Francis Ford Coppola
From the most wanted Director in Hollywood to a quiet Retirement with Wine of course and a few thoughts on film making.
By Steven C. Owens
One could say that Life imitates Art and Francis Ford Coppola “went to the mattresses” for the past twenty years? Similar to the characters in The Godfather when Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) shot and killed a police Captain and a rival mob boss, Virgil Solosso. From there Michael went into hiding and so did the Corleone family in the semi-fictitious move “The Godfather”.
“Going to the mattresses” was a phrase used for when Mob Families had to hide in one room apartments, mattresses on the floor, to avoid a long bloody mob war usually after they caused the rift. When hell blew over and “Families” began losing money due the long lay-off, the remaining or new Mob Bosses would have a “sit-down” and negotiate the safe return of all family members where business could resume. However, Francis Ford Coppola has been hiding in plain site for the last several years and wasn’t running from anyone.
The 81 year old vineyard owner and creator of his own “Coppola” wines leans over a large oak table littered with cheese and fruit and grabs a bottle of his Merlot Blend and laughs when he declares;
“Now this was a good year for wine”, Coppola points to the year 2007.
Being an Italian American, Coppola saw a lot of homemade wine as a child. Festival type gatherings with his “Clemenza” looking Uncles on hot summer days lounging in their backyard among the garden of tomatoes. The air was thick with the the smell of dark tobacco cigars floating through the air with smoke dancing in a circular motion as fresh-vine growing vegetables sweetened the aroma. You could estimate that the zest for wine was born into the chubby child during those mini festivals of laughter and drunkenness. The smell of fresh cut peaches attracted many house flies as some peaches lay half-eaten on the wooden tables. Some of them found solace mixing their own sweet juice in the dark red pools of fermented grapes performing back-strokes in glasses usually designed for water or orange juice. Nobody had wine glasses in the those days as they were only for the rich. His Uncle Louie used a metal tin can that he wiped clean with a dirty oil rag right before the first cup.
Thirty-five years have passed since he and his wife, Eleanor, bought Niebaum Mansion in Rutherford, CA, which they have restored over three decades. In 2006 they bought Château Souverain to produce their Diamond Collection and Rosso & Bianco wine brands. The Coppola Family were no strangers to wine as his Grandfather entered the business in the 1920’s so you could say that this move was preordained.
Coppola has lost most of his girth partly due to age and a far cry from his heaviest days of the 1970’s when movie making equaled long hours and bad nutrition. He is convinced that wine has kept him well fermented and enriched his blood well enough to keep his heart healthy. He sits and reflects in a chair his Grandfather carved from Italian wood and brought from Italy when he and his Grandmother made their way to Ellis Island.
“I always check the sturdiness of this chair every time I go to sit down. It never disappoints me (laughs).” Coppola declares.
“Checking places to sit before I actually sit in them is a habit I never broke since being so heavy. I forget I don’t have to do that anymore for that reason. Now I check because of my age… even though I feel great!”
He sips his Coppola wine from a small juice glass in homage to Marlon Brando in the Godfather and to his Uncles he remembers fondly. Oh he uses wine glasses, plenty of them. Some hand blown by merchants who still make their own glass items and sell them in a local town market. Coppola admits that he is a sucker for anything homemade and often gives away many of the wine glasses as gifts with his wife’s insistence as she knows he cannot drink wine at of all his “favorites”.
He removes his dark colored beret while starring into the cavernous hole of where his balding head rests, fiddling with it as if he needs it to in order to recall a few memories.
“Fred Astaire told me that his biggest regret was giving up the license to the Fred Astaire Dance Studio. All his life, he was haunted by seeing his name on a bunch of dance studios he hated. He told me, “Never give up your name.” If our name is on something, then it’s wine that we personally like to drink, or food we like to eat or places we like to stay. Your name is your word.”
Makes perfect sense as Coppola held on dearly to the The Godfather franchise. Especially The Godfather III.
“Well that movie . . . I never wanted to make a third Godfather. I never wanted to make a second Godfather. I didn’t think The Godfather was a serial-type story. To me the first Godfather was the Godfather, and everything else is greed."
The gap in time between the second and third installments ultimately makes it even more clear for fans of Coppola that the director never really intended to follow through with more than one movie. Part III didn’t come from the same place of inspiration, at least upfront. Judging by the finished product as a fan you could tell Part III lacked Coppola’s passion. By Coppola’s own candid admission, Part III came about as the result of wanting to put money away for his family, along with his legacy not yet being cemented in the way it is today. (The Godfather and Apocalypse Now were acclaimed in their time, but also divisive, and obviously not yet regarded as classics.) Rumors were that Paramount was going to make the film with or without Coppola and having so much personally invested in the first two movies there could be no other director to close out the trilogy. The films failure is based on a few main factors:
Paramount gave Coppola 6 weeks to write the script, Francis asked for 6 months. The studio won.
Casting of his daughter Sofia Coppola as Mary Corleone, and George Hamilton rather than the return role of Tom Hagen with Robert Duval, watered down the product and the changes in actors provided little effect in fact weakened it.
Sofia Coppola hadn’t even been her dad’s first choice for the role. Winona Ryder fell ill just as production was about to start in Sicily, and the director made the critical misstep of replacing her with his daughter.
A famous Movie Critic at the time, Roger Ebert of “Siskel and Ebert”, described the failed attempt of of Godfather III and also pointed out the lack of enthusiasm by Coppola;
In the “Godfather” movies Coppola has made a world. Because we know it so intimately, because its rhythms and values are instantly recognizable to us, a film like “The Godfather Part III” probably works better than it should. If you stand back and look at it rationally, this is a confusing and disjointed film. It is said that Coppola was rewriting it as he went along, and indeed it lacks the confident forward sweep of a film that knows where it’s going.
Some of the dialogue scenes, especially in the beginning, sound vaguely awkward; the answers do not fit the questions, and conversations seem to have been rewritten in the editing room. Other shots — long shots, into the light, so we cannot see the characters’ lips — look suspiciously like scenes that were filmed first and dubbed later. The whole ambitious final movement of the film — in which two separate intrigues are intercut with the progress of an opera being sung by Anthony — is intended to be suspenseful but is so confusing, we are not even sure which place (Sicily, Rome, London?) one of the intrigues is occurring. The final scene of the movie, which is intended to echo Marlon Brando’s famous death scene, is perfunctory and awkward. Roger Ebert
As he reaches for a slice of peach and a little more wine poured into a stumpy glass he reveals a belief he always carried with him regarding the importance of film making. A belief that produced wonderful relatable yet tragic characters full of flaws. Coppola agonized over the need to represent his vision versus the constant “dollar-sign” mentality of the Studio and their thirst for the glitz rather than the art; Robert Redford instead of Al Pacino, George C. Scott instead of Marlon Brando. Somehow Coppola got his way with casting but it was resistance all the way. Similar to the waves of the ocean smashing against the side of a small boat ready to capsize at any moment.
Film making is a game that you should play with all your cards and all your dice (makes the motion of throwing all his cards in the middle of the table) so when I make a movie I give each one all I got.
He stands briefly enough to wipe of his pants from any residue from the walnuts he was eating earlier and a way to continue his thoughts about wine making and the enormous success it has brought him.
Coppola was named the winner of “Wine Enthusiast Magazine’s” Lifetime Achievement Award, which honors industry leaders who have made outstanding contributions in the wine world.
“I’m humbled by this recognition. I’d always entertained the idea of having enough land to grow some grapes and make a little bit of homemade wine to share with friends, as my grandfather and uncles had done when I was growing up,” Coppola said in a statement.
“In the mid 1970s this became a reality for my family and now with 40 years in wine-making, quality and authenticity of our wines are particularly important because our name is on the label.”
The American wine magazine bestows the honor to “industry legends whose decades of innovative and groundbreaking work have indelibly altered the face of the wine world and beyond.”
The Family Coppola owns four wineries in California and Oregon and produces wines that come from some of the most prestigious American Viticultural Areas (AVAs).
In 2004, the winery was the first to sell wine in a can with its Sofia brand.
When Coppola holds a bottle of wine he holds as if he was gripping an Oscar for the first time and feels equally as proud.
He may no longer own a film studio like he did in the late 1970s, the decade in which he became the most sought after director in New Hollywood and had an extraordinary run of critically and commercially successful movies ranging from The Godfather to Apocalypse Now. However, in semi-retiremnt he has expanded his winery into a Coppola Inc. brand that now encompasses restaurants and eco-tourism resorts; while continuing to publish Zoetrope All-Story, a literary journal;
While promoting a Blu-ray release of his DRACULA in 2015, Coppola remarked on why he slowed his roll in film making the past 15 years:
That’s why I ended my career: I decided I didn’t want to make what you could call “factory movies” anymore. I would rather just experiment with the form, and see what I could do, and [make things] that came out of my own. And little by little, the commercial film industry went into the superhero business, and everything was on such a scale. The budgets were so big, because they wanted to make the big series of films where they could make two or three parts. I felt I was no longer interested enough to put in the extraordinary effort a film takes [nowadays].
The change in Hollywood from epic films to big budget Superhero movies is no knock on the industry Coppola clarified. Like in any era of movie making or even the sports world, industries change and younger directors like athletes do not know any different. The older Directors and athletes sometime have a hard time changing so they choose not too. In Coppola’s case he sort of took a back seat and didn’t walk completely out of the theater. Just chilln’ in the back row with a glass of wine.
