There’s a line at the end of Hearts of Darkness, George Hickenlooper and Eleanor Coppola’s essential chronicle of the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, that should instantly resonate with today’s younger DVD fans. And Coppola said this around 1990.

“The great hope is that now these little 8 mm video recorders...people who normally wouldn't make movies are going to be making them. One day some little fat girl in Ohio is gonna be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her little father’s camera. And for once, the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed forever and it will really become an art form. That's my opinion.”

If you replace “8 mm video recorders” with webcam or digital camcorders, Coppola was pretty damn prescient. But Coppola’s eerie prediction of YouTube is not what stays with viewers of Hearts of Darkness, whose long- awaited DVD release fills one of the format’s more glaring holes. Nor does it resonate that Apocalypse Now was a difficult 238-day shoot, and one of the most controversial productions of the modern filmmaking era. You won’t even remember that Coppola was on a fool’s odyssey or that Marlon Brando flew all the way to the Philippines and ate a bug. What lingers is the notion that directorial largess and near-insanity that marked Apocalypse Now’s problematic, wildly expensive shoot must sometimes be indulged in order to get the mad flights of genius that result.

Apocalypse Now is a film that remains as powerful today as it was when it won the Palme D’Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, or when the latest DVD iteration was released in 2006. Movies don’t seem to be made that way anymore, at least at the studio level. There’s romance in knowing that a typhoon blew down the sets and production had to stop for two months. There’s clarity in the confusion that resulted when Dennis Hopper (as an American photographer) had no idea what he was supposed to do yet refused to shut up long enough for Coppola to tell him. Today, you can imagine studio shareholders ripping their hair plugs out and considering a stock dump because the Philippines government took back their helicopters so they could fight the war raging in the southern part of the country.

Every DVD documentary or audio commentary carts out someone who claims “no studio wanted to do (fill in the blank) film.” Well, Coppola can do you one better: he put up his house and, in effect, the entire lifestyle he and his children (including future Lost in Translation director Sophia) had become accustomed to. He also put up his reputation, which had been burnished to an Oscar gold glow after the first two Godfather movies. And there were moments when it seemed like a sucker bet. In the documentary, director George Hickenlooper doesn’t spare the scathing newspaper headlines of the time, including one that reads, “Apocalypse When?”

It is to state the obvious that while Charles Marlow’s trip down the Congo (in the Joseph Conrad novel upon which the film is based) and Captain Willard’s up the Nung River (in Apocalypse Now) are trips into a fictional heart of darkness, Coppola’s journey was real, a dark and naked odyssey chronicled on film, by his wife no less. Some of Coppola’s most unhinged moments come from Eleanor’s audiotaped recordings, done without Coppola’s knowledge and meant to be used only as reference material. There’s a lot of surreptitious recording that went on during production. For instance, after star Martin Sheen has a heart attack (during which he was administered last rites by a priest who didn’t speak English), Coppola went bananas because the news had hit the stateside press. Coppola rails, putting an angry lid on any information about the incident. He gives the impression that he won’t even let Sheen die until he’s given the okay.

The documentary contains interviews with co-screenwriter John Milius, director George Lucas (the movie’s original director), co-producers Fred Roos and Tom Sternberg, production designer Dean Tavoularis, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, producer’s assistant Doug Claybourne, and actors Larry Fishburne, Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Sam Bottoms, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, and Dennis Hopper. But DVD lovers must be warned: this is not a DVD-style making- of piece about how they assembled the cast and optioned the book. This is an emotional diary, the story of a group of men and women who, as Coppola famously put it at Cannes, “had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.” It’s essential DVD viewing for anyone who loves movies. Its release was long overdue.

The Video: How Does The Disc Look?

The film’s theatrical aspect ratio of 1.33:1 is presented in non-anamorphic video. This is not a great looking film, but it wasn’t shot to be one and the transfer presumably matches the lousy quality of whatever original material was shot. I was hoping the newer interviews would look better and they do. But they still have that late ‘80s fade. Breaking it down, the footage Eleanor Coppola shot has more damage than I would have thought. There are moments that contain specks and at another point a blue, vertical line of damage appears. Sharpness is very acceptable most of the time, although long shots show softness. The new interview footage looks clearer and lacks damage and specks. The footage, however, is not that sharp and had those interviews been shot ten years later, they would have been recorded in digital (especially with George Lucas in the Coppola cabal). The clips from Apocalypse Now faired best, looking better on any of the film’s DVD releases, although I did see some edge halos. Overall, blacks were about average, with the film clips looking best and the vintage footage fairing worst.

The Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

The Dolby Surround 2.0 track is not bad for what it is. Unlike the picture, the audio seems to have been given a moderate polish. Dialogue is easy to understand and comes from the center channel. The only difficulties are with very soft off- camera questions from an interviewer, which would have to be artificially boosted to the point of hiss. There are a couple of good moments. Okay, there are two good moments. One is the sound of the rain that buffeted Thailand and toppled over sets, resulting in a two month filming delay. The other is the use of The Doors song, “This is The End.” Both have aural punch that the other material lacks. Dialogue ranges from good to tinny. There is no foundation of bass to give the mix any heft. Whatever sound effects there are come from on-set explosions and weapons fire. None of that material has any heft, either. In all, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this very average mix.

There are English Closed Captions and English, French, and Spanish subtitles.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

Francis and his wife Eleanor provide an audio commentary. Eleanor,
ever the documentarian, admits that "we're not recording it together." He says he thinks the documentary should be titled "Watch Francis Suffer." Coppola says he gave his artist wife a 16 mm camera and an audio assistant to shoot behind the scenes footage because he wanted to bring his family along to the shoot. Eleanor says Warner Bros. wanted to send a documentary team to the Philippines, but Francis said, "No, no, Eleanor will do it." The main reason he preferred her was so Warner Bros. wouldn't have potential spies on a very difficult set. There's little in the commentary that's scene specific. Eleanor talks about the why's and how's of her end of the shoot. Francis' comments are more like an interview looking back on the production, which makes much of his comments well-trod.

The only other extra on the DVD is Coda: 30 Years Later, which chronicles the making of Coppola's new film, Youth Without Youth. The film is considered rejuvenation for the director, who hadn't directed a movie for about ten years. I've seen Youth Without Youth and you can definitely sense Coppola’s reinvigoration, even if the film is, at times, impossibly dense. Except for his grey beard, Coppola looks the same. Considering the hell he went through making Apocalypse Now, the Youth Without Youth shoot was tame, and Coda reflects that. It's much more of a making-of presentation, which renders it pretty typical for the genre. I wondered why they even included this on the Hearts of Darkness DVD. Then I thought, maybe Coppola only agreed to allow Hearts of Darkness to be released if they added a 60-minute commercial for Youth Without Youth. Unlike Hearts of Darkness, this footage is digital clean.

Exclusive DVD-ROM Features: What happens when you pop the disc into your PC?

There are no DVD-ROM features on this DVD.