Godfather (63 page)

Supernova
casts Spader as an astronaut aboard a medical rescue ship who discovers a malevolent alien stowed away on board. MGM-UA insisted on a PG-13 rating for the film, so Coppola and his editing team had to delete some material in the love scenes between Spader and Angela Bassett (as a lady astronaut) that he would have preferred to keep. He also eliminated a confusing subplot. As a result, the release prints of the movie came in at a spare eighty-eight minutes. Still Coppola's editorial assistance helped to create a standard sci-fi movie that is an intriguing, gripping deep-space thriller. Coppola issued a statement when the film premiered, stating, “I hope that my experience in the film industry helped improve the picture and rectified some of the problems that losing a director caused.”
¹⁶

More important for Coppola personally was the release of a reedited version of
Apocalypse Now Redux
(2001), with fifty minutes of footage added to the film as originally released. The release of this new version of
Apocalypse Now
was like “the reclaiming of a child.” It is a fascinating reworking of the original movie that seems “to alter the film enormously and make it into a masterpiece that left the contemporary landscape of films in 2001 looking even more threadbare.” By the same token, Ryan Gilbey, in his 2003 book on the films of the 1970s,
It Don't Worry Me
, contrasts the weatherproof grandeur of
The Godfather
with the dated machismo of gangster pictures like
Dirty Harry
.
¹⁷

In recent years Coppola has received recognition from various sectors in the film world. These acknowledgments include a Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival in 1992 for his contribution to the art of the cinema; a Life Achievement Award in 1998, the highest honor that can be bestowed by the Directors Guild of America; and a gala tribute by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York on May 7,2002, for his distinguished career in the cinema. In addition, the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, which preserves films that are deemed culturally, historically, and aesthetically important, included
The Godfather, The Godfather
Part II
, and
The Conversation
in its collection in 1995.

Moreover, the American Film Institute honored the best one hundred American films made during the first century of cinema with a TV special that aired on July 16, 1998. Included high on the list of films (which were chosen by a panel of film professionals and critics) were
The Godfather, The Godfather
Part II
, and
Apocalypse Now
. Furthermore, an international poll of filmmakers and film critics, conducted in 2002 by
Sight and Sound
, the London film journal, voted Coppola one of the top ten directors of all time and listed the same three films just mentioned among the ten greatest motion pictures ever made. Furthermore, when
Premiere
magazine held a nationwide poll in 2003 for the one hundred greatest movies,
Godfather II
led the list in first place. In addition, when the AFI announced the top one hundred heroes and villains during a TV special broadcast on June 3, 2003, Michael Corleone, as played by Al Pacino in
Godfather II
, was among the legendary villains of all time. The official recognition accorded Coppola by the Directors Guild, the American Film Institute, the Library of Congress, and other organizations attests to his enduring contribution to American film.

At the close of the Lincoln Center tribute, Coppola gave a “curtain speech” in which he stated:

At the Academy Awards in 1979 I presented the Best Director award. I don't know what got into me but I looked at that vast audience of people out there in their tuxedos (this was the entire body of the creative talent really of Hollywood) and I just broke from what I was supposed to say, and started talking about the future: how the cinema was about to change, and how it would happen in a wonderful way. But even with all this new technology, it will always be based on human talent. The people were looking at me kind of funny. Of course what I said was true. Cinema has continued to evolve, and since it's always been a marriage of technology and human talent it would be naive to think it wouldn't continue….

The new cinema of the last few years shows what the real potential is. Artists working together on extraordinary impossible films air the ideas and question the problems, which illuminate contemporary life and bring us to some solutions. I dream and hope the cinema in general can step forward, be something other than a means of employment. Many of my colleagues would love someone to say to them, “Gee, make a film you consider valuable, not something we have calculated with our corporate
budgets.” If you wonder why few classics have been made in the last 20 years, that's primarily the reason.
¹⁸

Writing on the occasion of Coppola's Lincoln Center tribute, Kent Jones notes: “There are few spectacles in American cinema more touching than the career of Francis Ford Coppola, one-time
wunderkind
, now creative grand old man of Hollywood…. There's something uniquely moving about Coppola's need to bring us all under his tent and waltz together to the music of the spheres.” It even accounts, as stated above, for his smaller films, “where he's looking for a shortcut to grandeur.” Coppola possesses “talent to burn and a precocious command of the medium,” which makes him “a great director, as opposed to a calculating entertainer.”
¹⁹

In fact, Coppola is an expert storyteller capable of making riveting films with powerful performances. As such, he has sometimes been called a genius—a term he disavows: “It's embarrassing when someone calls me a genius. What is that? I would like it if it meant I was a unique person, one of a kind.”
²⁰
He prefers to think of himself as “a talented amateur,” he tells me. “I'm an amateur, because being an amateur means that you make movies because you love them—not to make a living.”

Coppola has always maintained that he is not interested in “soap opera psychodramas” rife with sentimentality, or the rest of “the current parade of clichés and formulas” that open every week at the multiplex. On the contrary, “I am stimulated by stories of great adventure and enterprise,” films like
Apocalypse Now
and
Tucker
. “We all know what the last act will be, that we'll be looking up from a bed somewhere saying our final words. When that happens to me, I want to know that I went on some adventures. I think in those terms, and prefer stories about people like that, people who step out.”
²¹

Coppola ended his remarks at the Lincoln Center gala by saying that he had begun work on an ambitious, epic-scale film entitled
Megalopolis
. “Al Pacino, quoting Robert Browning has said, ‘If a man's reach does not exceed his grasp, what's a heaven for?”‘ Actually Coppola has been nursing this pet project, which deals with “the contest of the past and the present,” since the early 1980s. In it he plans to mesh a story of the corruption of ancient Rome at the time of the conspiracy fomented by the corrupt politician Catiline (108–62 B.C.) with a story about the evils of modern urban life in contemporary New York. So the movie “will swing from the past to the present, and the images of republican Rome will merge and blend with the New York of today.”
²²
“Clearly, a man with a phantom project called
Megalopolis
on the back burner has a whole universe in his head, far more
expansive and more magical than anything possible in drab old reality. And what's touching is the way he attempts to share the oceanic vastness of his imagination with this audience.”
²³
Whether Coppola has another great film in him remains to be seen. That he has already proved himself to be an exceptional director is beyond question.

And the Coppola legend lives on. Sofia Coppola's second feature,
Lost in Translation
(2003), a bittersweet comedy with Bill Murray playing a Hollywood star stranded in Tokyo, was the occasion of a cover story on Sofia in the
New York Times Magazine
. The article states that Sofia promises to live up to the standard set by her father, “one of the most important American filmmakers of all time.”
²⁴
Francis Coppola served as an executive producer on the film for American Zoetrope, a company with a history as long and varied as the producer himself. Coppola now has his own American Zoetrope DVD label, which releases not only his own films but the films of other directors. As usual, Coppola runs this operation with state- of-the-art equipment that allows for the best possible transfers of film to DVD.

The reputations of filmmakers soar and sputter in the stock market of critical opinion. Reliable blue-chip directors like Coppola tend to weather the cyclical ups and downs of the marketplace with long-term returns. In 2004
Premiere
magazine released the results of another nationwide poll, this time for the seventy-five most influential films of all time.
The Godfather
was chosen because it elevated the gangster film to the level of epic cinema. Furthermore, pictures such as Coppola's recent
Dracula
continue to be popular on TV; indeed,
TV Guide
hailed the movie upon a recent showing as “Coppola's sumptuously crafted vampire classic.”
²⁵
A Hollywood director who has helped set the gold standard for motion picture artistry with films like the
Godfather
trilogy,
Apocalypse Now
,
The Conversation, Peggy Sue Got Married, Dracula
, and
The Rainmaker
, Francis Coppola has forever secured his place in the pantheon of auteur directors.

1
. Lee Lourdeaux,
Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America: Ford, Capra, Coppola, and Scorsese
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 177.

2
. Richard Schickel, “Rough Cuts,”
Los Angeles Times Book Review
, 13 January 2002, p. 2.

3
. Jeffrey Chown,
Hollywood Auteur: Francis Coppola
(New York: Praeger, 1988), p. 214.

4
. Chuck Kleinhans, “Independent Features: Hopes and Dreams,” in
The New American Cinema
, ed. Jon Lewis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 310.

5
. Michael Schumacher,
Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker's Life
(New York: Crown, 1999), pp. 179–80.

6
. Gerald Mast and Bruce Kavvin,
A Short History of the Movies
, rev. ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000), p. 444.

7
. Robert Johnson,
Francis Ford Coppola
(Boston: Twayne, 1977), p. 29.

1
. Ben Hecht, “Enter the Movies,” in
Film: An Anthology
, ed. Daniel Talbot (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), p. 258.

2
. Unless noted otherwise, quotations from Coppola in this book are from the author's conversation with him.

3
. Lee Eisenberg, “Francis Coppola and Gay Talese,”
Esquire Film Quarterly
(July 1981): 84.

4
. Joseph Gelmis,
The Film Director as Superstar
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), p. 179.

5
. Peter Biskind,
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: Coppola, Scorsese and Other Directors
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), p. 149.

6
. Harlan Lebo,
The Godfather Legacy
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 16.

7
. Schumacher,
Francis Ford Coppola
, p. 19.

8
. Jean-Paul Chaillet and Elizabeth Vincent,
Francis Ford Coppola
, trans. Denise Jacobs (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984), p. 3.

9
. Johnson,
Francis Ford Coppola
, p. 28.

10
. Ronald Bergan,
Francis Ford Coppola: The Making of His Movies
(New York: Orion Books, 1998), p. 17.

11
. Michael Goodwin and Naomi Wise,
On the Edge: The Life and Times of Francis Ford Coppola
(New York: Morrow, 1989), p. 238.

12
. Ibid., p. 37.

13
. Jon Lewis,
Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy: Francis Coppola and the New Hollywood
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 15.

14
. Peter Cowie,
Coppola: A Biography
, rev. ed. (New York: Da Capo, 1994), p. 25.

15
. Johnson,
Francis Ford Coppola
, pp. 29–30.

16
. Roger Corman,
How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime
, with Jim Jerome (New York: Random House, 1990), pp. 90–91.

17
. Ibid.

18
. Johnson,
Francis Ford Coppola
, p. 30.

19
. Chaillet and Vincent,
Francis Ford Coppola
, p. 5.

20
. Corman,
Hundred Movies
, pp. 110–11.

21
. Cowie,
Coppola
, p. 26.

22
. Corman,
Hundred Movies
, p. 114.

23
. Bergan,
Francis Ford Coppola
, p. 21.

24
. “
The Young Racers,” Variety Film Reviews: 1907—1996
, vol. 16 (New Providence, N.J.: Bowker, 1997), n.p.

25
. Corman,
Hundred Movies
, pp. 113–14.

26
. Michael Pye and Linda Myles,
The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood
(New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1979), p. 71.

27
. Bergan,
Francis Ford Coppola
, p. 21.

28
. Goodwin and Wise,
On the Edge
, p. 44.

29
. Johnson,
Francis Ford Coppola
, p. 32.

30
. Goodwin and Wise,
On the Edge
, p. 48.