Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola (born April 7, 1939, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.) is an American motion-picture director, writer, and producer whose films range from sweeping epics to small-scale character studies. As the director of films such as The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979), he enjoyed his greatest success and influence in the 1970s, when he attempted to create an alternative to the Hollywood system of film production and distribution.

Early years

Coppola’s father, Carmine, a frustrated composer who played flute in several orchestras, including Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony orchestra, settled his family in the New York City area. Coppola grew up in and around Queens and in Great Neck, on Long Island. Confined to bed with polio at age nine, he devised puppet shows for his own entertainment and soon began making 8-mm films. After earning a B.A. in drama from Hofstra University, he pursued a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of California at Los Angeles, studying filmmaking. During that period Coppola began working for noted low-budget exploitation-film producer-director Roger Corman, for whose American International Pictures he performed second-unit photography and direction, among other tasks. One of Coppola’s first projects was writing dialogue to be dubbed into his reedited versions of a pair of Russian-made films that became The Magic Voyage of Sinbad and Battle Beyond the Sun (both 1962). While on location in Ireland, Coppola persuaded Corman to put up $20,000 to bankroll his first directorial effort, Dementia 13 (1963), a gory horror film based on a script that Coppola had hastily written.

After contributing to the scripts of This Property Is Condemned and Is Paris Burning? (both 1966) as a contract writer for Seven Arts, Coppola wrote and directed the charming coming-of-age tale You’re a Big Boy Now (also 1966), which served as his master’s thesis film. Short on plot but rich with incident, it was the story of a virginal young man (played by Peter Kastner) looking for love while in the employ of the New York Public Library. It featured a remarkable cast (including Elizabeth Hartman, Karen Black, Rip Torn, Tony Bill, Julie Harris, and Geraldine Page) and a soundtrack by the Lovin’ Spoonful. Impressed by the film, Warner Brothers signed Coppola to direct the big-budget musical Finian’s Rainbow (1968). Based on a Broadway play from the 1940s that subversively satirized racism, it starred masterful dancer Fred Astaire but stumbled partly as a result of the mid-production departure of choreographer Hermes Pan.

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Warner Brothers provided the financing ($750,000) for Coppola’s next project, The Rain People (1969). Scripted and directed by Coppola, it followed a pregnant Long Island housewife (Shirley Knight) who leaves her husband and takes to the road. Her path crosses most significantly with those of a former football player with a brain injury (James Caan) and a Nebraska policeman (Robert Duvall). Warner Brothers had tied its financing of The Rain People to another project from Coppola’s fledgling Zoetrope Productions, THX 1138, directed by his friend George Lucas. Disappointed by the box-office results of Coppola’s film and unimpressed by the first cut of Lucas’s, the studio ended the partnership. In the meantime, Coppola won an Academy Award for his collaboration with Franklin Schaffner on the screenplay for Patton (1970).

The 1970s

Coppola’s breakthrough came with The Godfather (1972), a brilliant, enormously successful, muscular adaptation of Mario Puzo’s blockbuster novel of the same name. A huge box-office hit (the fifth highest-grossing film of the 1970s), The Godfather was also lauded by critics and was ranked third on the American Film Institute’s 1998 list of the top 100 American films of all time. A violent, emotionally charged exploration of a Mafia family, The Godfather is a mythic gangster film, but it is also the story of a father and his sons. Marlon Brando won the Academy Award for best actor for his portrayal of the title capo, Vito Corleone. John Cazale, Caan, and Al Pacino played his sons and Duvall his trusted adviser (the last three were nominated for best supporting actor awards). Coppola was nominated as best director, and he and Puzo won the award for best adapted screenplay.

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Financially empowered to make a less commercial, more personal film, Coppola wrote, directed, and produced The Conversation (1974), a meditation on technology’s dehumanizing power. Gene Hackman starred as a surveillance expert who suspects that a couple upon whom he has electronically eavesdropped are about to be murdered. Too bleak for some tastes, the film nonetheless boasted an Academy Award-nominated screenplay as well as strong performances, and it was nominated for the Academy Award for best picture.

Coppola, however, ended up competing against himself, as his masterful sequel The Godfather: Part II (1974) won that year’s Academy Award for best picture. Moving both forward in time through the 1950s and back to the early years of the 20th century, Godfather II bookended the events in The Godfather with contrapuntal stories that enriched each other (and, in the process, the original film). Robert De Niro played the young Vito Corleone, who, having immigrated from Italy, takes over New York’s Little Italy bit by bit, ruthlessly ascending to the rank of “godfather.” In the parallel 1950s story, Vito’s son Michael (Pacino) endeavors (just as ruthlessly) to make the Corleone family legitimate. The Godfather: Part II made explicit the immigrant struggle for survival in America that was at the root of the first Godfather. Michael V. Gazzo and Actors Studio guru Lee Strasberg were nominated for the Academy Award for best supporting actor, which was won by De Niro. Moreover, Coppola won the award for best director and shared the best screenplay award with Puzo while Carmine Coppola and Nino Rota won the award for their musical score.

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At the peak of his influence—no other writer-director had ever had two best picture nominations and two best screenplay nominations in the same year—Coppola set about the arduous task of filming Apocalypse Now (1979), which transposed Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War with a script by Coppola, John Milius, and Michael Herr. The troubled production was plagued by natural disasters (shot on location in the Philippines, it was struck by a typhoon and an earthquake), personal tragedy (star Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack and nearly died), and simple hubris. Coppola’s original $12 million budget finally exceeded $30 million, much of it due to his own profligacy, and a considerable portion of the overrun was paid for by Coppola himself. Moreover, the excessive cost of production and the rumors from the troubled set besmirched the reputation Coppola had earned as the crown prince of Hollywood directors. The quixotic making of the film was chronicled by Coppola’s wife, Eleanor, in her journal Notes (1979) and later in the documentary Hearts of Darkness (1991).

Despite its well-documented problems and setbacks, Apocalypse Now is an assault on the senses that is generally regarded as a flawed masterpiece. It is especially compelling when Duvall and Frederic Forrest are front and center. Brando’s darkly complex depiction of the monomaniacal colonel Kurtz was celebrated by some critics and dismissed by others, but it remains hard to forget. In the end, Apocalypse Now earned eight Academy Award nominations, including best picture, and was anything but a failure at the box office, finishing as the year’s sixth highest-grossing motion picture.