Corey Larson - Final Project

Francis Ford Coppola: 1960’s - Present

Introduction
In the 1960’s, with the war in Vietnam first beginning to break out and the number of televisions in a household rising nationally, Hollywood was in shambles. Other then Howard Wise’s The Sound of Music, the 60’s did not have movies profiting at the box office, and the movie industry was in desperate need of change. Up to this point, large production companies such as Warner Brothers and Paramount Pictures were still using outdated material such as studio-based musicals; material that were not practical for the growing counterculture movement.

However, good news soon arrived to the cinema companies. With more and more young adults attending college to avoid being drafted, more auteurs began to surface creating a new colorful selection of “dedicated artists,” which had recently graduated from film schools with degrees in the filmmaking industry (Cook 2000). When the Easy Rider pandemic sweep the nation in 1969, the large movie moguls were left with no other choice then to trust these artists with production money, a chance that had to be taken in avoidance of being left in the dust with out cashing in on the movement.

It was during this time that film students such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas first made their appearances. Most directors that contributed to the film renaissance of the 1970’s rose from the turmoil of this transition period and with it came experimentation and risk-taking. Especially for one director by the name of Francis Ford Coppola, who began to tackle great obstacles only several years out of film school. This paper will explore Francis Ford Coppola’s life in cinema, particularly between 1970 through 1979 when he helped develop modern day filmmaking practices with abnormal plot lines and extraordinary performances behind the camera that would bend the fate of Hollywood forever.

Childhood Years
Francis Ford Coppola, the second of three children, was born on April 7th, 1939 in Detroit, Michigan. When Francis was 2 years of age, he moved to Queens, New York where his father, Carmine Coppola, who became the first flautist ever to play for the NBC Symphony Orchestra (Britannica 2006). Queens is where Francis lived and went to school for the remainder of his child- and early adult-hood years.

When Francis was nine years old he started taking interests in film. Francis contracted Polio during this time and due to his restraints enforced upon him by the disease, Francis was not able to leave his bed for large periods of time, allowing him to explore his imagination. It is said that Coppola would create his very own puppet shows and film them using his fathers 8mm movie camera to entertain himself while in bed (Britannica 2006).

College Years and Zeotrope
For his undergraduate schooling, Francis went to Hofstra University in the town of Hempstead, which is located on the southern edge of Long Island. In 1960, he received his undergraduate degree in drama and then set off for California where he was going to attend graduate school at UCLA (Cook 2000).

While at UCLA Francis began making big progress working under a man by the name of Roger Corman, a low-budget horror film director. With the help of Roger’s leftover equipment, crew, and sets from the movie The Young Racers (1963), Francis developed his first solo piece of art, Dementia-13, in 1963 (Cook 2000). It only took him three days to shoot the entire film, and coincidently made him a star among all of the other film students at UCLA. “In those years, it was unheard of for a young fellow to make a feature film. I was the first one!” proclaimed Francis for the book Easy Riders Raging Bull (Biskind 1998).

With several other projects here and there including the screenplays for Is Paris Burning? (1966) and This Property is Condemned (1966) Francis became more experienced with both writing and directing movies; an experience that led him to the movie You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), a film which he had to adapt from a comic and shoot under a budget of $800,000 (a task he would struggle with later in life). Even though the film was not an immediate success it served as a great master’s thesis for his M.F.A. in film directing and landed him his second major job (Cook 2000).

Warner Brothers were so impressed with Francis’s work on Big Boy, that immediately after shooting they signed him up to direct the 1968 film Finian’s Rainbow, a musical starring Fred Astaire. This film was also a disappointment in the box office, but Francis’s outstanding work kept him on good terms with Warners who again hired him to make a film based off his own material, The Rain People (1969).

The Rain People, a highly risky and visionary film during this time, was about a pregnant woman whom leaves her husband to travel west to California. It was considered a very feminist movie in the 60’s, and was hailed by women during the push for equal rights in the 70’s. It was also ground breaking in the sense that it shot on location, using a station wagon to drive the camera equipment and crew across country. According to Francis, this was one of his favorite films to direct, because it was his first big break from the tradition Hollywood cinema that he despised.

“This film was a great adventure. A road movie where we all piled into trucks and shot across the country from an original script” (Keegan 2007).

During the time of The Rain People, the Easy Rider pandemic exploded across the nation, making it necessary to explore new forms a cinema. To help with this movement Francis talked Warners into allowing him to start his own studio, American Zeotrope, named after European filmmaking equipment highly used in French new wave films. The purpose of American Zeotrope was to help develop new age pictures and strive towards “innovative filmmaking strategies” (American Zeotrope Films 2007).

In 1971, American Zeotrope saw its first development with the first feature film of Coppola’s college chum George Lucas. The film was THX-1138, and despite its futuristic appearance to Star Wars (the trilogy that made George Lucas), it was almost cut short by Warners who despised it. Warners refusing to bankroll THX demanded that Francis pay back for the cost of the studio throwing Francis threatening close to bankruptcy along with American Zeotrope.

However, Francis, now rolling in big bucks for his work on The Rain People and the creation of a small screenplay called Patton (1970) was able to keep American Zeotrope alive (Cook 2000).
To this day American Zeotrope still lives, but under the new name of Zeotrope. According to the website, Zeotrope has helped launch the careers of such actors as Nicolas Cage (Coppola), Matt Damon, Tom Cruise, Jim Carrey and many more, while producing 15 Academy Award winning films; four of which are on the American Film Institute's top 100 American films (American Zeotrope Films 2007). It has also contributed to innovations in filmmaking such as audio Dolby stereo sound format, electronic non-linear editing, and the silverfish; a trailer set-up as a movable command base for all immediate on-site editing. Before the silverfish, film footage would have to be sent to a lab before viewing it.

The 1970’s
The 70’s was the golden age for Hollywood, and with directors graduating from film schools across the nation and people beginning to revisit the movie houses, movie production was becoming very competitive. All most, all the directors from this period were trying to produce the next big hit and to become rich from the payoff, except a few; Francis Ford Coppola and his good friend George Lucas were still trying to push new wave films.
However, Francis Ford Coppola, after falling out with Warners over the American Zeotrope dispute, was currently unable to find work. It was during this period of time of searching for work that Paramount pictures asked him to direct The Godfather (1974). By this time three directors had already turned down the film due to its low budget of $2 million and even lower appeal. However, Paramount was very persistent on having Francis direct their film due to his Italian heritage, and his desperate need of money (Biskind 1998). Even though The Godfather was everything that Francis was trying to run from, traditional Hollywood, he took the job and opened up the biggest door of his life.

From day one, Francis and Paramount bumped heads. Paramount wanted The Godfather to be a cheap and quick movie, but Francis continually fought for a larger budget. Francis wanted to have the movie shot on location in New York and to be set in the 1940’s like the bestselling book, and eventually he got his way. Francis’s stubbornness mixed with the books success on the best sellers list convinced Paramount that this was not going to be a small task, and it proved to be the right move. In 1972, The Godfather was released. Due to Paramount’s extensive advertising and new saturated booking it brought in a whopping $86.3 million when the film only took $7 million dollars to make (Cook 2000). The Godfather would become the first blockbuster of the 1970’s and Francis Ford Coppola was right there with it.

The Godfather won three Oscars that year and even though Best Director was not one of them Francis was now a name to be reckoned with in Hollywood. He quickly used the money that he earned from The Godfather to produced George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) and his own work of art The Conversation (1974), which came out the same year as his second installment of The Godfather Trilogy, The Godfather Part Two (1974). Even though The Conversation was written and directed by him, it still could not compete with the magnitude of The Godfather Part Two, which he would go to win best director for. With three masterpieces out within a time frame of two years Francis Ford Coppola was becoming household name and a cultural icon attached to this period of time. However, he was not done with his quest.

In 1979, Coppola released his final auteur film of the 70’s. Apocalypse Now, a hallucinogenic view of the Vietnam War became the 32nd highest grossing film, but due to natural disasters that plague the film from the beginning, it only made around 5 million in profit. Taking four years to produce it was nominated for 8 academy awards, only to win two, for cinematography and sound (Cook 2000). This damaged Francis’s career and left him in a rough position with the 70’s coming to a close. However the turnout of the film, it is still considered one of Francis’s masterpiece works, and one of the greatest war movies of all time.

The Slump Years
After the 1970’s passed, so did Francis Ford Coppola’s golden years. Even though some of his work in this slump period is still highly recognized like The Outsiders (1983) and Bram Stokers Dracula (1991), he felt as though he had sold out, now becoming more of a director for hire then the auteur he wanted to be.

Most of the films he directed in the 80’s and 90’s such as Jack (1996) and Rumble Fish (1983) were made primarily to pay off enormous debts that were incurred from various artistic experiments that failed in the decades to follow (Keegan 2007). One such project was the 1982 musical, One from the Heart, which crushed Francis’s dream of creating a viable alternative to Hollywood (Dargis 2005). It was now the 1980’s, and the most influential period in American film had passed; Coppola just did not realize it yet.

Along with everything else that was going wrong with Francis during this time, in 1986 Francis oldest son died in a tragic boating accident at the age of 22. After this incident, Francis directorial jobs began to falter, leading him to “his premature critical burial” (Keegan 2007).

“When you lose your kid, it’s the first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning for about seven or eight years,” Francis was quoted (Keegan 2007).

Not being able to contribute that much to the film world, Francis was forced to seek out new endeavors. With the money he was earning for directing, producing and screenplays Francis Ford Coppola purchased over 200 acres of grape growing land in Napa Valley, California. He also purchased several land plots in Belize where he began building hotels, and started up a magazine that publishes short stories that can be adapted into movies. By the late 1990’s Francis’s side business, known as Francis Ford Coppola Presents Ltd., was earning more profit then expected. He would now be able to finance his own movies and become the young artist he used to be instead of the director for hire he was throughout the nineties, which left him and his fans unsatisfied (Keegen 2007).

Aesthetic Influence and Signature Traits
Coppola has many distinguishing features in both his screenplays and films that are unique to him. These aesthetic attributes are most noticeable in his four masterpieces of the 1970’s, and will be explained using such as examples. The most prominent trait in a Coppola film is “the family” as a central theme. Perhaps it can be an Italian-American family of 100, or a lonely man whose only family is a work colleague. There is always somebody else for a character to easily associate with. In the movie The Godfather, the family relationship is very apparent, but films such as The Conversation are more elusive. In The Conversation, one is presented to Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) an aged, single man who seems to have nobody in the world, but himself. However, one can see that his begging pleas to rehire a disgruntle employee is really an attempt to heal wounds that broke a family bond shared between the 2.

In Apocalypse Now, the theme of family is depicted in three separate situations; as Captain Willard’s (Martin Sheen) team traveling into Cambodia, the surfing General’s (Robert Duvall) Calvary, and Colonel Kurtz’s (Marlon Brando) loyal army. The viewer can distinguish these families by sensing the pain, the loss, and the suffering that differs in each individual circle. It is also important to note that just like in real-life, families in a Coppola production have their own “dysfunctional aspects” (LoBrutto 2006).

Along with family Coppola tends to flourish on the struggle of power within the film. In the beginning of The Godfather, Micheal Corleone (Al Pacino) first denies to Kay that he is nothing like his family; a powerful Mafia family. However, as the movie progresses to scenes such as at the hospital, it is apparent that Micheal Corleone struggles with the power his family conveys. In the scene, the camera shows the baker shaking terribly after a close assassination attempt, while Micheal is amazed at himself that he is perfectly calm. Eventually at the end of The Godfather, Micheal accepts his anointed power much like Captain Willard at the end of Apocalypse Now. Power is very important, and because Coppola likes to exaggerate this struggle he never presents hero (Cumbow 2005).

Substituting out the hero in his movies, Coppola instead spreads out power and gives authority to certain characters to recollect it; thus leaving one true victorious “Power God,” at the end of every film (Cumbow 2005). This can best be exemplified by Micheal Corleone. Micheal Corleone is no hero through-out the duration of The Godfather (except for perhaps his father), but instead takes on a journey that builds him up to become the “Power God.” Coppola often showcases this future “Power God” as the main character, but what makes the great twist at the end of The Conversation is that Harry Caul does not end up with the power nor does he prevent the murder that would make him a hero.

Another feature that is less noticeable is how Coppola tends to transform characters from ‘“Romeo and Juliet’ to ‘Rebel without a Cause’” (Dargis 2005); not in the terms of love, but in how the character’s struggle with power. An example of this would be Harry Caul. Harry Caul is simply Harry Caul, until he is thrown into a conspiracy of murder. Then he abandons his normally somber character (Romeo and Juliet), becoming a rebel without a cause to dig deeper into the conspiracy until he fully emerges himself. In fear of being killed, you then see “rebel” Harry fight guards and tear apart a room, something a “Romeo” would not do.

Visually, Francis Ford Coppola’s strongest trait is his use of the close u p. Close ups in Coppola’s films are only used in sequence with the dialogue between two people. When displaying a conversation, Coppola shrouds one of the speakers with complete darkness and the other speaker with only about half with light protruding through from the outside world to make the other half visible (Cumbow 2005). This gives the scene a feel of confession, letting power collide with its lesser; furthermore showcasing the struggle for power. If darkness is not an option, one character will most likely be looking away only making a portion of their cheek visible, and sometimes blocking half of the other conversationalist’s face.

Going with the darkness, Francis will often use darkness to blanket extreme power. By making the lesser beings more visible, it is as if one were acting for the other who is “in charge.” This often adds humility to a scene, something that is not often thought of with an American mafia film or a film about Vietnam. He will also use Darkness in Staircases with protruding light such as that used in conversations to create drastic black and white contrasts.

In order to draw viewer’s eyes in a certain direction, Coppola uses his environment around him which is why parallel line structures are so evident in his movies. A viewer will always find a hallway scene in his movies where the character is near the end of what seems to be a tunnel. This type of structure in a scene creates open space which adds a sense of loneliness; a feeling that Francis tries to convey to help the viewer relate to the film and/or characters emptiness. Other ways that Francis produces space is by dropping out the background of two characters in dialogue. Also he will tend to use a zoomed out steady cam, with an actor on an extreme point on the screen.

Finally, an innovative feature that Coppola uses is the dissolve-tion of one scene into another; as if one scene is melting away, as the other comes into view. Coppola uses this technique of slowly changing the scene to keep the previous scene fresh in the minds of the viewer. Also, the double lapping of pictures is emotionally appealing. This technique was never used before in film before Francis and it was used more in his later films of the eighties.

Conclusion
By being both a risk-taker and a dedicated artist, Francis Ford Coppola front lined the whole Hollywood renaissance, particularly between the years of 1970 and 1979 when he came out with four back-to-back masterpieces and created a studio dedicated to implementing creativity. His resistance to budget constraints, his wish of directorial authorship and his goal of finding creative approaches to film not only helped define an important decade in film history but also developed modern day filmmaking practices. Currently, even though he has not directed a film in over a decade, Francis (68) is still trying to defeat the traditional Hollywood genre film and push the boundaries. With so he released a new film by the name of Youth Without Youth (2007), and is currently in production of another film by the name of Tetro (2009). Both films use unconditional types of filmmaking that the artistic Coppola used in his early years of filmmaking.

References

American Zoetrope Films, (2007). Films: People, History, Technology. Retrieved December 8, 2007, from The Zeotrope Virtual Studio Web site: http://www.zoetrope.com/.

Britannica (2006). Coppola, Francis Ford. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD.

Biskind, P. (1998). Easy Riders Raging Bulls: How The Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York City, NY: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks.

Cook, D.A. (2000). Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam 1970-1979. Los Angeles, California: University of California Press Berkeley.

Cumbow , R.C. (2005-11-26). Altman and Coppola in the Seventies: People and the Power. Retrieved December 8, 2007, from 24liesasecond.com Web site: http://www.24liesasecond.com

Dargis, M. (September 9, 2005). Coppola Pays a Return Visit to His 'Gone With the Wind' for Teenagers. The New York Times Late Edition, p. E3.

Keegan, R.W. (2007).Coppola, Take 2. Time. 170 number 21, 81-83.

LoBrutto, V. (2006). Godfather:The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola. Middle Search Plus, Retrieved December 8, 2007.