Anthony Bourdain’s unwitting contribution to Francis Ford Coppola movie ‘Megalopolis’
The legacy of the late Anthony Bourdain looms large over many areas of pop culture. The professional chef with the gravelly voice and world-weary features who seemed up for just about anything was beloved for his frankness, disarming eloquence, and penchant for finding culinary excellence off the beaten path. Though his television shows Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, The Layover, and Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown were ostensibly about food, he always found a way to connect them to broader explorations of culture, location, and even existentialism.
Bourdain became such a beloved figure during his 15-year career on television that stars from all corners of the entertainment industry were eager to make guest appearances. Some of his celebrity guests included Bill Murray, Alice Cooper, and Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, but one of the biggest stars to appear alongside him was none other than The Godfather director and culinary connoisseur Francis Ford Coppola. For all his wisdom, it’s unlikely that even Bourdain could have predicted that the encounter would end up playing a role in one of the director’s biggest cinematic gambles.
Speaking to Rolling Stone earlier this year, Coppola recounted the torturous 30-year process of bringing his $120million science fiction epic, Megalopolis, to theatres. In 2001, the director started doing table readings of an early version of the script with stars including Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Uma Thurman. However, he hit a creative wall when 9/11 happened, and he could no longer bring himself to work on a script about a utopian society. More than 15 years later, however, his appearance on Parts Unknown indirectly changed his mind.
“Around 2017 or so, Anthony Bourdain invited me to come on to his travel show,” Coppola remembered. “He came to Sicily, and it was a lot of fun, but when I eventually saw the episode, I thought, ‘I look like a whale.’ This is not healthy for me. I signed myself up for this five-month program at Duke Fitness Center, where [The Godfather writer] Mario Puzo had gone a few times and lost close to 50 pounds. You don’t see any 85-year-old, 300-pound men running around.”
Adding: “But on the days where it would be these strict exercise regimens, I started listening to some of the readings of Megalopolis just for the hell of it and thought, ‘This feels more relevant than ever.’ I realised that even though the script was 20 years old, I could still do it.”
We have a lot to thank Bourdain for, but Megalopolis isn’t one of them. The two-hour and 18-minute epic was a box office bomb almost as soon as it hit theatres, and for good reason. Bursting with scattershot, hackneyed ideas about society writ large, it missed the mark for critics and audiences alike. At its best, it’s an ambitious, operatic fable that is ahead of its time. At its worst, it’s an over-indulgent mess from a director who has lost his way.
It’s probably for the best that Bourdain never has to know that he indirectly helped revive it from Coppola’s scrapheap.
