In the 20 years since I first saw “The Conversation,” I can’t walk past Union Square without hearing the haunting piano score and picturing what I believe to be the best opening shot in San Francisco cinematic history.
Although in recent years it has become a deserted symbol of the city’s so-called doom loop, Union Square is bustling with people as the film’s opening credits roll. A wide aerial shot high above makes it impossible to know which person in the crowd we’re tracking.
The camera slowly zooms in, and we hear ambient street noise and a jazz tune reverberating through the park. A minute later, a strange, mechanical glitch interrupts the documentary feel of the shot. Something is off, but we don’t know what.
That feeling of dread lingers throughout Francis Ford Coppola’s forgotten classic, which was released 50 years ago in between the director’s far more famous but less personal films: “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II.”
Gene Hackman and co-star John Cazale working at Harry Caul's Potrero Hill workshop in "The Conversation."
American Zoetrope
Coppola has said he favors “The Conversation” to those cinematic legends — even though, as he said on the DVD commentary of the film, it was “not a lot of fun” to make.
“The Conversation” isn’t exactly a fun movie to watch, either. Starring a stone-faced Gene Hackman with a menacing supporting turn from a young Harrison Ford, it’s a creepy, paranoid technological thriller dealing with murder and guilt.
Conceived before but released just as the Watergate scandal broke with Richard Nixon’s infamous tapes, the movie depicts Hackman’s Harry Caul as a for-hire bugger who becomes obsessed with his secret recording of a mysterious couple walking around Union Square.
Guilt-ridden from a past job that got his targets killed, he rewinds and replays his analog reels and enhances their dialogue using his high-end gear, seeking its true nefarious meaning, but it only accelerates his downward spiral into madness. Echoing those reels and the walk around Union Square, the film’s only soundtrack consists of composer David Shire’s lonely piano looping the same hypnotic tune, adding a relaxing element to the otherwise stressful plot.
A still image from outside Harry Caul's Potrero Hill office in "The Conversation."
Courtesy of American Zoetrope
Filmed entirely on location in the city, it was nominated for best picture at the 1975 Oscars (only to lose to “Godfather II”), as well as best sound (the winner was “Earthquake”) and original screenplay (the winner was “Chinatown”). Despite some fierce competition, I consider it the most underrated San Francisco film, especially for presaging the outsize role that tech and surveillance now command in the city.
“I completely agree,” Pat Jackson, assistant editor on “The Conversation,” told SFGATE regarding its “most underrated” status. “Maybe its 50th anniversary will revive the attention that it’s due.”
For Harry Burson, who studied “The Conversation” while getting his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and now teaches film at the University of Illinois Chicago, it’s his favorite movie, period.
At left, Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul being restrained on the staircase at One Embarcadero Center. At right, Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams as the mysterious couple in "The Conversation."
American Zoetrope
“There’s something interesting to me about the way guilt and paranoia can drive someone crazy,” Burson said while explaining his love for the film. “… As a San Francisco movie, it’s what I think of in the Bay Area after the moment of the counterculture. Like, ‘What are we gonna do now, after this political moment?’”
An unforgettable opening
That artificial glitch in the film’s opening seconds, introduced by sound editor Walter Murch, is meant to suggest digital recording technology that didn’t exist at the time — except for a pro like Harry. Sounds like this one in “The Conversation” are unsettling and form a character of their own, in a way that had rarely been seen in movies before.
“Is something wrong on my TV? Do I have something wrong here?” said Burson of his initial reaction to the scene.
A still image from the opening shot of "The Conversation," looking over Union Square in San Francisco.
Courtesy of American Zoetrope
Union Square in San Francisco, April 25, 2024.
Lance Yamamoto/SFGATE
Coppola called the Union Square shoot, with a total of six camerapeople, “total chaos,” in a 1974 interview with fellow director Brian De Palma. “Half our crew was in all those shots. And you can see them!”
“We just showed the principals to the cameramen and said, ‘Try to find them and keep them in focus,’” Coppola said in the interview. “And then the actors kept walking around and around and it was literally done as though the situation was as it was. This was shot many times — for at least three or four days.”
Legendary as the scene was, after wrapping it, Coppola fired director of photography Haskell Wexler for the rest of the film over a disagreement in how they wanted it shot — “Haskell saw it in a slightly more romantic style,” Coppola said in the DVD commentary.
The fog machine fiasco
The Union Square shoot was a relative breeze next to the scene in Alta Plaza Park that was supposed to be the film’s ending. Caul, wracked with guilt and fearing for the life of the woman in the conversation (played by Cindy Williams of “Laverne & Shirley”), follows her into what was supposed to be thick, natural fog and blurts out strange facts about his childhood as an act of restitution.
“He’ll kill you if he gets the chance,” Harry warns her, slightly altering what her boyfriend, played by Frederic Forrest, tells her.
The fake fog machines director Francis Ford Coppola used at Alta Plaza Park in San Francisco caused a mini-riot among neighbors.
Courtesy of American Zoetrope
A view of the staircase at Alta Plaza Park, where a memorable scene from "The Conversation" was filmed.
Charles Russo/SFGATE
But the star of that shot — the fog — never really came. Coppola grew frustrated, but the ensuing mayhem led to “The Conversation” having an even better ending than Coppola had imagined. There was supposed to be more to the scene, including Harry sitting next to Williams’ character in a Muni bus. It was all ruined by the lack of fog.
“San Francisco gets very foggy, and I thought for sure that if we were shooting this film for 40 days, we’d get one foggy day,” Coppola said in the De Palma interview. “Well, we never shot that scene because we never got the fog.
“So the last day, in desperation, we tried to make the fog and we got the scene you see in the picture.”
Coppola used a fog machine, only it quickly led to a backlash from the park’s neighbors, who complained the oil it expelled was dirtying their cars. News reporters and police descended on the scene, making it that much more difficult to shoot.
“We’re trying to shoot this difficult scene, and Gene was, as often when he was in that character, just wanted to concentrate on the work and wasn’t particularly in a good mood,” Coppola said in the film’s commentary. “I remember I just got so fed up with the people while we’re shooting coming, and reporters trying to ask us … to make a mountain out of a molehill that I just got upset and just wrapped the film and didn’t shoot anymore.”
Instead, Coppola followed an editor’s suggestion to move the scene to the film’s middle and make it a dream sequence for Harry. The film’s actual ending, with Harry tearing apart his apartment to search in vain for the bug that’s been planted on him, seems infinitely more effective.
Gene Hackman's character steps off a vintage Muni bus in "The Conversation."
Courtesy of American Zoetrope
“I can’t imagine it as the ending,” said Jackson, the assistant editor, of the park scene. Making note of Coppola’s professed interest in secretly recording people as a kid, she added that using Harry’s deconstructed apartment “has elements that are autobiographical to Francis. Now I can’t see it without knowing it comes out of a person’s lived experience. It has more weight.”
Alta Plaza Park significantly alters “The Conversation” in another way. Coppola had used long-range radio microphones to record Forrest and Williams’ dialogue in Union Square, much like Harry might have done. But after shooting, they realized some of the dialogue had been distorted by microwave transmissions.
Coppola rerecorded Forrest’s ominous line, “He’d kill us if he got the chance,” in the park with a new inflection that, with some finesse from Murch, takes on a new meaning that Harry doesn’t notice until it’s too late.
A career springboard
What “The Conversation” lacked in box office appeal upon its release, it did make up for in launching successful careers. This was Jackson’s first feature film as an editor — she worked on documentaries at KQED up to that point and had only six weeks to work on the film at Zoetrope’s Folsom Street studio before leaving for a project in Oman. Her future credits as sound editor include “Apocalypse Now,” “Blue Velvet,” “Toy Story” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”
Francis Ford Coppola directs the making of "The Conversation" at Union Square in San Francisco.
American Zoetrope
In a March 2024 interview, Murch credited Jackson’s cut of a scene where we see Hackman recognize the severity of what’s being said on the audio while he physically clicks the rewind button as “the key to this film.”
Of working with Coppola and Murch, Jackson said, “It set up the expectation for the rest of my professional life that heaven is working on a project that is interesting with people who are exhilarating to work with.”
(SFGATE was unable to reach Coppola, whose self-financed film “Megalopolis” releases this year, and Murch for comment on this story.)
It was only the second film for costume designer Aggie Rodgers, whose first had come a year earlier in “American Graffiti,” which Coppola produced. She’s the one who, by chance, found the movie’s most enduring wardrobe choice — Hackman’s ugly gray plastic raincoat.
Rodgers said she and Coppola argue “all the time” about who can take credit for the raincoat, adding that he gives her the credit.
“I’m sure I was in there looking for other stuff,” Rodgers said of finding the coat at an Army surplus store downtown. “I thought I’ll just take one of these, you never know when you’ll need that s—t. So the next week, I came and got another dozen more, because they rip.”
Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul in "The Conversation," in a scene at One Embarcadero Center.
American Zoetrope
Rodgers went on to be the costume designer for “Return of the Jedi,” and she was nominated for an Academy Award for her costume work in “The Color Purple.”
She does concede some rookie mistakes on the set of “The Conversation.” They include going for a haircut in the middle of shooting, which got her teased on the set; forgetting to reapply the name tag Hackman was wearing in between shoots of the wiretapping convention scene at the St. Francis Hotel, which required a reshoot where Hackman rips the tag off his suit; and falling victim to a wardrobe scam at the hands of Ford.
He wasn’t known as the charming rogue Han Solo for another three years, but Ford persuaded Rodgers into taking him and co-star Robert Duvall shopping at the upscale Wilkes Bashford for shoes she estimates cost $475.
Ford promised he would give back the shoes if they didn’t appear in the movie — only he then told the camera operator it was necessary to shoot his feet. Ford kept the shoes.
“He's so naughty. I know him to this day,” Rodgers said.
A pre-Han Solo Harrison Ford steals scenes in his supporting role in "The Conversation."
American Zoetrope
Ford’s character, the assistant to Duvall’s corporate boss who hires Caul, was supposed to be a more minor one. But he impressed Coppola with his ideas for the role, such as offering Christmas cookies to Caul at his office.
Perhaps the most memorable character in “The Conversation” is San Francisco itself. The film blog Reel SF counts 15 city locations in the movie, including Caul’s workshop in Potrero Hill and One Embarcadero Center, where Coppola turns an outdoor staircase into what looks like the indoor lobby of the client’s business.
While there are the inevitable anachronisms, San Francisco also takes on a documentary form that looks fresh today. The Cindy Williams character’s lament about a homeless person in Union Square who once had a family hasn’t aged a day. Neither have the scenes where Caul rides vintage Muni buses.
Through the window of Caul’s apartment in Hayes Valley, we can see a building being gradually torn down as the film advances. It’s at once a real-life snapshot of the end of the Western Addition’s disastrous “Urban Renewal” program, a symbol of Caul’s carefully constructed privacy being torn asunder and a preview of the gentrification to come decades later to the city.
Harry Caul is always watching now
Gene Hackman's character in "The Conversation" walks on the pedestrian bridge that links One Embarcadero Center with Maritime Plaza.
Courtesy of American Zoetrope
Replace Caul’s raincoat with a hoodie, and it’s too easy to see him resemble the tech disruptors who took over San Francisco over the past 15 years. The ubiquity of cameras and AI surveillance in the Bay Area, from neighborhoods to homeless people’s cars to our own phones, may leave a modern audience too desensitized to invasions of privacy to be shocked by Caul’s Union Square operation.
Still, I will plead with anyone to spend a few bucks on Prime to rent “The Conversation” — that is, if you’d rather not wait to buy the 50th anniversary 4K restored Blu-ray being released in July.
You’ll see a local classic that, unlike that bug in Harry’s room that we never find, is hiding in plain sight. What’s more, you might avoid being a romantic casualty.
“I divorced my first husband because he didn’t like the film,” Rodgers said. “And he didn’t like ‘American Graffiti,’ and I thought this partnership is doomed.”
Senior Homepage Editor, SFGATE
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