Francis Ford Coppola

In the seven years between the releases of "The Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now," Coppola produced "American Graffiti," launched Carroll Ballard's feature career with the Zoetrope production of "The Black Stallion" and saw Lucas and many of the younger producer-director's friends veer off into their own company, Lucasfilm. When he didn't know how successful "Apocalypse Now" would be, he streamlined Zoetrope into a company mostly meant to service only himself; when "Apocalypse Now" became a hit, he tried to expand it again with the purchase of an actual physical plant (the creaking Hollywood General Studios) in Los Angeles. "I saw him a lot then, during the Hollywood thing," Milius told me in 1997. "It was his last great act of rebellion. There were grand ideas, like doing 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' or 'The Killer Angels.' He was going to get Werner Herzog $20 million to do 'The Conquest of Mexico.'"

But the ambitious studio plans didn't survive the fiasco of Coppola's exercise in nouveau back-lot style, "One From the Heart" (1982). Milius insists, "Like I say about the American Indian, or the mob in Vegas -- I think he gave in too easy. But I think he just got worn out after 'Apocalypse Now,' and it changed him forever."

The '80s and '90s saw the emergence of several new and barely recognizable Coppolas: the nostalgist of "The Outsiders" (1983), "Peggy Sue Got Married" (1986) and "Tucker" (1988); the overactive visual virtuoso of "Rumblefish" (1983), "The Cotton Club" (1984) and "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (1992); the kiddie filmmaker of "Life Without Zoe" (his segment of the 1989 trilogy "New York Stories") and "Jack" (1996). When he consented to extend his greatest triumph with "The Godfather Part III" in 1990, the result was a fascinating misfire (and a suitable subject for a running joke on the part of TV's "Godfather"-loving mobsters in "The Sopranos": "What happened with 'III'?").

Yet every so often, passages in a Coppola film will show signs of his old warmth and fullness, as in the marvelous funereal rituals and the "Old Guard" camaraderie of James Caan and James Earl Jones in "Gardens of Stone" (1987), set in Arlington National Cemetery during Vietnam. And, in general, there's no sign that Coppola has merely become cynical or hackneyed or malicious. I was not a fan of "John Grisham's The Rainmaker" (a minority position when it premiered in 1997), but the problem was that Coppola, as the writer-director, had given himself over to Grisham too completely; he showed flair with the extensive supporting cast of slickers and slimeballs (particularly Danny De Vito's self-described "para-lawyer"), yet was paralyzed into sentimentality by Grisham's bright-eyed legal-beagle hero (Matt Damon).

I interviewed Coppola about "The Godfather" when he was working on "The Rainmaker." He mentioned that a tool from his theater background that he used consistently in movies was a notebook like the one Elia Kazan put together while directing "A Streetcar Named Desire," in which he "provided the core to every scene. When I did 'The Godfather,' I took a lot of time and annotated the novel very carefully, trying to extract absolutely everything that I thought pertained, and put it in the form of a big loose-leaf book. I made a synopsis of each section and described the time, the period, the era, and outlined the pitfalls. And then I actually directed from that book. I find when I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did 'Apocalypse Now,' I used 'Heart of Darkness.' I find that novels usually have so much rich material it's better to look through it and base the film on that."

Although Coppola has always declared his desire to make original movies, the fact remains that most of his major work has derived from fiction; even Harry Caul's character in "The Conversation" was rooted in Hermann Hesse's "Steppenwolf." Viewed in that light, the fluctuations in his directing career are rooted in the varying quality of his sources, from Puzo to Grisham. Just like his magazine Zoetrope All Story, which "purchases both first serial rights and film options on the short stories and one-act plays published here-in," Coppola's ongoing effort to gain control of studios and production companies, with UA as a possible next goal, may derive from an ambition to acquire massive and diverse amounts of material the way Old Hollywood did.

Coppola is only 60. He may also want to reestablish the communal dream he banked so much on achieving and never fully abandoned. Were he able to assemble a millennial team as strong-minded and challenging as his old one, who knows what wonders he could still pull off. "Geronimo, Sitting Bull -- a lot of those great Indians went off the reservation in one great spark of rebellion," Milius told me two years ago. "Francis may have that kind of gesture and vision left in him; and if he ever really wants to do it he can count on my sword, too."

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