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Screenwriter John Milius on Apocalypse Now (5 min.)

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
—Friedrich H. Nietzsche, as quoted at the opening of Conan the Barbarian, written by John Milius and Oliver Stone

The high school classroom's graffiti-scarred desks are selected by eager students who stroll in from the hall. Some sit in the front row, some in the back seats. A few, grimly determined, notebooks held like shields, warily scan the faces, searching for their new teacher… At a massive oak desk waits their professorial instructor: graying, bearded, heavyset, his mischievous, observant eyes twinkling behind spectacles.

Across campus, a bell rings. The chatter ceases.

The instructor nods, someone closes the door. The students respectfully wait for the lesson. In turn, their instructor gazes at each student, his hands folded benignly, a calming presence, aware that the first day of school can be intimidating.

The instructor begins the lecture: “I used to be against unions. When I was young, I didn't appreciate the Guild. I was a rugged individualist. I was always going against the grain, but I also didn't need anybody. As time goes on, you realize that human nature is such that people with power are going to prey upon others. It's a social dynamic, a class struggle that's been going on forever. Writers are vulnerable. They're not industrialists. They're artists. And you need the collective bargaining desperately, because it's the only thing that writers can do; otherwise you're going to be stripped of your dignity and enslaved.”

Jaws are dropping. The students are aghast. One urgently consults a syllabus: Am I in the right classroom?  

The instructor recognizes the room's extreme mood swing. He grins, deciding to up the ante: “I love, at this late age, to be taking up the red flag, but you've all got to be revolutionaries.”

Apocalypse Now

But the name is spelled precisely in the academic syllabus: John Milius. Always an outsider, never a groupie; always the outlaw, never the sheriff-that John Milius. He wrote about loving the smell of napalm in the morning in Apocalypse Now. Answering Steven Spielberg's call to rescue Jaws, he phoned in the shark hunter's key motivational speech, how the World War II naval veteran could never forget nor forgive those sharks for slaughtering American sailors after the USS Indianapolis went down in the South Pacific. Hey, wasn't the line, “Make my day,” in Dirty Harry courtesy of this diehard unionist? And now he's the co-creator and executive producing the HBO series Rome? How can this add up?

These students expect a macho screenwriter who'll charge up San Juan Hill, surf the riptide, offer prescriptions for survival and success… not to champion collective activism like some liberal.
“This is sort of strange,” he admits, sensing the growing bafflement, “for me to sound like some Red, but there is nothing worse than the evils of the studios. You've got to stop the erosion of your rights and your dignity as human beings. This Guild will cease to exist soon if you don't do something about it. It's better to die on your feet rather than live on your knees.”

More mouths drop open. Baffled glances are exchanged. Where have you gone, John Milius?

And then the Milius grin spreads even wider. “The good news,” he announces, “is that without writers all these bureaucrats will be out of work. Hopefully, there will be show trials and executions.”

The classroom echoes with grateful laughter. Just as this notorious loner had opposed every Hollywood trend, he's “still at large, still robbing trains.” And still among the best in the business.

Surf City

Just for the weekend, John Milius has voluntarily traveled from his rural New York state home to this Hollywood High School classroom on Sunset Boulevard. He's here to participate in the Writers Guild of America, west's third salon for members. This salon is subtitled the “101 Greatest Screenplays Edition” and promises “an afternoon of intimate encounters with Hollywood's top screenwriters.”

Milius is not alone. Other distinguished screenwriters-in classrooms down the Hollywood High halls are James L. Brooks, Callie Khouri, Christopher McQuarrie, Phil Alden Robinson, Eric Roth, and Joseph Stefano-have also sacrificed their Sunday afternoon to address questions of craft, share war stories, provide business tips, inspire camaraderie. Their “students” are not wannabes seeking codes for breaking into the business: They're professional writers, each a member in good standing of the Writers Guild, each seeking higher learning through class encounters of a rare kind.

“I like to start off with that speech,” Milius now explains to his postgraduate students, “to make sure you get that information. It's important.”

How did he come to this adamantly pro-union position? He's self-educated, starting out in the late-1960s with “the worst possible work ethic, which is being a surfer.” (In 1977, Milius re-created his Southern California adolescence by writing and directing Big Wednesday.) Accidents of fate led him to the University of Southern California film school; meanwhile, he joined a gang of cinema rebels that included George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola. “I met Steven [Spielberg] when he was 17, and he became part of the gang. We all hung out together-Lucas and Caleb Deschanel, Basil Poledouris, and Randy Kleiser. And Steven was a natural ringleader. He has a lot of enthusiasm. He fit in very well.”

“When I came into the movie business,” he reminisces, “if you made a really good film-a Lawrence of Arabia-it would be a hit, get a lot of acclaim, and be a successful endeavor. So little of that changed until recently, when they figured out various tricky marketing techniques-release something all around the world at once, so you get this huge opening weekend, and then nobody likes it, but they all went. So the studio bosses, so to speak, figured out other techniques to get the money back. We don't need quality anymore, they think. So consequently, it's very hard to get to them and say, 'You need me because I'm good at this.' They have no respect for your abilities as an artist, and they don't read scripts.”

Indeed, Milius argues that the current breed of network and studio executive is guilty of more than not reading scripts; when they do get around to reading, he believes, they've lost the skills necessary to interpret and imagine or even recognize quality writing. Simply writing good spec scripts had made a huge impression on his friends, who wanted directing careers and preferred being on a set rather than in a room alone, writing. He was the kid who wrote.

“Nothing is as hard as facing the blank page,” he tells the class. “But you know. You know. That's why writers should protect their dignity, because none of this stuff exists; there's nothing for directors to do, if they don't have a script. There's nothing for execs to do. Their job is to keep their job.”

The ability to tell a story and transfer that invisible world onto a blank page, Milius says, translates into power. For example, he relates an anecdote from his college days at USC. Protected temporarily by a four-year college draft deferment, Milius nevertheless was “fascinated” by the Vietnam War and planned on enlisting. “Besides, we were all going to be drafted,” Milius knew, following graduation, “and I really wanted a military career.” The Paris peace talks had devolved into arguments about the size and shape of the negotiating table (literally). Reading the news stories describing such “negotiations,” Milius decided to drop out of college and enlist in the Marine Corps. “I'd lived my itinerant surfer life and been a lifeguard, so I thought this is going to be either my real career or I'll be killed in Vietnam.” But he flunked his Marine physical: He had asthma. “It was totally demoralizing.”

Realizing for the first time that he'd not be dead by age 26-something he hadn't considered before-Milius wrote an original screenplay  about “my generation's war,” based on a favorite novel, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Ten years later it became a movie titled Apocalypse Now.

When Milius invaded Hollywood in the early '70s, the studio system was dominated by the so-called “young film Turks.” Milius was among the generation of filmmakers making a difference. And it helped immensely to encounter executives who recognized good writing and encouraged talent. “The Art of the Deal,” as film critic Pauline Kael labeled the coming business takeover, was just beginning to emerge.

Milius learned fast: “I didn't get notes for the first half of my career, or maybe the first two-thirds of my career. The only notes that I got were from Coppola,” while making Apocalypse Now. But Milius reconsiders: “Matter of fact, I never got notes [from Coppola]. We just argued.”

But Milius always felt like an outsider, “about to be kicked out.” He was not the good liberal saying all the right things. He didn't feel “normal to Hollywood, but they've always sort of held their nose and made deals with me as a writer. Which is sort of the way I've run my whole career-with the desperation of a train robber: If there is an opportunity, take it and do whatever you can.”

For a long time, every script Milius wrote got made and sometimes by the best directors in the business: With Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, he wrote 1941 for Spielberg to direct; with Michael Cimino he wrote Magnum Force; alone, he wrote and directed The Wind and the Lion. Of course, Conan and Red Dawn, Extreme Prejudice, and his 1987 Miami Vice teleplay “Viking Bikers From Hell” forever made Milius a marked man in Hollywood. Here was the champion of the Second Amendment, writing violent scripts, promoting a conservative agenda, and representing macho individualism. Somewhere during the early 1990s, he began to get executive notes and realized many of his scripts weren't moving into production. That which got made took longer, became endurance trials.

Was Milius being unfairly targeted? As he puts it, being self-reliant today is labeled as unstable.

“Many people own guns but consistently vote against them and never talk about them,” he told Fade In magazine. “I used to shoot with Spielberg and Zemeckis and Robert Stack. But no one else would admit they had any.”

Which is okay with Milius, who's always stood his ground.

“I've done violent films all my life,” he once wrote in an essay commenting on the Littleton High School massacre, “and I don't have any guilt. I follow a very strict moral code, and my movies follow that code. There are consequences for every action. Everybody pays the price for what they do. It's the people in the middle who are for oppression. I see all this victimization leading toward totalitarianism. We're willing to throw away the Constitution. People don't really care about their personal freedoms anymore, as long as they have cars and homes and cool clothes. [Soviet communist leader] Khrushchev said, 'We'll sell you the rope with which you'll hang yourself.' We're using our freedoms to inflict totalitarianism on ourselves.”

Milius wrote those prophetic words well before 9/11, for a 1999 WRITTEN BY.

Question & Answer Period

The instructor pauses and glances at the clock: only 20 minutes left until the end of this class. “I should see if anyone wants to ask a question.”

Hands rise quickly. A woman in the back row timidly asks something that is drowned out by the Sunset Boulevard traffic just beyond the classroom windows.

“You better talk louder,” Milius says. “I shoot guns. I'm a little deaf.”

She laughs, repeats her question: “Where does this disparagement of the writer-this contempt-come from? I don't understand it myself.”

“It's a natural thing,” Milius calmly answers. “I first really started to understand it with John Huston [while writing The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean for the director in 1972]. He'd been a very good writer and a very good actor.  He said, 'You know, you write very well, kid. I'm going to get you for that.' He loved to torture writers.”

Another “student” is called upon: “You've directed, you've written. Which is harder.”

“Directing is easier,” Millius answers quickly. “All you have to be is awake to direct.” After the laughter, he proceeds more seriously: “If directors read the Junior Officers Guide for the Marine Corps, they would learn a tremendous amount about directing. They'd learn more about directing than they would reading about what Kubrick did. Because you have to learn how to lead people and have people have confidence in you. If you build a certain esprit de corps [on set], people will do anything for you.”

He describes how, while directing Conan the Barbarian, he made a point of always eating after the crafts and technical support crews. He stood in line to eat, never had food delivered to his trailer. If the crew stood in the snow, Milius did too. “You want the people to be behind you, but you have to lead from the front. You must never abuse power. They'll follow you then.”

Another student asks about the Rome miniseries. Had Milius turned to cable television because the studios had barricaded their doors? “I think the feature film is done,” he answers. “It's finished. It's like vaudeville. But no, HBO's really no different. I go wherever I can tell the story. I never had a thing about feature films being special and never had the kind of snottiness that people have about-'Oh, I'm a movie maker.' I don't care where it is. I don't care if it's television or me sitting here. I'm a storyteller. That's what I do. I sit around the campfire and spin yarns.”

The class is almost over, but there's time for one last question. A student follows the TV-genre question with another about Milius' recent highly publicized wargame-writing experience. “I loved the people, loved the sessions,” Milius answers, “but all the games I saw were basically shooting galleries. They wanted me to come up with stories, and we came up with characters and plots and everything. The executives eventually took it all out. 'Our kids just want action,' they told me.”

The bell rings again across the high school campus. Doors bang open, and writers pour out into the halls, mingling, chatting, sharing notes, choosing their next teacher. As I start for Phil Alden Robinson's classroom, a question haunts me. I double back and address the contradictions of John F. Milius.

“Mr. Milius,” I say, feeling like one of those student suck-ups I loathed in high school, “sorry to bother you, but may I ask one last question? How can you be a proud, card-carrying member of the NRA and a Maoist?”

Milius nods, “Yeah, yeah. I love it when people point out these. 'You're very inconsistent in your politics,' they'll say. 'You're not a good Republican. You're not a good conservative. You don't approve of George Bush's administration. You're pro-choice. And yet you're a militarist, and a gun fanatic, and believe in the Second Amendment. And consider yourself a Roman. I mean, how do you reconcile that?'”

Milius stares at me, a twinkle behind his spectacles, waiting for the set-up.

“Okay, how do you reconcile that?”

 “I'm a screenwriter. What do you expect? I make it up as I go along.”