Fax Bahr co-directed one documentary, the film every making-of is measured against, and then spent the rest of his career writing sketch comedy. Hearts of Darkness is superbly assembled and too fond of its subject; nothing since has been in the same line of work.
Fi1m perspective
Late at night in the Philippines, Francis Ford Coppola talks, and a tape recorder he does not know about listens. Those recordings, made by his wife Eleanor, are the reason Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991) exists, and the job Fax Bahr took on, with George Hickenlooper, was to build a film around them. The two of them wrote it, sat the survivors of the Apocalypse Now shoot down for new interviews, and with the editors Jay Miracle and Michael Greer cut those interviews against Eleanor's 16mm footage of sets, crew and weather. It is the best making-of documentary we know, and Bahr has never directed anything like it since.
The assembly is the achievement. Eleanor Coppola filmed for three years; Bahr and Hickenlooper arrived in 1989 to give the material a shape. Their method is plain: a scene from the shoot, then someone older explaining what it was like, then back. It looks simple because they made it look simple. We felt like eavesdroppers listening to Coppola's voice on those tapes, and a little ashamed of ourselves, which is exactly the effect a film about a man losing his grip in a jungle should have.
The flaw, which we named in our review and hold to, is that the film likes him too much. It shows Coppola nearly wrecking himself and several other people, then hands the microphone to the calmer, older Coppola and lets him say what it all meant. Bahr has said of the film: "I had a very specific outline of what I thought the film would be, and it pretty much held up throughout the process." We believe him. The outline was an admirer's, and 96 minutes of admiration is a lot even for this subject.
Then he left. Bahr moved into sketch comedy with his writing partner Adam Small: an American sketch series in the early 1990s, then MADtv, which the two of them co-created in 1995 and which ran for fourteen seasons. His feature credits since are as a writer, on Son in Law (1993) and Malibu's Most Wanted (2003), and for story on Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (2013). We have not reviewed them and will not judge them here. We will note that the man who watched Coppola come apart in the Philippines chose, for the decades that followed, to write jokes, and that this seems to us a reasonable response.
See Hearts of Darkness, for Eleanor Coppola's footage and for the patience with which Bahr and Hickenlooper let it play. Do not go looking in the rest of his filmography for a second one. Bahr made this kind of film once.
Biography
Fax Bahr is a writer, director and producer. He co-directed and co-wrote the screenplay for the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse with George Hickenlooper. The film draws on footage shot by Eleanor Coppola during the troubled production of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
Bahr began his career in documentary filmmaking before moving into television. He joined the writing staff of In Living Color and later co-created the sketch series MADtv. His feature screenplay credits include Son in Law (1993), Malibu's Most Wanted (2003) and the story for Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (2013). He has received a Primetime Emmy Award for directing.
