20 Things You Somehow Missed In Apocalypse Now

The editing of Apocalypse Now was a massive undertaking. Coppola and his crew shot well over a million feet of film negative, and printed at least a million feet to edit. Editors Gerald Greenberg, Walter Murch, Richard Marks, and others, worked endlessly trying to shape this ludicrous amount of film into a watchable movie.

Greenberg was primarily responsible for editing the 130,000 feet of film that had been shot for the helicopter attack scene. There was so much film that wasn't used that some sections were being discarded into a garbage barrel. Coppola, who was visiting the editors as they worked, reached into the barrel and pulled out a strip of film. It was from a still-mounted camera that had been set to record the napalm explosion: the trees of the jungle in the distance, helicopters occasionally moving through the shot, smoke, and then the burst of flames. Coppola watched the footage through a Moviola editing machine and mused about how funny it would be to open the film with this footage, set to The Doors song, "The End."

Funny, because the song is called "The End," but it's played at the beginning of the movie.