Though Cyndi Wood is still remembered for her definitive cowgirl dance before a crowd of frantic GIs in Apocalypse Now, she originally had a greater part in the film. Her psychologically intense 15-minute scene with actor Sam Bottoms after the Playboy helicopter breaks down on the river ended up on the cutting room floor. Wood felt that Coppola "wanted to give a girl in a magazine a platform to make a statement about what it was really like to be celebrated for your beauty.

"After I was Playmate of the Year I went for almost two years without going on a single date, and I was very lonely. Men who would go out with me had a hard time just being themselves because they'd created this illusion in their minds of who I was and it had nothing to do with who I was at all. Francis wanted to capture some of this kind of thing because the guys over in Vietnam went through the same thing: a lot of loneliness, a lot of feeling separate, wanting to connect with the opposite sex and never having the opportunity."

As with most of the Apocalypse cast, Wood's experience on the notoriously over-budget, disaster-struck film was one of the most significant experiences in her career. The production was imperiled by a horrific typhoon, the death of fellow crew members in a freakish helicopter accident and rumors of witchcraft and curses placed on the production. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, the 1991 documentary on the making of Apocalypse, tells only half the story of the wild times behind the scenes of the Vietnam epic, says Wood.

"If a hundred years from now they decided to make a film about what really went on over there, it would be ten times more interesting than the movie itself. At times, everything was so surrealistic that, honest to God, I thought I was really in Vietnam. It was an amazing life experience that I will always remember."