Francis Ford Coppola, Ralph Macchio revisit making of ‘The Outsiders’ in live Yountville appearance

In 1980, a group of Fresno schoolkids wrote a letter to director Francis Ford Coppola asking him to make a film based on their favorite book, “The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton.

Coppola had made some of the most enduring movies of the 1970s, including “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now.” But “The Black Stallion” is the movie that caught the eye of Fresno’s Lone Star School librarian.

In the letter, seventh- and eighth-graders at the school said they were “representative of the youth of America” and believed that if Coppola read “The Outsiders,” he would want to make the young-adult novel into a film.

They were right.

“I had this piece of paper with all these little signatures, an entire library class asking me to make the film. So I had to take it seriously,” Coppola said in an interview this month.

“I was very touched by the book because it shows … such emotion and love. I was just moved by it and moved by the fact that young people had chosen this book as one of their favorites because of what it says about their ability to feel.”

Presented by Napa County Reads, Coppola will discuss the making of “The Outsiders” with one of the film’s stars, Ralph Macchio, today at Yountville’s Lincoln Theater. Excerpts from the film will be shown at the event, which is free for students.

Coppola, a former school drama teacher, said he’s looking forward to the conversation because he learns as much from students “as they might learn from me.”

Author S.E. Hinton was only 15 when she started writing “The Outsiders,” a tale of rivalry in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She was 16 when she completed the book, and 18 when it was published in 1967.

Coppola’s film “The Outsiders” premiered in 1983 and helped launch the acting careers of a pack of young stars, including Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Diane Lane, Tom Cruise and Leif Garrett.

“When we auditioned it, we saw everyone,” Coppola said. “We were looking for those people who would emerge as the young stars of the next generation, and indeed they did. We had them all.”

The film was a critical and commercial hit. Coppola, however, had given in to pressure and cut some scenes to make it shorter.

“Very often you are prevailed upon by others - it’s too long, that’s the most common criticism you get - so you tighten it up,” Coppola said.

“But very often that’s not the right thing to do. It’s only playing long because it’s not playing well. Sometimes by shortening it you are making it longer for the audience because they’re less involved in it or less absorbed by it.

“The right thing might be to make it longer,” he added. “On a few occasions you have the opportunity to correct that.”

When Coppola’s granddaughter was about 11, she asked the director if he would show “The Outsiders” to her class. He reviewed a Betamax tape with the original film on it, the one before he made the late edits.

He showed that version to her class and realized it was a better film than the final cut.

So he re-edited the film, restoring key scenes and replacing some of the “schmaltzy” music written by his father, composer Carmine Coppola, with rock songs from the 1950s and ’60s.

In 2005, Warner Bros. released the updated version on DVD as “The Outsiders: The Complete Novel” with “every scene the novel had,” Coppola said.

Some of his ardent fans were surprised that, after writing the innovative screenplay for “Patton” and spending years trudging through the jungles of Southeast Asia to make “Apocalypse Now,” Coppola would create films smaller in scope, such as “The Outsiders” and “Peggy Sue Got Married.”

Part of Coppola’s motivation was monetary.

“I was playing Russian roulette with the financing of the films. With ‘Apocalypse Now,’ I found no one would let me make that film, so I went into debt to make it. When I survived that, I did it again with ‘One from the Heart,’ which didn’t do well,” he said.

“I owed the bank a lot of money, and they had all of my property signed over to them. They said they’d let me keep my Napa home and the vineyards there and one particular building in San Francisco if I would pay back a huge amount of money. I did that by making a film every year.”

Coppola, who has frequently worked outside the Hollywood studio system, is now considered one of the great directors of our time. Yet when he was creating some of his most memorable films, he wasn’t always embraced for his ideas.

“What I was doing wasn’t exactly heralded at the time as, ‘Oh wow, this is terrific,’?” Coppola said. But “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now” have “stood the test of time and over the years, little by little, sort of changed what movies were like.”

Consider Coppola’s provocative script for “Patton,” in which the legendary general, played by George C. Scott, stands in front of a giant American flag and says: “Men, all this stuff you’ve heard, about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung.”

That script, written in the late 1960s was initially rejected. But when Scott rejected the replacement, he was shown Coppola’s treatment and said that was the film he wanted to make.

Coppola said some found the “Patton” script to be “a little too weird. But I always say that the things you do that get you fired are the same things that later get you lifetime achievement awards.”