In its article on Francis Ford Coppola’s struggle to secure a distributor for the highly ambitious (and very expensive) Megalapolis, The Hollywood Reporter quoted an anonymous industry source, who said, “There’s simply no way to position this movie. “
The cinephile aspect of the web lost its brain from there, letting out a proverbial laugh of general disbelief. Are you having trouble marketing a film directed by the five-time Oscar winner, guilty of some of the most influential films ever made?All a distributor has to do, as X user Ryan Lee astutely pointed out, is create a poster directory with Coppola’s impressive credentials: The Godfather, The Godfather II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now.
“I realize I left a mark and some people think I’m a very vital director,” the director told Empire in 2021. “I’ve made a handful of movies that will last a long time. “”.
Born on April 7, 1939, Francis Ford Coppola grew up in Queens, New York, the son of composer Carmine Coppola. At the age of eight, he fell ill with polio and was confined to his room. In an effort to fill the endless hours due to lonely boredom, the longtime filmmaker turned to “puppets, mechanical items and devices” to entertain himself, he told the New York Times in 1988. “I’m smart with devices and I’ve become a handyman. I think what I think. ” I’m an inventor.
Fascinated by storytelling, he first dreamed of becoming a playwright, but eventually turned to cinema after seeing Sergei Eisenstein’s Ten Days That Shook the World. Coppola began his career in pornography (no joke) and through the past. In the 1960s, he graduated from UCLA’s film school and founded his own film brand, American Zoetrope, with a pre-Star Wars George Lucas. Along with Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and many others, Coppola would become an emblem of Hollywood’s New Wave. movement, in which young administrators brought a new modern size (formed through the turbulent years of the counterculture) to the old system of studies.
Coppola’s mythical streak between 1972 and 1979 spawned four of the most critically acclaimed and culturally impactful films ever made: The Godfather, The Godfather II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. By the early 1980s, Coppola had racked up five Academy Awards, totaling one. for his work as a screenwriter on Franklin J. ‘s Patton. Schaffner (1970).
Of course, he continued to make films in the years that followed, but he struggled to regain the stratospheric good fortune he had achieved in the ’70s.
Even if you don’t make it to the bottom of this list, you can guess what the main entries will be. It is universally accepted that Coppola made his most productive films in the 1970s, however, there are some underrated gems among his later productions. adding a memorable interpretation of the most famous vampire in pop culture history. For the list in particular, I’ll rank Coppola’s filmography according to their respective scores on Rotten Tomatoes. Come on, okay?
Arguably the low point of Coppola’s career, Jack asks audiences to swallow a premise about a boy who ages faster than any other child (hence the outward appearance of the vanquished Robin Williams). The film was panned and only grossed $58 million at the box office. “There are adult themes,” co-writer Gary Nadeau told The Telegraph in 2021. “It’s about death. But they sold it as a comedy, so it felt like a children’s movie. As writers, we had another movie in mind than the one that had been released. . . The first conception of the film was nothing more tender and sincere.
Jack only received a 17% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is now streaming on Disney.
Coppola’s latest installment, Twixt, follows a sufferer (Val Kilmer), who finds himself caught up in the mystery of a small-town homicide case. The horror film failed to move the needle in terms of viewership and critical enthusiasm. To quote The Hollywood Reporter: “As a self-financed and, in all likelihood, self-distributed film, with the director accompanying the film on its theatrical run, there would possibly be elements here to galvanize the reflected image or the discussion with a curious audience. But as a true premiere film, even with Val Kilmer, Elle Fanning and Bruce Dern in the cast, the film doesn’t stand a chance. Coppola tried his hand last year with a restored, re-edited edition of the film he called “The Authentic Cut. “
Twixt received a 30% discount on Rotten Tomatoes and is available to hire and/or own on YouTube Movies.
Based on Mircea Eliade’s 1976 short story of the same name, Youth Without Youth marked Coppola’s return to the world’s most level-headed direction after a ten-year hiatus. The film follows Dominic Matei (Tim Roth), an elderly linguistics professor suddenly gifted with a new life. There was a love story, and there were all sorts of things that I discovered that were intriguing, and all kinds of things that I was looking to learn, like the origins of language and the nature of human consciousness and the concept of time,” Coppola stated his preference for adapting the original curtains (via Oregon Live).
Youth Without Youth earned a 33% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is now streaming on Tubi.
What could be considered simply a complement to the tremendously astonishing Apocalypse Now, Gardens of Stone tackles the Vietnam War from a national perspective. The Godfather alum, James Caan, leads the task as a sergeant caught between duty to his country and a friend who fiercely opposes the conflict. Speaking to Vulture in 2020, Coppola expressed deep regret for directing the film, as his 22-year-old son, Gian-Carlo Coppola, died in a twist of the production’s fate.
“There’s one movie I wouldn’t have made because it charged me for everything, and it’s one of the movies I made at a time when I had to make a movie every year to keep my space and my family together. “” said the filmmaker. says. I fantasize about not having directed Stone Gardens. I wouldn’t have lost my son.
Gardens of Stone reached 44% on Rotten Tomatoes and is now streaming on Tubi.
Coppola’s Las Vegas love affair flopped so badly on its initial release that the director himself pulled it from theaters, according to this 2012 interview with the Los Angeles Times. However, in recent years, the film has definitely been re-evaluated as a charming homage. to the cinematic taste of the Golden Age of Hollywood. It even had a limited theatrical reissue earlier this year, with the New Yorker proclaiming:
The film almost feels like Coppola’s reaction to his last decade of acclaimed films: the two Godfather films, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now. What those works represent is realism and, wonderful as they are, they left Coppola no room to explore aesthetics. Cinema aspect. The physical realism of Apocalypse Now, with its grueling filming in the Philippines and its real explosions and military planes in soft f, was so excessive that Coppola filmed it like a documentary. Style had to take a back seat, but in “One”. from the Heart”, the events on the screen are inventions; Reality comes from within, from cinematographic painting, from the possible thick impasto of light and shadow, and from the compositional delicacy of stylized movement.
One From the Heart has earned a 51% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is now available to sign up and/or buy on Prime Video.
Coppola’s third directorial effort, Finian’s Rainbow is a big-screen adaptation of the 1947 musical of the same name. Fred Astaire plays Finian McLonergan, an Irish immigrant who arrives in the southern United States with his daughter and a magical gold coin that can replace lives. for the better. Despite receiving two Oscar nominations for Best Music and Best Sound, Coppola regretted leaving the film’s post-production paintings in the hands of its producers.
“As it stands, I think the film is good, but I let the manufacturer and others finish the film after doing a first cut and I went off to make The Rain People,” he said in 2007. “Now, when I look at Finian’s Rainbow, I think my only dissatisfaction is that I could have taken a big step forward if I had done the final post-production. I do it one day just for fun, not to show it, but just for fun. to see how well I can do it. »
Finian’s Rainbow has a score of 53% on Rotten Tomatoes and can be rented and/or owned on YouTube Movies.
Coppola reluctantly directed The Godfather III for Paramount, as he desperately needed cash at the time. These are precisely the maximum artistic conditions under which a film can be made. The end result was an unnecessary trilogy that pales extraordinarily in comparison to its predecessors. Among the sequel’s many flaws are the absence of Robert Duvall as consigliere Tom Hagen and the misguided choice of the director’s own daughter, Sofia, as Mary Corleone. Even the story, in which Michael strikes a dubious deal with the Vatican, is a bit undercooked. Despite this, The Godfather Part III grossed $136 million internationally and was nominated for seven Academy Awards, in addition to Best Picture.
The Godfather III scored 66% on Rotten Tomatoes and is now streaming on Paramount.
Produced by Roger Corman’s low-budget film, Coppola’s feature debut is as exploitative as it gets. ” Unaware that a psychopathic assassin with an axe lurks on her relatives’ estate, a scheming widow hatches a plan to get her hands on an inheritance. ” reads the synopsis. In a verbal exchange with Slash Film last year, Coppola recalled how the entire production took shape on the fly: “I went to Ireland and I didn’t even have a script. I had this page that I had to write. I wrote a script while I was filming it. I would write it overnight on booklets so we could unroll it and hand it out to the actors.
Dementia Thirteen scored 69% on Rotten Tomatoes and is now streaming on Tubi.
Based on the novel of the same name to The Outsiders by S. E. 1967’s Hinton is even considered one of the most productive coming-of-age films ever made. The story of two gangs separated by their socioeconomic status, the film features lead roles from Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Ralph Macchio, Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, and the late Patrick Swayze. “I read Susan Hinton’s book. . . and I was moved by the point of esteem that those deficient ‘Greaser children had each other, even though they didn’t have the advantages of their ‘social’ rivals,” Coppola told The Guardian in 2021. I’ve always thought that children have a lot more emotions than we give them and I wanted to do Hitale. When I was about 17, I was a theater counselor at a summer camp, and the idea of being with a dozen young kids in the field and making a movie seemed like camp to me. Counselor to me again. He would tell me my problems and give me a laugh.
The Outsiders received a 70% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is now streaming on Tubi.
Introducing Alden Ehrenreich’s first film (Solo: A Star Wars Story), Tetro marked Coppola’s first original screenplay since The Conversation. It tells the story of two estranged brothers, Bennie (Ehrenreich) and Tetro (Vincent Gallo), who are reunited in Argentina. A lot of the story is about a younger brother who idealized an older brother and then disappeared, so he was orphaned by his hero,” the director said in an interview with the Seattle Met. “I have an older brother and my brother has been smart to me since day one. But now that I understand the movie, I’ve learned that maybe I felt that when he had to leave, I actually felt like he was leaving me. It left me in a very vulnerable time.
Tetro has a 71% score on Rotten Tomatoes and is available to rent and/or own on YouTube Movies.
Set against the backdrop of the Harlem-based jazz hotspot of the 1920s and 1930s, The Cotton Club is Coppola’s exploration of the paradoxical racial divisions in early twentieth-century America. “The club had the most talented black performers of its time, and yet it segregated and black people couldn’t stop watching the show. It was the hoi polloi, the real high society, the people who went there and I wanted to see anything with two globals, a black global and a white global intertwined and, of course, be over. at the Cotton Club with the acts and shows,” he said in 2019. The film ended up earning two Academy Award nominations for art direction and editing.
The Cotton Club earned a 74% score on Rotten Tomatoes and is now streaming on Tubi.
Filmed back-to-back with The Outsiders, Rumble Fish (also based on a novel by S. E. Hinton) stars Matt Dillon as Rusty-James, a young thug who aspires to the halcyon days of a street gang led by his older brother, Motorcycle Boy. (Mickey Rourke). ” I made the decision to shoot in black and white because I wanted to make an art film for young people, and black and white provides a quality of poetic realism,” Coppola explained to The Guardian in 2012. “I didn’t do it, I just let the script tell the story; I also used the camera angles, lighting, and soundtrack to get a young audience to love the film as much as I did. I was disappointed when he didn’t rush to see her. But its appeal is nicely endured. It was the movie I wanted to make.
Rumble Fish has a 76% approval score on Rotten Tomatoes and is available to hire and/or own on YouTube Movies.
Coppola’s contribution to this anthology is Life Without Zoë, which he co-authored with his daughter Sofia (now an acclaimed filmmaker in her own right). In its review of the segment, the New York Times wrote:
“Its dominant message, which is more or less that of Marie Antoinette, is conveyed through the titular schoolgirl, who spends her parents’ long absences in Sherry-Holland and is cared for by an adorable staff. Zoe’s antics, which take her from a personal school setting to a masquerade ball on the Acropolis and characters like the richest kid in the world, are given a colorful look and an absolutely bland feel, even as she’s helping to reconcile her parents separated for years. Maximum honesty comes out when Zoe declares, “Let’s go shopping!”
New York Stories earned a 76% score on Rotten Tomatoes and is now available to rent and/or buy on Prime Video.
Widely regarded as one of the film adaptations of Bram Stoker’s seminal vampire novel, Coppola’s edition of the world’s most famous leech is backed by exuberant production design, lavish dresses, and a very funny performance, with Gary Oldman as the Count himself. It also starred Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, and Anthony Hopkins, grossed over $215 million internationally, and won 3 Academy Awards (out of four nominations) for costume design, sound editing, and makeup.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula has passed through 77% of Rotten Tomatoes users and is lately streaming on Pluto TV.
Like many of the films on this list, Coppola’s second feature was an adaptation of an existing novel (this one written by David Benedictus). The coming-of-age sex comedy earned a three-star rating from Roger Ebert, who described the director as “a new UCLA wunderkind whose only past endeavors were skin movies. “Cast member Geraldine Page won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
You’re a Big Boy Now has an 82% approval score on Rotten Tomatoes and is available for purchase on Amazon.
Based on John Grisham’s 1995 novel of the same name, The Rainmaker is, in fact, a story of the underdog. Matt Damon plays Rudy Baylor, a rookie lawyer who takes on lawyers from a well-funded insurance company. “I had never read ‘It Had Been a Grisham Novel,'” Coppola told Roger Ebert in 1997. “I saw The Rainmaker in an airport. They gave it to me as a gift and I enjoyed it. In a way, it reminded me of The Godfather. People like the concept that if an injustice happens, they can pass it on to someone and fix it.
The Rainmaker scored 82% on Rotten Tomatoes and is now streaming on Paramount with a Showtime subscription.
The first production to premiere through American Zoetrope, The Rain People centers on a frustrated pregnant housewife (Shirley Knight) who desperately seeks freedom. “This is the first film I’ve made as a comedy,” Coppola said in a 1969 interview. “I think the biggest reaction I’ve had has been the fact that other people are very interested and think about it a lot, even after seeing it. They come to me and say, “Well, I don’t think she’s coming back” or something. And that’s wonderful. If you stimulate thinking about those things, maybe a husband will think about his wife in a way that he hadn’t thought of before and maybe they can build something more effective through that. Rain People also features pre-Godfather tours through James Caan and Robert Duvall.
The Rain People has an 85% approval score on Rotten Tomatoes and is available to hire and/or buy on Prime Video.
A precursor to timeless comedies like 17 Again and Hot Tub Time Machine, Peggy Sue Got Married stars Kathleen Turner as a housewife on the verge of divorce, who has the chance to relive her senior year at the best school, circa 1960. The film also features the lead roles of Nicolas Cage (Coppola’s real-world nephew) and Jim Carrey. Peggy Sue was well received by critics (Roger Ebert called it “one of the most productive films” of 1986) and earned 3 Academy Award nominations for Best Actress, Cinematography, and Costume Design.
Peggy Sue Got Married has a score of 87% on Rotten Tomatoes and is available to hire and/or buy on Prime Video.
Many enthusiasts consider The Godfather Part II to be impressive over its predecessor, and that’s a very fair assessment. Grandiose in scope and storytelling, the film features parallel narratives, comparing Michael’s ruthless rise to the force to that of his own father, Vito (played as a young man through Robert De Niro). The film has an undeniable sense of grandeur, aided by inspiration from real-world occasions such as the Cuban Revolution and Wallachian audiences. Although it wasn’t as big a financial success as the original, the sequel was critically acclaimed as an impressive masterpiece. It won six Academy Awards, becoming the first of the two sequels to win Best Picture (the second, of course, was The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King).
The Godfather Part II has a 96% approval score on Rotten Tomatoes and is streaming on Paramount lately.
While it may sound like a backlash to the Watergate scandal, The Conversation was written long before Richard Nixon’s presidency imploded. Even so, the bizarre timeliness of Coppola’s slow-moving mystery, centered on obsessive surveillance expert Harry Call (played to neurotic perfection by Gene Hackman), still packs a punch a century later, making it one of the genre’s biggest paranoid thrillers. The film was not a box office success, grossing only about $5 million worldwide, but garnered critical acclaim and earned 3 Academy Award nominations. adding one to Best Picture.
A whopping 97% of Rotten Tomatoes users have approved The Conversation, which is available to sign up and/or buy on Prime Video.
When someone says they’ve poured out “their blood, sweat and tears” on something, they’re usually aiming for hyperbole. Apocalypse Now, on the other hand, deserves this expression, due to the fact that Coppola and his cast almost commit suicide while seeking to kill themselves. The production was so arduous that it was chronicled in the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. All this angst has been rewarded with one of the biggest cinematic indictments against the U. S. military’s movements in Southeast Asia. Lines of dialogue – such as “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!” – and the iconic scene of Huey helicopters flying in formation to the rhythm of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” have an indelible component of our popular film culture. Apocalypse Now grossed over $100 million internationally and won two Academy Awards (out of 8 nominations) for sound and cinematography.
Apocalypse Now Redux scored a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and is streaming on Prime Video lately.
Is The Godfather the biggest crime movie ever made?I’ll let you answer this question. Based on the best-selling novel by Mario Puzo, the Corleone family’s mafia saga offers an offer that no viewer can refuse: a chance to explore the dark side of the American dream. Everything in the film is the best, from the casting to the music to the underlying themes of family, loyalty, loss, and sacrifice. And once again, the behind-the-scenes story of the making of the film is as captivating as the finished film itself. A box office bust and critical success, The Godfather grossed more than $250 million worldwide and took home three Academy Awards, in addition to the coveted Best Picture award. What else can I say other than, “Put down the gun, grab the cannoli. “»
The Godfather captivated audiences with a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is streaming on Paramount lately.
An exciting long-running project, Megalopolis languished in progression hell for more than 40 years before cameras began in late 2022. With no one interested in financing the film, Coppola decided to release the necessary $100 million. to realize their ambitious vision.
According to Deadline, Megalopolis follows an “ambitious architectural idealist” named Cesar (Adam Driver), who takes on Mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) in a dystopian edition of disaster-stricken New York City. The two characters wonder “whether to embrace the long term. “run and build a utopia with renewable materials, or adopt a strategy of reconstruction as always, full of concrete, corruption and intermediation of force at the expense of a restless marginal class. “Caught in the middle is Cicero’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel).
“It’s a love story,” Coppola said in an interview with GQ in 2022. “A woman is torn between loyalty to two men, but not just to two men. Every man has a philosophical principle. One is her father, who raised her, who taught her Latin on his lap and is devoted to a much more classical view of society, that of Marcus Aurelius. The other, who is the lover, is the enemy of the father but bets on a “let’s jump to the future, let’s jump to the future”. about all this garbage that has polluted the Huguyidad for 10,000 years. “Let’s locate what we really are, which is an enlightened, friendly and joyful species. “
Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Shia LaBeouf, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Chloe Fineman, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, D. B. Sweeney, Aubrey Plaza, Baily Ives, Grace VanderWaal, Talia Shire and James Remar complete the cast.
The film will have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024 and could benefit from wider distribution by French company Le Pacte (Anatomy of a Fall).
Conclusion
Even if all of his films were limited success, Francis Ford Coppola remains an unbreakable barrier between cinema as a sacred art form and cinema as a way to make a quick buck.
“The language of cinema was born out of experimentation, of other people who didn’t know what to do,” he said in a 2012 interview. “But unfortunately, after 15 to 20 years, it’s become an advertising industry. People were making money from film,” and then they started saying to the pioneers, “Don’t experiment. We need to make money. ” We don’t need to take any chances. An essential detail of any art is risk. If you don’t take any chances, how are you going to create something really beautiful, that has never been noticed before?I like to say, “That safe cinema is like not having sex and expecting to have a baby. You have to take risks. “
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