The Projector #96: A Few More Thoughts on "One From the Heart" (Patreon)

I think I like One From the Heart more than my co-hosts for the One From the Heart episode (thanks again to Josh Rothkopf for joining us) but I’d never call it a great movie. I’d call it a flawed, fascinating movie with moments of greatness. But, boy, those moments are so great to my eyes that a lot of flaws fall by the wayside. So just a few more thoughts before we, as a podcast, move on:

It’s kind of fun to play out some sliding-doors scenarios involving the movie and Coppola’s career. What if he’d never made One From the Heart? What if he’d just laid back a bit after the success of Apocalypse Now rather than rushing into what was supposed to be a low-key project? He might have better been able to focus on other Zoetrope projects. The Black Stallion was a success. Zoetrope helped make Kagemusha, Koyaanisqatsi, and The Grey Fox possible, but could a less distracted Coppola have done more for Hammett and The Escape Artist? Or maybe he could have made The Brotherhood of the Grape, a Robert Towne screenplay he planned to make at one point. (A footnote here: Zoetrope was supposed to produce Photoplay, an early film by Martha Coolidge that never happened. She made her first film in Hollywood without him a few years later. It was called Valley Girl and helped make Nicolas Cage, Coppola’s nephew, a star, though she didn’t know of Cage’s relationship to Coppola when she cast him.) Maybe he could have become the art-fostering mogul he dreamed of being in a way that lasted. Who knows?

Alternately, what if One From the Heart had been the success he envisioned? Audiences would have embraced its look and Coppola’s method of production. The ’80s might have looked much different. Picture it: a decade of neon and films that played like some kind of weird hybrid of film, live TV, and theater.

There really wasn’t anyone else like Teri Garr, was there? (I’m using past tense because she’s sadly retired due to illness.) She was a unique screen presence, able to switch from dramatic gravity and to comedic levity with ease. Looking over her career, she never really got a great starring role, but maybe that’s just as well. It’s some actors’ destiny to sweep in and make every movie they’re in better for as long as they’re on screen.

The soundtrack never found much traction outside the film. It’s not even much talked about by Tom Waits fans, as best as I can tell. But there’s a neat mash-up on the album For the Stars, a collaboration between mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and Elvis Costello. The two perform it as a duet as a medley with Paul McCartney’s thematically simpatico “Junk.”

Fortunately, not all of Las Vegas goes to junkyards to die. There’s also The Neon Museum. (I still haven’t been, but my wife loved it and came back with a t-shirt for me featuring Vegas Vickie.)

Heaven’s Gate has undergone a critical reappraisal in the past few years. Will that ever happen to One From the Heart?

Love it or hate it, we hope you enjoyed that episode. I’m looking forward to getting some feedback from that, and from Annette. Whatever you think, they’re not films that inspire indifference.

In the meantime, here are some articles you might enjoy.

• We kicked around the idea of covering Nia Dacosta’s Candyman but ultimately didn’t go with that. It, too, is a film that’s inspiring a lot of discussion, including some compelling reviews by Angelica Jade Bastién, Robert Daniels, and Walter Chaw.

• Variety goes inside the slowed-down covers factory.

• Looking to a past episode, our own Tasha Robinson talked to Green Knight DP Andrew Droz.

• And, looking ahead, Tasha also reviewed Reminiscence.

• Meanwhile, Scott Tobias got worked up over Body Heat’s 40th anniversary.