Got A Question About A Francis Ford DVD? Ask Kim Aubry. Or Better Yet, Let DVD Verdict Do It For You!

Judge Ryan Keefer

October 3rd, 2005

Kim Aubry has been working with Francis Ford Coppola for over two decades, starting as a producer on Coppola's One From the Heart, Aubry worked with Coppola on several subsequent films, including Jack, Gardens of Stone, and The Rainmaker. He has also established Zoetrope Aubry Productions (formerly Zoetrope DVD), producing DVDs like The Godfather Collection, The Conversation, and Tucker. DVD Verdict spoke with Aubry about the release of The Outsiders—The Complete Novel (in stores now!), working with the legendary director, all while avoiding any questions about a new version of Apocalypse Now (well, almost).

DVD Verdict: The stories about how Francis made the film and the reasons for this "Extended Cut" are pretty humorous. Can you go into some detail for our readers?

Aubry: It's very synergistic in a way. I guess the theme is about youth literacy. And I say that because here we have a young woman growing up in the late '50s and early '60s in Tulsa, Oklahoma who is a bookworm, kind of a loner. As a sophomore and junior in high school, she wrote a book, which became incredibly popular through word of mouth. She writes the book and it comes out in 1967, and bit by bit it builds to become a defining work of young adult fiction. And the significance of the book is that it encourages reluctant readers among teenagers to read, because they can relate to the characters and the story. And I speak from personal experience here; by the way, my own daughter is eleven and a half had the exact experience with this book. She's not a big reader but she can't put this book down. So the string for me is that this book which has been used by schools and libraries and educators through the '70s and '80s to get young people to read, then in turn led a librarian in Fresno, California to encourage her students to organize and write a letter to Francis Coppola (which they thought was a writing exercise). Coppola reads the letter, Coppola responds by directing the film, giving the book new life. But from 1983 until 2005, Coppola receives a continuous stream of mail from young readers and young fans that have seen the film. They all say they love the casting, they love the film, but what happens in the beginning? Why don't we see Ponyboy get jumped? It doesn't make sense. Why does Ponyboy begin, faithful to the book, saying, "As I stepped out of the darkened movie house," and suddenly you're on a street? It doesn't make sense. What happened to the boys at the end? That doesn't make sense. The through line here is again, people writing letters to Coppola, Coppola encouraged over the course of twenty years to reconsider the film and in really the greatest show of respect to the author (Susie Hinton), he re-edits the film to make it more faithful to the structure of the book. Letters got him to make the film adaptation in the first place; letters got him to re-make the film in a form that's more faithful to the book. Everyone's happy, it seems. Susie Hinton is extremely happy with the result, Francis is very happy, he calls this the definitive version of the film and from the early notices, maybe we made a good thing better.

Verdict: I think that you did. I came from one of the few high schools that didn't have Susie's book as required reading; we were a Lord of the Flies school. I didn't discover the book and film until later, and it appears that even on the extended edition that there are a few more extended scenes. Can you talk to how tough the restoration process was, and the decision to re-do the soundtrack?

Aubry: Sure. The restoration was challenging, and I don't want to exaggerate the difficulty of it, I was prepared to do it, because I was the producer of Apocalypse Now Redux, which was a similar kind of technical challenge. What made this project more doable than Apocalypse was that beginning in the very early '80s with One From the Heart, Coppola, far ahead of the rest of the industry, began to integrate videotape into the post-production process at a pretty sophisticated level. What that means is that it was possible for us, with limited time and funds, to review earlier assembled cuts of The Outsiders on old videotape, and many of these videotapes were encoded with information that led up to the original negative in a very sophisticated way. It was time consuming and challenging, some pieces were very hard to locate, but that then caused us to open the door to looking at unprinted negative (sometimes called "B takes"), and sometimes the B material had better performances in it, it just wasn't considered for whatever reason at the time. Getting to the point of a version that was satisfactory to Francis that incorporated the deleted scenes or new cuts of things that had been deleted wasn't so hard; we had a couple editors who were really good working on it. In a way, the challenge was once Francis signed off on the edit, which was made from work print or videotape source material, the real challenge was finding the bits and pieces of original camera negative that was stored in multiple vaults in different ways, identifying it, and incorporating that into the final cut of the film. It's like any other process, like building a house. The house goes up really fast, and then it takes a really long time to get the kitchen cabinets in. That last 1 percent of refining can take a really long time to get it just right.

Likewise with sound, the process of remixing the soundtrack, not so much the music, but causing the new scenes to integrate in the old scenes seamlessly so that you can't really tell where one part ends and one part begins. We were really aided by the fact that we had the original sound designer of the film, Richard Deggs, involved with us on the new version. As far as the replacement of the original score for the film, that was something that Francis had wanted to do. He had threatened to do it for years but it always seemed like idle conversation, "Gee, if I had the chance to do that film again, I'd love to try it with a rock 'n roll score, 'cause I'm not really satisfied with how the old score worked." When we got the greenlight to go for it, and he said, "OK, let's remove the score, what would it be like to have an all-Elvis score?" Well gee, number one, expensive, number two, his arrangements and his songs and his voice are kind of hard to navigate film dialogue around. So what we came up with is this idea that in some of the scenes that don't have a lot of spoken dialogue in them an Elvis song could work as a mood setter or as a time and place setter because obviously the Greasers would have been listening to Elvis in that era, well then that's great. So we had songs like "We're Gonna Move" or "Tomorrow is a Long Time" or even "Blue Moon" which invoked not only the period, but the feeling of that scene. But then in other parts of the film, we opted for a more instrumental rock and roll treatment.

Verdict: You've been working with Francis both on his DVDs and films for awhile now. I was wondering how you first came to be involved in working with him, and also what the work environment is around him?

Aubry: I was an employee of his from 1987 to 2004 as an executive in his company, but it was a small company, so I wore many hats. I had a Chief Technology Officer hat, and at times a Sound Mixer hat. It was a great inspiration from me, I didn't come from the feature film world, I can from a different career path. I had been really been involved in public radio, radio production, and teaching. And for me it was a great job and at times an incredibly stressful job. In the post-production of the films, Francis is, as you might guess, extremely involved, always trying to tinker with the process, and is a technology savant. It was very interesting to work with him and help him formulate themes for editing films and finishing films in new ways, using new technology. And it was a great era to be doing that because from the late '80s through the mid '90s, Hollywood was kind of stuck in the photomechanical, traditional, manual paperwork way of working. From the first films that I worked with Francis on, I would say that the preponderance of film crews didn't own a personal computer or know about them or use word processing. Certainly e-mail was not happening at that time in a general way. And so the organization of the media for a film post-production was a very traditional, manual system. It worked well, by the way, but it was lagging behind and not taking advantage of the tools of personal computers, coordination, electronics, and videotape. So working for him in this era was great because I was constantly challenged. "What if we edited Godfather III electronically, what would that be like?" Gee, I think it's impossible Francis. "Good, let's do it."

Verdict: I've listened to a couple of Francis' director commentaries, and there seems to be a bit of a "work hard, play hard" philosophy and on a commentary for The Godfather, Part III, he discussed a good recipe for gnocchi. I'm presuming you eat well during a production?

Aubry: Absolutely. Probably more in pre-production, because that's when the creative juices are really flowing. When you're in production the schedule is really intense. Although if you check out The Outsiders documentary Staying Gold, you'll see two moments that involve food. One is from 1982, and one is from 2003 where Francis is feeding us, and Ralph Macchio starts to prepare sausages and things. It's hard to imagine a Francis film that doesn't have some kind of food overlap.

Verdict: It seems he's really enjoying being a Dad now, with Sofia's emergence, and with other members of the family like Nicolas, Marc, and Roman.

Aubry: And don't forget Jason Schwartzman.

Verdict: Of course, Jason and Talia (Shire) also. Do you think that there's still an urge to direct or write more, or is he pretty content with where he is in his career?

Aubry: I think he will be writing scripts and thinking about new kinds of films and possibly making them until the end, whenever that is. He threatens retirement every five years, or whenever he's really frustrated by something. Or he teases or torments us by saying: "Gee, if it's so much easier to make money selling good wine or making tomato sauce, then why the heck do I have to kill myself making a film?" And it sort of rolls off our backs and I know that he's thinking about what his next film will be.

Verdict: What do you think that, in terms of your collaboration with him, is the film you're most proud of?

Aubry: Oh gosh. Well, Apocalypse Now Redux was certainly the most interesting. Well, no, not really, I loved working on Dracula, and it came out really well. The challenges that were interesting to me at the time are probably not the most interesting to others. I was very proud of the fact that despite a lot of external hurdles and political pressures and schedule and budget issues, Dracula came out beautifully but it come out on time and on budget, which I was really proud of at that time, because everyone said that it wouldn't. In terms of the DVD side, I love The Godfather Collection. I'm really proud of the documentaries we made for that, the presentation of that, and I'm also very proud of an unpopular film and DVD title which was One From the Heart. It's a film that's hard to explain to people, and it's hard to explain what happened to him as a consequence of making that film. But we tried when we made that DVD, so I'm quite proud of that.

Verdict: Along with those, the other one that I'm a big fan of is The Conversation.

Aubry: Well, the effort on that one was to expand the soundtrack to stereo, working with Walter Murch (the original co-editor), and that was terrifically fun and it was interesting and I'm very pleased with the way it came out, but we left the image untouched, it's exactly as it was. I think the commentaries are good. And another relatively unpopular Coppola film that I'm very happy with the way we did it is Tucker. Of all the DVDs that I've done, I'm most proud with the presentation of Tucker. We got in way over our heads in making that DVD, we restored the soundtrack; we were really concerned that the presentation of that film on DVD would reflect the essence of what the film was. Francis' signature is that his films are what they are about. If The Outsiders is an epic for teenagers, and Rumble Fish is an art film for the kids, Tucker was a little gadget, and we wanted our DVD to be a gadget.

Verdict: Are there any plans to revisit some of his other films or if there's anything in the pipeline you can talk about?

Aubry: We're working on an elaborate, enhanced version of Apocalypse Now that I hope will be really great for fans. Both versions are on DVD but neither of them have any bonus content. That's probably the biggest one. We'll probably take a look at Dracula because we were not involved in the first Sony release of Dracula.

Verdict: Are there any extras for Apocalypse Now you can tempt us with?

Aubry: (long pause) A lot has been said about the process of making Apocalypse Now in the Philippines, it's been talked about in documentaries and news coverage and books. But not much has been said or written about the post-production process of Apocalypse Now and that always bugged me because of my roots in post-production. I think Apocalypse Now of course owes a great deal of its importance to the writing and the photography that took place, but it also owes quite a bit to the post-production issues. They shot a million and a half feet of negative on that film, it had to be edited, it had to be thought about, and it had to be structured and sculpted, and so on our DVD I think we're going to look at the post-production Apocalypse in an in-depth way. But it's early.

Verdict: Well, based on your history so far, and what ZAP is going to be doing for DVD fans in the future, I'm looking forward to it, and thank you for your time today. Thanks for your time Kim.

Aubry: Thanks!