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?
The Godfathers have been so thoroughly praised, taxonomized, referenced and ripped off that, the first time I watched Part I (a rite of cismale passage initiated by my father - and I know I’m not alone in that), I felt the uncanny sensation of recognizing specific scenes and lines of dialogue already, courtesy of spoofs that I had seen in Seinfeld and The Simpsons. Despite incessantly talking about it with other straight white men I’ve encountered along my journey, I can’t recall any one specific piece of writing on it from memory, rapturous or critical, published in the 1970s or since. That’s not fully true - I took a stab at writing about the trilogy (as well as the metatextual contradiction this paragraph describes) back in 2015, when Brooklyn Magazine queried a handful of its film writers about the movies they circle back to as comfort food every holiday season. It’s clear I was in an even more confused place in my life and straining not to push too far past the word limit given, but here goes:
Around the time my preteenage self saw Luca Brasi mount his bulletproof vest to the crisp stirrings of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”, I knew The Godfather was a movie about all the things The Holidays inflict on us: the arriving and departing of beloved extended relatives, the intra-sibling resentments that grow from minor scrapes into defining handicaps, the renewing (and/or abandoning) of the prior generation’s hard-won rituals, the silent comparisons one makes marking their inner holiday-day against the outside world’s. Inside Michael Corleone’s frigid reflections bookending Part II—about what could have been, but most definitely wasn’t—and the empty spaces of the family home, I found a perfect cap to each calendar year’s long return-trail of reality.
This brings us to the genesis of this volume of Element X, Christmas 2021. I do try not to go full cine-bro when possible, but as discussed, my wife and I had COVID; being broke and homesick, I thought maybe the trilogy (total runtime, 535 minutes) could be a fun bonding activity in quarantine, the cinematic equivalent of eating my feelings. Furthermore, she would learn everything she needed to know about the immigrant experience in 20th century America. The idea was a flop. She fell asleep within the first few minutes of Part I, those scenes in the dark stillness of Don Vito’s home office during his daughter’s wedding; I hoped the cut from indoor to the jubilant cacophony outside would wake her up, but no dice. But she stirred awake enough to tell me the movie had a “good vibe” so The Godfather played on. I didn’t finish Part I in one sitting, so instead I tracked down a copy of Coppola’s 8+ hour The Godfather: A Novel for Television from 1977, the first of the re-edits, an idea that was (surprise!) proposed by Coppola and greenlit by Paramount in order to offset the skyrocketing costs of making Apocalypse Now.
Here’s the deal with A Novel For Television (which would also mutate into The Godfather Novella, The Godfather Saga, The Godfather 1901–1959: The Complete Epic, and The Godfather Epic): it reconfigures the two films into one long linear historical narrative. Part II is celebrated for contrasting Michael’s present-day (1950s) struggles with the early years of the Corleone family, as Vito (Robert De Niro) rises to power in the Little Italy of the 1910s - flashbacks depicting him as a kind of Sicilian Robin Hood who earns the trust of his fellow migrants by being less cruel than the established pezzonovantes. The ratio of Michael-to-Vito scenes in Part II is about 4:1, while A Novel For Television puts back 30 or so minutes of deleted material from these early passages - delectable stuff, all of it, but it fundamentally changes the meaning of the juxtaposition. With Michael up against corrupt politicians, ancient vendettas between rival families and the suspicion of a traitor in his inner sanctum, the flashbacks make him (and us) succumb to rosy nostalgia for A Simpler Time that probably never existed. The reveries are not just circular but concentric: family is everything, but there is such a thing as taking too much refuge in “the past”. When Michael asks his mother how Vito kept the clan together under so much pressure, she replies - from the heart - that “You can never lose your family.” The saga concludes when Michael orders the murder of his weak brother Fredo (John Cazale) as punishment for turning against the family and putting his own life - and his children’s - at risk.
Watching the 1977 megamix also meant breaking The Godfather into digestible chunks with indeterminate starting and stopping points: replayed, spread out over weeks if not months. It became wallpaper, muzak - a fate more and more common to all sorts of movies, even if this kind of viewing (?) experience remains mostly on the hush within whatever passes for “film discourse” these days. If a similarly COVID-positive friend visited, I would say: “I’m rewatching The Godfather. Wanna dip in?” If someone asked what I was watching, I would say I was watching The Godfather; those who had never seen it would ask, as if they were choosing which translation of an elephantine classic novel to buy: “What’s the best way to watch that?” I was only able to do this because these movies are among the best-preserved in popular memory. It’s easy to take an artwork for granted when it’s permanently available, when you’ve had infinite opportunities to peer into it. All this is to say: one reason The Godfather demands to be seen is so you can go back and watch it again. And because each holiday tradition mandates a certain amount of eye-rolling, I decided to suck it up and try Part III (or, this time, Coda) again too. Returning to my blurb for Brooklyn:
And, hell: in Part III, a cash-in sequel requested at once by everybody and nobody, I even found a soothing analogy for the season’s wasteful, hyperventilating candelabra! No holiday cycle would be complete without at least a partial dip into the Corleone Saga (and not just because these damn movies get marathoned on American TV 24/7).
I understand why people have a weakness for the final chapter - seeing Pacino, by 1990 fully haggard and gravel-voiced, return to the role that made him famous when he was boyishly young sparks a certain sentimentality that’s almost as strong as Coppola and Puzo’s screenplay is weak. Maybe Puzo was right when he called Pacino’s scream at the end of the trilogy one of the greatest pieces of motion picture acting of all time; morbid curiosity will send future movie freak completists to watch Coda even as their elders advise against it. For me the film’s truest meaning is in its failure, as opposed to being suggested by the text: maybe it can be read as a lesson in the folly of chasing respectability when so much poisoned history at your back. By now in his 60s, Michael seeks to make the family legitimate once and for all in an elaborate business deal with the Vatican (again, one of Coppola’s signature themes is the depraved depths of hypocrisy.) This has as much to do with grand power politics as it does with Michael’s own guilt over the killing of Fredo; the original Part III trailer began with Michael in confession, saying “I killed my father’s son. I killed my mother’s son.” (In interviews, Pacino has said he never personally bought the idea that Michael would feel remorse for this decision, which seems a creative problem.)
The differences between Part III and the new Coda are mostly imperceptible. Either cut’s failures might be easier to forgive with age and hindsight, but nevertheless the project remains an overreach that had no organic need to exist at all. (Again: the filmmaker conceded openly, publicly, readily, repeatedly, that he needed the money.) If Parts I & II or A Novel For Television continue to yield riches, Part III/Coda is an object lesson in Coppola microwaving the hits: in the grand finale, high-profile murders are contrasted with the opera debut of Michael’s estranged son Anthony in Palermo, more or less identical to the crosscutting of murders with his godson’s baptism at the end of Part I, the ritual sacrifice of a water buffalo juxtaposed with the murder of Marlon Brando’s General Kurtz at the end of Apocalypse Now, or the parallel cutting of Gregory Hines’ longest tapdancing solo with score-settling mob-land massacres at the end of The Cotton Club. Then again, just like you don’t get The Talented Mr. Ripley without The English Patient, so it goes with Coda and Coppola’s subsequent film, the endlessly fascinating Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which unleashed an entirely different side of him as an artist of the macabre and grotesque thanks in huge part to the contributions of costume designer Eiko Ishioka6. Never the same river (of blood) twice.
Last February saw the death, at age 91 in Seattle, of movie critic Sheila Benson, a perpetually underrated writer on film. Here’s what she wrote in the Los Angeles Times7 about her shift of opinion after seeing Coppola’s One From The Heart ten years after its premiere:
The answer, I think, is not to try to love films less or with less enthusiasm, but to understand that love is not fixed forever, any more than taste is.
Around the time a not-quite-finished version of Kanye West’s mid-divorce album Donda II crashlanded onto the internet, self-help strategist Herbert Lui posted a Twitter thread about Kanye’s creative process and why it was wrong to dismiss the record as a work in progress. (Consider Kanye’s stressed chorus on one of the would-be singles: “Do I look happy to you?!”) Lui first cites Pablo Picasso, as quoted in the 1993 pop-psych book Creating Minds by Howard Gardner:
If it were possible... there would never be a ‘finished’ canvas but just different states of a single painting.
He then follows with a quote taken from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Da Vinci:
Relinquishing a work, declaring it finished, froze its evolution. Leonardo did not like to do that. "There was always something more to be learned, another stroke to be gleaned from nature that would make a picture closer to perfect.”
I have read neither of these books myself (too busy watching mafia movies) but the drive to keep perfecting something already in full view of the public is almost dangerously human; the blurring of I’m-the-artist-here-pal fussiness with blatant cash-grabbing showmanship is just one thing Coppola and Kanye have in common. From this labyrinth we can divine a new idea of authorial privilege: many directors of lesser stature have been content, or at least performed contentedness, with their career legend hitched to one or two monolithic “masterpieces”, parroting the same stories their younger selves fed critics and journalists back in the day, cheerleading the last time something in their careers went right. Many never recover from their first rodeo. Sometimes it’s a lack of imagination; sometimes it’s a defense mechanism; the repeat trauma of Hollywood has untold effects on the human organism underneath it all that can’t be avoided. The actual compromises remain, as ever, trapped behind studio vaults, balance sheets and non-disclosure agreements.
Maybe at 82, Coppola is wise enough to see the idea of the masterpiece as a dead end. Maybe, like Kanye, he’s at a place where he can luxuriate in the act of creation as long as he pleases, and mere mortals will just have to meet him at that level8. It’s good for business, but should one man have all that power? Even if going back to the canvas is a bid for more Megalopolis money, it also feels like Coppola searching for something else, sought not just by Michael Corleone but by millions of no-name fathers and husbands around the world today: not immortality, but absolution.
Special thanks to Aaron E. Hunt and Lygia Brubeck.
Current Mood: Dissatisfied 🤷
Current Music: Lowell Lo - Main Theme From The Killer
The death of Coppola’s filmmaker-prodigy son Gian-Carlo in a speedboating accident turns up all over his latter filmography. The most intriguing retelling of this tragedy is in his wife Eleanor’s 2017 romantic comedy Paris Can Wait starring Diane Lane, with Alec Baldwin as the stand-in (gregarious, distracted, Falstaffian) for Francis. Read my interview with Eleanor Coppola here.
That said, I’ve wondered if reality television, with its cheap framing devices handed down by executives to be improvised into flesh by the vampiest non-actors on the face of the planet, isn’t just the sad, crude version of what Coppola has spent the last few decades agitating for…
In a 1974 issue of Jump Cut, John Hess quotes Coppola as saying “The film always was a loose metaphor; Michael as America”, and “I leave Godfather Part II with Michael very possibly the most powerful man in America. But he is a corpse.” Robert K. Johnson’s 1977 monograph Francis Ford Coppola cites the filmmaker as having originally referred to Part II as “The Death of Michael Corleone”.
In high school, my best friend and I always laughed recalling Coppola’s penultimate line of audio commentary at the end of Part III on DVD: “There it is: the Death of Michael Corleone.”
Another of my favorite pieces of Godfather marginalia: just nine years after Part III, it was announced Coppola and Puzo were developing a Part IV which would contrast Corleone heir Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia)’s plotline with another set of flashbacks, this time to the Depression-era machinations of young Sonny Corleone (to be played, improbably, by Leonardo DiCaprio.) Given that almost none of the original stars would be returning and the project was scrapped after Puzo’s death, Coppola later conceded in so many words that this was announced to reboot interest in the franchise so the dying author could leave some more money to his family.
A subtle, moving detour from Live Cinema and its Techniques: Coppola shrugs off his 1987 adaptation of Rip Van Winkle, for Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre, as his lone and unsuccessful prior foray into live broadcast cinema. He finds a measure of redemption decades later in Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s blurb on the episode, for The A.V. Club, which correctly describes the episode as a “crayon sketch” for Dracula. The production was designed by Ishioka.
I found some great LA Times headlines trying to dig this up. 1982: COPPOLA DECLARES THIRD BANKRUPTCY. 1986: BAD TIMES BEHIND, COPPOLA DANCES TO ANOTHER TUNE. 1990: ALREADY BEING SECOND-GUESSED, COPPOLA MOANS.
(For a truly fanatical look inside the mind of the artist, I recommend the Kanye Tracker - but “the artist” refers as much to Ye as to the fans feverishly updating this thing.)