Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker's Life
Michael Schumacher
Bloomsbury, £25, 544pp
Buy it at BOL
Coppola was the first of a generation who at the end of the 60s gatecrashed Hollywood "via the shortcuts of film school and producer Roger Corman's low-budget mill", where previously a slow pecking order had meant aspiring directors had to wait their turn, sometimes for years.
According to this biography, in 1972, Coppola, having lucked out on The Godfather 's success, was on Sunset Boulevard in his chauffeured limousine with William Friedkin, director of The French Connection, another big hit. Peter Bogdanovich, the newly successful director of The Last Picture Show, drew alongside. While waiting for the lights to change the three men, "all young and in demand, crowed over their respective successes, with Coppola the winner on account of the size of his box office".
This cock-of-the-walk scene was forgivable because all three looked to have licked the system and joined the Hollywood pantheon (which Bogdanovich had been instrumental in creating as a critic). But they all blew it; they all turned out to be chumps.
As with several other contemporaries, a sickly, cosseted childhood had contributed to Coppola's imagination, and like them he hid his wunderkind reputation behind an early beard. He was also content at first to work with the system. When young European filmmakers were indulging in social revolution, he was making his first studio movie with Petula Clark, Tommy Steele and Fred Astaire.
He got the job of The Godfather, so the story goes, because of his Italian name. What Schumacher doesn't ask is to what extent The Godfather created the myths with which Coppola subsequently surrounded himself. Nor is the transformation from self-confessed nerd to self-invented movie mogul adequately explained. With success, Coppola quickly emerged as a potentate, buying property like Monopoly, acting as a cultural fixer, issuing press statements like Charles Foster Kane.
Shards of Kane, Welles, Hearst and San Simeon were evident in Coppola's public face; he was always the showman, whether creating an anti-Hollywood principality in San Francisco, courting European auteurs or pursuing the messy dream of Zoetrope Studios. Distraction probably accounts for the surrogate nature of too many Coppola movies. For all his vaunted skills as a screenwriter, the films often lacked a final draft. Apocalypse Now added up to less than the brouhaha surrounding its production. Schumacher ignores the willed recklessness at the heart of the project, with Coppola perhaps desperate to make up for a lack of personal experience; nor does he question the usual "they-all-went-mad" story.
Too much dreary synopsis and too many old reviews contribute to a book stronger on the ephemerality of film criticism than on Coppola, who is presented in terms of standard press-release jargon - risk-taker, visionary, maverick (the genius of Hollywood is that it lets everyone believe they are a maverick: controlled deviancy is a part of the system).
Coppola's visionary schemes were pretty half-baked. For all his cultural philanthropy, he was an erratic employer, firing regularly, and he indulged in too many follies, the exception being his career as a vintner (no quarrel there, his wine is excellent). The films came bedevilled by sloppiness - his own admission - and too many press releases supposed to be taken at face value.
Overall, what emerges as Coppola's most impressive achievement is his ability to spend money. For all the history of fiscal mess, mountains of debts, legal wrangles and extravagant investments, in the long run he proved canny at looking after number one. With the exception of The Godfather (in its extended television cut), the movies pale beside a magnificent talent for financial irresponsibility in the face of disaster.
