Francis Ford Coppola

During the chaos of the Philippines, Eleanor Coppola realized that her husband might have finally found what he wanted: a community of artists. That longing for connection with other artists and old traditions fueled Coppola's art from the beginning. Some careers split naturally before and after landmark movies -- Robert Altman with "Nashville," David Lean with "Lawrence of Arabia." "Apocalypse Now" has been the dividing line between the untrammeled accomplishments of early-to-mid -'70s Coppola and his rockiness in the '80s and the '90s. But even in his early career he teetered between attempts to carve out an empire of art and efforts to intensify his own artistic acts.

In 1997, before the 25th anniversary celebration of "The Godfather," Coppola told me, "I think the style of getting together with other people, in this case young people -- a lot of it came out of my experience in college. I was a theater major at Hofstra, a school that has a wonderful theater and theater tradition. We were near New York so we were still close to the professional theater geographically, and that was the time, when I was 17 or 18, that I sort of came into my own. And on campus the theater was in that style of student organization where we students sort of had the power. Like many people of my age I was influenced by the films of Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick, and the wave of great foreign films. So I had one foot in international film and one foot in an entrepreneurial sort of theatrical tradition." After Coppola graduated from UCLA film school, "It was natural for me," he said, "to try to be close to friends and people I admired, such as Carroll Ballard and John Milius and George Lucas, and with them try to launch something independent and something American that was really related to cinema. It was like doing in a second installment what I had liked doing in college."

As far back as college and film school, Coppola was willing to mix the image of an artist with that of a go-getter. Peter Bart, the journalist-turned-Paramount executive (now editor of Variety) who approached him to make "The Godfather," told me that he remembered Coppola in film school as "already a great rewrite man; I'd written a story for the New York Times about him as an up-and-comer. I wasn't sheltered -- I had been a writer for both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, I had covered the Supreme Court and the Watts riots. Yet what was astonishing me then was that so many young filmmakers were really impressive. It was 15 years later that I realized that there was this amazing incursion of talent into the industry -- Hal Ashby, Martin Scorsese, Lucas -- that hasn't happened since. And Coppola was perhaps the brightest."

He was also readier than any of his peers to pay his dues, whether that meant patching together a shoestring nudie film ("Tonight for Sure," 1961) or doing odd jobs and a quickie horror flick for Roger Corman ("Dementia 13," 1963, when he married Eleanor), or signing up as a screenwriter-for-hire for Ray Stark's company, Seven Arts. Coppola's first "personal" movie, the 1966 youth comedy "You're a Big Boy Now" (developed on his own dime), is the work of an exuberant young showoff. What's most entertaining is the quicksilver location shooting and editing. Along with the Lovin' Spoonful music on the soundtrack, the film turned New York into what the city's PR campaigns called "a summer festival."

Coppola confessed to me that he made his next film, "Finian's Rainbow" (1968), because "musical comedy was something that I had been raised in with my family and I thought, frankly, that my father would be impressed if I were suddenly directing a Hollywood musical comedy -- because he had wanted to break into that Hollywood area." Coppola portrays "Finian's Rainbow" as a "move against my main direction of doing original films -- a left turn" meant to pay off a psychic debt to his dad. But what makes the film affecting is Coppola's yearning to connect with Broadway and Hollywood's musical-comedy legacy. Enough bubbles of spontaneous lyricism erupt to keep the creaking fantasy afloat -- especially in the opening-credits scenes of Fred Astaire and Petula Clark, as an Irish rover and his daughter, traveling through magical landscapes on their way to "Rainbow Valley, Missitucky" (Carroll Ballard shot this footage). And on this film Coppola befriended a former acquaintance, USC film school legend George Lucas, who was observing the production on a scholarship from Warner Bros.

Brainstorming with Lucas about making unconventional movies outside Hollywood rekindled Coppola's dreams of spearheading revolutionary theatrical enclaves. "I wanted to be with friends in a 'La Boheme'-style fraternity," Coppola confirmed. "It's true, the stimulation you receive from hearing what so-and-so is writing, what they're doing; the admiration I had for these other filmmakers was self-empowering, and stimulating for my own work. And that has been true more generally. You ask why there are movements in movie history -- why all of a sudden there are great Japanese films, or great Italian films, or great Australian films, or whatever. And it's usually because there are a number of people that cross-pollinated each other." When I mentioned Bart's feeling of being stunned that all these "brilliant" filmmakers seemed to be swarming around him, Coppola replied, "I don't know how brilliant we were, but we were very enthusiastic about movies and the chance to make them."

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