1962: The Playgirls and the Bellboy (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter); Tonight for Sure (+producer); 1963: The Terror (Lady of the Shadows) (co-director, +associate producer); Dementia 13 (The Haunted and the Hunted) (co-scenarist/scriptwriter). 1966: You're a Big Boy Now. 1968: Finian's Rainbow. 1969: The Rain People. 1972: The Godfather (co-scenarist/scriptwriter). 1974: The Conversation (+producer); The Godfather, Part II (co-scenarist/scriptwriter, +co-producer). 1979: Apocalypse Now (co-scenarist/scriptwriter, +producer, role, co-music). 1982: One from the Heart (co-scenarist/scriptwriter, +producer). 1983: The Outsiders (+producer); Rumble Fish (co-scenarist/scriptwriter, +producer). 1984: The Cotton Club (co-scenarist/scriptwriter). 1986: Peggy Sue Got Married (+producer); Captain Eo. 1987: Gardens of Stone (+producer). 1988: Tucker: The Man and His Dream (+producer). 1989: Episode 2 in New York Stones. 1991: The Godfather, Part III. 1992: Bram Stoker's Dracula (+co-producer). 1996: Jack (+producer). 1997: The Rainmaker. 1998: On the Road. 2000: Supernova (uncredited). 2007: Youth without Youth (+producer). 2009: Tetro (+producer).
1962: The Premature Burial (Corman) (assistant-director); Tower of london (dialogue director); The Magic Voyage of Sinbad (adaptor). 1963: The Young Racers (Corman) (sound, 2nd unit cinematographer?uncredited); Battle Beyond the Sun (Corman) (scenarist/scriptwriter). 1966: This Property Is Condemned (Pollack) (co-scenarist/scriptwriter); Is Paris Burning? (Paris br?le-t-il?) (Cl?ment) (co-scenarist/scriptwriter). 1967: Reflections in a Golden Eye (Huston) (scenarist/scriptwriter). 1970: Patton (Schaffner) (co-scenarist/scriptwriter). 1971: THX 1138 (Lucas) (executive producer). 1973: American Graffiti (Lucas) (executive producer). 1974: The Great Gatsby (Clayton) (scenarist/scriptwriter). 1979: The Black Stallion (Ballard) (executive producer). 1982: Hammett (Wenders) (executive producer); The Escape Artist (Deschanel) (executive producer). 1983: The Black Stallion Returns (Dalva) (executive producer). 1985: Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Schrader) (executive producer). 1987: Tough Guys Don't Dance (Mailer) (executive producer). 1992: Wind (executive producer). 1993: The Secret Garden (executive producer). 1994: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (co-producer). 1995: My Family, Mi Familia (executive producer); Haunted (executive producer); Don Juan DeMarco (producer). 1996: Dark Angel (executive producer) (for TV); Marlon Brando: The Wild One (role) (for TV). 1997: Buddy (executive producer); The Odyssey (executive producer) (for TV). 1998: Moby Dick (TV) (executive producer); Outrage (TV) (executive producer); Lanai-Loa (producer). 1999: Sleepy Hollow (executive producer); Goosed (executive producer); The Third Miracle (executive producer); The Virgin Suicides (producer); The Florentine (producer); Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (TV) (executive producer). 2001: Suriyothai (executive producer); Jeepers Creepers (executive producer); No Such Thing (executive producer); CQ (executive producer); 2002: Assassination Tango (executive producer); Pumpkin (executive producer); In My Life (TV) (executive producer). 2003: Lost in Translation (executive producer); Jeepers Creepers II (executive producer). 2004: Forever Is a Long, Long Time (executive producer); Kinsey (executive producer). 2006: The Good Shepherd (executive producer); Marie Antoinette (executive producer). 2010: Somewhere (2010) (executive producer).
Worked in various capacities for Roger Corman at American International, 1962-64; director for Seven Arts, 1964-68; founder, American Zoetrope production organization, San Francisco, 1969; director for American Conservatory Theatre and San Francisco Opera Company, 1971-72; founder, with Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin, Directors Company, 1972; publisher, City magazine, 1975-76; opened Zo?trope Studios, San Francisco, 1980.
Oscar for Best Screenplay (with Edmund H. North), for Patton, 1970; Oscar for Best Screenplay (with Mario Puzo), and Best Director Award, Directors Guild of America, for The Godfather, 1973; Palme director'or, Cannes Festival, for The Conversation, 1974; Oscars for Best Director and Best Screenplay (with Puzo) for The Godfather, Part II, 1975; Palme director'or and FIPRESCI Prize, Cannes Festival, 1979, for Apocalypse Now, 1979.
Detroit, Michigan, 7 April 1939.
Hofstra University, B.A., 1959; University of California, Los Angeles, M.FA. in cinema, 1967.
Married Eleanor Neil, 1963; children: Sophia, Giancarlo (died, 1987), Roman.
Francis Ford Coppola became the first major American film director to emerge from a university degree program in filmmaking. He received his Master of Cinema degree from UCLA in 1968, after submitting his first film of consequence, You're a Big Boy Now (1967), a freewheeling comedy about a young man on the brink of manhood, to the university as his master's thesis.
The Rain People (1969), based on an original scenario of his own, followed in due course. The plot of this tragic drama concerns a depressed housewife who impulsively decides to walk out on her family one rainy morning to make a cross-country trek in her station wagon, in the hope of getting some perspective on her life. For the first time Coppola's overriding theme, which centers on the importance of the role of a family spirit in people's lives, is clearly delineated in one of his films.
Coppola's preoccupation with the importance of family in modern society is brought into relief in his Godfather films, which depict an American family over a period of more than seventy years. Indeed, the thing that most attracted him to the project in the first place was the fact that the best-selling book on which the films are based is really the story of a family. It is about ?this father and his sons,? he says, ?and questions of power and succession.? In essence, The Godfather (1972) offers a chilling depiction of the way in which young Michael Corleone's loyalty to his flesh-and-blood family gradually turns into an allegiance to the larger Mafia family to which they in turn belong-a devotion that in the end renders him a cruel and ruthless mass murderer. With this film Coppola definitely hit his stride as a filmmaker, and the picture was an enormous critical and popular success.
The Godfather II (197'4) treats events that happened before and after the action covered in the first film. The second Godfather movie not only chronicles Michael's subsequent career as head of the ?family business,? but also presents, in flashback, the early life of his father in Sicily, as well as his rise to power in the Mafia in New York City's Little Italy. The Godfather II, like The Godfather, was a success both with the critics and the public, and Coppola won Oscars for directing the film, co-authoring the screenplay, and co-producing the best picture of the year. In 1990 he made his third Godfather film. This trilogy of movies, taken together, represents one of the supreme achievements of the cinematic art.
In contrast to epic films like the Godfather series, The Outsiders was conceived on a smaller scale; it revolves around a gang of underprivileged teenage boys growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1960s. The Outsiders was a box-office hit, as was Peggy Sue Got Married, a remarkable fantasy. The title character is a woman approaching middle age who passes out at a high-school reunion and wakes up back in high school in 1960. But she brings with her on her trip down memory lane a forty-two-year-old mind, and hence views things from a more mature perspective than she possessed the first time around.
Coppola has made two films about the Vietnam War. Apocalypse Now, the first major motion picture about the war, is a king-sized epic shot on location in the Philippines; and it contains some of the most extraordinary combat footage ever filmed. But there are no such stunning battle sequences in its companion film, Gardens of Stone, since it takes place state-side, and is concerned with the homefront during the same period.
His next subject was a biographical film about Preston Tucker, a maverick automobile designer, entitled Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Coppola contends that Tucker developed plans for a car that was way ahead of its time in terms of engineering; yet the auto industry at large stubbornly resisted his ideas. Unfortunately, Coppola comments, creative people do not always get a chance to exercise their creativity.
Coppola demonstrated once more that he had mastered his craft in making Bram Stoker's Dracula. In it he created a more faithful rendering of the Stoker novel than had been the case with previous film versions of the celebrated horror tale, and the film turned out to be a huge critical and popular success.
Francis Coppola is one creative person who has continued to exercise his considerable talent throughout his career. Admittedly, he has had his occasional failure, such as the off-center teen movie Rumble Fish (1983). But the majority of the films he has directed over the years have demonstrated that he is one of the most gifted directors to come across the Hollywood horizon since Stanley Kubrick.
Coppola himself observes that he looks upon the movies he has directed in the past as providing him with the sort of experience that will help him to make better films in the future. So the only thing for a filmmaker to do, he concludes, is to just keep going.-GENE D. PHILLIPS