ANSEL ADAMS said, “There are no rules for good photographs, only good photographs.” Shunryū Suzuki said, “There is no enlightened person. There is only enlightened activity.” What if there are no great directors, only great movies? The thought crossed my mind while reading a recent, widely circulated GQ interview with Francis Ford Coppola, occasioned by the 82-year-old auteur’s announcement in late 2021 that he was going to spend $100 million of his own fortune on Megalopolis, an allegorical political sci-fi architecture drama he’s been trying to get off the ground for decades. “On New Year's, instead of talking about the fact that you're going to give up carbohydrates,” he explained, “I'd like this one question to be discussed, which is: Is the society we live in the only one available to us?” The emphasis is mine. This seemed a surprising turn towards the serious from Coppola, who has always been galaxy-brained - see his 1991 comments about “the little fat girl in Ohio” who would become the next Mozart - but has, in recent years, taken more obvious relish in playing the role of elder Hollywood statesman, peppering his interviews with aphorisms and anecdotes from his equally storied lives in both filmmaking and family-raising/empire-building. I’m forever remembering a morsel he tossed out in a talk a few years back with film critic and scholar Annette Insdorf at Manhattan’s 92Y:
Drinking, you get sick and old. Chasing girls, your wife is mad at you and breaks your heart. Eating too much, you get fat. So learning is one of the - learning, and music, is the only thing you really get pleasure from that doesn’t bite you back.
Terrifying - but let’s get back to the movies. Coppola has spent his career interrogating - resenting, bemoaning, endangering, leaning back into - his name brand which, especially thanks to the legendary production hell of Apocalypse Now and the bankruptcy-inducing experimental musical One From The Heart, is synonymous with flying too close to the sun. The stories behind his most grandiose failures are more famous than many directors’ actual biggest movies. For all the cracks about his side hustles (the wine, the resorts, the weed), Coppola never retired from filmmaking; his last three features ran the gamut from incoherent gourmet arthouse passion project (Youth Without Youth) to shot-on-digital B&W indie (Tetro) to supernatural meta-exploitation in 2011’s Twixt. That film starred Val Kilmer as a touring, alcoholic horror novelist mourning the death of his child and the collapse of his marriage - a stand-in for Coppola1, yet also clearly patterned off of Stephen King. Visually, Twixt speaks to to an almost mortifying lack of fresh ideas: its heavily digital, Hot Topic-inflected aesthetic has no pretense to naturalism or classicism. A civilian viewer would never guess this same person directed some of the most beloved, critically acclaimed films of all time. Surely it means something that Coppola’s return to the low-budget horror of his youth is, for my money, both his most nakedly autobiographical and worst film?
After Twixt but before Megalopolis, Coppola was focusing his energies on something he calls “Live Cinema”: he published a book about it and performed two elaborate experiments in staging and directing live-recorded, live-broadcast movies (?), the first time at Oklahoma City Community College in 2015 and the second at UCLA in 2016. These are just the first two of an alleged four-part experiment called Distant Vision (“DV”), in which Coppola choreographs a sprawling, imperfect-by-design teledrama based on the experiences of his own family in the 20th century, as well as the development of early broadcast media. (A friend, who was invited to witness one of the completed Distant Vision assemblages post facto at a private screening, said it was pretty hard to get through.) The book provided little insight into Coppola’s Hollywood work, which is sort of a compliment - it’s clear he has been nurturing these uncommercial pet obsessions for a long time, and his grasp of the technology required is breathtaking2. His diaries are also hilarious. On Saturday, May 3, 2015, Coppola wrote:
All is well; I am here—now I must rewrite SHORT DV: be healthy (do exercises), work hard (write SHORT DV), be happy (pasta fazool).
The next day:
I hated that Avengers movie and so the taste of the world and I are parting even further than before. Nothing I can do but note it is happening.
Sadly, far more attention has been paid in the last several decades to Coppola’s obsession with revising and rereleasing his features. This has become popular among aging filmmakers of varying stature over the last few decades; those of us old enough to remember George Lucas’ “Special Editions” of the original Star Wars trilogy, or Steven Spielberg removing the phrase “penis breath” from E.T. for that film’s 25th anniversary, probably never anticipated similar remake/remodels from Wong Kar-wai or Paul Schrader, let alone a successful campaign for a major studio conglomerate to put out one name-hack’s version of its latest Wagnerian toy commercial to appease millions of online fan-cels over another’s. Anyway: the Redux-ification of Apocalypse Now (ultimately, released three different times) saw Coppola amending and expanding his magnum opus to end all magnum opuses despite its rapturous reception on arrival in 1979. The Cotton Club Encore allowed Coppola to redress studio-mandated wounds he was not able to prevent during that film’s notorious uphill, coke-fueled battles of production and post-production; most significant among these was the restoration of subplots and through-lines following the film’s Black characters, principally tap dancer Gregory Hines and his romance with a white-passing flapper girl played by Lonette McKee. In the case of his adaptation of The Outsiders, Coppola restored scenes (again, likely cut thanks to studio pressure) from S.E. Hinton’s original novel. In 2021 he also released a Director’s Cut of his 1963 horror film Dementia 13, produced when Coppola was one of many fledgling Baby Boomer filmmakers employed by schlock maestro Roger Corman.
The generous read is that Coppola’s obsession with “fixing” these movies once and for all is consistent with a long career of self-destruction and self-reinvention, likely stemming from his desire to crawl out from under the shadow of the movie that made him a household name, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. It seemed strange to me that the GQ piece barely mentioned The Godfather or its 50th anniversary rerelease (which happened just weeks ago at AMC Theaters across America, to considerable box office success by streaming-era / pandemic-era standards.) Then again, we’re talking about a movie which was claimed long and wide as the Greatest Film Ever Made; the arc of history is long, but it suggests nothing new can be said about The Godfather. I believe it dominated the IMDB Top 250 (or split duties with Citizen Kane and, uh, The Shawshank Redemption) for many years before Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy ushered in a different generation of rabid, and extremely online, trilogy-obsessed fanboys. Seeing Coppola, flanked by Robert De Niro and Al Pacino (who looks, always, like a cartoon cat whose tail got stuck in an electrical socket), feebly remarking on The Godfather’s half-centennial after a bizarre introductory montage scored the trilogy’s most iconic moments to snippets of Nas, Kanye and Jay-Z, mere moments after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock across the face and sent the 2022 Oscar ceremony into chaos, felt like further proof of the commemoration’s near beside-the-point-ness.
Besides: everybody knows Part II is better - richer, darker, more nuanced, more tragic - than Part I, but every frame of Part I is essential. That’s not even a “but”. The diptych tells a complete story, that of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) losing his soul while struggling to maintain control of the Corleone Family’s crime empire in the years following World War II - the ultimate parable of American capitalism3. 18 years later, Coppola would reteam with Puzo on Part III, widely understood as the weakest of the three. In December of 2020, Coppola released a 30th anniversary recut of Part III, retitled The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone4. Even for an artist as beloved as Coppola, it’s important to cast questions of artistic motive aside and remember that these recuts and reissues are also, always, double (triple? quadruple?) dips, opportunities to print new money from old media - or rather, the collectively held image or notion of said media, which is what the geniuses in Hollywood and Wall Street today call “intellectual property” (IP)5.
Maybe that’s an un-generous read, but Coppola’s politics were rarely gimlet-eyed about the tolls (psychic or monetary) of success, even as he progressed from a family of immigrant strivers to the face of New Hollywood - calling out hypocrisies of the American political system from chateaus in Napa Valley and palazzos in Italy. The excesses of Apocalypse Now’s production are the stuff of legend, yet their real-world ramifications should be better known: Coppola’s famous declaration at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival premiere that the film was not “about Vietnam - it is Vietnam” - accrues complicated resonance in the subsequent years. The production essentially colonized part of the Philippines in its mission to recreate the Mekong Delta, such that Coppola and his financiers paid princely sums to the regime of dictator Ferdinand Marcos to lease active-duty helicopters and tanks from the Philippine Air Force. More famously, production designer Dean Tavoularis purchased real cadavers from Filipino grave robbers for a mass burial scene. How far should one go in criticizing U.S. imperialism if the process requires a whole new version of it, backed by Hollywood dollars instead of U.S. taxpayer ones? Furthermore, as I have written about the gangster films of Martin Scorsese, the degree to which onscreen sociopathy is embraced whole-heartedly by the same kind of people being indicted creates an endless, interminable headache.
Mercifully, The Godfather is beyond criticism. It’s almost like the movie’s success was so total that it rendered film criticism useless. But this is also true for other mammoth IPs (franchises, mythologies) in whose images we are drowning more and more, voluntarily and otherwise. Is the film culture we live in the only one available to us?