Before Megalopolis Put a Mic in the Theater, Twixt Was Meant to Be Edited on the Fly
Francis Ford Coppola turned heads at at this year’s Cannes Film Festival when at a press screening for his self-funded, longtime passion project Megalopolis, a man approached a microphone near the screen and asked Adam Driver’s character, Cesar Catilina, a question, to which the on-screen Driver responded. It was a William Castle-like stunt, not much of a groundbreaking bit of expanded cinema, and besides a few-odd IMAX showings here and there, it is not a part of Megalopolis as a whole. This showman’s stunt, like so much from Coppola, actually has some more daring roots to it then the more superficial (and achievable) effect we have today. From an interview with Coppola in The Telegraph, we know that originally sequence was meant to incorporate a voice recognition software that would allow audiences themselves to ask Cesar a question, and then the projector system would sort to find the clip of Driver giving the more relevant response. This isn’t much more mechanically complex than what role-playing video games have been doing for the better part of 30 years, but in a time when cinema is in a crisis of audience passivity (indeed, Scorsese describing the Marvel-phenomenon as “closer to theme parks” than what he considers cinema is relevant here), just the act of demanding engagement feels vigorous and essential.
Megalopolis was by no means Coppola’s first attempt at expanding the boundaries of cinema. Infamously, Coppola nearly doubled the budget for One From the Heart, revolutionizing previsualized filmmaking with his “electronic cinema,” initially with the ambitions of making a live film—wherein the whole film is shot, edited and mixed live like a TV broadcast—à la Playhouse 90 movies like John Frankenheimer’s The Comedian. Coppola would continue to be obsessed with this live-broadcasted production, giving a masterclass on it at UCLA in 2016, and the following year publishing a book on the subject. Often overlooked on this topic, though, is Twixt, which was Coppola’s last feature film until Megalopolis hit screens, and concluded a cycle of artistically daring and personal films (with Youth Without Youth and Tetro preceding it) all shot digitally on the revolutionary Sony HDW-F900.
On paper, Twixt is a cheap genre movie, one as low-rent a B-picture as the film’s protagonist Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer) is a “bargain basement Stephen King.” Baltimore stops along his failing book tour in some dingy highway-side town that, according to the over-enthused Sheriff Bobby LaGrange (Bruce Dern) is full of secrets, including a serial killer. Baltimore needs money and a story, so he sticks around. In an alcohol-induced stupor, he wanders through the digitally blue night towards the old Chickening Hotel where, according to locals, Baltimore’s hero Edgar Allan Poe once stayed. Along the way, he meets the mysterious, ghostly young girl V (Elle Fanning), a fan who reminds Baltimore of his daughter. When they get up to the Chickening, she stops scared—there’s something bad in there. We soon find out in the surreal blue-tinted, black-and-white night (with accents of red splashed in, not unlike the use of color in Rumble Fish), that there are a dozen children buried underneath the hotel, murdered by the mad pastor who controlled them, with the 13th under his care escaping. Baltimore has inspiration for a new book.
Nestled within this airport novel horror story is one of Coppola’s most deeply personal confrontations of a past that had been haunting him for 25 years: the death of his eldest son, Gian-Carlo, in a freak boating accident during the filming of Gardens of Stone. This tragedy forms the emotional core of the rest of Coppola’s filmography up to the point of Twixt—an obsession with family, loss and the control of time. Much of Coppola’s narrative choices become obvious when this is considered. The Godfather Part III posits that the fate worse than death for Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is the loss of his daughter (played by Francis Ford’s youngest, Sofia Coppola). Twixt is the most direct confrontation, with the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe (Ben Chaplin) ultimately revealing to Baltimore that the book he is researching and hallucinating was an exploration of himself all along, seeing a vision of his daughter’s death as she is killed in an accident much the same to Francis’ son. Coppola, in his Gothic voyaging, is looking for a way to reconcile his own grief.
It is not just the content that Coppola uses in this exploration, but the form itself. Twixt was originally envisioned as an expanded cinema project, with Coppola commissioning the design of a live-editing software that would allow him to re-cut the film on the fly, moving around scene orders, music cues, or even pick between takes. This didn’t necessarily materialize, although it was demonstrated at San Diego Comic-Con in 2011.
Coppola had brought on musician Dan Deacon to the project for his interest in audience participation at live shows, hiring him as a music supervisor for the live project—his first cinematic composition role alongside Osvaldo Golijov, Coppola’s regular composer for this cycle of films. At the Comic-Con panel demonstration, a few recuts were shown, and Coppola played around with some live music chanting “Nosferatu” (the track that’s part of is a banger).
This was just a demonstration, though. And like with Megalopolis’ attempt to allow the audience to interact with the screen, which ended up as nothing more than a little promotional spectacle, Twixt’s live roadshow never happened. Instead Twixt went on to DVD bargain bins, largely forgotten for its ambitious attempts at redefining the theatrical experience.
It would be incorrect to presume that the release copy of Twixt (although it is still my favorite version) was as complete as, say, Apocalypse Now, which Coppola also couldn’t help but cut and recut time and time again, given that Twixt’s original intent was to be recut. It was designed as a malleable film, something never quite complete, something to keep digging into and exploring.
Originally, after the intimate moments where Poe shows Baltimore that the story he was trying to write was about the death of his daughter (the death of Coppola’s son), we move to one last big scare, where the serial killer plot comes to a bloody conclusion, all the strings are cynically threaded together, and we cut to Baltimore with his publicist, who loves every bit of it. A title card tells us that this new novel sold 30,000 copies—not terrible for a third-rate author. It’s a bitter conclusion, one reflective of Coppola’s state of mind in the early 2010s after spending another stint behind the camera being largely ridiculed for his experimentation. It would be back to selling wine for him, and luckily he didn’t have to drive very far because Twixt was shot on the estate.
But in 2022, a new version emerged: B’Twixt Now and Sunrise: The Authentic Cut, where the serial killer plot is more muted, and the picture broadly seeps with more sincerity rather than leaning into the sardonic anger of the 2011 version (the final moments with the publicist are cut entirely). When he started, Coppola did not realize where the film was going to take him, nor that exploring images that came to him in a dream—as he explains to his granddaughter, Gia (Gian-Carlo’s only child), in her behind-the-scenes documentary on Twixt—would lead him to his own guilt. The release cut keeps going after this revelatory emotional climax, but B’Twixt ends it all there. After 11 years of considering the film, that is the moment Coppola knows is the most important; there is nothing else worth saying except trying to express his deepest grief. I wonder, had Twixt gone on the road, if by the end of his journey Coppola would have found this ending in real time—if the spectacle would’ve transformed from just an exciting new possibility for exhibition to a way for Coppola to share his grief night after night.
Alex Lei is writer and filmmaker currently based in Baltimore. He can usually be found on Twitter.