Coppola's Comeback
Looking Back, and Looking Forward to 'Megalopolis'
A good story has to contain both a rise, and a fall. It could be a tragedy, a story ended by the fall. Or it could be a tale of re-birth, of come-back, and those are the stories we are attracted to most of all. But there must be a fall somewhere, otherwise we as the audience get either bored or jealous.
Francis Ford Coppola’s story fits into this template. There is staggering success, there is crushing failure, and now there are hopes of a grand and epic finale; a glistening sweet cherry on top of one of the most amazing careers in filmmaking.
Coppola is most well known as being the creator of The Godfather, perhaps the defining American film of the last century. An adaptation of Mario Puzo’s trashy pulp novel, with it the young Coppola managed to conjure up an unlikely piece of cinematic art, and quickly became of the hottest young directors around. But in many ways, The Godfather is one of the least interesting things Coppola did – what he did afterwards is much stranger and more compelling.
Francis Ford Coppola began directing Apocalypse Now, the long-gestating Vietnam War movie in March 1976. The script, by self-described ‘zen anarchist’ John Milius, had been in the works since 1967, and was initially intended for George Lucas, a close friend of both men. By the time Apocalypse got the go-ahead, it was no longer Lucas’s low-budget cinéma verité black comedy – he was too busy making a weirdly personal science fiction film called Star Wars – instead Coppola took on the project and envisioned it as a big-budget epic about the nature of war, madness and the American empire.
When he arrived in the Philippines in March, Coppola was expecting a four-month shoot, and the movie was meant to be released on April 7th 1977. The shoot took 238 days and the film was released in late 1979.
Difficulties began even ahead of shooting. Coppola, fresh off of winning five Academy Awards and massive commercial success, was in a bind: no one wanted to finance the film, and no one wanted to act in it. Brando was lured by the offer of $2 million for four weeks work but other actors proved impossible to get. Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, Steve McQueen, James Caan, and Robert Reford were all wanted for the part of Colonel Willard and all declined. The B-list was looked to, and Harvey Keitel was selected, but was re-cast for Martin Sheen as Keitel was judged unsuitable after just a few days.
Even with the casting issues solved, the film quickly went off the rails. A typhoon destroyed more than half of the sets. One production designer remembered that ‘it started raining harder and harder until finally it was literally white outside, and all the trees were bent at forty-five degrees.’ The damage was extraordinary, and the sets would take months to rebuild. The pyrotechnic explosions proved dangerous and nearly injured crew-members several times.
One day, the entire payroll was stolen despite the set being watched by armed guards. Helicopters and their pilots, lent to the filmmakers by the Marcos regime, had to be recalled suddenly in order to fight a communist insurgency in the south of the country. Prostitution and drug-use was widespread and there was an on-set Gonorrhoea outbreak. The film kept running over budget and over time – terrible news for Coppola who was partially funding Apocalypse himself and facing 27% interest rates.
When Brando finally arrived in the Philippines he was so overweight that the ending had to be re-written and he was shot mostly in mostly wearing black, and in close-up to hide his weight. Martin Sheen, the lead, had a near-fatal heart attack that was covered up lest the movie be shut down. Eleanor Coppola, Francis’s wife, was encouraged by him to shoot a behind-the-scenes documentary whilst all of this was happening – in it we see Coppola unravelling. A ‘method director’ instead of a ‘method actor’, Coppola had to live the movie as he was filming it – by exploring what madness meant, he risked slowly becoming mad himself.
Apocalypse Now seems like it would be the tell-tale example of an artist’s fall. Hubris and madness leading to a creative apocalypse in the East Asian jungle. But, as we know, Apocalypse turned into a enormous success. A work-in-progress cut was screened at Cannes – something that had never been done before, but one of Coppola’s gambles that paid off – and promptly won the prestigious Palme D’Or. Initially opening in just three cinemas in North America (those equipped with right equipment to play the film’s revolutionary sound design), the movie gained steamed and quickly became both a critical and commercial success. Coppola got his money back, and more. He flew close to the sun, but his wings did not melt off.
Coppola took his money, and his re-established clout – his four film-run during the 1970s: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather: Part Two, Apocalypse Now, is simply remarkable and has not been eclipsed since, critically or commercially – and ploughed it back into his dream, something called Zoetrope.
What is a zoetrope? A zoetrope is a pre-cinematic device that creates the illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of drawings or photographs inside a rotating cylinder. Viewers look through slits in the cylinder to see the images blend into a continuous, animated scene. Coppola was fascinated by zoetropes as a child – it must have been a good way to pass the time during long hospitalisations for polio, for a little boy fascinated by film and technology.
For Coppola Zoetrope was his life-long dream. It was the name of the film production company he had started with his friends, named after a childhood toy. Zoetrope was intended to change the Hollywood system – to replace the old way of doing things, with the new. The name Zoetrope comes from the Greek, and as the company’s first ads reminded people: ‘Zoetrope means Life Revolution’. The life revolution didn’t work out. Coppola and his friends signed a deal with Warner Brothers to produce five films, but this was quickly quashed after the failure of Lucas’s THX 1138 in 1971. The $300,000 payment for the deal turned out to be a loan that Coppola was liable for. He needed money, and agreed to film some commercial film called The Godfather after it had been turned down by numerous other directors.
Nine years and five Oscars later Coppola decided to restart the dream of American Zoetrope. Whilst he couldn’t recapture the rag-tag spirit of Zoetrope’s early days he certainly could try. Coppola was always a source of big ideas, an Italian-American renaissance man, obsessed with art and technology. Coppola wanted Zoetrope to become a Mecca for film-makers and creative types and employed some of his favourite people such as Jean-Luc Goddard, Gene Kelly and Akira Kurosawa. Occasionally – no, often – enthusiasm outweighed common-sense, however. Coppola took a meeting with legendary Old Hollywood director King Vidor, hoping to finance his next moon – the octogenarian was going deaf and blind.
In 1980, Coppola bought a movie studio in Los Angeles, going against Zoetrope’s initial impetus which was to move the film industry from L.A. to San Francisco. This proved to be a mistake, as a combination of financial mismanagement and over-ambition meant that the studio was gradually, and then suddenly near-bankrupt. The situation could have been salvageable but Coppola’s plans to ‘make a better telephone, develop a more efficient toaster, improve the style of baseball uniforms’ and to create a ‘revolutionary design school’ in the style of Bauhaus, were all killed by a little movie called One From the Heart.
After Apocalypse Now, Coppola wanted to do something different and settled on directing a small-scale romance movie called One From the Heart from a script Armyan Bernstein. With Coppola being Coppola, the project quickly grew in scope. He turned it into a musical and hired Tom Waits to write the score. He also used the film as a test-run for a pioneering new technology called Electronic Cinematography. This approach integrated video and film technologies and allowed him to view the electronic 'video' version of a scene immediately after it was shot, a big change from the time when directors had to wait days for the film to be developed to see the results.
Stylistically, One From the Heart is beautiful. It had better be. The film went so over-budget, destroyed Coppola’s Zoetrope dream, and ended ‘The New Hollywood’. But one can at least see every dollar on screen. The film was shot entirely on several stages just outside of Las Vegas but was paradoxically set in Vegas. Coppola’s Vegas was even more monumental than the real thing, all bright neon and flashing lights. Despite the stylistic flourishes though, the film never comes alive, because the romance between the couple never feels real. It could be down to the script or the acting, but ultimately it was Coppola’s responsibility – people on set described him as being distant, and shut off in his trailer, fiddling with the new technology, rather than getting to the emotional heart of the story. He was once again the boy scientist of his youth, in trance to his gadgets and emotionally stifled.
As Zoetrope struggled financially Coppola’s investors pulled out and he struggled to pay his workers to finish the movie. Remarkably, they continued to work for free. The film was completed but there would be no saving grace like on Apocalypse. The film was panned by critics, and earned less than a million dollars, on a nearly $30 million dollar budget. Pauline Kael aptly titled her review ‘Melted Ice Cream’. One From the Heart is perhaps unfairly maligned, and has flashes of genius, but there is no denying that it was disastrous for Coppola’s Zoetrope utopia. He was forced to sell the film studio and radically scale-back his vision. For the next two decades he worked as a director-for-hire, taking on commercial work in order to pay back his debts and making low-budget art films on the side. Some say that he never made a good film after Apocalypse Now.
So how does Coppola’s story end? You can’t keep a man like Coppola down. For much of the past decades Coppola has been building his wine business. He’s clearly a man of great appetite has his own brand of pasta, sauce and even cannabis. He’s started a magazine, runs a chain of small hotels and has created a prestigious short story competition. In 2021 he sold his winery for what is rumoured to be close to a billion dollars.
With the Zoetrope dream dead, Coppola has invested in another dream, a movie called Megalopolis. The story was floating around his mind even before Apocalypse Now and was a life-long passion project. He began writing it in the 1980s, and during the 1990s, he made films like Bram Stoker’s Dracula so he could get out of debt and fund Megalopolis. In 2001, the film was close to pre-production with actors being selected, and over 30 hours of B-footage being shot in New York City. The project was abandoned after 9/11 however and stayed dormant until finally in 2019 Megalopolis was once again announced to be in development.
What is Megalopolis? To this day we don’t know – though it is likely to come out either this year, or in the next. Coppola has hinted that the film would be a love story, but that it would also contain elements of science fiction, as the story would concern the battle between tradition and progress. It would be based on the Catilinarian conspiracy – a power struggle in Ancient Roman history – but the film would also have contemporary significance, being set in present-day New York. Someone close to the film has described it as ‘Julius Caesar meets Blade Runner’. Coppola has also released a list of books that inspired the film, including works by Francis Fukuyama, David Graeber and Hermann Hesse. If you don’t know what any of this means, then you are not alone. I suppose we’ll all have to wait until Megalopolis is released. The details look promising: the cast list includes a mix of up-and-coming actors like Adam Driver and Shia LeBeouf as well as old greats such as Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight; the film is also entirely self-funded by Coppola himself and is said to use innovative new technology.
What happens with Megalopolis is anyone’s guess. However, in a way, it doesn’t matter whether the film is good or not. The important thing is that it is happening at all. One man’s artistic journey is coming to an end with a bang rather than a whimper. We can only hope that Coppola’s $100 million gamble pays off. Coppola’s dreams of American Zoetrope, of a filmmaker’s utopia, may not have panned out like he wanted. But we can’t say that his approach has been a failure.
In Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, two characters debate agrarian socialism. ‘Fourierism was tried in the 19th century and failed – wasn’t Brook Farm Fourierist? – it failed,’ says the sceptic. ‘That’s debatable,’ replies the believer. ‘Whether Brook Farm failed?’ the sceptic asks again. ‘That it ceased to exist I’ll grant you, but whether it was a failure I don’t think can be definitely said,’ comes the reply. I think that’s right. American Zoetrope didn’t fail, it ceased to exist. And Megalopolis won’t fail either, because its very existence is success.
This article originally appeared in Interkom magazine.