Get Ready for Blood, Sweat and Women

Perhaps it is the Santa Ana, blowing in from the Mojave Desert. Or a kind of Morse code flashed out by the traffic lights along Sunset Boulevard. Or maybe John Galley, head of production at Warner Bros., has the answer. "At best," he says, "this business is a crap shoot." Whatever the reason, each year Hollywood producers put their money on only two or three numbers--two or three kinds of movies. The themes for 1977: war, jocks and women.

COMBAT. Though they have traditionally been popular in Hollywood, war movies were eclipsed for a decade or more by the divisive reality of the war in Viet Nam, seen live and in color every night on the evening news. Now, with the fall of Saigon a receding memory, war films are staging their own kind of blitzkrieg. Toral Tora! Tora!, the story of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, nearly ruined 20th Century-Fox when it was released in 1970, at the height of the Viet Nam War. Midway, on the other hand, which took unused footage from Tora! for its own scenes of the momentous World War II carrier battle in the Pacific, was the sixth-largest grosser in the peaceful year of 1976. It made well over $20 million--more than a third of it in Japan.

This year audiences had better duck and hold their ears because just about every conflict but the War of Jenkins' Ear will be playing at the neighborhoods. Leading the attack is Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's epic about the Viet Nam War itself. Loosely based on Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse is about a mad Green Beret commander, played by Marlon Brando, who wages his own war in a remote Vietnamese province. Shooting in the jungles of the Philippines has been rather hellish for the cast--which also includes Robert Duvall and Martin Sheen. Most have had a bout or two with dysentery, and many scenes have been played knee-deep in mud.

For the sake of realism, refugees from Saigon were dressed in black pajamas, and a Philippine aborigine tribe was brought down from the mountains to portray Montagnards. As camera crews shot around them, they went about their everyday lives of working, eating and even giving birth. Since the Pentagon threw up its hands at the antiwar, antiArmy script, Coppola turned to the more amenable Philippine army, which provided helicopter pilots. The only trouble was that, although the Philippine pilots knew how to take off and land, they were baffled by the intricate maneuvers Coppola demanded. He handled that problem by hiring former U.S. pilots to give on-the-job training.

One problem, however, proved obdurate: Brando's weight. Instead of looking like a Green Beret commander, trim and tough, Brando, who was paid $2 million, panted through the paddies like Sidney Greenstreet vainly looking for the way to Rick's Bar. Coppola's solution was to film only Brando's face and hands in closeup and to use a suitably slim, 6-ft. 5-in. double for long shots. Even Coppola's inventiveness had no remedies, however, for the two typhoons that ripped up his sets.

With every delay costs have risen. Apocalypse may cost as much as $30 million, $10 million more than budgeted. Says Mike Metavoy, production head of United Artists: "Francis is at the edge of a cliff, and he'll either soar like an eagle or drop like a rock."

Safer bets are MacArthur and A BridgeToo Far. MacArthur will attempt to repeat the success of Patton by island-hopping across the Pacific with the imperious five-star general. Gregory Peck, who plays the lead, studied old newsreels to catch MacArthur's flamboyance and even shaved the crown of his head to match the general's little bald spot.

With an all-star cast--Robert Redford, James Caan, Laurence Olivier, Liv Ullmann, Ryan O'Neal, Gene Hackman, Michael Caine and Sean Connery --Producer Joseph Levine claims to have already received enough backing from eager distributors to cover his $25 million outlay for A Bridge Too Far. The saga of the abortive Allied attempt to cross the Rhine in 1944 by parachuting 35,000 men behind the lines into Holland, the movie employed an army all by itself. Besides the stars, Director Richard Attenborough recruited 100 young actors in London and trained them to behave and, supposedly, even think, like crack British troops. For the dramatic scenes of the airborne assault, hundreds of paratroopers from a Belgian unit and from Britain's 16th Paratroop Brigade jumped out of antique DC-3 Dakotas.

For those who want other battles --or other wars--there will be plenty more. Cross of Iron is the story of the German retreat across Russia after Stalingrad; Dog Soldiers revolves around three Viet Nam veterans who become involved with both heroin and the CIA; and The Eagle Has Landed is a fictional account of a German attempt to kidnap Winston Churchill. The towering Tory, a famous old brandy sniffer, would at least like the casting. He is portrayed by the proprietor of the Beehive, a country pub in Kent.

SPORT. There is no connection--except that sport is a form of warfare--but 1977 will also be the year of the cinema jock. Rocky will be followed by a flurry of boxing movies: The Greatest, all about, natch, Muhammad Ali, who plays himself; Raging Bull, starring Robert DeNiro as former Middleweight Champ Jake LaMotta; and a comedy called Knockout, in which a clothes designer buys a boxer as a tax shelter. For football fans there is Dan Jenkins' Semi-Tough, which began shooting in Dallas last week, with Kris Kristofferson and Burt Reynolds. Says Jenkins: "The script is really a sequel to my book--a sort of Son of Semi-Tough. " For hockey nuts there is Slapshot, starring Paul Newman. Newman insisted on doing his own skating during the violent sequences and looks, as a result, as bruised as Bobby Orr after a bout with the Philadelphia Flyers.

WOMEN. Following a long spell of small parts, women actresses at last seem to be coming into their own again. Shooting will soon begin on Judith Rossner's bestseller Looking for Mr. Goodbar, directed by Richard Brooks and starring Tuesday Weld and Diane Keaton. Sissy Spacek, Shelley Duvall and Janice Rule form the trio in Three Women, a film that Director Robert Altman says, somewhat obscurely, is based on one of his dreams. Equally mysterious, although for different reasons, is Demon Seed. In that science-fiction thriller Julie Christie is impregnated--don't ask how--by a computer.

Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave star in Julia, a film taken from Lillian Hellman's autobiography. The producers went out of their way for authenticity. For a scene depicting the festive party after Hellman's first Broadway triumph, Sardi's restaurant, off Schubert Alley, was duplicated right down to the caricatures of actors on the walls--all in London, of course.

Women, who dominated the screens in the '30s and '40s, still make Hollywood a little nervous, however. "It has yet to be proven that there's a market for strong female roles," says Paramount Executive Richard Sylbert. "Traditionally, women go to the movies to see Robert Redford and Paul Newman. But maybe times are changing." Producer Dan Melnick takes a somewhat more optimistic view: "If a few of these pictures do very well at the box office, we may rediscover the 1940s all over again."

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