An ageless shot at redemption

WHEN Francis Ford Coppola headed for Tulsa, Okla., in the early 1980s to film S.E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders,” a novel about alienated teenagers and class conflict, it came at a time in his career that he now likens to being an oil tycoon who’d lost everything. “If you were a wildcat in the oil business and you made a lot of money, then lost all your money, you’d go back to digging the hole,” he said this summer, during a brief visit to New York.

Filming “The Outsiders,” which will be rereleased Tuesday on DVD with an additional 22 minutes, was a chance to “get back to the basics, to take [my film] company out of the mess it was in.”

After the stunning critical success of “The Godfather” (1972), when it seemed as if any celluloid the director touched would turn to gold, Coppola suffered a setback with huge cost overruns on “Apocalypse Now.” After that, “I went into this burst of manic energy,” he recalled. “I thought I would save ‘Apocalypse Now’ by making ‘One From the Heart.’ ”

That didn’t work -- “One From the Heart” was not received well by critics, nor did it set Coppola’s production company back on track financially. “It was a terrible spot. Sofia, my daughter who was about 9 years old at the time, would sit on the porch of our house in Napa, and the process servers would come. She would tell them, ‘Go away. This is Tara.’ Things were bleak.”

Then came a “very touching letter” from a school library in Fresno, signed by “about 120 kids, mostly 14-year-olds, telling me their favorite book was ‘The Outsiders,’ and they nominated me to direct it,” he continued. “I used to be a drama counselor at a summer camp, and any request that comes in from kids, I always try to do it.”

“The Outsiders” is the story of teenagers growing up in Tulsa in the early 1960s, who fall into two groups: the “greasers” and the “socs” (pronounced so-shes, for “social”). Fights are constantly breaking out between the two; one young girl (Diane Lane) tries to befriend a greaser and all hell breaks loose, ending in a fight and the self-defense stabbing of a soc by a greaser.

Recalling the film, “you have the impression of it all being a distant memory, it has a misty, nostalgic, dreamlike quality,” said Rodney Hill, co-editor (with Gene D. Phillips) of “Francis Ford Coppola: Interviews.” The nostalgia is similar to Coppola’s “Peggy Sue Got Married” and “Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” added Hill. “ ‘The Outsiders’ has an episodic quality. There’s a burst when two brothers have a fight. There’s a big moment when there’s a fight in the park, and a guy gets killed. Big moments are strung together within a slow-moving, meandering structure. It’s the way memory works. You have vivid moments that you remember and everything else is a little bit blurry.”

“The Outsiders,” which was published in 1967, is a story of the loss of youth, of family ties, friendship, love and redemption. Susan Eloise Hinton wrote the book under the name S.E. Hinton so as not to reveal her gender; it was published when she was 17.

After receiving the letter from Fresno, “I read the book, and I understood what it was that kids liked,” said Coppola. “Kids are capable of feelings; they have a sense of tragedy.”

Back in the comfort zone

THE cast includes Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Tom Cruise. For the beleaguered director, it was a chance to return to his roots, to what he loved about making movies.

The production “was headquartered in a high school; we had all of our stuff with us, it was akin to, ‘Let’s put on a show.’ It was what I was comfortable with, what I felt secure in -- simple, modest, a small crew, contained equipment.” (Coppola said he enjoyed the experience of working in Tulsa so much that he stayed beyond the initial four months to film a second Hinton novel, “Rumble Fish.”)

To prepare the actors, “we put all the greasers in the worst part of the hotel,” he said. “We put the socs in the penthouses, gave them bound scripts with their names and beautiful leather jackets. We made the greasers spend a night in crummy, shacky houses.” The young actors “were extremely thrilled to be working in this situation. I was famous for having made ‘The Godfather,’ so they figured we were making a ‘Godfather’ for kids.”

The film, a diversion from his financial difficulties, was released in 1983 to mixed reviews.

Kids, however, adopted it as their own, so much so that they have often asked the director about certain scenes that were in the book but not the movie. Fortunately, Coppola had shot many scenes Warner Bros. had him cut, so they were complete and ready for the new version, now called “The Outsiders: The Complete Novel.” (The film was released theatrically in New York on Sept. 9. The DVD also features comments from Coppola, several cast members and Hinton.)

One scene from the book that kids often ask about is a scene that is now the opening for the film. Ponyboy (Howell), one of the younger greasers and a promising young writer, is followed and harassed by the rich kids. It’s “a little vignette that sets up who everyone is,” said Coppola. He also modified the score, by his father, composer Carmine Coppola. It was “possibly too dense. Now it’s more Elvis, more the kind of music the kids would have listened to.”

In another new scene, two brothers (Lowe and Howell) are sharing a bed, talking before they fall asleep. “I thought it was innocent enough,” said Coppola. “But I showed a preview, and there were some kidders in the audience, and I think the scene suffered from a hip attitude toward that.”

The main impetus for going ahead with the DVD project came, not surprisingly, from Coppola’s 16-year-old granddaughter, Gia.

She asked him to show it to her class, and he did a rough edit, cobbling together the finished film with scenes that had been cut. He didn’t want her classmates asking about the missing scenes, he said -- “I was embarrassed that she’d be embarrassed.”