Inside the Coppola Personality is an amiable piece that, perhaps by default, contains thematic echoes of Hellman's other work. While listening to Coppola describing The Silver Fish, an equipment-filled trailer from which he often supervised activity on his sets, it is difficult not to think of such obesessional figures as Two-Lane Blacktop's drivers or Cockfighter's Frank Mansfield. But it would be misleading to describe Hellman's film as critical of Coppola; the portrait is essentially a warm one, and scenes depicting family gatherings (such as Coppola's 42nd birthday party), kitchen activity and a lunch with the crew reveal how similar scenes in The Godfather trilogy were drawn from the filmmaker's own life. With his habitual practice of allowing theme to emerge naturally from precise observation of human behavior and his interest in subcultures, it seems inevitable that Hellman would be attracted to the documentary form. As we will see, Hellman would work on more than one documentary during the early 1980s, and would later marry documentary director Emma Webster: "My wife is a documentarian who I think wants to make fiction films, and I'm a fiction filmmaker with a documentarian trying to get out."18
On April 3, 1982, Hellman's close friend and collaborator Warren Oates died of a heart attack in Los Angeles: "I was very angry that he died, because I felt that he literally killed himself. He called me the day before and said 'I just had a heart attack.' I said, 'What?!' and he said, 'Ahhh, just kidding. I had bad indigestion last night.' Those kind of jokes were not kidding. He was telling me something and he was telling himself something. And I know he was experiencing pain for six months or so, and he wouldn't go to a doctor. So I was really angry. I was mad at him when he died. Warren and I had one disagreement during The Shooting. That was it — we never argued again. Warren hated going on location — that's why he didn't do Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. But he would've gone to the ends of the earth for me. He was the embodiment of the philosophy of acting of somebody like Spencer Tracy. No fuss, no torture. He just came in and did his work. His one passion in life was investing. Far more so than acting. He was obsessive about his stock portfolio; that's where his real desire was. Warren was one of my closest friends, and I felt he was my alter ego. The fact that I identified so strongly with Warren's characters freed me in a way. I didn't have to think about how to express myself, because it just came naturally, as part of the process. In a funny way, it enabled both of us to be less self-conscious, to be less intellectual, to be more intuitive about the work that we were doing. He was the most extraordinary actor that I've ever worked with, and I don't think I'll ever find anybody that replaces him in that regard. He had a quality that harked back to the great Western actors like Gary Cooper, the silent man whose honesty and integrity are apparent from his face. What was intriguing about Warren was that he was quite different from how he appeared. Not unlike Peckinpah — they're both very Western characters who were loving friends and bitter enemies with adjoining property in Livingstone, Montana. They had the same reluctance to show anything soft. I was very close to Warren until the day he died, and I never knew he wrote poetry. He was very much like my heroes in the sense that he didn't reveal a lot about himself. He was a great friend — a great companion, but you had to dig for a long time to find out who Warren really was. I think this quality of mystery is very important for an actor. It's something that too few actors today have."19 Of the four principal actors in Two-Lane Blacktop, three died within a few years of each other; Laurie Bird, who had been living with Art Garfunkel in New York, took an overdose of valium in 1979,20 and Dennis Wilson drowned on December 28, 1983.
While attending the 1982 Cannes Festival, Hellman became one of several directors attempting to answer the question, "Is cinema becoming a dead language, an art which is already in the process of decline?" for Wim Wenders' Chambre 666, filmed in room 666 of the Hotel Martinez: "I happened to be at Cannes, I can't remember what I was doing — probably peddling projects. I was available and Wenders kind of latched onto me. And then when I found out what it involved, I suddenly dreaded this terrifying experience he had gotten me into. He literally just turned the camera on and walked away. I'm not a great monologuist."21 The answer given by Hellman is as follows: "I don't go to the movies very much anymore. I have a video recorder and I record movies off the air, but I don't watch them while they're being recorded and I very rarely look at them after I've recorded them, so I have a library of about 200 movies that I never see. I think that it doesn't really matter much whether movies look like TV or TV looks like movies or whether the language of cinema is changing. I don't think that pictures are dying, I think that there are good times and there are bad times for movies and I think that the last few years have been a bad period. I think that there haven't been a lot of movies that I cared to see, and the ones that I have seen I've been disappointed in, so I find that if I go to see a movie that disturbs me because it's not very good, then I'll look for an old movie that I've seen before, that I like, and I'll go to see it and I'll get some kind of nourishment from it."22
Later in 1982, Hellman again did some work on a documentary: "A friend of mine who's a French producer, Stephane Tchalgadjieff, was producing and directing a documentary on prostitution in Hollywood, and he asked me not to direct, but to just kind of help out, to be an advisor. I worked for several days as a non-paid 'consultant.' There wasn't much 'direction,' other than setting up the situations and hiding the camera. We were shooting a scene with hidden cameras on Sunset Boulevard, at the corner of what years ago was Schwab's Drugstore but is now something else. We were in this truck, shooting through a window that people couldn't see into, and our actress, who was a real hooker but who was demonstrating for us, was talking to a couple of prospective clients. She made a deal, and they promptly handcuffed her. They were plainclothes policemen. She said, 'I'm not a prostitute, I'm an actress,' and pointed to the truck where we all were. So they came in, confiscated everything, and arrested us. It turns out there's a law against using what they call 'concealed electronic devices,' and it's a very serious offense: the fine is $50,000 and two-and-a-half years in jail. I was very unhappy about that situation. Stephane and I went to the county jail to bail out our star. We had already filmed some interview material with her, but I can't remember whether Stephane or I or both asked the questions. She was 18 or 19 and black. She was planning to work for three years in order to save enough money to buy a small apartment house in Fresno. Anyway, I was booked but not jailed. I needed $2,000 in order to retain a lawyer, and called the first 75 or so names in my rolodex asking for $35 to be used towards my defense. Almost everyone I called offered to help, and within the space of about half a day I raised the $2,000. Christopher Isherwood actually got out of a sick bed and got a friend to drive him over to my house (about 20 miles from where he lived in Santa Monica) in order to give me a check. And I got off. Case dismissed. I didn't shoot anything for the film after the arrest, but I can't say for Stephane. I don't know the title or whether it was finished. Years later, I tried to make a documentary entitled Love and Money, about my traveling all over the world to pay back all of these friends, but couldn't get any company interested in financing it."23