Scott Glenn used Marine training to help save ‘Apocalypse Now’

The challenges that bedeviled the production of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” are legendary, but what isn’t widely known is how an up-and-coming actor in a minor role salvaged the film set and crew from a typhoon and, arguably, saved its director’s life.

“That was one of the best adventures I have ever had,” actor Scott Glenn, now 74, recently said in an interview with The Washington Times about the troubled film that shot for over 200 days across several years.

After a hitch in the Marine Corps in the 1960s, Mr. Glenn tried his hand at acting for a little more a decade when the call came for “Apocalypse Now” — a loose retelling of Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness” — that set Capt. Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) going upriver to “terminate, with extreme prejudice” the maddened Col. Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) in the Vietnam War.

Mr. Glenn was hired to work for just a few days of work but wound up staying on — and saving — the production for several months.

Mr. Glenn went to the Philippines — dubbing as war-torn Vietnam — two weeks before shooting his scenes at the request of Mr. Coppola to get used to the terrain, the time difference and the punishing humidity.

Mr. Glenn was first housed at a place called the Sand Valley Inn, which was a Japanese command bunker during World War II.

“When I got there almost all of the cast and crew and Francis were so sick of being there, that that weekend they decided to go back to Manila by helicopter,” he recalled. “And I thought, ’Nah, I’m going to stick around.’”

Left on location with Mr. Glenn was a skeleton crew of movie craftsmen, production assistants, Martin Sheen — who was cast as the leading man after Mr. Coppola fired Harvey Keitel — and Mr. Sheen’s family.

No sooner had the choppers whisked away Mr. Coppola and his entourage than the Pacific turned its wrath on the set: Two typhoons joined in the South China Sea and whirled back toward the Philippines as Typhoon Olga (Didang). The storm quickly tore the set to shreds.

“Where we were had been an isthmus, and it turned into an island,” Mr. Glenn said. “And the only people who had any idea of how to behave in an emergency were me and another guy who was a production assistant named Doug Claybourne. We both were, still are and will be, past our deaths, United States Marines.”

Mr. Glenn and Mr. Claybourne quickly took charge, setting up a toilet and salvaging what they could from the storm. Adding to their troubles was that a local woman was due to give birth to twins.

“[They asked if] anybody had ever delivered a kid,” Mr. Glenn said with a chuckle, “and begrudgingly I said, ’Yeah, I delivered my second daughter in our home in Topanga Canyon.’”

Even under the best of circumstances, assisting in childbirth requires some light, but by then it was night and there was no fuel to spark up the lone generator. Mr. Glenn quickly whipped up a coconut moonshine to light the makeshift delivery room for a few hours on generator power.

“It was the biggest typhoon that had hit the Philippines since 1932,” Mr. Glenn said of Didang, which knocked out their ability to communicate with anyone in the capital city for three days. “Francis and everybody else in Manila probably thought we were dead for sure,” Mr. Glenn said, “but they realized that we hadn’t been destroyed, and as the waters started to recede, they came back.”

But just as the waters retreated, the insurance underwriters of the film came calling, intent on determining whether the shoot could continue or was — quite literally — a wash.

“The term ’force majeure’ means that an insurance adjustor has to see that you’re trying to continue shooting your film, and he has to see that it’s impossible before they’ll write out the check,” Mr. Glenn said of the visit by the nervous underwriters. “They brought an insurance guy out to what had been like a kind of a mild little stream; it was [now] almost a whitewater.”

In a desperate attempt to prove that the straits were anything but dire, Mr. Coppola and director of photography Vittorio Storaro tried to show the adjustors that the “stream” was in fact fordable. The duo boarded a production boat and set out to cross the angry rivulet.

“And of course what happened was, they got in the boat, they shoved the boat out into the stream, and the boat was just instantly caught by the current,” Mr. Glenn said. “But they put a rope on the back on the boat so that if they couldn’t get across, they could pull everybody back to shore.”

Mr. Glenn quickly surmised that though tethered to land, when the safety rope went taut, the current would surely capsize the vessel, dumping both director and cinematographer into the drink.

“I sprinted the 25 yards and I pulled [a knife] out and cut the rope,” he said. “It snapped like a big bullwhip and the boat was OK — it righted itself and went downstream” so that its occupants could then be rescued.

The challenges were far from over. With the rain still coming down, one of the evacuation helicopter pilots refused to take off, saying the sideways deluge would mix with the fuel, which the pilot said would make the chopper “crap out on our way to Manila.”

“I said, ’No, I’ll fill it up; I’ve done it a million times before,” Mr. Glenn said. “All you have to do is sort of shield the jet fuel pipe from the wind and shoot [the fuel] into the helicopter, and you can see there’s no water getting into the tank.”

Despite his improvisational rescue, some jet fuel splashed onto his bare chest.

“Once I filled the helicopter up, the front of my body looked like I had measles or something,” he said, “but, you know, it goes away in a few hours. It’s no big deal.”

Mr. Coppola was so grateful for saving his life and allowing them to take off during the tempest that he offered Mr. Glenn his choice of any role in the film, even writing him one from scratch, he said.

Thinking quickly, Mr. Glenn responded, “I want to be in the part with Marlon Brando at the end of the film.”

Mr. Coppola’s gratitude briskly turned to obstruction.

“He said, ’That’s the only part of the film I really can’t write you a part for,’” Mr. Glenn said. “He said, ’It’s completely settled; we’ve got Dennis Hopper coming in” for the role of the photojournalist who had fallen under the spell of Brando’s character, the demented Col. Kurtz.

Perhaps fearing his good deeds would not go unpunished, Mr. Glenn continued to press until Mr. Coppola came up with a viable solution.

“He said, ’You could be [Lt. Richard M. Colby,] the guy who went up the river ahead of Martin Sheen,’” to assassinate Col. Kurtz but who also was bewitched by the mercurial soldier. “But he said, ’Scott, you’ll be like a glorified extra,’” Mr. Glenn said, “’but if that’s what you want, I’ll do it.’ And I said, ’That’s what I want.’”

Even though Colby turned out to be a wordless role — Mr. Sheen as Willard recognizes him upon arriving at the Kurtz compound, but upon stepping in close realizes that Colby’s humanity has evaporated as he absently strokes his rifle with a vacant stare — Mr. Glenn knew it was his chance to apprentice at the throne of the legendary Brando.

“I knew that acting is like anything — you learn from doing it,” Mr. Glenn said. “And I thought, ’I want to be around Marlon Brando when he’s doing stuff. I want to see Marlon Brando and Dennis Hopper, these, iconic brilliant people that I’ve heard about my whole life. I can actually be there and talk to them and watch them.’”

Mr. Glenn’s two-week job on “Apocalypse Now” turned into a several-month assignment thanks to his coming into the Kurtz compound for the film’s third act and to Mr. Coppola’s giving him the job of assisting two former Green Berets in teaching the extras how to pass for real military as well as interacting with the indigenous Ifugao tribesmen who had been drafted as the tribe that Kurtz lords over like a god figure.

“I fell in love with the Ifugou,” Mr. Glenn said, “and I moved into their longhouses and learned their language and lived with them for months before Francis got there to shoot the end of the movie.”

Despite going wildly overbudget, Mr. Keitel’s firing, Mr. Sheen’s heart attack, Mr. Coppola’s extramarital affair and the studio’s constant threats to shut them down, “Apocalypse Now” became one of the most venerated films in history, snagging two Oscars and earning nearly $80 million. It consistently ranks high on subjective lists of the greatest movies of all time.

Despite his silent debut, Mr. Glenn went on to an acting career in nearly 100 films, including “Silence of the Lambs” and “The Barber,” now out on DVD and video on demand.

Mr. Glenn remains thankful that his calm in the face of disaster not only saved the day and earned him a crucial-though-small role opposite Mr. Sheen but also extended his “Apocalypse Now” paycheck.

“My 2-week job turned into [a] 7-month job,” he said.