Defiant art: The movie Francis Ford Coppola was “constantly damned and ridiculed for”
The career of Francis Ford Coppola is a truly fascinating thing, with the filmmaker having helmed several of the greatest movies ever made before embarking on an extensive downturn that’s yielded the odd flash of the old brilliance while coming perilously close to ruining him financially on more than one occasion.
Of course, there’s only one way to go for any director who delivered The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now consecutively within the space of seven years between 1972 and 1979, but by that point, Coppola’s place in cinema history was already secured.
Declaring bankruptcy twice over for unwisely funnelling millions of his own dollars into productions that proceeded to bomb at the box office and push him to the brink of personal, professional, and fiscal disaster would be a lesson most people would learn the first time. Still, it didn’t stop the maverick from footing the entire cost of Megalopolis himself.
After agreeing to direct The Godfather Part III largely because he needed the money, Coppola was back on top form in his following feature when the lavish, opulent, gothic trappings of Bram Stoker’s Dracula became his biggest hit since The Godfather. All of that goodwill was swiftly undone when he took the reins on Robin Williams’ sentimentally cloying Jack.
The story of a boy who ages four times faster than the average child, Williams plays a ten-year-old child trapped in the body of a 40-year-old man, but naturally, lessons are learned along the way by the protagonist and everyone in his orbit. A commercial disappointment and a critical catastrophe, Coppola was one of the very few willing to defend it to the death.
“Jack was a movie that everybody hated, and I was constantly damned and ridiculed for. I must say I find Jack sweet and amusing. I don’t dislike it as much as everyone, but that’s obvious; I directed it,” he said. “I know I should be ashamed of it, but I’m not. I don’t know why everybody hated it so much. I think it was because of the type of movie it was.”
First-time screenwriter Gary Nadeau wasn’t quite as bullish, describing his experience of seeing the initial cut of Jack as a terrifying one. “I thought my career had ended,” he admitted to The Telegraph. “Not only that, but I’d be the man who destroyed Francis Ford Coppola’s career.”
Fortunately, things didn’t quite come to that point, with Coppola’s next film being solid John Grisham adaptation The Rainmaker. It would take a brave soul to try and argue that Jack isn’t one of the legend’s worst movies, but at least the director got what he wanted out of it by trying something different in the realm of the family-friendly comedy, as well as getting the opportunity to work with Williams.
