The issue has already been discussed in this space but just for thoroughness’s sake I should have linked earlier to Spencer Morgan‘s 10.23 New York Observer piece about George Hickenlooper being pissed about not being invited to record a voice-over commentary for the upcoming DVD Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (Paramount Home Video, 11.20), the legendary doc about the making of Apocalypse Now that he and Fax Bahr co-directed.

Hickenlooper tells Morgan that Francis Coppola, the doc’s rights-owner who apparently was invited to record a voice-over commentary, is the principal bad guy in this deal. “This is a real slap in the face to me and to filmmakers in general,” Hickenlooper lamented. “It’s very disillusioning because I worship Francis. He’s trying to portray himself [in interviews] as this icon of artistic integrity, and yet simultaneously he’s completely burying me and my partner.”

Hickenlooper “allowed that reissuing the documentary was Coppola’s prerogative not just legally, but personally, since it focuses on the perspective of the latter man’s wife, Eleanor, during the famously fraught filming of Apocalypse Now.