Francis Ford Coppola

The gambler of New Hollywood

Most great directors are remembered for a sensibility. Coppola is remembered for a wager — the belief that the biggest money in American movies could be spent on the most personal impulses, and that a filmmaker who owned his own studio could keep making that bet. For roughly seven years he was right in a way no American director has been right since. For the four decades after, he kept placing the same bet anyway, which is arguably the more interesting half of the story.

Detroit, Corman, and a decade that couldn't miss

Born in Detroit on April 7, 1939 to the flautist Carmine Coppola and Italia Pennino, he took a theater degree at Hofstra in 1960 and an MFA at UCLA in 1967, apprenticing in between for Roger Corman, who hired him in 1962 and let him direct Dementia 13 (1963) on $40,000 in nine days. He won his first Oscar as a writer, for the Patton (1970) screenplay co-written with Edmund H. North, and in 1969 founded American Zoetrope in a San Francisco warehouse with George Lucas — a company built, in his own framing, to make mainstream pictures that would pay for the odd ones.

Then the run: The Godfather (1972), which won Best Picture while he lost Best Director to Bob Fosse and which he called a nightmarish experience; The Conversation (1974), Palme d'Or at Cannes; The Godfather Part II (1974), six Oscars from eleven nominations, including his Best Director; and Apocalypse Now (1979), which survived typhoons, Martin Sheen's heart attack and Brando's improvisations to share the Palme d'Or with The Tin Drum. The reckoning came fast. One from the Heart (1982) took $636,796 against a $26 million budget, cost him the 23-acre studio in 1983, and started a decade of paying down debt that ended in Chapter 11 in 1990.

What the numbers say

Our library ranks Coppola #7 among all directors, on a body-of-work score of 31.85 — and the shape of that number is unusual. The Godfather sits at #1 overall (score 9.75), Apocalypse Now at #5, The Godfather Part II at #15, The Conversation at #71. Four films in the top hundred is a Kubrick-grade concentration. But the fifth-best Coppola in our data is Rumble Fish (1983) at #725, and after that the curve falls off a cliff: Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) at #2117, The Cotton Club (1984) at #2820, Megalopolis (2024) at #4404, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) — a genuine worldwide hit, $215.9 million on a $40 million budget — at #6454, one list appearance to its name.

That gap between #71 and #725 is, to my eye, the single most legible career shape in the top ten directors. It is the signature of a filmmaker whose critical standing rests almost entirely on one decade, and who spent the rest of his life refusing to be a curator of it — most literally with Megalopolis, self-financed for $120 million against a Delicato winery stake and grossing $14.4 million.

Where to start

The Godfather, obviously, then The Conversation — the small paranoid film that shows what the big ones are actually made of. Apocalypse Now third, when you have the evening for it.