Francis Ford Coppola

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Francis Ford Coppola

Coppola at the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con International

Born April 7, 1939 (age 78)

Detroit, Michigan, United States

Residence Napa Valley, California, United States

Education Great Neck North High School

Alma mater Hofstra University

UCLA

Occupation Film director, screenwriter, film producer

Years active 1962present

Home town Woodside, Queens, New York City, New York,

United States

Political Democratic

party
 Spouse(s) Eleanor Jessie Neil

(1963present)

Children Gian-Carlo Coppola (deceased)

Roman Coppola

Sofia Coppola

Parent(s) Carmine Coppola

Italia Pennino Coppola

Family Talia Shire (sister)

August Coppola (brother)

Nicolas Cage (nephew)

Jason Schwartzman (nephew)

Robert Schwartzman (nephew)

Marc Coppola (nephew)

Gia Coppola (granddaughter)

Francis Ford Coppola (US pronunciation: / ko p l /; born April 7, 1939), also credited as Francis
Coppola, is a semi-retired American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is considered to
have been a central figure of the New Hollywood wave of filmmaking.
After directing The Rain People (1969), he co-wrote the 1970 film Patton, earning the Academy
Award for Best Original Screenplay along with co-writer Edmund H. North. His directorial
prominence was cemented with the release in 1972 of The Godfather, a film which revolutionized
movie-making in the gangster genre,[1] earning praise from both critics and the public before winning
three Academy Awardsincluding his second Oscar (Best Adapted Screenplay, with Mario
Puzo), Best Picture, and his first nomination for Best Director.
He followed with The Godfather Part II in 1974, which became the first sequel to win the Academy
Award for Best Picture. Highly regarded by critics, it brought him three more Academy Awards: Best
Adapted Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture, and made him the second director, after Billy
Wilder, to be honored three times for the same film. The Conversation, which he directed, produced
and wrote, was released that same year, winning the Palme d'Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival.
He next directed 1979's Apocalypse Now. While notorious for its lengthy and strenuous production,
the film was widely acclaimed for its vivid and stark depiction of the Vietnam War, winning the Palme
d'Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival. Coppola is one of only eight filmmakers to win two Palme
d'Or awards.
While a number of Coppola's ventures in the 1980s and 1990s were critically lauded, he has never
quite achieved the same commercial success with films as in the 1970s.[2][3][4] His most well-known
films released since the start of the 1980s are the dramas The Outsiders and Rumble Fish (both
1983), the crime-drama The Cotton Club (1984), and the horror film Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992).

Contents
 [hide]

1Early life
2Career
o 2.11960s
o 2.21970s
2.2.1Patton (1970)
2.2.2The Godfather (1972)
2.2.3The Conversation (1974)
2.2.4The Great Gatsby (1974)
2.2.5The Godfather Part II (1974)
2.2.6Apocalypse Now (1979)
o 2.31980s
2.3.1One from the Heart (1982)
2.3.2Hammett (1982)
2.3.3The Outsiders (1983)
2.3.4Rumble Fish (1983)
2.3.5The Cotton Club (1984)
2.3.6Rip Van Winkle (1984)
2.3.7Captain EO (1986)
2.3.8Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)
2.3.9Gardens of Stone (1987)
2.3.10Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)
2.3.11New York Stories (1989)
o 2.41990s
2.4.1The Godfather Part III (1990)
2.4.2Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
2.4.3Jack (1996)
2.4.4The Rainmaker (1997)
2.4.5Pinocchio dispute with Warner Bros.
2.4.6Contact dispute with Carl Sagan/Warner Bros.
o 2.52000s
2.5.1Youth Without Youth (2007)
2.5.2Tetro (2009)
o 2.62010s
2.6.1Twixt (2011)
2.6.2Distant Vision (2015)
3Commercial ventures
o 3.1American Zoetrope
o 3.2Zoetrope Virtual Studio
o 3.3Inglenook Winery
o 3.4Uptown Theater
o 3.5Francis Ford Coppola Presents
3.5.1Winery
3.5.2Resorts
3.5.3Cafe and restaurant
3.5.4Literary publications
4Other ventures
5Honors
6Filmography
 7See also
8References
9Further reading
10External links

Early life[edit]
Coppola was born in Detroit, Michigan, to father Carmine Coppola (19101991),[5] a flautist with
the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and mother Italia (ne Pennino; 19122004). Coppola is the
second of three children: his older brother was August Coppola, his younger sister is actress Talia
Shire. Born into a family of Italian immigrant ancestry, his paternal grandparents came to the United
States from Bernalda, Basilicata.[6] His maternal grandfather, popular Italian composer Francesco
Pennino, immigrated from Naples, Italy.[7] Coppola received his middle name in honor of Henry Ford,
not only because he was born in the Henry Ford Hospital but also because of his musician-father's
association with the automobile manufacturer. At the time of Coppola's birth, his father was a flautist
as well as arranger and assistant orchestra director for The Ford Sunday Evening Hour, an hour-
long concert music radio series sponsored by the Ford Motor Company.[8][9][10] Two years after
Coppola's birth, his father was named principal flautist for the NBC Symphony Orchestra and the
family moved to New York, settling in Woodside, Queens, where Coppola spent the remainder of his
childhood.
Contracting polio as a boy, Coppola was bedridden for large periods of his childhood, allowing him to
indulge his imagination with homemade puppet theater productions. Reading A Streetcar Named
Desire at age 15 was instrumental in developing his interest in theater.[11] Eager to be involved in
film-craft, he created 8mm features edited from home movies with such titles as The Rich
Millionaire and The Lost Wallet.[12] As a child, Coppola was a mediocre student, but he was so
interested in technology and engineering that his friends nicknamed him "Science".[13] Trained initially
for a career in music, he became proficient on the tuba and won a music scholarship to the New
York Military Academy.[12] Overall, Coppola attended 23 other schools[14] before he eventually
graduated from the Great Neck North High School.[15] He entered Hofstra College in 1955 with a
major in theater arts. There he was awarded a scholarship in playwriting. This furthered his interest
in directing theater despite the disapproval of his father, who wanted him to study
engineering.[16] Coppola was profoundly impressed after seeing Sergei Eisenstein's October: Ten
Days That Shook the World, especially with the movie's quality of editing. It was at this time Coppola
decided he would go into cinema rather than theater.[16] Coppola says he was tremendously
influenced to become a writer early on by his brother, August,[14] in whose footsteps he would also
follow by attending both of his brother's alma maters: Hofstra and UCLA. Coppola also gives credit
to the work of Elia Kazan and for its influence on him as a director.[14] Amongst Coppola's classmates
at Hofstra were James Caan, Lainie Kazan and radio artist Joe Frank.[15][17] He later cast Lainie
Kazan in One from the Heart and Caan in The Rain People and The Godfather.
While pursuing his bachelor's degree, Coppola was elected president of The Green Wig (the
university's drama group) and the Kaleidoscopians (its musical comedy club). He then merged the
two into The Spectrum Players and under his leadership, they staged a new production each week.
Coppola also founded the cinema workshop at Hofstra and contributed prolifically to the campus
literary magazine.[12] He won three D. H. Lawrence Awards for theatrical production and direction and
received a Beckerman Award for his outstanding contributions to the school's theater arts
division.[18] While a graduate student, one of his teachers was Dorothy Arzner, whose
encouragement Coppola later acknowledged as pivotal to his film career.[11]

Career[edit]
1960s[edit]
Coppola enrolled in UCLA Film School for graduate work in film.[12] There he directed a short horror
film called The Two Christophers inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's "William Wilson", and Ayamonn the
Terrible, a film about a sculptor's nightmares coming to life,[13] before directing the
experimental softcore comedy Tonight for Sure in 1962.[15]
At UCLA, Coppola met Jim Morrison. He later used Morrison's song "The End" in Apocalypse
Now.[19]
The company that hired him for Tonight for Sure brought him back to re-cut a German film titled Mit
Eva fing die Snde an directed by Fritz Umgelter. He added some new 3-D color footage and earned
a writer's and director's credit for The Bellboy and the Playgirls, also a box-office failure. Coppola
was hired as an assistant by Roger Corman and his first job for Corman was to dub and re-edit a
Russian science fiction film, Nebo zovyot, which he turned into a sex-and-violence monster movie
entitled Battle Beyond the Sun, released in 1962.[15][20] Impressed by Coppola's perseverance and
dedication, Corman hired him as dialogue director on Tower of London (1962), sound man for The
Young Racers (1963) and associate producer of The Terror (1963).[18]
While on location in Ireland for The Young Racers in 1963, Corman, ever alert for an opportunity to
produce a decent movie on a shoestring budget, persuaded Coppola to make a low-budget horror
movie with funds left over from the movie.[18] Coppola wrote a brief draft story idea in one night,
incorporating elements from Hitchcock's Psycho,[21] and the result impressed Corman enough to give
him the go-ahead. On a budget of $40,000 ($20,000 from Corman and $20,000 from another
producer who wanted to buy the movie's English rights),[21] Coppola directed in a period of nine
days Dementia 13, his first feature from his own screenplay. The film recouped its expenses and
later became a cult film among horror buffs. It was on the sets of Dementia 13 that he met his future
wife Eleanor Jessie Neil.
In 1965, Coppola won the annual Samuel Goldwyn Award for the best screenplay (Pilma, Pilma)
written by a UCLA student.[12] This secured him a job as a scriptwriter with Seven Arts. In between,
he co-wrote the scripts for This Property Is Condemned (1966) and Is Paris Burning? (1966).
However, with fame still eluding him and partly out of desperation, Coppola bought the rights to
the David Benedictus novel You're a Big Boy Now and fused it with a story idea of his own, resulting
in You're a Big Boy Now (1966). This was his UCLA thesis project that also received a theatrical
release via Warner Bros.[15] This movie brought him some critical acclaim and eventually his Master
of Fine Arts Degree from UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in 1967.[18][22]
Following the success of You're a Big Boy Now, Coppola was offered the reins of the movie version
of the Broadway musical Finian's Rainbow, starring Petula Clark in her first American film and
veteran Fred Astaire. Producer Jack L. Warner was nonplussed by Coppola's shaggy-haired,
bearded, "hippie" appearance and generally left him to his own devices. He took his cast to the Napa
Valley for much of the outdoor shooting, but these scenes were in sharp contrast to those obviously
filmed on a Hollywood soundstage, resulting in a disjointed look to the film. Dealing with outdated
material at a time when the popularity of film musicals was already on the downslide, Coppola's
result was only semi-successful, but his work with Clark no doubt[according to whom?] contributed to
her Golden Globe Best Actress nomination. The film introduced to him George Lucas, who became
his lifelong friend as well as production assistant in his next film The Rain People in 1969. It was
written, directed and initially produced by Coppola himself, though as the movie advanced, he
exceeded his budget and the studio had to underwrite the remainder of the movie.[15] The film won
the Golden Shell at the 1969 San Sebastian Film Festival.
In 1969, Coppola took it upon himself to subvert the studio system which he felt had stifled his
visions, intending to produce mainstream pictures to finance off-beat projects and give first-time
directors their chance to direct. He decided he would name his future studio "Zoetrope" after
receiving a gift of zoetropes from Mogens Scot-Hansen, founder of a studio called Lanterna Film and
owner of a famous collection of early motion picture-making equipment. While touring Europe,
Coppola was introduced to alternative filmmaking equipment and inspired by the bohemian spirit of
Lanterna Film, he decided he would build a deviant studio that would conceive and implement
creative, unconventional approaches to filmmaking. Upon his return home, Coppola and George
Lucas searched for a mansion in Marin County to house the studio. However, in 1969, with
equipment flowing in and no mansion found yet, the first home for Zoetrope Studio became a
warehouse in San Francisco on Folsom Street.[23] The studio went on to become an early adopter of
digital filmmaking, including some of the earliest uses of HDTV. In his book The American
Cinema, Andrew Sarris wrote, "[Coppola] is probably the first reasonably talented and sensibly
adaptable directorial talent to emerge from a university curriculum in film-making... [He] may be
heard from more decisively in the future."[24]
1970s[edit]

Coppola in 1976

Coppola epitomized a group of filmmakers known as the "New Hollywood" that emerged in the early
1970s with ideas that challenged conventional film-making. The group included Steven
Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Terrence Malick, Robert Altman, Woody Allen, William
Friedkin, Philip Kaufman and George Lucas.[15][25]
Patton (1970)[edit]
Main article: Patton (film)
Coppola co-wrote the script for Patton in 1970 along with Edmund H. North. This earned him his
first Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. However, it was not easy for Coppola to
convince Franklin J. Schaffner that the opening scene would work. Coppola later revealed in an
interview:[26]
I wrote the script of Patton. And the script was very controversial when I wrote it, because they
thought it was so stylized. It was supposed to be like, sort of, you know, The Longest Day. And my
script of Patton wasI was sort of interested in the reincarnation. And I had this very bizarre
opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I wasn't
fired, but I was fired, meaning that when the script was done, they said, "Okay, thank you very
much," and they went and hired another writer and that script was forgotten. And I remember very
vividly this long, kind of being raked over the coals for this opening scene.
"When the title role was offered to George C. Scott, he remembered having read Coppola's
screenplay earlier. He stated flatly that he would accept the part only if they used Coppola's script.
'Scott is the one who resurrected my version,' says Coppola."[27]
The movie opens with Scott's rendering of Patton's famous military "Pep Talk" to members of the
Third Army, set against a huge American flag. Coppola and North had to tone down Patton's actual
language to avoid an R rating; in the opening monologue, the word "fornicating" replaced "fucking"
when criticizing The Saturday Evening Post. Over the years, this opening monologue has become
an iconic scene and has spawned parodies in numerous films, political cartoons and television
shows.
The Godfather (1972)[edit]
Main article: The Godfather
The release of The Godfather in 1972 was a milestone in cinema. The near 3-hour-long epic, which
chronicled the saga of the Corleone family, received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics
and fetched Coppola the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, which he shared with Mario
Puzo and two Golden Globe Awards: for Best Director and Best Screenplay. However, Coppola
faced several difficulties while filming The Godfather. He was not Paramount's first choice to direct
the movie; Italian director Sergio Leone was initially offered the job, but declined in order to direct his
own gangster opus, Once Upon a Time in America.[28] Peter Bogdanovich was then approached but
he also declined the offer and made What's Up, Doc? instead; Bogdanovich has often said that he
would have cast Edward G. Robinson in the lead had he accepted the film. According to Robert
Evans, head of Paramount Pictures at the time, Coppola also did not initially want to direct the film
because he feared it would glorify the Mafia and violence and thus reflect poorly on his Sicilian and
Italian heritage; on the other hand, Evans specifically wanted an Italian-American to direct the film
because his research had shown that previous films about the Mafia that were directed by non-
Italians had fared dismally at the box office and he wanted to, in his own words, "smell the
spaghetti". When Coppola hit upon the idea of making it a metaphor for American capitalism,
however, he eagerly agreed to take the helm.[29]
There was disagreement between Paramount and Coppola on the issue of casting; Coppola stuck to
his plan of casting Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone, though Paramount wanted either Ernest
Borgnine or Danny Thomas. At one point, Coppola was told by the then-president of Paramount that
"Marlon Brando will never appear in this motion picture". After pleading with the executives, Coppola
was allowed to cast Brando only if he appeared in the film for much less salary than his previous
films, perform a screen-test and put up a bond saying that he would not cause a delay in the
production (as he had done on previous film sets).[30] Coppola chose Brando over Ernest Borgnine on
the basis of Brando's screen test, which also won over the Paramount leadership. Brando later won
an Academy Award for his portrayal, which he refused to accept. Coppola would later recollect:[21]
The Godfather was a very unappreciated movie when we were making it. They were very unhappy
with it. They didn't like the cast. They didn't like the way I was shooting it. I was always on the verge
of getting fired. So it was an extremely nightmarish experience. I had two little kids, and the third one
was born during that. We lived in a little apartment, and I was basically frightened that they didn't like
it. They had as much as said that, so when it was all over I wasn't at all confident that it was going to
be successful, and that I'd ever get another job.
After it was released, the film received widespread praise. It went on to win multiple awards,
including Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Coppola. The film routinely features at
the top in various polls for the greatest movies ever. It has been selected for preservation in the
United States National Film Registry. In addition, it was ranked third, behind Citizen Kane,
and Casablanca on the initial AFI's 100 Years100 Movies list by the American Film Institute. It was
moved up to second when the list was published again, in 2008.[31] Director Stanley Kubrick believed
that The Godfather was possibly the greatest movie ever made and had without question the best
cast.[32]