The documentary on the making of Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now ought to please almost everyone. Those who admired the Coppola opus will be able to exclaim over the miracle that such a man could pull out such a movie from such a mire of disarray, diffusion, unwieldiness. Those who thought he did not pull it out therefrom will have ample opportunity to say I-told-you-so. And those who elected to forgo it altogether will not now be tempted to -- well, but why would they be tempted to attend this one either? Shown first on the Showtime cable channel before finding its way into theaters, it has been assembled by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper (though the credit reads "with" rather than "and": whatever that implies) from some sixty hours of behind-the-scenes footage shot by Coppola's wife Eleanor (who came out with a book about the experience, but never did anything with the film), plus some "secret" audio tapes recorded by her ("I tell you right straight from the sincerest depths of my heart, the film will not be good," rants her husband. "I'm thinking of shooting myself"), plus some reminiscing interviews conducted with some of the major participants (Coppola himself, of course; Lucas; Milius, with a rifle mounted on the wall behind him; Sheen; but not, needless to say, Brando), plus some scratchy narration by Orson Welles from a Thirties radio adaptation of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, plus some outtakes as well as excerpts from the finished film. In the end, it serves as both a witness to and a collaborator in the grandiosity of Coppola's project: a witness to past grandiosity but a collaborator in its perpetuation, playing this second role simply by its emergence twelve years after the fact. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd