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| Birth Name(s) : Francis Ford Coppola |
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Full Francis Ford Coppola Biography
Francis Ford Coppola (born April 7, 1939) is a five-time Academy Award winning American film director, producer, and screenwriter. Coppola is also a vintner, magazine publisher, and hotelier. He earned an M.F.A. in film directing from the UCLA Film School. He is most renowned for directing the highly regarded Godfather trilogy, The Conversation, and the Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now.
Francis Ford Coppola was born to Carmine Coppola (who, at the time, was the first flautist to play with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra) and his wife, Italia, in Detroit, Michigan on April 7, 1939. He was the second of three children (his sister is actress Talia Shire). Two years later, Carmine became the first flautist for the NBC Symphony Orchestra and the family moved to New York City, finding a home in Woodside, Queens, where Francis spent the remainder of his childhood.
Coppola's daughter, Sofia Coppola, has gone on to become a director in her own right. She became the first American woman to nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. Her films include the critically-acclaimed The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation.
In between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Coppola directed The Conversation, a story of a paranoid wiretapping and surveillance expert (played by Gene Hackman) who finds himself caught up in a possible murder plot. The Conversation was released to theaters in 1974 and was also nominated for Best Picture, resulting in Coppola being one of the very few filmmakers to have directed two films competing for the same Best Picture Oscar since the annual number of nominees was cut down to five in 1945. While The Godfather Part II won the Oscar, The Conversation won the 1974 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
During this period he also wrote the screenplay for the critically and commercially unsuccessful 1974 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby (starring Mia Farrow and Robert Redford)
Following the success of The Godfather, The Conversation and The Godfather Part II, Coppola set about filming Apocalypse Now, a version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with the setting changed from colonial Africa to the Vietnam War. Before setting off to make the film, Coppola went to his mentor Roger Corman for advice about shooting in the Philippines, since Corman himself was familiar with shooting a film in that area. It was said that all Corman advised Coppola was "Don't go". The creation of the film went into Hollywood's history books as one of its most notorious fiascoes when the production was a disaster from the start, being beset by numerous problems, including typhoons, nervous breakdowns, the firing of Harvey Keitel, Martin Sheen's heart attack, and an unprepared Marlon Brando with a bloated appearance (which Coppola attempted to hide by shooting him in the shadows). It was delayed so often it was nicknamed Apocalypse Whenever. The film was equally lauded and hated by critics when it finally appeared in 1979, and the cost nearly bankrupted Coppola's nascent studio American Zoetrope.
After filming Apocalypse Now Coppola famously stated:"We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane."
In 1982, he produced The Outsiders, a film adaptation of the novel of the same name by S. E. Hinton released in 1983. Coppola credited his inspiration for making the film to a suggestion from middle school students who had read the novel. The Outsiders is notable for being the breakout film for a number of young actors who would go on to become major stars. These included major roles for Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, and C. Thomas Howell. Others rising stars in the cast include Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and Tom Cruise. Matt Dillon and several others also starred in Coppola's related film, Rumble Fish, which was also based on a S.E. Hinton novel, and was filmed at the same time on-location in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Carmine Coppola wrote and edited the musical score, including the title song "Stay Gold," based upon a famous Robert Frost poem. Performed for the movie by Stevie Wonder. Because of the movie's success, Wonder released Stay Gold on his album, Natural Wonder, although with a different melody.
In 1986 Coppola, with George Lucas, directed the Michael Jackson film for Disney theme parks, Captain Eo, which at the time was the most expensive film per minute ever made.
In 1990 he completed the Godfather series with The Godfather Part III which, while not as critically acclaimed as the first two movies, was still a box office success. Some reviewers criticized the casting of Coppola's daughter Sofia, who stepped into a role abandoned by Winona Ryder just as filming began.
In 1997, Coppola founded Zoetrope All-Story, a flashy literary magazine that publishes short stories. The magazine has published fiction by T.C. Boyle and Amy Bloom and essays by David Mamet, Steven Spielberg, and Salman Rushdie. Since its founding, the magazine has grown in reputation to become one of the premier American journals of literary fiction. Coppola serves as founding editor and publisher of All-Story.
He co-owns the Rubicon restaurant along with fellow San Franciscan Robin Williams, and Robert De Niro. |
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