Since Coppola had directed a student production of a musical at Hofstra University before graduating in 1960, he decided to return to the stage for a month in the summer of 2000. He adapted the novel Gidget, about a teenaged girl who loves surfing, into a high school musical. He composed all twelve of the original songs himself. He then staged the show as a workshop production at Orange County High School for the Performing Arts in Cerritos, California, and the four-night run got raves from the locals. Coppola, as we know, was a drama counselor at a summer camp when he was in his teens. “I like to work with kids,” he says, which is obvious from The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, and Jack. “It was really a nice experience for me. And that was how I spent my summer vacation.”15
Meanwhile Coppola has continued as a member of the board of directors of MGM-UA. Indeed, he supervised (uncredited) the final edit of Supernova (2000) after the director, Walter Hill, walked off the picture due to artistic squabbles with the studio brass. The movie starred James Spader, who urged Coppola to pull up a chair to the editing table and rescue the picture. So it seems that Coppola’s career has come full circle. Not only did he return briefly to directing student musicals, but he also reedited a movie, just as he had reedited a Russian sci-fi film, Battle Beyond the Run, while he was working for Roger Corman after departing UCLA’s film school in the early 1960s.
Supernova casts Spader as an astronaut aboard a medical rescue ship who discovers a malevolent alien stowed away on board. MGM-UA insisted on a PG-13 rating for the film, so Coppola and his editing team had to delete some material in the love scenes between Spader and Angela Bassett (as a lady astronaut) that he would have preferred to keep. He also eliminated a confusing subplot. As a result, the release prints of the movie came in at a spare eighty-eight minutes. Still Coppola’s editorial assistance helped to create a standard sci-fi movie that is an intriguing, gripping deep-space thriller. Coppola issued a statement when the film premiered, stating, “I hope that my experience in the film industry helped improve the picture and rectified some of the problems that losing a director caused.”16
More important for Coppola personally was the release of a reedited version of Apocalypse Now Redux (2001), with fifty minutes of footage added to the film as originally released. The release of this new version of Apocalypse Now was like “the reclaiming of a child.” It is a fascinating reworking of the original movie that seems “to alter the film enormously and make it into a masterpiece that left the contemporary landscape of films in 2001 looking even more threadbare.” By the same token, Ryan Gilbey, in his 2003 book on the films of the 1970s, It Don’t Worry Me, contrasts the weatherproof grandeur of The Godfather with the dated machismo of gangster pictures like Dirty Harry.17
In recent years Coppola has received recognition from various sectors in the film world. These acknowledgments include a Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival in 1992 for his contribution to the art of the cinema; a Life Achievement Award in 1998, the highest honor that can be bestowed by the Directors Guild of America; and a gala tribute by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York on May 7,2002, for his distinguished career in the cinema. In addition, the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, which preserves films that are deemed culturally, historically, and aesthetically important, included The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and The Conversation in its collection in 1995.
Moreover, the American Film Institute honored the best one hundred American films made during the first century of cinema with a TV special that aired on July 16, 1998. Included high on the list of films (which were chosen by a panel of film professionals and critics) were The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now. Furthermore, an international poll of filmmakers and film critics, conducted in 2002 by Sight and Sound, the London film journal, voted Coppola one of the top ten directors of all time and listed the same three films just mentioned among the ten greatest motion pictures ever made. Furthermore, when Premiere magazine held a nationwide poll in 2003 for the one hundred greatest movies, Godfather II led the list in first place. In addition, when the AFI announced the top one hundred heroes and villains during a TV special broadcast on June 3, 2003, Michael Corleone, as played by Al Pacino in Godfather II, was among the legendary villains of all time. The official recognition accorded Coppola by the Directors Guild, the American Film Institute, the Library of Congress, and other organizations attests to his enduring contribution to American film.
At the close of the Lincoln Center tribute, Coppola gave a “curtain speech” in which he stated:
At the Academy Awards in 1979 I presented the Best Director award. I don’t know what got into me but I looked at that vast audience of people out there in their tuxedos (this was the entire body of the creative talent really of Hollywood) and I just broke from what I was supposed to say, and started talking about the future: how the cinema was about to change, and how it would happen in a wonderful way. But even with all this new technology, it will always be based on human talent. The people were looking at me kind of funny. Of course what I said was true. Cinema has continued to evolve, and since it’s always been a marriage of technology and human talent it would be naive to think it wouldn’t continue….
The new cinema of the last few years shows what the real potential is. Artists working together on extraordinary impossible films air the ideas and question the problems, which illuminate contemporary life and bring us to some solutions. I dream and hope the cinema in general can step forward, be something other than a means of employment. Many of my colleagues would love someone to say to them, “Gee, make a film you consider valuable, not something we have calculated with our corporate budgets.” If you wonder why few classics have been made in the last 20 years, that’s primarily the reason.18
Writing on the occasion of Coppola’s Lincoln Center tribute, Kent Jones notes: “There are few spectacles in American cinema more touching than the career of Francis Ford Coppola, one-time wunderkind, now creative grand old man of Hollywood…. There’s something uniquely moving about Coppola’s need to bring us all under his tent and waltz together to the music of the spheres.” It even accounts, as stated above, for his smaller films, “where he’s looking for a shortcut to grandeur.” Coppola possesses “talent to burn and a precocious command of the medium,” which makes him “a great director, as opposed to a calculating entertainer.”19
In fact, Coppola is an expert storyteller capable of making riveting films with powerful performances. As such, he has sometimes been called a genius—a term he disavows: “It’s embarrassing when someone calls me a genius. What is that? I would like it if it meant I was a unique person, one of a kind.”20 He prefers to think of himself as “a talented amateur,” he tells me. “I’m an amateur, because being an amateur means that you make movies because you love them—not to make a living.”
Coppola has always maintained that he is not interested in “soap opera psychodramas” rife with sentimentality, or the rest of “the current parade of clichés and formulas” that open every week at the multiplex. On the contrary, “I am stimulated by stories of great adventure and enterprise,” films like Apocalypse Now and Tucker. “We all know what the last act will be, that we’ll be looking up from a bed somewhere saying our final words. When that happens to me, I want to know that I went on some adventures. I think in those terms, and prefer stories about people like that, people who step out.”21
Coppola ended his remarks at the Lincoln Center gala by saying that he had begun work on an ambitious, epic-scale film entitled Megalopolis. “Al Pacino, quoting Robert Browning has said, ‘If a man’s reach does not exceed his grasp, what’s a heaven for?”‘ Actually Coppola has been nursing this pet project, which deals with “the contest of the past and the present,” since the early 1980s. In it he plans to mesh a story of the corruption of ancient Rome at the time of the conspiracy fomented by the corrupt politician Catiline (108–62 B.C.) with a story about the evils of modern urban life in contemporary New York. So the movie
“will swing from the past to the present, and the images of republican Rome will merge and blend with the New York of today.”22 “Clearly, a man with a phantom project called Megalopolis on the back burner has a whole universe in his head, far more expansive and more magical than anything possible in drab old reality. And what’s touching is the way he attempts to share the oceanic vastness of his imagination with this audience.”23 Whether Coppola has another great film in him remains to be seen. That he has already proved himself to be an exceptional director is beyond question.
And the Coppola legend lives on. Sofia Coppola’s second feature, Lost in Translation (2003), a bittersweet comedy with Bill Murray playing a Hollywood star stranded in Tokyo, was the occasion of a cover story on Sofia in the New York Times Magazine. The article states that Sofia promises to live up to the standard set by her father, “one of the most important American filmmakers of all time.”24 Francis Coppola served as an executive producer on the film for American Zoetrope, a company with a history as long and varied as the producer himself. Coppola now has his own American Zoetrope DVD label, which releases not only his own films but the films of other directors. As usual, Coppola runs this operation with state- of-the-art equipment that allows for the best possible transfers of film to DVD.
The reputations of filmmakers soar and sputter in the stock market of critical opinion. Reliable blue-chip directors like Coppola tend to weather the cyclical ups and downs of the marketplace with long-term returns. In 2004 Premiere magazine released the results of another nationwide poll, this time for the seventy-five most influential films of all time. The Godfather was chosen because it elevated the gangster film to the level of epic cinema. Furthermore, pictures such as Coppola’s recent Dracula continue to be popular on TV; indeed, TV Guide hailed the movie upon a recent showing as “Coppola’s sumptuously crafted vampire classic.”25 A Hollywood director who has helped set the gold standard for motion picture artistry with films like the Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, Peggy Sue Got Married, Dracula, and The Rainmaker, Francis Coppola has forever secured his place in the pantheon of auteur directors.
Notes
Prologue: Artist in an Industry
1. Lee Lourdeaux, Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America: Ford, Capra, Coppola, and Scorsese (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 177.
2. Richard Schickel, “Rough Cuts,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 13 January 2002, p. 2.
3. Jeffrey Chown, Hollywood Auteur: Francis Coppola (New York: Praeger, 1988), p. 214.
4. Chuck Kleinhans, “Independent Features: Hopes and Dreams,” in The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 310.
5. Michael Schumacher, Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life (New York: Crown, 1999), pp. 179–80.
6. Gerald Mast and Bruce Kavvin, A Short History of the Movies, rev. ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000), p. 444.
7. Robert Johnson, Francis Ford Coppola (Boston: Twayne, 1977), p. 29.
1. Point of Departure
1. Ben Hecht, “Enter the Movies,” in Film: An Anthology, ed. Daniel Talbot (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), p. 258.
2. Unless noted otherwise, quotations from Coppola in this book are from the author’s conversation with him.
3. Lee Eisenberg, “Francis Coppola and Gay Talese,” Esquire Film Quarterly (July 1981): 84.
4. Joseph Gelmis, The Film Director as Superstar (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), p. 179.
5. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: Coppola, Scorsese and Other Directors (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), p. 149.
6. Harlan Lebo, The Godfather Legacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 16.
7. Schumacher, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 19.
8. Jean-Paul Chaillet and Elizabeth Vincent, Francis Ford Coppola, trans. Denise Jacobs (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), p. 3.
9. Johnson, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 28.
10. Ronald Bergan, Francis Ford Coppola: The Making of His Movies (New York: Orion Books, 1998), p. 17.
11. Michael Goodwin and Naomi Wise, On the Edge: The Life and Times of Francis Ford Coppola (New York: Morrow, 1989), p. 238.
12. Ibid., p. 37.
13. Jon Lewis, Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy: Francis Coppola and the New Hollywood (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 15.
14. Peter Cowie, Coppola: A Biography, rev. ed. (New York: Da Capo, 1994), p. 25.
15. Johnson, Francis Ford Coppola, pp. 29–30.
16. Roger Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, with Jim Jerome (New York: Random House, 1990), pp. 90–91.
17. Ibid.
18. Johnson, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 30.
19. Chaillet and Vincent, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 5.
20. Corman, Hundred Movies, pp. 110–11.
21. Cowie, Coppola, p. 26.
22. Corman, Hundred Movies, p. 114.
23. Bergan, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 21.
24. “The Young Racers,” Variety Film Reviews: 1907—1996, vol. 16 (New Providence, N.J.: Bowker, 1997), n.p.
25. Corman, Hundred Movies, pp. 113–14.
26. Michael Pye and Linda Myles, The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1979), p. 71.
27. Bergan, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 21.
28. Goodwin and Wise, On the Edge, p. 44.
29. Johnson, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 32.
30. Goodwin and Wise, On the Edge, p. 48.
31. “Video Classics: Dementia 13” American Film 15, no. 6 (1990): 54.
32. Gelmis, Director as Superstar, p. 180.
33. Ibid., pp. 177, 186.
34. Goodwin and Wise, On the Edge, p. 55.
35. Johnson, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 39.
36. Chaillet and Vincent, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 8.
37. Johnson, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 89.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., p. 90.
40. Robert Evans, The Kid Stays in the Picture: A Memoir (Beverly Hills: Dove, 1995), pp. 248, 255.
41. Johnson, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 170.
42. Ibid., p. 174.
43. Chaillet and Vincent, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 41.
44. Gene D. Phillips, Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction and Film Noir (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), pp. 221, 222.
2. Going Hollywood
1. John Gallagher, Film Directors on Film Directing (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), p. 25.
2. Chaillet and Vincent, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 11.
3. Goodwin and Wise, On the Edge, pp. 63–64.
4. Johnson, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 57.
5. Goodwin and Wise, On the Edge, pp. 63, 64.
6. Chown, Hollywood Auteur, p. 23.
7. Ibid., pp. 23–24.
8. Ibid., p. 26.
9. Lourdeaux, Italian and Irish Filmmakers, p. 176.
10. Goodwin and Wise, On the Edge, p. 73.
11. Chown, Hollywood Auteur, p. 23.
12. Johnson, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 61.
13. Biskind, Easy Riders, p. 36.
14. Goodwin and Wise, On the Edge, p. 75.
15. Gelmis, Director as Superstar, p. 183.
16. Ibid., p. 184.
17. Bergan, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 32.
18. Ibid.
19. Goodwin and Wise, On the Edge, p. 80.
20. Chaillet and Vincent, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 17.
21. Pauline Kael, Going Steady: Film Writings, 1968–1969 (New York: Boyars, 1994), p. 159.
22. Goodwin and Wise, On the Edge, p. 82.
23. Stephen Farber, “George Lucas Hits the Big Time,” in George Lucas: Interviews, ed. Sally Kline (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), p. 36.
24. Dale Pollock, Skywalking: The Life and Times of George Lucas, rev. ed. (New York: Da Capo, 1999), p. 74.
25. Pye and Myles, Movie Brats, p.
82
26. Jean Valley, “The Empire Strikes Back and So Does George Lucas,” in George Lucas: Interviews, ed. Sally Kline (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), p. 96.
3. Nightmares at Noon
1. Judy Stone, Eye on the World: Conversations with Filmmakers (Los Angeles: Silman-James, 1997), p. 642.
2. Bergan, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 34.
3. Gelmis, Director as Superstar, pp. 187–88.
4. Ibid., p. 187.
5. Gabriella Oldham, First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), p. 326.
6. Chaillet and Vincent, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 21.
7. Ibid., pp. 27–28.
8. Dennis Schaefer and Larry Salvato, Masters of Light: Conversations with Contemporary Cinematographers (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 85, 88.
9. Goodman and Wise, On the Edge, p. 87.
10. Johnson, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 73.
11. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 710.
12. Goodwin and Wise, On the Edge, pp. 91–92.
13. Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Holt, 1991), p. 613.
14. Chaillet and Vincent, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 21.
15. Pollock, George Lucas, p. 85.
16. David Briskin, Inner Voices: Filmmakers in Conversation, rev. ed. (New York: Da Capo, 1997), p. 15.
17. Chaillet and Vincent, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 29.
18. Pollock, George Lucas, p. 88.
19. Chaillet and Vincent, Francis Ford Coppola, p. 30.
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