Francis Ford
Loren Swaggr
Francis Ford Coppola (/ˈkoʊpələ/ KOH-pə-lə,[1][2][3] .mw-parser-output .IPA-label-smallfont-size:85%.mw-parser-output .references .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .infobox .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .navbox .IPA-label-smallfont-size:100%Italian: [ˈkɔppola]; born 7 April 1939)[4] is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is considered one of the leading figures of the New Hollywood film movement of the 1960s and 1970s and is widely considered one of the greatest directors of all time.[a] Coppola is the recipient of five Academy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, two Palmes d'Or, and a British Academy Film Award (BAFTA).
After directing The Rain People in 1969, Coppola co-wrote Patton (1970), which earned him the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay along with Edmund H. North. Coppola's reputation as a filmmaker was cemented with the release of The Godfather (1972), which revolutionized the gangster genre[13] of filmmaking, receiving strong commercial and critical reception. The Godfather won three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay (shared with Mario Puzo). The Godfather Part II (1974) became the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Highly regarded by critics, the film earned Coppola two more Academy Awards, for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director, making him the second director (after Billy Wilder) to win these three awards for the same film.
Many of Coppola's relatives and children have become popular actors and filmmakers: his sister Talia Shire is an actress, his daughter Sofia is a director, his son Roman is a screenwriter, and his nephews Jason Schwartzman and Nicolas Cage are actors. Coppola resides in Napa, California, and since the 2010s has been a vintner, owning a family-branded winery of his own.
Two years after Coppola's birth, his father was named principal flutist for the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and the family moved to New York. They settled in Woodside, Queens, where Coppola spent the remainder of his childhood.
Having contracted polio as a boy, Coppola was bedridden for large periods of his childhood, during which he did homemade puppet theater productions. He developed an interest in theater after reading A Streetcar Named Desire at age 15.[21] He created 8 mm feature films edited from home movies with titles such as The Rich Millionaire and The Lost Wallet.[22] Although Coppola was a mediocre student, his interest in technology and engineering earned him the childhood nickname "Science".[23] He trained initially for a career in music and became proficient in the tuba, eventually earning a music scholarship to the New York Military Academy.[22] In all, Coppola attended 23 schools[24] before he eventually graduated from Great Neck North High School.[25]
He entered Hofstra College in 1955 as a theater arts major. There, he was awarded a scholarship in playwriting. This furthered his interest in directing theater, though his father disapproved and wanted him to study engineering.[21] Coppola was profoundly impressed by Sergei Eisenstein's film October: Ten Days That Shook the World, especially the quality of its editing, and decided to pursue cinema rather than theater.[21] He said he was influenced to become a writer by his brother August.[24] Coppola also credits the work of Elia Kazan for influencing him as a writer and director.[24] Coppola's classmates at Hofstra included James Caan, Lainie Kazan, and radio artist Joe Frank.[25][26] He later cast Lainie Kazan in One from the Heart and Caan in The Rain People, The Godfather, and Gardens of Stone.
While pursuing his bachelor's degree, Coppola was elected president of the university's drama group The Green Wig, and its musical comedy club, the Kaleidoscopians. He merged the two groups into The Spectrum Players, and under his leadership, the group staged a new production each week. Coppola also founded the cinema workshop at Hofstra and contributed prolifically to the campus literary magazine.[22] He won three D. H. Lawrence Awards for theatrical production and direction and received a Beckerman Award for his outstanding contributions to the school's theater arts division.[27] While a graduate student, Coppola studied under professor Dorothy Arzner, whose encouragement was later acknowledged as pivotal to Coppola's career.[21]
After earning his theater arts degree from Hofstra in 1960, Coppola enrolled in UCLA Film School.[22][28] There, he directed a short horror film, The Two Christophers, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's "William Wilson" and Ayamonn the Terrible, a film about a sculptor's nightmares coming to life.[23] He also met undergraduate film major Jim Morrison, future frontman of The Doors. Coppola later used Morrison's song "The End" in Apocalypse Now.[29]
In the early 1960s, Coppola made $10 per week[30] (roughly equivalent to $100 per week today).[31] Looking for a way to earn some extra money, he found that many colleagues from film school made money filming erotic productions known as "nudie-cuties" or "skin flicks", which showed nudity without implying any sexual act.[32] At 21, Coppola wrote the script for The Peeper, a comedy short film about a voyeur who tries to spy on a sensual photo shoot in the studio next to his apartment. Coppola found an interested producer, who gave him $3,000 to shoot the film. He hired Playboy Bunny Marli Renfro to play the model and had his friend Karl Schanzer play the voyeur. With The Peeper finished, Coppola found that the cartoonish aspects of the film alienated potential buyers, who did not find the 12-minute short exciting enough to screen in adult theaters.[33]
After much rejection, Coppola received an opportunity from Premier Pictures Company, a small production company that invested in an adult production called The Wide Open Spaces, an erotic western written and directed by Jerry Schafer, which had been shelved for more than a year. Both Schafer's film and The Peeper featured Marli Renfro, so the producers paid Coppola $500 to combine the two films. After Coppola re-edited the picture, it was released in 1962 as the softcore comedy Tonight for Sure.[33]
Another production company, Screen Rite Pictures, hired Coppola to do a similar job: re-cutting a German film titled Mit Eva fing die Snde an [de] (Sin Began with Eve), directed by Fritz Umgelter. Coppola added new color footage with British model June Wilkinson and other nude starlets.[34] The re-edited film was released as The Bellboy and the Playgirls.
That same year producer/director Roger Corman hired Coppola as an assistant. Corman first tasked Coppola with dubbing and re-editing the Soviet science fiction film Nebo zovyot, which Coppola turned into the sex-and-violence monster movie Battle Beyond the Sun, which was released in 1962.[25] Impressed by Coppola's perseverance and dedication, Corman hired him as a dialogue director for Tower of London (1962), sound man for The Young Racers (1963) and associate producer and one of many uncredited directors for The Terror (1963).[27]
Coppola's first feature-length film was Dementia 13 (1963). While on location in Ireland for The Young Racers in 1963, Corman persuaded Coppola to use that film's leftover funds to make a low-budget horror movie.[27] Coppola wrote a brief draft in one night, incorporating elements from Hitchcock's Psycho,[35] and the result impressed Corman enough to give the go-ahead. On a budget of $40,000 ($20,000 from Corman and $20,000 from another producer who wanted to buy the movie's English rights),[35] Coppola directed Dementia 13 over the course of nine days. The film recouped its expenses and later became a cult film among horror buffs. It was on the set of Dementia 13 that Coppola met the woman he would marry, Eleanor Jessie Neil.
In 1965, Coppola won the annual Samuel Goldwyn Award for best screenplay (Pilma, Pilma) written by a UCLA student.[22] The honor secured him a job as a scriptwriter with Seven Arts. During this time, Coppola also co-wrote the scripts for This Property Is Condemned (1966) and Is Paris Burning? (1966).
Coppola bought the rights to the David Benedictus novel You're a Big Boy Now and merged it with a story idea of his own, resulting in his UCLA thesis project You're a Big Boy Now (1966), which earned Coppola his Master of Fine Arts Degree from UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in 1967.[27][36] The film also received a theatrical release via Warner Bros and earned critical acclaim.[25] Geraldine Page was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe Award for her performance.
Following the success of You're a Big Boy Now, Coppola was offered to work on a movie version of the Broadway musical Finian's Rainbow, starring Petula Clark in her first American film and veteran Fred Astaire. Producer Jack L. Warner was not impressed by Coppola's shaggy-haired, bearded, "hippie" appearance and generally left him to his own devices. Coppola took the cast to the Napa Valley for much of the outdoor shooting, but those scenes were in sharp contrast to those filmed on a Hollywood soundstage, resulting in a disjointed look to the film. Dealing with outdated material at a time when the popularity of film musicals was already waning, Clark received a Golden Globe Best Actress nomination. The film introduced Coppola to George Lucas, who became his lifelong friend as well as a production assistant on his next film The Rain People in 1969.
The Rain People was written, directed, and initially produced by Coppola himself, though as the movie advanced, he exceeded his budget and the studio had to underwrite the remainder of the movie.[25] The film won the Golden Shell at the 1969 San Sebastian Film Festival.
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