The film THX [1138] came out and was not a success commercially. It was such not-a-success that Warner Bros., who had financed the film and had also financed the development of a number of other screenplays, among them Apocalypse Now and The Black Stallion and The Conversation, decided to cancel the contract. And not only to cancel the contract, but to hold Francis [Ford Coppola] financially responsible for all the development funds that had been spent up to that time. So no, Francis, that was not a development that was a personal loan to you, and you now have to pay it back. I don't know the particulars of how this contract got into that state, but the effect was, Francis had to pay back something like $300,000 of development costs, which is a lot of money now and it was a huge amount of money in 1969. And it was a desperate situation for American Zoetrope, to have made a first film, to have it be released, to have it fail, and then to have the rug pulled out from all the other projects that we were developing and intending to make.

And a life raft appeared on the horizon, which was a film project that Paramount was making about the mafia, called The Godfather. And many directors had turned this project down, because it seemed too low-rent a film. Fred Zinnemann was offered the film apparently, and turned it down. So it was directors of that calibre. And as Paramount was working through their list, they eventually came to Francis Coppola, who had directed a number of films, he was Italian, and none of his films had really been financially successful, but that seemed to be a gamble to them worth making. So Francis was approached, and because of the desperate nature of the financial situation, accepted the job. And so we, me and American Zoetrope, found ourselves working on this Hollywood film. And for a while, we were working on it in San Francisco, it was being edited in San Francisco. We shot in New York, but the editors Peter Zinner and Bill Reynolds moved to San Francisco and they were editing the film. And we were doing not the final mix, but the pre-mixes of the film at our mixing facility. And I was editing the sound for the film. And at a certain point in the film's evolution, all of that work got transferred back down to Hollywood. And this was the first time that I'd ever worked in Hollywood at a studio, ever, on such a high-profile film, because The Godfather had been a bestselling book and everyone was keyed up to see the film that was going to be made from it. So the stakes were high, and getting higher, as we worked on it.