‘Dracula’ Only Whets the Appetite of Coppola Fans

Listening to director Francis Ford Coppola’s first laser-disc audio track may rank with waiting for the movies to talk in the first place. You know that there’s something important to be said, on many levels. But “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” fails to take you fully into the mind of one of the premier filmmakers of the 20th Century.

In its own frustrating way, it resembles the experience of “The Jazz Singer”--full of promise, innovation and history but more of a preamble than anything else.

Not that the Criterion, three-disc CAV edition of Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” ($125) is not a welcome addition to the serious laser-disc library. It even comes blazing with a few innovative features.

As expected from this prestigious label, the digital transfer in its original 1.85:1 theatrical aspect ratio is crisp and rich, with enveloping Dolby digital sound that doesn’t disappoint.

The set, with each disc carefully encased in its own sleeve, comes with numerous scenes pictured on the album’s interior jacket. There is the by-now almost requisite original theatrical trailer, storyboards included among the discs’ supplementary material and an informative, if not overpowering, video documentary on the film’s making. And 75 carefully chosen chapter stops.

But of special interest to aspiring filmmakers is the interactive film-editing “workshop”--an opportunity to look at footage and match your cuts against Coppola’s. It’s almost like taking a multiple-choice exam, without having to wait for the answers.

Also of note is the chapter on Cinefex’s special effects, scene by scene--an impressive feature of the film.

The liner notes and essay by David Ehrenstein match in their pretentiousness some of the routine discussion of the film on the second audio track by Coppola, his son Roman Coppola, who supervised special effects and was second-unit director, and makeup supervisor Grego Cannom, who won an Oscar. Cannom seems to monopolize the track with often superficial comments. Still, during the two-plus hours (127 minutes) of the audio track discussion, there do emerge some insights into Coppola’s creative filmmaking techniques.

“I felt unless we had a new take on ‘Dracula,’ it was sort of pointless to do it,” Coppola says. He looked to early movie Draculas, especially John Carradine’s and the early German “Nosferatu,” as well as Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast” for inspiration. One of this set’s best features is the inclusion of excerpts from these films (among the supplementary disc material) in juxtaposition with scenes from Coppola’s film to graphically show the influences at work.

“One of the biggest problems was trying to figure out how to mount (the film) with the budget that we had,” Coppola notes. The rich visual look of the $40-million 1992 film, which stars Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves, Anthony Hopkins and Tom Waits, eventually took on the style of the time period in which Stoker wrote the novel.

Coppola, who clearly enjoys the process of filmmaking, reveals some of the frustration that has dogged him as an innovative director working within the Hollywood mainstream. “All the forces around you are trying to make the film be what they already know,” he says. “It’s sort of like cooking for people who don’t like to eat.”

But Coppola spends too much time on the audio track complaining about the way the media have treated him. He is especially bitter about early derogatory reports on the rough cut of the movie that he says turned the audience and critics against the film before it was even released. He pleads that no film should be judged before it’s completed and approved by the filmmakers--then it’s fair game.

One of the frustrations of this information-laden three-disc set, however, is that, even with all the supplementary material, it seems at times as though it was made for those wanting just a taste of Coppola’s filmmaking recipes. In fact, there is an audience starving for a full seven-course Coppola feast on filmmaking that communicates far more of the passion that he seems to have kept bottled up. It is Coppola’s creative insight, his ideas and mental processes, as well as glimpses of his filmmaking techniques and influences, that we want to know more about.

And that has got to come with the film that cries for it: “The Godfather” trilogy. For what many consider to be one of the finest films of the century, the need for a full-feature laser disc screams out loud and clear.

Unfortunately, Paramount only seemed to provide such a set several months ago with its costly ($200) “collector’s edition” of the three “Godfather” films. But a collection without an audio track discussion from Coppola and with only a perfunctory “making of” documentary supplement was an offer that serious cineastes should have refused.

“The Godfather” in its original and re-edited versions demands the first-class treatment that the lesser “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” gets. For that matter, so does Coppola’s earlier “The Conversation.”