Simon Thompson chronicles Francis Ford Coppola’s career purgatory post-Apocalypse Now, as the filmmaker flitted between exile and embrace by the mainstream Hollywood studios…
Francis Ford Coppola’s name is one that is synonymous with one of the most daring, innovative and exciting eras in American filmmaking, the New Hollywood era (1967- early 80s). Although this period was widely acknowledged as his heyday, he found himself being in and out of fashion in the 1980s, because of a systemic shift to a much more corporatized Hollywood machine that pushed the talented and experimental “movie brats” like Coppola and Scorsese onto the sidelines.
Some of the movie brats managed to negotiate this landscape better than others, falling in and out of favour with producers, a process which Coppola took to extremes not experienced by the others, before enjoying a briefly welcoming period in the 1990s, subsequently retreating back into exile again to raise the finances for his latest film, the science fiction/political epic Megalopolis. In true Coppola fashion, Megalopolis has had an incredibly elongated production yet has restored him back to a level of prominence that he hasn’t known for a long time.
When people talk of Coppola it’s the 1970s which often get mentioned- and for good reason. Coppola in this decade went on a directing run that most filmmakers would fight a hundred Kimbo Slices in a back alley to achieve. From 1972-1979 he directed; The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974), The Conversation (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979) – four of the most highly regarded and influential American films of the mid-late 20th century (contrary to those shoddily inserted AI generated quotes in the Megalopolis trailer).
As the 1970s became the 1980s, Coppola embarked on a game of hop-scotch between studio acceptability and a kind of martyred exile, a sacrificial lamb upon the altar of a newly corporatized Hollywood that, after the expensive failures of movies such as 1941, New York New York, and Heaven’s Gate, was looking for crowd-pleasing hits which played it safe, a far cry from the days where works such as Apocalypse Now and The Godfather would be afforded lavish budgets.
After the hellscape that was the production of Apocalypse Now, Coppola decided that for his first movie of the 1980s he wanted to make a straight down the middle love story in the style of a golden age Hollywood musical a la Vincente Minelli or Stanley Donen. Coppola believed this endeavour, entitled One From The Heart and starring Fredric Forrest and Terri Garr, with music written by Tom Waits, would be both a guaranteed hit and protect him from any of the financial fallout stemming from his fears of Apocalypse Now being a box office turkey.
Initially budgeted at an already sizeable $15 million ($57 million in today’s money) One From The Heart’s production costs skyrocketed to almost $26 million due to Coppola’s demand for lavish backgrounds and expensive miniatures to create a dreamlike atmosphere. Originally supposed to be produced by Coppola for MGM, Coppola moved the movie to his own newly created studio Zoetrope, taking out heavy pre-loans (borrowing which has undergone a soft credit check) to finance the production and gambling with house money in the process.
This gamble would not pay off, however, as the movie, while on the one hand praised for its striking visuals, was also being heavily criticised by reviewers at the same time for its flimsy characterisation and narrative. To make matters even worse, however, One From The Heart absolutely flat-lined at the box office, making little over $600,000- nowhere even close to half of its budget.
In an ironic twist of fate the movie that Coppola thought would be his insurance policy in Hollywood had fared far worse critically and commercially than Apocalypse Now, the one that he thought would be his epitaph. The disastrous box office takings of One From The Heart would both bankrupt Zoetrope (killing numerous interesting auteur projects from the likes of David Lynch, Michael Powell, and Claire Noto in the process) and mark him as a director not to be trusted by the studio higher-ups.
One From The Heart signalled a humiliating nixing of Coppola’s dreams of becoming a Louis B Mayer style mogul, and forced him back into working within a Hollywood landscape that, while he didn’t recognise it, he realised he would have to tolerate if he wanted anything made. After abandoning a trilogy of Yukio Mishima adaptations, Coppola was at a crossroads creatively until a chance letter from a Fresno school librarian, named Jo Ellen Misakian, written on behalf of her seventh and eighth grade students and asking him to adapt SE Hinton’s classic novel about teenage gang life in 1960s Oklahoma, The Outsiders, came his way.
Coppola was so moved by the letter he decided to give the book a chance. Hinton’s depictions of childhood resonated with him and as he later explained, it reminded him of a summer he spent working as a drama teacher in his youth. Coppola loved Hinton’s writing so much that he decided to option the rights to another one of her novels, Rumble Fish, and adapt both of them in 1983.
These adaptations however, couldn’t be any more of a study in contrasts if they tried. The Outsiders was a crowd-pleasing teen drama which, to Coppola’s credit, did a first class job of capturing the plot and spirit of Hinton’s original novel, and recruited a cast of actors that would all go on to rise to various levels of success such as Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, and Rob Lowe. Crucially, the movie financially did well enough for Coppola to be welcomed back into the fold after the poor box office takings of One From The Heart, grossing $33.7 million dollars from a $10 million budget.
With goodwill from Hollywood’s money men coming his way once again, Coppola decided to complete set it on fire with his second Hinton adaptation in 1983, Rumble Fish. Rumble Fish was a brooding and completely iconoclastic teen movie, which, despite starring perennial pin up Matt Dillion and America’s most exciting young acting talent since Al Pacino in Mickey Rourke, the existentialist family drama about a boy named Rusty Jones trying to escape his large than life older brother, the Motorcycle Boy’s shadow, sadly didn’t capture the attention of American audiences in the way that The Outsiders did.
This was largely down to the fact that Rumble Fish was a mainly black and white art piece, (with Coppola using colour very sparingly), blending together elements of the French New Wave, Noir, German Expressionism, and the works of Orson Welles to tell its story. The movie also featured a ground-breaking use of time lapse photography to communicate the film’s main theme of the passage of time passing without people realising it. Coppola’s lofty ambitions to make art instead of a disposable teen drama, left Universal (the distributor of the movie) scratching its head as how to market it. As a result Rumble Fish was a financial disaster at the American box office, grossing only $2 million off a budget of $10 million.
Although the movie was praised by some American critics, such as Roger Ebert , who commended Coppola for making something “ daring, off-beat, and totally original” , as well as saying “ Who but Coppola could make this film? And, of course, who but Coppola would want to?”, the movie fared much better with European audiences, allowing Rumble Fish to become a massively re-appraised cult favourite since its release in 1983.
Coppola was now back in the Dantean struggle he’d started the decade with, and his next movie, 1984’s The Cotton Club, would serve to continue it. A lavishly budgeted 1920s period piece adapted from James Haskin’s book of the same name, The Cotton Club centres around a jazz musician named Dixie Dwyer (played by Richard Gere) who unwittingly saves the life of notorious gangster Dutch Schulz. Impressed with his bravery, Dutch brings Dixie into his criminal empire, only for Dixie to fall in love with his girlfriend Vera (Diane Lane).
Unlike Coppola’s other big budget musical flop One From The Heart, there were things about The Cotton Club that worked. The movie has a stellar supporting cast, including Bob Hoskins, Laurence Fishburne, Nicolas Cage, and Gregory Hines, but Gere is massively mis-cast in the leading role and was drafted in as a last minute substitute when producer Robert Evans wanted either Harrison Ford or Al Pacino in the part instead.
This would be one of this movie’s numerous production troubles, with Robert Evans having to jump through hoops and even resorting to cocaine trafficking to raise the necessary funds. The production was a mess even before Coppola was brought in by Evans to direct.
With a rapidly spiralling budget that started out at $47 million and climbed to $58 million (roughly $183 million in 2024) Coppola did the best that he could, given the circumstances, delivering a final product that, despite aiming for a gritty EL Doctorow style tone, feels like two completely different movies in one. Although the film was nominated for several Academy Awards and Golden Globes and was well received critically, audiences really didn’t take to The Cotton Club, as shown by its meagre gross of $29 million dollars.
In contrast to One From The Heart, however, the movie has had a successful second life, thanks to Coppola finding a Betamax tape of his original cut in 2015. Coppola re-edited in the 25 minutes of extra footage, spending over $500,000 to do so. This re-cut version of The Cotton Club has been glowingly praised by publications such as Rolling Stone and has given the movie new appreciation.
In true Coppola fashion, he would follow up The Cotton Club with Peggy Sue Got Married in 1986, a movie which would provide Coppola with another brief sojourn out of exile. Peggy Sue Got Married would be a new venture into a genre that Coppola hadn’t tried before-romantic comedy.
Brought in once again to save a faltering production, after director Jonathon Demme and the film’s star Debra Winger quit, Peggy Sue Got Married could have been a case of history repeating itself for Coppola and the end result being another The Cotton Club style disaster. Instead Coppola managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, making a masterful and bittersweet romantic comedy, directing Winger’s replacement Kathleen Turner to a career-best performance.
The movie follows Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner), a middle aged divorcee attending her 25th high school reunion wondering where she went wrong in her life. After fainting at said event, she somehow wakes up again in her youth and is forced to navigate this bizarre circumstance as well as rectify the youthful mistakes that led to her unhappiness in middle age.
With a supporting cast of future stars (Jim Carrey, Nicolas Cage, Helen Hunt) and a wistful Powell and Pressburger style tone, the movie struck a chord with both critics and audiences at the time, with Roger Ebert calling it “one of the best movies of the year” and audiences at the time, having moved away from the dark New Hollywood era from the decade before, really responding to its nostalgic elements.
Although the movie was overshadowed by the box office success of Robert Zemeckis’s classic time travel comedy Back To The Future, Peggy Sue Got Married still provided Coppola with his first hit since The Outsiders three years earlier grossing $41.5 million from an $18 million budget. Once again in a fit of true panache, Coppola had pulled himself from the scrap-heap and back to relevance.
Having returned back to prominence both through the success of Peggy Sue Got Married and his directing work with George Lucas on Michael Jackson’s Captain E.O ride, Coppola decided to parlay his new found good fortune into two new projects, the Vietnam War drama Gardens of Stone (1987) and a biopic of Preston Tucker entitled Tucker The Man and His Dream (1988).
Gardens of Stone represented a return to familiar thematic territory for Coppola, but unlike Apocalypse Now it would be set in the States and focus on a group of soldiers about to be sent to Vietnam. The plot follows a grizzled veteran sergeant (James Caan), trying to guide a young recruit ( DB Sweeney), to prepare him for what is about to come. Made during a new wave of Vietnam War dramas that were coming out of Hollywood at an industrial pace because of the success of Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), Gardens of Stone was an incredibly forgettable outing from Coppola, lacking even the bizarreness of his near career-killer One From The Heart. The movie grossed only $5 million off a $13 million budget and didn’t make much noise critically either.
Coppola’s final movie of the 1980s, Tucker The Man and His Dream, on the other hand, is not only a hidden masterpiece in his filmography but also provides the perfect representation of his drive to experiment. Tucker was a long gestating passion project of Coppola’s that dated all the way back to 1973, but was constantly side-tracked by other scripts and the need to raise finances. Coppola’s interest in Preston Tucker, the then much maligned outsider (yet later vindicated when other car companies stole his ideas such as disc brakes, seatbelts, and rear engines) automobile investor/inventor, was sparked by his father’s investment into and purchase of a Tucker mobile.
Coppola wouldn’t revive interest in the film until 1986, when, after telling George Lucas about his idea during the making of Captain EO, Lucas was so enamoured with the project he decided to sign on as an executive producer. Lucas wouldn’t just provide financial aid to Coppola however, he also convinced him to change his initial idea from doing the movie as a musical but instead to make it as a Frank Capra style piece of Americana.
When looking at the story of the film, detailing Preston Tucker (played to Jimmy Stewartesque perfection by Jeff Bridges), a tenaciously optimistic inventor and his plan to build a new car to compete with the big three of the American car industry (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler) – only to have his plans foiled by the moneymen and various powerful lobbyists – it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why Coppola felt such a kinship with his subject.
Bolstered by a ridiculously strong supporting cast, featuring Martin Landau as Preston’s most trusted salesman Abe, Dean Stockwell almost stealing the movie as Howard Hughes, and Joan Allen as Vera Tucker his long suffering wife, Tucker The Man and His Dream is a bittersweet triumph, bringing back a style of American filmmaking thought to be long extinct since the 1930s-50s, that of the Minelli/Capra feel good picture, with the jazzy score of Joe Jackson and the warm, lush colour palette selected by Vittorio Storaro imbuing the film with the same spirit that those great filmmakers strived for and that Coppola sought to re-capture.
Opening to mixed reviews, as it unfairly did, was one thing, but given the movies massive for the time $22-24 million budget, its gross of only $19 million was a complete disaster. An increasingly younger cinema-going audience satiated by either John Hughes style teen dramas or the action movie renaissance that was happening in the decade, with movies like Rambo, Terminator, and Predator, sadly weren’t exactly going to give Tucker The Man and His Dream a chance.
Coppola was now so entrenched on the outside of Hollywood that he believed Tucker to be his last big studio film, and that he would begin a new period of completely independent experimentation-a strangely prophetic declaration by Coppola, yet off by about a decade. Coppola would start the 1990s with a return to the familiar territory that made his name with The Godfather Part III, one of the most unnecessary sequels in the history of cinema. To use the analogy of a three course meal the original Godfather was a delicious bowl of French Onion Soup, Part II was the best steak you’ve eaten in your life, and then Part III was a frozen out of date Curly Wurly hoisted onto your plate by the world’s most misanthropic waiter.
Coppola didn’t want to return to the saga of the Corleone family, correctly feeling that the two movies he had made told the complete story, but through the deadly combination of the financial failures of One From The Heart and The Cotton Club Coppola reluctantly, desperately short of money, decided to come back to direct.
The failure of The Godfather Part III is frankly another article in itself, but to cut a long story short the movie, despite doing well financially (grossing over $100 million on a $54 million budget), still went down with fans of the first two and most critics like a lead balloon. Common bugbears about the movie include the casting of Coppola’s daughter Sofia as Mary Corleone (who got the role because Winona Ryder had to drop out due to illness and Julia Roberts was unable to play the part because of scheduling conflicts) and her lack of chemistry with co-star Andy Garcia, the absence of fan favourite character Tom Hagen, and the overall convoluted pacing, in contrast to the stately yet economical structure of the first two movies.
As divisive a movie as Godfather III was, however it was still a financial success, putting Coppola back into the most stable position he’d been in since making Peggy Sue Got Married. With a new found amount of clout, he tried to mount productions ranging from adaptations of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost, as well as a biopic about FBI founder J Edgar Hoover, until he decided upon exploring horror-a genre he hadn’t tried before-with a new adaptation of the mother of all vampire stories, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Dracula was a long-standing favourite novel of Coppola’s, who had many enjoyable memories of reading it to the kids that he worked with during his time as a summer camp counsellor, so to helm a movie adaptation was a dream come true. The script by James V Hart was brought to Coppola’s attention by Winona Ryder after a meeting between the two to clear the air about her non-starring in Godfather III. Ryder was enthusiastic about the twist of the love-story component of the script, an aspect that wasn’t present at all in Stoker’s original novel.
With an all-star cast featuring the likes of Gary Oldman, Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Richard E Grant, Tom Waits, and Cary Elwes, Coppola, with Hart’s script, set about modernising Stoker’s original novel, keeping it within its 19th century time period but incorporating modern issues, such as the Aids epidemic, into the movie’s plot. Coppola also vetoed the use of CGI special effects instead deciding to keep the effects practical to better capture the feel of silent horror classic such as FW Murnau’s Nosferatu and Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.
To get a feel for the style of the movie, Coppola viewed Eisenstein’s Ivan The Terrible, and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and The Chimes At Midnight to establish the mood and atmosphere. Budgeted at a lavish $40 million dollars to account for the extensive period costuming, Hollywood insiders thought that Coppola had another turkey on his hands, with some cruelly dubbing the film as “The Bonfire of the Vampires” after Brian De Palma’s The Bonfire of The Vanities which had crashed and burned at the box office two years earlier.
Instead Coppola would buck precedent and produced the movie exactly on budget and on time, with the end result being a focused and modern, yet baroquely stylish, Hammer-esque approach to the vampire classic. Audiences and critics at the time mostly loved Gary Oldman’s performance as a brutal yet lovelorn Dracula, the lavish costumes by Eiko Ishioka, and the German expressionist style set design by Dante Ferretti, but a large amount of criticism was reserved for Keanu Reeves’s accent and performance in the role of Jonathon Harker – with the consensus opinion to this day being that he was badly miscast in the part.
Despite some negative reviews the movie was a huge financial success, grossing $215 million from its $40 million budget, and developed a huge cult following that continues to this day.
With two hits under his belt for the first time since the 1970’s, something strange would happen to Coppola. For the rest of 1990s he would become something he never sought to be, a director for hire, making studio mandated projects so as to have the means to fund various movies of his own that he actually wanted to make.
Four years after Dracula, he would produce a dismal failure in the Robin Williams led comedy-drama Jack, and the well-received but financially unsuccessful legal-drama The Rainmaker a year later. After completing The Rainmaker, Coppola went into semi-retirement for ten years before returning with a poorly received passion project, Youth Without Youth. He followed this up with another experimental drama two years later entitled Tetero, starring Vincent Gallo, which, although it was criminally under-distributed, received far better reviews than his previous effort did and was even included on Cahiers Du Cinema’s top ten films of the year.
Twixt, made another two years later in 2011, would round out Coppola’s experimental trilogy of small-budget movies to prepare for an undertaking that had been on his mind for decades – an ambitious science-fiction drama titled Megalopolis.
To describe Megalopolis as a long gestating ambition for Coppola, is akin to saying that Swiss cheese has a lot of holes in it. Born out of his childhood love of science fiction movies (such as Metropolis and Things To Come) and an adult fascination with Roman history and Ayn Rand, the idea for Megalopolis was first hatched by Coppola soon after the completion of the filming of Apocalypse Now – all the way back in 1977. It wouldn’t be until 1983 however, that Coppola wrote a 400 page first draft of the script with plans to begin filming after The Cotton Club, sadly nixed by that movies’ financial failure.
Coppola’s bold ambitious epic about an architect named Cesar who plans to demolish the city of New Rome and build a utopian city anew, putting him into conflict with New Rome’s Mayor Cicero, was going to need an insane amount of time and money to see the light of day. Coppola’s first meaningful attempt to make Megalopolis was in the early 1990s, when he decided that he would move to Italy to shoot it on the sound stages of Cinecitta free from Hollywood interference.
This of course didn’t happen and he stayed in America to make Godfather III instead. Although Coppola wanted to start filming straight after Godfather III, he again found himself fiscally constrained due to the poor box office for One From The Heart and Tucker The Man and His Dream – so he postponed shooting Megalopolis to 1996 at the earliest, so he could prioritise Dracula, Jack, and The Rainmaker to get out of debt.
It wouldn’t be until 2001 that Coppola finally looked like he might be able to make his long standing obsession a reality. He had table reads of the script with Hollywood A-listers such as Russell Crowe, Nicolas Cage, Uma Thurman, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro, Marvel legend Jim Steranko produced concept art, and Coppola and cinematographer Ron Fricke even shot test footage in downtown New York. In September of 2001, however, the horror and the tragedy of 9/11 attacks happened, leaving Coppola disheartened with the project and so he shelved it, feeling unable to reconcile the movie’s themes and ideas with a real life tragedy of that magnitude.
But over the years Coppola gradually returned to the project, cultivating a successfully winery and resort business which he sold off in 2021 to raise capital to self-finance it. His dream of complete creative control had now become a reality and he brought in a starry cast of the likes of Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Jon Voight, and Dustin Hoffman.
The end product however has turned out to be, ironically, far from utopian, it’s a convoluted, pretentious, Neil Breen like, laughably atrocious mess. That being said, however, in a world of art by mandate and committee, as well as bloated and bland big budget superhero fare, it’s somewhat refreshing that this completely earnest car crash of a movie exists on Coppola’s own terms, as there are few high budget, high concept flops as interesting as this one is.
Even when presented with numerous opportunities to give up however, it’s a testament to Coppola’s perseverance and love for cinema that he has constantly clawed his way back after exile time and time again with the bravery to fail and the talent to make masterpieces, always ready to try something new and interesting, no matter what.
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