Francis Ford Coppola: Playboy Interview

Every year or so, the American movie industry comes up with a talented new young director whose current flick is hailed as the greatest piece of goods since "The Birth of a Nation"; he usually finds himself an overnight celebrity, the darling of TV talk shows and interviews profiles. Few deserve such treatment and even fewer manage to survive it. The latest of Hollywood's directorial darlings is a portly, bearded, fast-talking 36-year-old dynamo named Francis Ford Coppola (pronounced Cope-uh-lah), who made headlines this year by being nominated for five Academy Awards—and winning three of them. In the history of the awards, only the venerable Walt Disney received more nominations (six) in a single year. Coppola was also named best motion-picture director of the year by the Directors' Guild of America.

Unlike most of the other boy geniuses, however, Coppola might actually be every bit as talented as the reviewers say he is. His present eminence rests largely on having made "The Godfather Part II" an even bigger artistic success than the original "Godfather," which, in addition to grossing a staggering $285,000,000, has been acclaimed by most serious movie critics here and abroad as the greatest gangster picture ever made. For the first time in Hollywood history, a sequel to a tremendously successful motion picture has surpassed the original in critical estimation and is likely to do the same at the box office.

Just three years ago, Coppola was broke and so little in demand that he was reportedly only fourth or fifth on Paramount's list of possible candidates to direct what the studio envisaged all along as no more than a big-budget thriller to be carved out of Mario Puzo's sprawling best seller. Since "The Godfather," Coppola has become the one person in the movie industry more in demand than Clint Eastwood. "If he took all the offers now coming his way in any one week," a studio executive recently said, "he'd have to work uninterruptedly for the next 50 years and might get to be rich enough to buy up Fort Knox."

The wonder is not that Coppola is so young to be in such a position but that it took Hollywood so long to find out about him. Francis remembers his childhood as an agitated series of crises, with much shouting, passion and tears. His father, Carmine, was a virtuoso flutist who played with several leading orchestras, including Arturo Toscanini's celebrated NBC Symphony. Unable to achieve recognition as a composer, he moved the family back and forth across the country in pursuit of his career, which was finally capped with an Oscar for the score of "Godfather II." Francis' older brother, August, a writer, was handsome, brilliant and popular with girls; his sister, Talia, an actress (she played Connie, Michael Corleone's sister in both "Godfathers"), was the baby of the family. Francis retreated for a while into a fantasy world in which, for hours on end, he played with puppets, watched TV and read comic books.

He aspired to playwrighting but quickly changed his mind when he saw his first Eisenstein film, "Ten Days That Shook the World," at the age of 17. "On Monday I was in theater," Coppola has said, "and on Tuesday I wanted to be a film maker."

At UCLA's film school, Coppola won the Samuel Goldwyn writing award and at 22 he landed a job as a staff writer with Seven Arts, a major production company, where he directed a low-budget horror picture for producer Roger Corman. Coppola's master's-thesis film, "You're a Big Boy Now," a knockabout farce with a rock score, brought him to the attention of Warner Bros., which signed him to direct a musical, "Finian's Rainbow." It flopped. Mostly on his own, Coppola put together "The Rain People," a film he wrote and directed about a pregnant woman who leaves her husband, despite the fact that she loves him, because she doesn't want to be married anymore. The movie antedated women's lib and is now considered to have been ahead of its period, a polite way of saying that it didn't make much money. But by that time, Coppola had also co-authored the screenplay of "Patton," for which he won an Oscar. He was barely 28 and the odds were he'd make it big, if he just stuck around long enough.

By 1969, however, Coppola had had enough of Hollywood's chaotic financing methods, antiquated production techniques and rigidly entrenched craft unions. He talked Warner's into letting him set up his own production company, American Zoetrope, and moved to San Francisco, where he proposed to turn out high-quality, low-budget features. The company's first project, "THX 1138," a futuristic script directed by his friend George Lucas that has since become a cult classic, all but sank it. Warner's canceled its contract, leaving Coppola stranded under a mountain of debts, from which he quickly extricated himself with "The Godfather," followed not only by "Godfather II" but by its rival for best-picture honors in the 1974 Oscars competition, "The Conversation."

Today, Coppola's only worry is deciding what to do next. He has enough money to indulge himself and he has a number of projects that have been sitting on his desk and/or maturing in his head for years. In addition to Lucas, whom he prodded into writing and directing the enormously successful "American Graffiti"—which he produced after the script had been rejected by 11 studios—Coppola has gathered around him in San Francisco a small army of young supremely talented individualists. They swarm in and out of the Coppola Company headquarters an old eight-story San Francisco office building that Coppola is restoring. Coppola listens to everyone and overlooks nothing.

Some people feel this may be his undoing as an artist. Coppola willingly delegates authority and listens to advice, but he clearly feels capable of undertaking just about anything interesting that comes his way. He has also set up his own distribution company, has acquired a small legitimate theater, where he plans to produce and direct his own plays as well as those of others, is wheeling and dealing in real estate and publishes a biweekly interviews called City that aspires to do for the San Francisco region something of what New York does for its area. He enjoys a warm home life with his artist wife, Eleanor, and their three small children, as well as an active social one with a wide circle of friends and cronies whom he calls "the family." To find out more about this artist-mogul, Playboy assigned contributor William Murray to track him down on his home grounds and interview him. Murray reports:

"Getting to see Francis Ford Coppola these days is about as difficult as setting up a téte-á-téte with the Godfather himself. It took weeks and dozens of long-distance phone calls, filtered through the usual guard screen of secretaries and superefficient business managers, before a meeting was finally arranged.

"I finally caught up with Coppola at his house, a light-blue, turn-of-the-century, 28-room mansion with a magnificent view of the Golden Gate Bridge. The huge rooms are stocked with gadgets, including an old jukebox, a player grand piano, hi-fi equipment and a fully equipped projection room. It was exactly the sort of palazzo I'd have envisioned for a self-exiled Hollywood tycoon, but I hadn't been in the place more than 20 minutes before I realized that, far from being a self-advertisement for power and success, everything in the house reflected the highly personal, even eccentric tastes of Francis or Eleanor Coppola.

"The first thing Coppola did was to make me a cappuccino on his own espresso machine, imported from Turin. We sat and sipped coffee. Everything was moving at such a leisurely pace that I couldn't imagine at first how I'd ever be able to get a real conversation under way with him.

"I needn't have worried. The minute I switched on my tape recorder, Coppola came to life. This was work. First, he corrected the position of the machine, then he fiddled with the volume and tone controls till he had them set to his satisfaction. Finally, he allowed me to question him. All you have to do with Coppola is get him going. After that, the problem is slowing him down, much less stopping him; I got the feeling he could have been a tremendous politician or an eloquent preacher. We talked for several hours that first day, then continued the next two days at his office.

"Our final session was held at his home. Coppola, wearing an Arab caftan that failed to conceal his bulk, ushered me into one of the Bay Areas' largest back yards, where a Moorish-style pool is heated to body temperature. He leaped into the water and for the next five minutes he moaned—very loudly. What if the neighbors complain? he was asked. 'It's my pool,' he answered, 'and I'll moan if I like.' Sipping a cup of espresso while standing in the water, he added: 'Y' know, I like this. It's my idea of real decadence.'

"Back in the living room, Coppola, his robe billowing about him, pirouetted, gavotted and jigged without a trace of self-consciousness to a record of carnival music that he'd brought back from Rio, where he'd gone to unwind for a couple of weeks. Then, I think, I saw the key to Coppola: He throws himself completely into everything he does, whether it's work or play. The man is a block of pure energy, with the powers of concentration of a leopard stalking prey. If anyone can pull off what he proposes to do to the film business, I'm convinced he can and I came away hoping he'd succeed."