10. Harvey Keitel - Apocalypse Now (...and Eyes Wide Shut, for that matter)
When lists of the great American actors of the '70s are made up -- Pacino, DeNiro, Nicholson, Duvall -- Keitel often seems to be forgotten, which is a shame considering the admirable list of credits he racked up during that time: Mean Streets, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Fingers, Blue Collar...Perhaps Keitel was not helped by the fact that he ultimately missed out on the opportunity to star in one of the iconic American movies of the decade. Apocalypse Now was writer/director Francis Ford Coppola's transposition of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness into the new context of the Vietnam War -- hardly a laid back victory lap for the man who'd already earned two best picture Academy Awards for The Godfather Part I and II, and the Palme d'Or for The Conversation. What better project could a rising young actor like Keitel have to bolster his star? Unfortunately, it was not to be. Keitel worked on Apocalypse Now for about a week, but something was amiss. Exactly what that something was has been a point of contention in subsequent years. Some have claimed that it was a simple matter of Coppola and Keitel not seeing eye to eye on the part (Keitel had actually been a marine, and may've had very definitive ideas about how to play the role); co-producer Gray Frederickson claimed that Keitel, a city boy, had been uncomfortable from day one out in the jungle, surrounded by snakes and spiders, and that Keitel was literally thanking Frederickson when he was told he'd been fired. (Maybe Keitel was right to be thankful, considering how long Apocalypse Now's production stretched on, and how many hellish nights were spent by Coppola's cast and crew out in that damned jungle...) The deciding factor seems to have been a conceptual one; Coppola felt very strongly that Captain Willard, the assassin sent to kill Marlon Brando's mad Colonel Kurtz, should be a passive figure, the eyes through which the audience views all of the story's strange events, and that Keitel was ultimately too energetic, to engaged; as Coppola's longtime collaborator Walter Murch said, Coppola felt that the audience "would watch do things, and be fascinated by that, but they would not accept him as an inactive person..." Keitel was ultimately replaced by Martin Sheen, who seemed to perfectly embody the passive, soulful quality Coppola was looking for. (And who provided his own fair share of turmoil to the production by way of a heart attack and an emotional breakdown.) Interestingly enough, Keitel would later lose out on another opportunity to work with a legendary director, although this time entirely by his own hand; Keitel apparently
stormed off the set of Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut, infuriated by Kubrick's glacial working methods.