Apocalypse Now Redux
John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola
Faber £12.99, pp208

Now that every new film drags a spangled train of merchandising behind it, you can almost certainly cherish the screenplay of American Pie II in limited-edition calfskin, and break the ice at slumber parties with a slightly foxed folio of Scream III. But to date there has been no generally available script of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's extravagant satire of the Vietnam War, even though it's often the first name on the team-sheet when the line-up of all time greats is being picked.

I like to imagine this omission is not unconnected to the snafus and artistic differences for which the movie has become a byword. Perhaps a clause buried deep in Harvey Keitel's contract was activated by his agent after he was fired from the role of Captain Willard in favour of Martin Sheen nearly a month into principal photography.

At any rate, Faber is finally plugging the gap in the cineaste's shelf between the diary kept by the director's wife during the making of the film, and Peter Cowie's exhaustive The Apocalypse Now Book. The latter has become a kind of Dead Sea Scrolls to hollow-eyed completists, 'who croon over every scrap of hearsay like relic hunters musing on the knucklebone of a saint', as the critic of The New Yorker put it recently.

Well, the hearsay is now history, or so we are led to believe. The long-awaited text accompanies a definitive re-edit of the movie. In effect, Apocalypse Now Redux is a crib to the director's cut of the film, which puts back the fabled missing sequences minutely inventoried by Cowie.

One result of these restorations is to extend the running time from two and a half hours to a popcorn-hardening three and a quarter. The screenplay is commensurately outsize. But readers of these pages have long known where to find the book-of-the film in a conveniently portable format.

Apocalypse Now was inspired by Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness. Coincidentally, it's 100 years since Conrad was doing his own retouching of what was originally a magazine piece, before its first release between hard covers in 1902.

The story of Kurtz, the ivory trader with an 'unlawful soul', who is driven mad by egoism and worshipped as a god at his remote African station, has had an impact out of all proportion to its lightweight frame (the Penguin Classic imprint tips the scales at 94 pages: about the length of the roll call of caterers on the Coppola project). Werner Herzog also tried to film Heart of Darkness, and its influence is present, acknowledged or otherwise, in Gide, William Golding, TS Eliot and Borges.

The Conrad book is a work of smoke and mirrors - or rather, of steam and shadows. The reader spends no more than 10 pages in the company of Kurtz, who turns in one of the greatest cameos in literature. He is already dying, and we catch only scraps of his much-advertised 'eloquence'. Admittedly, there's more in these scraps than in sheaves of other writers' dialogue.

Heart of Darkness has been called the first twentieth-century novel. Appropriately, Conrad seems to have had one eye on the possibility of a movie adaptation. When Marlow, the pursuer of Kurtz, demands of his listeners 'Do you see him? Do you see the story?' he might have been anticipating Coppola's animated exchanges with studio executives. At last they're taking Apocalypse Now out of its mothballs, and to borrow the in-joke of the dry-cleaning industry, 'I love the smell of naphthalene in the mornings!'

· Stephen Smith is a Channel 4 News reporter