It’s nothing short of a miracle that the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s new film Megalopolis never quite degraded into the Russian-doll existentialism depicted in Synecdoche, New York. Now that the long-mythic project (he’s been teasing the film in interviews at least as far back as 1983) is officially slated for public release, it’s exciting to think that we’ll have gotten new movies from Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and William Friedkin within the span of a year—two iconic New Hollywood directors with seven-decade careers that each lend themselves to endless debates with regard to rankings of their films in spite of some clear frontrunners (shout out After Hours, King of Comedy, Cruising, Sorcerer, etc.) and one iconic New Hollywood director with a seven-decade career who famously made both The Godfather and Jack.
Coppola has already spent most of his life as a filmmaker trying to convince us that he’s misunderstood, but it feels like that narrative becomes more obscured every year that The Godfather remains atop lists from AFI, BFI, and probably any other FIs I’m not aware of. As it happens, the trajectory of his early career was one accidental success after another as he took on gigs adapting literary sources and historical accounts in order to collect finances for projects based on low-concept original screenplays. Almost immediately after a Lynch’s-Dune-like start helming an epic Technicolor musical with Fred Astaire before he even turned 30 (which he took on to gather funds for a personal indie film), he was awarded an Oscar for his Patton screenplay (which he took on to gather funds for a personal indie film) leading him to be considered for the widely turned-down job of adapting Mario Puzo’s popular pulp novel (which he took on to gather funds for a personal indie film)—a project which he adapted and directed so flawlessly that he was asked to return to the text for a sequel before that was really even a thing in Hollywood (which he begrudgingly took on—you guessed it—to gather funds for a personal indie film).
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here, as is bound to happen when discussing the wild, non-linear journey that is Coppola’s career—which is not unlike the boat ride through surreal scenes experienced by Willard in Apocalypse Now—evidently all leading up to the even more epic-scaled and presumably even more personal Megalopolis. And before we go any further, I’d like to contextualize the clichéd “most personal work to date” designation—a phrase abused by artists and their PRs alike in an effort to make audiences care about the fact that they’re announcing a new project for the 23rd time. With Coppola, though, he always tends to have a point when he uses this phrase: Although I think he’s referring to the time and energy he puts into these movies (again, the deeply complex universe he built for Megalopolis began with him deep-diving Roman history some 40 years ago), in reality the ongoing autobiographical element always seems to slip in without him realizing it, usually with regard to the film’s family dynamics (need we remind you how deep his family’s nepotism runs?).
This journey of accidentally telling us how he feels about his career and his family began in the early ’60s with a widely overlooked first chapter wherein the director was hired to put up with whatever bullshit (complimentary) Roger Corman threw his way in order to bang out Dementia 13 (allegedly Corman’s the one who added the number to the film’s otherwise explicable title as a hail-mary in hopes of theaters showing it on the 13th of every month) on a Corman-tight budget and a Corman-tight shooting schedule at the tender age of 24 (take that, Orson). Turning around something irreverently coherent, which previewed the family dramas he’d transform into genre films in the future, he then graduated to the more substantially budgeted You’re a Big Boy Now that incidentally also served as Coppola’s thesis project for his UCLA graduate film program.
With this momentum, he got in over his head with the aforementioned musical Finian’s Rainbow in ’68, leading to his preliminary Most Personal Film Yet: 1969’s The Rain People, his first adaptation of an original story that’s as bold as it is (by his own admission) flawed. What probably felt like a fairly optimistic start to a career in no-budget, purely autonomous filmmaking for Coppola, Rain People retained plenty of the quirk of the new-wave-y You’re a Big Boy Now while hinting at the family tragedies to come in his filmography, as the narrative investigates the way women get stuck in a maternal/marital role no matter where they turn in our broken country full of overly reliant men. Though the movie’s overt feminism doesn’t foreshadow much in the Coppola canon, its cautionary tale about turning on one’s family outlines his predominant MO solidified in the impending Godfathers.
In the meantime, the for-hire screenwriting side gigs he began working while at UCLA (he wrote alongside—and butted heads with—Gore Vidal and for Sydney Pollack) escalated to the point of Oscar recognition, putting his plans for his follow-up—the aforementioned indie film, The Conversation—on hold until he’d worked through a couple more Oscar-generating projects in the form of The Godfather and its first sequel. The Conversation, on the other hand, remains Coppola’s only celebrated film from an original screenplay, eerily channeling the director’s repressed anxieties about how he was being perceived by the public—which bloated significantly between when he completed the script in the mid-’60s to its theatrical run half a year before The Godfather Part II. It’s a great movie on its own terms, but it’s also fascinating as the sole look at the muted, low- to mid-budget Coppola we didn’t get to see again for another three decades.
Similar in its singularity to Conversation yet directly oppositional in scope, Apocalypse Now was a fairly straightforward fusion of a jingoist John Milius/Michael Herr original script and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that wound up being both a stunningly apolitical (well, maybe not according to Rumsfeld) condemnation of the Vietnam War and a deeply layered character study of a filmmaker leading his cast, crew, and immediate family down the film’s metaphorical river toward madness. In being a cautionary tale about “winning it your own way,” it arrived in the wake of the ever-combative Coppola achieving unprecedented success in an industry he desperately aimed to shake up, and notably featured a prolonged shooting period in which the filmmaker (much like his subject) anxiously ambled along until reaching the final moment of required decision-making (basically he didn’t know how to end it). As suggested by his wife Eleanor’s published Notes and the Hearts of Darkness documentary the book later lent itself to, it was also the story of Coppola’s marriage, post-infidelity, where Francis had become warped by the jungle into a megalomaniacal Kurtz figure Eleanor was unsure how to confront as she silently observed the production’s horrors.
While Coppola slowly earned back all $30+ mil he dropped on Apocalypse Now’s three-year production period, he very quickly showed us what it would’ve looked like had the production flopped with another, more most-personal-er most-personal-film-to-date in the form of a self-penned story literally titled One From the Heart—a script that feels both as promising and undercooked as Rain People did, as it oddly sets an equally small-scale story about a couple experimenting with unethical non-monogamy within the largest independently owned lot in Hollywood. Clearly the script is playing second fiddle to the imagery of Coppola’s recently purchased Zoetrope Studios set (it gets a shout out in the end credits before any cast or crew), with what feels like a two-hour advertisement for a regression back to old-Hollywood ideals. I guess it sort of did achieve that goal by being solidified alongside Popeye and Heaven’s Gate as one of the most expensive turn-of-the-decade gambles directed by an esteemed New Hollywood director that ushered in the end of that fertile creative period.
Despite the fact that the next 20 years saw Coppola mostly just stepping into for-hire gigs, directing projects he almost certainly wouldn’t helm otherwise or stepping in to salvage a film mid-production (successfully or not) to work his way out of debt, there are five movies from this period that feel worth mentioning. The first of these is the freewheeling Rumble Fish, an S.E. Hinton adaptation he Corman-ed together while still in Omaha after wrapping production on another, worse Hinton adaptation he got bullied into making by middle schoolers. Contrasting with the tearjerker tropes of The Outsiders, the unexpectedly humble Rumble Fish is actually one from the heart as its fraternal narrative is dedicated to Coppola’s older brother (and the father of Nic Cage, who appears in the film wearing a detailed recreation of his dad’s actual jacket). Much more solemnly, 1987’s Gardens of Stone became another familial homage as its production coincided with the freak-accident death of Coppola’s oldest son. Spectrally directed (understandably), the story of a (surrogate) son dying a pointless death which his (surrogate) dad feels powerless to stop became a vessel for grief rather than the Vietnam War story Rumsfeld always wanted Coppola to tell (he did approve this movie’s script prior to filming).
The following year, Coppola reconnected with his somewhat-estranged former protege George Lucas, who helped bankroll Tucker: The Man and His Dream, a movie about a family man who sells investors on a highly innovative product by advertising it before it’s been fully ideated, who’s prone to violent tantrums in boardrooms and on the production line when his vision gets diluted, and who ultimately spends twice his budget to create a product so perfect that the evil press cuts it down before it gets a chance to shine—but it’s OK, because ultimately he’s just doing it for the people (if you still aren’t convinced of the autobiographical lens, the budget in question is $26 million, the same as that of One From the Heart).
As something of a yang to its yin, Coppola’s next movie was a blatant cash grab he’d previously sworn he’d never stoop to, which probably became much more appealing once he approached it as a personal fantasy of a guy so rich he’s able to pay off other people’s multi-million dollar debts. If that isn’t enough to chalk Godfather III up as one of FFC’s MPFTDs, consider the angle that it’s about a powerful man realizing too late in life that he never really put his family before his work, with his own non-actor daughter stepping in to play the role of the patriarch’s offspring.
Hear me out, but the last movie I wanna talk about from this period is Jack. Beneath all the fart jokes of its Benjamin-Button-by-way-of-30-Rock-gag script about a kid who ages at four times the speed of his peers lies a tidy allegory for a filmmaker who was bullied by his contemporaries for his enormous stature at such a young age, and who overcame that ridicule only to watch those same contemporaries later worry about his well-being at the geriatric age of 17. I know it’s kind of a meme, and certainly not a passion project for Coppola, but it’s a shockingly morbid movie—I read a journal entry Coppola wrote in the early ’90s where he spoke as if he didn’t expect to live much longer, making all the fantastical medical, existential, and hormonal concerns the movie presents—and anxiously follows through on—fairly weighty. The valedictorian speech a 68-year-old Robin Williams gives to his high school classmates at the end of the film feels like a self-eulogy, either for its writer’s life or for his career.
Which brings us up to Coppola’s present wine-money era. Before committing to his long-held dream project that makes the extravagance of One From the Heart (not to mention the controversial production of Apocalypse Now) seem quaint, the director finally got to release a series of mid-budget personal projects reflecting on his own life and work (they’re curiously all about struggling to find an end to one’s story). 2007’s Youth Without Youth is about a 70-year-old man magically becoming 40 again and getting a second chance at finishing his “life’s work”; 2009’s Tetro is another narrative about two brothers—in this case, the sons of a composer, as Coppola is; 2011’s Twixt is about an author insisting on creating something for himself rather than churning out his bread-and-butter witch books (see: mafia movies), dealing with financiers who demand a firm story rather than “style bullshit,” and putting up with leech-y collaborators (it also features a stirring moment explicitly recreating the scene of Coppola’s son’s tragic death).
While Megalopolis certainly sounds broad in its scope, I’m gonna go out on a limb and predict that at its heart, it’s a movie about one deeply complex subject: Francis Ford Coppola. FL
