Apocalypse Now (idea)

It is interesting to note that in Apocalypse Now, which is an adaptation of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (from which the epigram of The Waste Land was almost taken, as "The horror, the horror!"), there are many scattered T.S. Eliot references:

• When Martin Sheen's character (ostensibly playing Marlow) first arrives at the Kurtz compound, a very drugged-out Dennis Hopper assaults him with lines from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
• Upon his first meeting with Sheen, Marlon Brando's Kurtz reads to him, from memory, lines from Eliot's The Hollow Men. This poem has two sentences from Heart of Darkness as its epigram ("Mista Kurtz, he dead. / A penny for the old guy").
• While Kurtz is reciting this passage, there are two books clearly visible on his desk: From Ritual to Romance by Jesse Weston, and The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer. Both of these are cultural anthropology tomes on religion and ritual that Eliot had read before composing (and referenced often in) his most famous poem, The Waste Land.