Francis Ford Coppola: The Entrepreneur

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Today, we are doing a deep dive on Francis Ford Coppola’s career, with a focus on the business side (as always, the weekly links and memes are at the bottom of the piece).

Francis Ford Coppola’s film Megalopolis will hit theatres on September 27th.

The director of The Godfather I & II and Apocalypse Now has been working on-and-off on this project — a retelling of the Fall of the Roman Empire in modern times — for nearly 5 decades.

In a baller move, the 85-year old Hollywood legend sold his parts of his winery to help finance the majority of the film’s ~$120m budget (similarly, I recently sold my Peloton bike and used the funds to finance a pair of waterproof Nike Pegasus Shield runners).

It is often said that individual films are like startups, with each one requiring someone to raise funds (to finance production), recruit talent (directors, actors, designers etc.) and deliver a product (film).

This is Coppola’s latest all-in move for a career that has seen the entire spectrum of entrepreneurship: 1) fake it ‘til you make it; 2) working on thin budgets and scrambling for every dollar; 3) mortgaging a house to ensure creative control; 4) working to pay off debts; 5) multiple bankruptcies; and 6) a ~$300m fortune that was built mostly from a side hustle (Coppola has made more from wines than films).

With Coppola taking such a major swing for his 23rd film, I want to walk through the entrepreneurial side of his career by taking a chronological look at 8 films and 2 business ventures:

• Dementia 13 (1963) — Making Your Own Luck

• You’re A Big Boy Now (1966) — Creating Momentum

• American Zoetrope — Co-Founding An Independent Studio

• Patton (1970) — Developing The Right Skills

• The Godfather I (1972) — Keeping The Highest Standards

• Francis Ford Coppola Winery — The $500m+ Side Hustle

• Apocalypse Now (1979) — The Cost of Control

• One from the Heart (1982) — Hubris

• Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) — Working For Money

• Megalopolis (2024) — The 47-Year Passion Project

The details for this piece primarily come from a long Deadline interview with the director in 2019, a documentary about his studio American Zoetrope and an incredible episode from my friend David Senra at the Founders podcast (which was based on a Coppola biography by Michael Schumacher).

Let’s get into it.

Francis Ford Coppola was born in 1939 in Detroit, Michigan to second-generation Italian parents: Carmine (father) and Italia (mother).

He grew up in an artistic household. His maternal grandfather was a famed Italian composer and his father was a classical musician (flutist), who performed on major radio programs and for NBC. Coppola’s younger sister is actress Talia Shire (she played Connie Corleone in The Godfather) and his older brother August — the father of Nicolas Cage (yes, that one) — had a long career in the arts.

Reflecting on his life, Coppola believes that “you can always understand the son by the story of his father. The story of the father is embedded in the son.”

With this perspective, there were two key learnings for Francis: his father never achieved the success he imagined for himself, and his father admired risk-takers. The son would take huge risks during his career which ultimately led him to the top of the film industry. Carmine had the opportunity to participate in this journey, as Francis asked him to compose original music for his films, including The Godfather series (sadly, Coppola’s older brother August — who he worshipped — became very jealous of Francis’ future success and they had a falling out).

Coppola’s filmmaking journey began in childhood when he was partially paralyzed after contracting polio and spent countless days in bed re-making theatre plays. After overcoming the illness in his teens, Coppola enrolled at Hofstra College to study theatre arts 1955. He quickly won a scholarship for playwriting and took over the school’s drama and comedy groups, combining them to put on weekly shows.

He had ambition and talent combined with massive charisma. One of his classmates, Joel Olanski, wrote a profile about Coppola in 1958 and stated that his mix of talents could only result in two possible outcomes: “(Coppola) was going to go all the way or he was going to burn himself out….there would be no middle ground.”

Of course, Coppola did go all the way and the next step on his journey was when he went to UCLA Film School and directed his first film.

***

Dementia 13 (1963) — Making Your Own Luck

Roger Corman — who passed away earlier this year at the age of 98 — is one of the most influential figures in film history.

Many people may not know his catalogue of low-budget culty B-grade horror and thriller films from the 1970s and 1980s. But everyone will recognize the Hollywood icons that Corman is credited with mentoring: Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, William Shatner and Coppola among many others.

“If you do a good job (on my films), you won’t have to work for me for very long,” is the famous pitch that Corman gave to up-and-coming talent looking to break into the industry.

Corman kept a tight lid on film budgets and was always looking for young (and less expensive) talent. In the early 1960s, Corman asked a UCLA Film School professor if any of her students fit the bill. The professor tapped Coppola, who was working on erotic scripts and short films while studying (one such flick that no one reading this has ever seen and probably will never see was called The Peeper).

Unsurprisingly, Corman aimed for quantity over quality and this was how he was able to provide so many directing and acting opportunities. Coppola started working as Corman’s assistant and was given as much production and editing work as he could handle.

Coppola identified a huge opportunity in Corman’s high-volume business model: “I knew that whenever Corman takes a crew on location, he can’t resist the temptation of doing a second picture since he already paid for the crew’s expenses there.”

In 1962, Corman was directing a horror film with shooting locations across Europe. The young Coppola was working as a sound technician even though he wasn’t trained in the trade (Coppola said of the experience, “My peculiar approach to cinema is I like to learn by not knowing how the hell to do it, (because then) I’m forced to discover how to do it.”)

Corman’s production had a budget of $165,000 and when filming wrapped in Ireland, there was still $22,000 left. With the crew on site, Corman wanted to use the leftover funds to make a cheap rip-off of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Without hesitation, Coppola wrote a treatment in one night based on Corman’s premise and in his mentor’s style. Corman was happy with the story and gave Coppola the remaining $22,000 to direct the film. Previewing his future ability to scrape together funds, Coppola also secured another $20,000 by selling the film’s distribution rights in Europe (a move he would copy many times over in the future).

The young filmmaker’s indefatigable work ethic and instinct to jump on opportunities led to his feature film debut when Dementia 13 came out in 1963 (Coppola returned Corman’s favour by casting his mentor as a United States Senator in The Godfather Part II).

“The secret of (getting my projects) off the ground is that I’ve always taken big chances with personal investments,” Coppola would say of his filmmaking approach. “While the other guys my age were all pleading ‘Corman, please let me make a film’, I simply sat down and wrote the script.”

Dementia 13 is an example of that corny LinkedIn aphorism that “luck is when opportunity meets preparation” but that’s exactly how Coppola manifested this first directing gig.

***

You’re A Big Boy Now (1966) — Creating Momentum

With Dementia 13 under his belt, Coppola’s next goal was to get a directing gig with a major Hollywood studio.

He went #FounderMode and full reality-distortion field to make it happen.

Coppola first acquired the rights to a novel by David Benedictus titled You’re A Big Boy Now, a satirical comedy about a shoe salesman in London. He adapted the story and planned to make the project as his UCLA Film School thesis. Then, he convinced actors to come onboard by saying a film studio had committed to the project (none had). He then told major studios that the production was already in motion (it wasn’t) and they should fund it before another studio took the opportunity.

Eventually, Warner Brothers agreed to distribute the film and Coppola was paid $8,000, which was only 1% of the film’s $800,000 budget. Although he was also given some upside based on the film’s box office performance, this was an underwhelming offer by Hollywood standards.

“There is one thing I found out (about making film),” Coppola says of getting his second feature film off the ground. “Don’t ask. Just go ahead and force the issue. That way, you get momentum going with everybody wanting to jump on the bandwagon.”

The film was critically acclaimed and received an Oscar nomination for actress Geraldine Page. Despite being an awful financial deal for Coppola, the opportunity to prove himself with a major Hollywood studio this early in his career — at a time when very few directors in their 20s were getting any jobs — was totally worth it.

Why? Because Warner Brothers placed Coppola on two other projects.

First, it asked him to adapt a musical called Finian’s Rainbow. The film came out in 1968 to mixed reviews but Coppola met future Star Wars-director George Lucas during the production. Lucas became Coppola’s assistant for his next film with Warner Brothers and they began a lifelong friendship.

Released in 1969, The Rain People went over-budget and strained Coppola’s relationship with the studio. It was such a bad experience that Coppola decided to walk away from the studio system. But he did so after establishing himself as an icon amongst young film directors. Someone that willed himself into Hollywood and was interested in telling different stories and try new filmmaking techniques.

***

American Zoetrope — Co-Founding An Independent Studio

In December 1969, Coppola and George Lucas co-founded American Zoetrope as an independent film studio. They believed there was a better way to make movies after Coppola’s rocky three-film run with Warner Brothers.

The timing made sense.

America’s film industry had dominated culture from the 1930s through the 1950s but the 1960s marked a new era. The rise of TV was chipping away at film’s influence and old studio moguls were leaving the game.

A sequence of two films in the mid-1960s showed the waning cultural influence of Hollywood blockbusters. In 1965, The Sound of Music was a smash hit and the source of one of the greatest soundtracks ever (I can recite the lyrics and dance for “So Long, Farewell” at the drop of a hat). Three years later, the exact same creative team tried to reproduce the magic with Julie Andrews in a musical film titled Star! and it completely flopped.

A series of other flops led to widespread concern in Hollywood that the film medium would disintegrate into irrelevance, much like vaudeville theatre had in previous decades. The years of 1969 and 1970 actually saw some of the lowest filmgoing numbers on record.

With Hollywood’s declining fortunes, film studios fell into the hands of corporate conglomerates, which weren’t exactly known for having best taste.

Notably, Jack Warner sold off a large part of Warner Brothers in 1966. The buyer was Kinney, a conglomerate that owned funeral parlours and parking lots. Paramount Pictures — the studio that would produce The Godfather — was also acquired by a conglomerate in 1966 for a negligible sum of $600,000. The buyer was Gulf + Western Industries, which started in manufacturing and natural resources before acquiring 60+ companies across every industry (in the 1980s, the company sold its non-media assets and what remained was acquired by Viacom in 1994).

To flee the declining industry and corporate influence, Coppola and Lucas based their new company in San Francisco. In hindsight, it looks symbolic to launch a “startup” in the Bay Area. This was decades before the height of the tech boom, though. The decision to set up in San Francisco was literally to keep a physical distance from Old Hollywood in Los Angeles.

The potential for a “New Hollywood” was epitomized by the July 1969 film, Easy Rider. Directed by Dennis Hopper — who also starred in the film alongside Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson (all three were graduates of Roger Corman School of Hard Knocks) — the road biking drama went on to make $60 million on a $400,000 budget, resulting in a massive 150x return on investment. The film was also nominated for numerous Academy Awards and proved that it was possible for independent production houses to succeed outside of the traditional Hollywood system.

Coppola became the elder statesman among a group of director friends (Lucas, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg) who defined “New Hollywood”. This iconic group was called “The Movie Brats” and would go on to dominate the 1970s with films including The Godfather (Coppola, 1972), American Graffiti (Lucas, 1973), Mean Streets (Scorsese, 1973), The Godfather Part II (Coppola, 1972), Carrie (DePalma, 1976), Jaws (Spielberg, 1975), Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976), Star Wars (Lucas, 1977) and Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979).

To be sure, not all of these films were American Zoetrope productions. Lucas would actually split with Coppola after his 1973 hit American Graffiti. American Zoetrope struggled financially in its early days. But the main point is that Coppola had planted a flag in the ground and was offering a different path forward that inspired the best of a new generation of film talent.

***

Patton (1970) — Developing The Right Skills

By the time he launched American Zoetrope, Coppola had achieved his college ambition of directing feature films with four under his belt by the age of 31.

Coppola didn’t just wake up and become a director one day, though. He learned all parts of the trade by working as a production assistant and stood out from the crowd by becoming one of the best screenwriters in the industry.

Screenwriting is the skill that he used to get a scholarship at Hofstra College. It was this skill he used to convince Corman to give him his first feature film directing gig. And it was this skill that led to his first Academy Award.

The Academy Award was for the film Patton, which starred George C. Scott as the legendary U.S. General George S. Patton. The real-life Patton died in a jeep accident in Germany near the end of World War II in 1945. For decades, major film studios tried to make a biopic about the General but his family and the U.S. Army were against the project. By the late 1950s, Patton’s widow had passed away and the Army was more receptive to the idea.

Coppola had co-written a WWII film about the liberation of France (Is Paris Burning? in 1966) and 20th Century Fox was impressed enough by the work that it asked him to adapt a Patton biography.

While directing was always the end-goal, Coppola developed related industry skills to maximize the surface are of opportunities (in his Founders podcast episode on Coppola, David Senra makes a relevant modern analogy: Kanye West always wanted to rap but the way he broke into the industry was by composing beats).

Naturally, Coppola asked to direct Patton but the studio said “no”. He was ready to quit the project but the $50k writing fee on offer was too much to pass up, especially as Coppola and his wife Eleanor needed to support two young sons (Gian-Carlo, Roman).

Patton came out in 1970 and crushed it at the Oscars in the following year including wins for Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay. Coppola claimed that last trophy and the milestone even played a part in helping him finish his next film, The Godfather.

***

The Godfather (1972) — Keeping The Highest Standards

The Godfather is considered by many to be the greatest film ever made, and the story behind its making is surreal. As described by Jenny M. Jones in the book The Annotated Godfather, the financial and creative odds were heavily stacked against the film’s success:

“One can’t help but marvel (at how The Godfather) ever got made, when every conceivable obstacle stood in its way:

A writer who didn’t want to write it (Puzo).

A studio that didn’t want to produce it (Paramount).

A film no director would touch (12 turned it down).

A cast of unknowns (outside of Marlon Brando, who was toxic).

A community against it (Italian-American civil rights groups).

And yet, The Godfather succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations, to become one of the greatest cinematic masterpieces in history.”

Despite these obstacles, it was Coppola’s commitment to his own taste and high standards that led to the creation of a masterpiece.

Let’s start in 1970: Paramount Pictures ranked 9th among film studios in box office receipts, but it was able to score one major hit. The film was Love Story, which made $106 million on a budget of only $2.2 million. It was based on America’s #1 best-selling book at the time. Paramount happened to own the rights to another top-selling book (Mario Puzo’s The Godfather) and was keen to make it a film.

We’ll talk about the film in a second but the Puzo backstory is so wild that it needs to be told:

• In 1965, Puzo was 45-year old semi-failed author.

• He owed $20,000 in gambling debts, so an editor suggested he use the “Mafia” themes from his previous books for a new commercial project.

• Puzo wrote a 10-page treatment and received a $5,000 advance. He actually didn’t know any mobsters so had to do deep research to finish the project.

• In 1967, Puzo completed 60 pages and hype around the book made its way to Paramount. The studio optioned the book for $12,500 and gave Puzo a max payout of $80,000 if a film was made.

• In 1969, Puzo finished the book and it became a smash: it spent 67 weeks on NYT’s bestseller list. Paramount securing the film rights for only $80,000 is considered one of the greatest film deals ever (Paramount did throw Puzo another $100,000 to write the script).

After Love Story’s success, Paramount moved fast to make a film adaptation of The Godfather. The effort was led by Senior VP Robert Evans, who ended up having an awful relationship with Coppola (Coppola felt Evans “needlessly meddled” in The Godfather’s production and their fraught partnership was turned into the Amazon Prime show, The Offer).

Paramount had production issues way before Coppola’s involvement.

No director wanted to take on the project because mob and criminal enterprises were not sexy content. Remember, this is decades before Goodfellas, The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad and Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.

In fact, Paramount had tried to make a Sicilian mobster flick in 1968 with mega-star Kirk Douglas (The Brotherhood) and it bombed hard.

The Godfather project was so unappealing that twelve directors rejected Evan’s pitch including Coppola the first time he was approached. Why? The Italian-American director wanted to do an “intellectual film about power and (family) succession” but Paramount wanted a “pseudo-Hollywood, Frank Sinatra story” that glamourized the mafia.

Another obstacle was that a prominent Italian-American civil rights group protested the portrayal of Italians in Puzo’s book. One of the leading activists was Anthony Colombo (his father was head of one of the Five New York Mafia Families). Colombo threatened to stonewall the production and, in the end, the words “mafia” and the Sicilian term La Cosa Nostra were “expunged” from the script.

Most previous Hollywood mob films were made by non-Italians and Paramount realized that Coppola’s heritage could help deflect criticism. So, the studio was willing to give Coppola some creative control to get him on board.

Coppola was also amenable because American Zoetrope needed to get funds through the door. Lucas told Coppola that The Godfather was a “life boat” for their burgeoning studio and urged Coppola to “take the project, do whatever they want…get the money and we can do whatever we want.”

To keep the production under the film’s initial budget of $2.5 million, Paramount pushed for two cost-cutting moves. Film it in St. Louis (which is less expensive than New York) and set it in the contemporary 1970s period (instead of having to design costumes for the late-1940s).

Coppola took on The Godfather in order to help fund American Zoetrope. However, he wasn’t willing to simply mail the project in. Filming in St. Louis and setting the time period during the 1970s was inconsistent with Puzo’s story.

Coppola’s vision won out — and pushed the budget to $7 million — but it almost cost him the entire job. Paramount had a director waiting to take over the project if Coppola strayed too far.

During production, Coppola had to send daily footage to the studio team so they could keep tabs. They bitched the entire time: “Marlon Brando mumbles too much”. “Al Pacino isn’t the right actor”. “The lighting is too dark”. “The angles aren’t good”. “The music sucks”.

Two developments saved Coppola.

First, he won that Oscar for Patton while filming The Godfather.

“I was in New York, about to get fired from The Godfather,” Coppola recalled of that 1971 night for the Academy Awards. “I watched the show with Marty Scorsese and he said to me, ‘How are they going to fire you now?’”

Second, he finished filming one pivotal scene that swayed Paramount execs. In the middle of the story, Michael Corleone goes to a restaurant to confront two antagonists. I won’t spoil it here, but it’s one of Hollywood’s most iconic scenes:

The head of Gulf+Western loved the scene. And, from there, Coppola was allowed to complete the project.

The film premiered on March 14th, 1972 and went on to pull in $287m at the box office (a ~40x return on budget; in 2024 dollars, that is a ~$1.4 billion on a $35 million budget). It also did very well at the 1973 Academy Awards including Best Actor (Marlon Brando), Best Adapted Screenplay (Coppola and Puzo) and Best Picture (somewhat shittily, a single Paramount producer — Albert S. Ruddy — went on stage and didn’t thank Coppola or the actors).

A year after these awards, The Godfather Pt. II came out to similar acclaim (he also directed the Gene Hackman thriller The Conversation in 1974). Coppola wanted Martin Scorsese to direct the sequel but the studio balked. In the end, Coppola snagged another Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture award as well as his first Best Director trophy.

“(The Godfather was) just the most frightening and depressing experience I think I’ve ever had,” Coppola said of the experience in 2016. “I had no power, and yet I had real opinions on how it should be done.”

While these classic mafia films made his career, Coppola became fixated on control. Paramount had give him creative freedom on The Godfather Part II but Coppola would go to extreme lengths to retain total control on his next film.

***

Francis Ford Coppola Winery — The $500m+ Side Hustle

A majority of Coppola’s estimated $300 million net worth, which is a funding source for his upcoming film Megalopolis, is based on an investment that the director made on a whim. The random nature of this outcome is befitting of someone who also made awful bets in the 1960s and 1970s on random film technology companies, a radio station, and a San Francisco magazine brand.

The story behind Francis Ford Coppola Winery goes back to 1887, when a Finnish-Russian boat captain named Gustave Niebaum made a fortune trading fur pelts in Alaska before moving to San Francisco and marrying a Californian. The entrepreneur loved wine and considered buying a winery in France, but his wife wanted to stay in America.

So, Niebaum took his fortune to Napa Valley and set out to create a winery operation that was on par with the best wines from Burgundy, France. The highest-quality site in Napa Valley for making such wine at the time was called Inglenook.

Fast forward to 1972. Niebaum’s wine-making operation was no longer functioning and the property was up for sale. Coppola, coming off of The Godfather, wanted to spend some of that sweet sweet cheddar:

I had no money whatsoever to my name, much less influence or connections, when I came (to California) to go to film school. I had not a penny. But after The Godfather I got the first little money I ever had. We had a nice house in San Francisco, and I said to my wife, “Let’s buy a cottage in the Napa Valley, so the kids could go to a place where there are trees and maybe an acre of grapes, and we’ll make wine like my grandfather did, and we’ll give it to the relatives for Christmas.”

She liked the idea of a little summer house. So we were looking at little cheap summer houses, and the agent said, “This isn’t for you, but they’re going to auction the Niebaum estate—the original house and a big hunk of the mountain.”

I said, “What’s that?”

So we wanted to see it. I had no money or ability to buy a place like that, but when I saw it… It was like, “This is where the rich people live.” It had a lake and 1,400 acres and this beautiful antique house. We were knocked out, so I made an offer. We didn’t get it, and that ruined our plan for a little cottage because nothing compared to this. (…)

About seven or eight months after having (lost out on the bidding process), my wife heard the rumor that the people who bought it were financed by a group that wanted to put 60 homes on the mountain but ran into trouble with the new agricultural preserve rules that said the mountain couldn’t be exploited—thank God. So, on a wild chance, I went to the people who had bought it and said, “Is there a chance you might want to sell it?” They said yes.

I bought it from them without even knowing where the hell I was going to get the money. It was about what a house cost in Beverly Hills in those days; I think $1.2 million.

After buying the property, the next film Coppola made was Apocalypse Now in the Philippines. As we’ll discuss in the next section, that production turned into such a financial boondoggle that Coppola almost sold his newly purchased winery.

At the depths of their money problems, Eleanor Coppola asked her husband, “We have this winery. What should we do? We have 100 acres of grapes and we don’t know anything about how to run a wine business.”

He replied, “Well, I (didn’t) know anything about how to make movies either, really, so let’s just do our best.”

It took a lot of work in the following decades but they did figure it out and the winery sold for an estimated $500m+ in 2021 (the Coppola’s owned a majority of the business).

“To be honest with you, I made more money in the wine business than I did in the film business,” Coppola said of the side hustle. “But I made it with money that I had earned in the film business.”

***

Apocalypse Now (1979) – The Cost of Control

In 1975, Coppola turned 36 and was on top of Hollywood after directing The Godfather Part I (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974) and The Conversation (1974) over a 3-year span.

What did he choose to do next? Make a film about the Vietnam War. An original script was written by John Milius and based on an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the 1889 novella about the horrors of colonialism in the Belgian Congo.

However, no major studio wanted to finance the film because:

1. Coppola wanted full creative control

2. Coppola wanted to own all of the film rights

3. The studios wanted Coppola to make another Mafia flick (Coppola: “If you make films you don’t know how to make, you learn a lot. If you make you do know how to make, you maybe make more money but you don’t learn as much.”)

4. The Fall of Saigon happened in April 1975 and the American audience wasn’t exactly asking for a Vietnam War film

“I was in my ‘up’ period but I was astonished that nobody wanted me to make Apocalypse Now,” Coppola would later say. “I learned the big rule of the movie business…(i)t’s also about the type of movie you want to make.”

Undeterred, Coppola set out to make the biggest bet yet of his career.

The Godfather Part II cost $14 million and Coppola estimated that Apocalypse Now would require the same budget. Coppola put up $7 million (mostly from those juicy Godfather checks) and raised another $7 million from United Artists by going back to his old bag of tricks (selling the studio the rights for domestic distribution over ~7 years).

Filming started in the Philippines in March 1976 and it was supposed to last 3-4 months. However, it took 16 months and Apocalypse Now became the poster child for a problematic Hollywood production:

• Harvey Keitel was the initial lead actor but Coppola fired him after one week.

• Martin Sheen took the lead role, but he drank so much on set that he gave himself a stress-induced heart attack and almost died.

• Marlon Brando demanded a huge fee (over $3 million — or $16 million in 2024 dollars — for three weeks of work and 10% of the film’s gross box office). He then showed up late, asked for rewrites, declined to read Conrad’s book and was so overweight that the costumes wouldn’t fit (to obscure his heft, Coppola filmed Brando in the shadows and had him wear oversized dark clothing).

• Dennis Hopper was snorting 3 grams of cocaine and downing 20+ drinks a day while on set (he and Marlon Brandon also hated each other).

• A typhoon destroyed 80% of the set and delayed filming for 3 months.

• Actual dead bodies — stolen from a local grave site — were used on set and the Filipino government’s strongman leader Ferdinand Marcos threatened to shut down the entire film.

• Coppola had an affair during the production and it almost ended his marriage to Eleanor (who was on set capturing footage for an astounding documentary she would release in 1991 titled Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse).

According to Sam Wasson in Air Mail, the budget for Apocalypse Now eventually ballooned to over $30 million.

To keep creative control and maintain all the film rights, Coppola mortgaged his home in San Fransisco and borrowed money against his ownership in The Godfather. Coppola says interest payments on his 7-figure loans reached 25%+.

As the production dragged on, Coppola’s Inglenook winery was almost put up for sale. George Lucas — newly minted from Star Wars (1977) — offered to help his friend by buying Inglenook and holding it for a decade until Coppola could buy it back.

This Lucas offer was a thank you for Coppola going to bat for Lucas’ first major theatrical film American Graffiti: released in 1973, that semi-biographic tale about Lucas’ adolescence made a monster $115 million on a $770,000 budget. American Zoetrope had produced the film with Universal Pictures but the studio didn’t think it would do well in theatres and almost sent it straight to TV. In a heated argument with the studio execs, Coppola pulled out his check book and offered to buy the entire film for the price of the budget. The studio relented and the rest is history.

Back to Apocalypse Now, a milestone that pushed the film across the finish line was a preview showing at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1979. The film’s beleaguered production had been covered by all the major trade publications and no one knew what to expect. Coppola compounded the pressure by making incredibly hyperbolic statements that — as the son of two Vietnamese refugees who fled the country — are objectively absurd:

“This isn’t a film about Vietnam. This is Vietnam.”

“The way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. 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.”

Sure, it was a difficult production but “This is Vietnam” is a bit much.

Anyway, the Cannes showing convinced the studio that Coppola could finish the final edit. A number of international distributor also picked up the film after Festival, which helped to offset the total cost — including marketing spend — that reached $45 million (about $200m in 2024 dollars).

The film was finally released in August 1979 and grossed $105 million. Coppola would make a fortune on future DVD, Home Video and other ancillary revenue streams including, most recently, a re-mastered cut in 2019 (Coppola: “I own Apocalypse Now because no one else wanted it”).

Despite the wild proclamations — and lack of Vietnamese-speaking parts — it’s an incredible artistic achievement and my favourite Hollywood Vietnam War film (over The Deer Hunter, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket).

Coppola said that the production of Apocalypse Now changed him as a person. He wanted full control and it nearly cost him everything.

My favourite take on the director’s 4-year transformation is from essayist Jed McKenna. In an piece titled “A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse”, McKenna makes the case that Apocalypse Now — much more so than either of The Godfather films — is Coppola’s greatest work and the film that truly made him an artist.

McKenna writes:

(Coppola) bit off more than he could chew with this project, so the universe reforged him into the tool that could do the job. (…)

In the course of trying to find his way, Coppola fell into suicidal despair over the fact that the movie would fail, that he couldn’t make the script work, that the project would bankrupt him and ruin his career, that it would cost him his family and health. (…)

Be careful what you wish for, not because you’ll get it but because you’ll be turned into the thing that can get it. It’s not a process where you just ask for something and it magically appears. It’s a process that breaks you down and rebuilds you into the right tool for the job.

It took every ounce of Coppola’s being to finish Apocalypse Now and he would never reach the same creative heights.

***

One From The Heart (1982) — Hubris

Nothing speaks more to the swings of Coppola’s career than the fact that he followed up the achievement of Apocalypse Now with the biggest flop of his career.

Titled One From The Heart, his next film was a musical comedy set in Las Vegas. Coppola was initially offered a record $2 million directing fee from MGM. He turned it down because the studio wouldn’t agree to his budget request, which jumped from $15 million to $23 million because the director wanted to try new and ambitious set design techniques.

Unlike his friend George Lucas — who was extremely prudent in expanding the Star Wars empire brick-by-brick — Coppola was always willing to roll the dice with risky and unproven projects.

To fill the funding gap, Coppola went back to one of his classic moves: he pre-sold film distribution rights.

But it didn’t make a difference. One from the Heart pulled in a pitiful $630,000 on a budget of $26 million.

The worst part was that Coppola was now deep in debt. He would declare bankruptcy multiple times in the 1980s and was motivated to make films to pay back lenders instead of reaching new creative heights.

“Sometimes I think, ‘why don’t I just make my wine, do some dumb movie every two years and take trips to Europe with my wife and kids’,” Coppola said of his changing fortunes. “I’ve had it in terms of going to incredible extremes, half-blowing my personal life up just to make a movie. I’m always going to bed in a cold sweat. Will the star do this picture? How am I going to film the scene? Will they like it? I know that feeling translates into your insides. I know I’m losing years off of my life.”

Coppola must have felt unstoppable after surviving Apocalypse Now.

But there’s always a fall and the first word that comes to mind for One From The Heart is hubris.

***

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) — Working For Money

Following the One From The Heart debacle, Coppola made 10 films in the following 10 years: The Outsiders (1983), Rumble Fish (1983), The Cotton Club (1984), Captain EO (1986), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Gardens of Stone (1987), Tucker: The Man and His Dreams (1988), New York Stories (1989), The Godfather Pt. III (1990) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992).

The films were produced by American Zoetrope, which continued to make interesting films with avant-garde directors including Japanese legend Akira Kurosawa and French icon Jean-Luc Godard (my favourite Zoetrope production after the 1970s is 2003’s Lost in Translation — the comedy-drama starring Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray — which was written and directed by Coppola’s daughter Sofia).

Creatively, a director who had made three of the top 20-ish greatest films ever during a 7-year span in the 1970s (The Godfather I, The Godfather II, Apocalypse Now) was a now a gun for hire.

This decade-long run was not his best work and a good example of why solely chasing money is kryptonite for creativity (as with many people, I choose to believe that The Godfather Pt. III never happened).

The pain of working to pay off ~$50 million in debt was made infinitely worse by a personal tragedy. Coppola’s eldest son Gian-Carlo — who dropped out of school to apprentice under his father — died in a boating accident in 1986.

Ultimately, it was Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1992 that ended Coppola’s financial woes. The film made made $83 million on a budget of $40 million.

A year prior, his wife Eleanor released the Heart of Darkness documentary on the making of Apocalypse Now and it clearly showed how much Francis needed her support to do his best work. In that 2019 Deadline interview, Coppola talks about their relationship — sadly, Eleanor passed away earlier this year — and how she stuck with him through thick and thin:

I’ve been married 56 years, and although there probably wasn’t one year where we didn’t talk about getting divorced—which any honest marriage would admit—the truth of the matter was she witnessed, by my side, some pretty extraordinary things.

When I was in Hollywood pursuing my original career to try to be a screenwriter I didn’t have any connections, no family who were in the movie business then. I had no money whatsoever.

Whatever happened to me started from zero, and she was married to me at that time. She shared the astonishment that I actually was making progress as a professional screenwriter at first, and ultimately as a filmmaker.

But I made the deal with the bank (after One From The Heart) and I did 10 pictures…that paid off the debt. With Bram Stoker’s Dracula I think we even were in excess of what I had owed because that film was financially successful. So I went to my wife and said, ‘You’ve been such a supportive wife. I’ve managed to put together $10 million. Here it is. Buy an annuity so that you never will have to go through this thing where they’re closing the grocery store accounts.’

See, I never had corporations protecting me, any of that stuff. She said, “Thank you, it’s been rough, but I really appreciate that you have done this.”

Consistent with the rest of this Coppola story, there was a twist from the Dracula windfall. A week after giving the $10 million to Eleanor for safekeeping, the other half of the Inglenook estate went up for sale. Coppola asked his wife to “give me back that money” and they bought the rest of the winery property.

In 2008, Coppola added on risk by borrowing $20m during the Great Financial Crisis and building children play areas (swimming pools, games) so that an entire family could spend all day on his estate. Other wineries copied this playbook and he credits this idea with turbocharging his business to the point it would eventually pay for his longest passion project: Megalopolis.

***

Megalopolis (2024) — The 47-Year Passion Project

Fast forward to September 2024. Coppola is now 85 years old. The last feature film he released was in 2011 (Twixt, which I have not seen but has a cool name).

He started filming Megalopolis in November 2022 and the production lasted until March 2023. The film is a real passion project that he’s been working at on-and-off for 47 years:

• 1977: He originates the idea for a film about the re-building of New York after a Fall of Rome type of disaster (he was 38 at the time and finishing up Apocalypse Now).

• 1983: He writes 400 pages of script excerpts and film notes.

• 1989-1996: He tries to get funding for the film but studios balked.

• 2001: Actors audition for the script and he films 30+ hours of background footage around New York (he pauses the entire project after 9/11).

• 2009: He picks the project back up and re-writes the script over 300x times in the next decade.

• 2017: Anthony Bourdain interviewed Coppola in Italy and after watching the show, Coppola realized that he was overweight and lost 75lbs to give himself the energy and stamina to finish the Megalopolis script and eventual filming.

• 2021: With the script completed, Coppola sells a significant portion of his winery holdings and uses his remaining ownership as collateral to get a bank line of credit to finance the $120 million budget.

• 2022-23: He starts filming and it’s a difficult production due to COVID, casting and funding.

Paralleling the chaotic production of Apocalypse Now, it took Coppola a long time to secure distribution. He brought the project to the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024 and the reviews were very mixed. But there was enough momentum that Lionsgate Films agrees to distribute Megalopolis (embarrassingly — and hilariously — Lionsgate made a trailer of the film using fake AI-generated quotes).

I have no idea if Megalopolis will be good but the cast looks legit including Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Fishburne (who was 14-years old for his film debut in Apocalypse Now and is Coppola’s longest acting collaborator).

It’s very hard not to want to support such a risky all-in bet when the rest of Hollywood is scared of its own shadow (other than sequels, super-heroes and existing IP).

Somewhat ironically, I’ve written this article from the lens of Coppola as an entrepreneur and business person even though these considerations were far from his priority.

So let me wrap by trying to answer this question: What has been Coppola’s motivation?

One answer during a press event for Megalopolis at the Cannes Festival suggests he never wanted to live with regrets.

“I never cared about money,” Coppola said when asked by a reporter why he risked so much of his own capital for Megalopolis. “In the end there are so many people when they die that say, ‘I wish I had done this, I wish I had done that’. But when I die I’m gonna say ‘I got to do this. I got to see my daughter (Sofia) win an Oscar (Original Screenplay for Lost In Translation), and I got to make wine. And I got to make all the movies I wanted to make. And I’m going to be so busy thinking about the things that I got to do, that when I die I won’t notice it.”

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