Name: Unti Francis Ford Coppola and Zoetrope
ISBN: 9780063037847

Sam Wasson

Unti Francis Ford Coppola and Zoetrope

Mat Connor

The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story is not a traditional linear biography with a chapter for each movie. Anyone who goes into it expecting that could be disappointed. 

There’s no chapter covering Jack—his insane movie where Robin Williams plays a 10 year old with a disease that makes him look 40 years old—which looking back must have been my first Coppola movie. I relate to that movie because I’ve always looked older than my age too. 

This biography is episodic, going back and forth in time, but focuses primarily on his time at UCLA, his film studio American Zoetrope, and deeper dives on the making of Apocalypse Now and the musical One From the Heart.

I found this a little tough going in the beginning. I had a hard time getting a grip on it so it was easy to keep putting it down for other books. The stuff about the crazy production of Apocalypse Now has been covered so much elsewhere, especially in his late wife Eleanor Coppola’s great documentary Heart of Darkness, that I was a bit bored. The biography took off for me when he covers One From the Heart, which I’ve never seen before. 

When you finish this biography, you might not have a clear linear picture on the full scope of his career, but you will have a deep understanding of his ambitions and mission to disrupt the studio system in order to produce great art. You have to admire an artist who is so uncompromising when it comes to his work that he will risk bankruptcy routinely to deliver his vision. As I write this, he’s about to premiere his long awaited Megalopolis and it still doesn’t have a US distributor. He’s nothing if not consistent. 

My favorite anecdote was about the time Coppola visited a local school to talk to the students and then spontaneously invited the entire school to come walk back to the studio for a visit. You can just picture him as the Pied Piper of Movies trying to get all these kids excited about filmmaking.

Unti Francis Ford Coppola and Zoetrope

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