Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola became the first of the film school generation directors to gain celebrity, with the phenomenal financial and critical success of The Godfather (1971). Other directors would follow, including George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Stephen Spielberg, but by dint of being the first as well as most adroit in media self-promotion, Coppola became something of the symbolic “Godfather” of the film school generation. His patronage of other directors, his multiple attempts at forming his own studio, and his activities in publishing and film preservation furthered this reading. Four films in the 1970s cemented his critical reputation. They were The Godfather (1971), Godfather II (1974), The Conversation (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979). By 1975, he had five Academy Awards, and Apocalypse Now would go on to share the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Coppola was thirty-two years old at The Godfather premiere, and his early artistic success became a vindication of the film school model of career advancement. He received an MFA from UCLA in the early 1960s and used that as a springboard toward exploitation filmmaking with Roger Corman (see, e.g., Dementia 13 [1963]). As he learned his craft, he became a house writer for Seven Arts, which resulted in the Patton (1970) assignment. Very prolific in this period, he squeezed in smaller films: You’re a Big Boy Now (1967), Finian’s Rainbow (1968), and The Rain People (1969), which the section Pre-Godfather Film Career highlights. Following the phenomenal success of the two Godfather films, public fascination with Coppola’s celebrity settled around the question of what he would do next. Never the shy introvert, Coppola flamboyantly announced that he would do a Vietnam film to commemorate America’s 200th anniversary, which would be released in 1976. The proposed film would also serve as closure to the cultural trauma of the Vietnam War. The two sections concerned with Apocalypse Now in this article will give some sense of the public furor over, as well as the canonization of, the film since its release. Due to financial over-commitments associated with Coppola’s purchase of the Hollywood General studio and the subsequent box office disaster of One from the Heart (1982) Coppola’s films of the 1980s are best characterized as of the “hired gun” variety. In the 1990s, Godfather III gave Coppola a large payday but did little to advance his critical regard. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) has been his biggest financial/critical success in the post–Apocalypse Now years. It also excited much academic commentary for its engagement with Bram Stoker and the vampire myth. As Coppola paid off his financial obligations, an earlier investment in a Northern California winery yielded spectacular financial success, which has allowed him to subsidize more experimental undertakings, represented in the Coda: Recent Films section.