‘Apocalypse,’ Now and Then

It’s a very long way back from the Apocalypse, and in many ways actor Sam Bottoms is still finding his way home.

In 1976, at age 20, he was chosen to play the key role of California surfer dude Lance Johnson in Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic “Apocalypse Now.” The shoot in the Philippines jungle consumed a year and a half of his life and proved mentally and physically grueling-this in a filmmaking era before the ease of computer-generated effects.

“It was all on camera-flares, explosions, concussions to the ear,” Bottoms recalls. “There was no shrapnel, but there was a lot of debris. I was picking stuff out of my skin for months and months afterwards, even though I was wearing flak jackets. It was pretty intense.”

So intense that even after the cameras stopped rolling, Bottoms says he could not let go.

Today, 25 years later, Bottoms, 45, is sitting in the overgrown yard of a rented Hollywood Hills house, the oval swimming pool dry and littered with eucalyptus leaves. He has let his hair grow long, sports a modified goatee from his latest role as a mercenary in a Japanese action film and is walking around barefoot. He talks slowly and steadily, in a measured California drawl, and says how much he likes the newer, longer version of the film, “Apocalypse Now Redux.” The added scenes, he believes, help the plot and Lance’s behavior make more sense.

In the film Lance is a gunner assigned to accompany Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) upriver in a gunboat to his fated meeting with the renegade Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Lance is a young draftee, a golden surfer boy plucked from the beaches of Southern California to do his duty in an increasingly pointless war, and who, at a pivotal juncture of the story, drops acid to cope with the pointlessness.

There were obvious parallels between Bottoms and Lance. “In 1976 I had been surfing a lot, I sort of was that character,” the actor remembers. “I was living that Southern California beach lifestyle.”

Born in Santa Barbara, Sam Bottoms and his three brothers--Timothy, Joseph, and Benjamin--have all been actors. “We started acting in amateur theater in Santa Barbara,” Bottoms says.

Then came his first film role, as Billy the mute boy ever sweeping the dusty streets of Archer City, Texas, in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 classic “The Last Picture Show.” That came about serendipitously, when his oldest brother, Tim, already cast as a lead, invited him for a set visit. One day Bogdanovich and his then-wife, Polly Platt, the film’s production designer, spotted Sam on the street and asked him about being in the movie, not knowing that he was Tim’s brother.

Afterward, he had a number of roles in television and film and then he read for the part for Lance in Coppola’s film. He felt in his gut that the film would be an important one. The delineation of the character was to undergo some changes between the first script Bottoms read and the finished film. In the original John Milius script, Lance dies at Kurtz’s compound during a furious battle. During a break back in the U.S., the actor recalls, “Francis said, ‘I’ve got some changes--you’re going to take acid at Do Lung Bridge and you’re not going to die.’ I took that to mean that Lance becomes a living tragedy, the survivor that has to return.”

Breaking ‘Actors’ Code’ in Earlier Interview

On this balmy afternoon, within eyeshot of the Hollywood sign, Bottoms seems the epitome of California mellow. Then his tanned face darkens when asked about actual drug-taking on the set. He had revealed to the makers of “Hearts of Darkness,” the 1991 documentary about the making of the movie, that he had in fact taken not acid, but uppers, for the role.

“I realized after that interview I had sort of broken an actors’ code” he says now. “I regret that very much. I believe that whatever it takes for an actor to get to a scene, that’s his business. And I don’t think that’s something to be shared with the public.”

“Apocalypse Now Redux” explains some things about Lance left murky in the 1979 version. “It includes those bridges to the development of the character that didn’t exist in the shorter version,” Bottom says. “Like where did they get the surfboard from? Where did Lance get the makeup from?”

The scenes with Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall) have been lengthened, so that the sequence of events that follows Lance’s being recognized as a famous surfer makes more sense. In order to clear a beach area for an impromptu surfing demo, Kilgore strafes and napalms a coastal village.

“What moved me this time is that I became more aware of the real victims of the war--the children, the families, the women,” Bottoms says. “When I see the movie now, there’s this tranquillity that’s completely destroyed, obliterated by the bombing. The schoolyard with all those children--I just openly break out in tears.”

Of course, Lance doesn’t want to surf at all amid this mayhem, and the bombing provides him the excuse he needs. “Lance explains he won’t surf because he’s an artist, and he won’t surf that on-shore slop,’ says Bottoms. Having surfed since he was a teenager, he explains the logic: After the napalm is dropped, it sucked the air in from the ocean, blowing the waves down--substandard stuff to a real surfer.

When Willard and his men make their getaway at the end of the sequence, Bottoms missed the gunnels in one take and was sucked under the boat and was spit out 50 feet with scratches and dislocated ribs.

“Francis is a great general, he’s a Gen. Patton, a Gen. Sherman, a great leader,” Bottoms says. “I was his loyal soldier, I would have done anything he asked. I did, and I’m surprised that I came out of it alive.”

Looking at Life After ‘Apocalypse’

Even after shooting was completed, Bottoms stayed with the project. During production he had met his future wife, apprentice editor Susan Arnold, and ended up moving to San Francisco to be with her and the film’s postproduction. (Now divorced, the couple have two daughters.)

He was now faced with a slew of acting offers, but he found them wanting. What could measure up to “Apocalypse Now,” in all its sound and fury? “I had set my ideals pretty high,” Bottoms admits. “I turned down a Brian De Palma film, ‘The Fury.’ I have no idea why, youthful folly perhaps.”

“I probably should have been living in L.A . at that time,” he says. “I was getting great opportunities. But I wasn’t able to execute them because I think emotionally my head wasn’t in the right place. I was terrified of celebrity. I was still really young, and I didn’t have good guidance or management by someone who could see the long term.”

He did not completely stop working. In 1979 he made “Up From the Depths,” a kind of poor-man’s ‘Jaws’ that, as Bottoms describes it, “ended up being a black comedy rather than a horror film.”

The appeal for Bottoms was that it was being shot in the Philippines. “I did it just to go back to revisit the Philippines--it was part of my ‘Apocalypse’ healing period,” says Bottoms.

He likens his mission to that of war veterans who, years later, feel compelled to revisit the country where they had been at war. “I felt I’d left a part of me in the Philippines, and I went back to find it.”

Over the years Bottoms has done some 30 features--most of them admittedly not masterpieces--plus TV and commercials. About three years ago he got rid of his agent. “I had to reevaluate and reestablish my enthusiasm for the business,” he says. “I’ve worked more in the last three years than I have in my entire career.”

Now, though, he finds, “I’m at a place where I think it might be helpful to find someone to work with.”

For a photograph, Bottoms has suggested standing on the floor of his empty pool. When a surfboard is added as a prop, he gamely poses hanging 10 on the edge of it, his head thrown back to catch the sun. Later, he recalls that a key line in the earlier script for “Apocalypse Now”--the version in which Lance dies--was “The tragedy of the war is a dead surfer.” Then he muses, coming up with his own last line, “A surfer standing at the bottom of a dry swimming pool--now that’s a metaphor.”