cover, scattered moisture stains, bumped corners and minor edgewear on back cover. The poster is for reference only and is not included with this lot. Comes with a COA from Heritage Auctions. From the Estate of Fred Roos.

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