The one movie Francis Ford Coppola wishes he never made: “It cost me everything”
Any director responsible for several of the greatest movies ever made, all of which were released within a decade of each other, should be given the freedom to do whatever they want. Francis Ford Coppola seized that opportunity for both hands, for better and worse.
After helming The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now consecutively, winning five Academy Awards from 12 nominations in the process, Coppola had free rein in Hollywood. That can often be a dangerous thing, though, as the filmmaker quickly discovered when he tried to change the face of cinema.
His first feature of the 1980s, One from the Heart, was supposed to usher in a revolution. Coppola planned to introduce pioneering techniques that would push the medium to a new level, only to end up with a calamitous box office bomb that lost a fortune and pushed him to the brink of bankruptcy.
Two years later, either side of his SE Hinton adaptations Rumble Fish and The Outsider, Coppola did much the same again. The Cotton Club was a disaster; he’d plunged himself into a financial black hole, and the only way out of it was to become a studio hand-for-hire. Peggy Sue Got Married was at least a hit, but his next film was marked by personal tragedy.
The war drama Gardens of Stone earned mixed reviews and sank without a trace at the box office, but that didn’t matter to Coppola. In the midst of production, his eldest son Gian-Carlo was killed in a speedboating accident at the age of 22. Ryan O’Neal, who’d been cast as Albert Wildman in the movie, was behind the wheel.
The actor was charged with manslaughter, pled guilty to negligently operating a boat, was sentenced to 18 months of probation, fined only $200, and spent 18 days behind bars after failing to carry out a mandated 400 hours of community service, with Casey Siemaszko brought in to replace him in the film.
“There’s one movie I wouldn’t have made because it cost me everything, and that was one of the movies I made at a time when I had to make a movie every year to just keep my house and my household together,” Coppola told Vulture. “I fantasise having not made Gardens of Stone. I wouldn’t have lost my son.”
Gian-Carlo was making his way in the family business, appearing in several of his father’s works as a background actor and serving as an associate producer on Rumble Fish and The Outsiders while he also directed the second unit on The Cotton Club, worked as a crew member on Penny Marshall’s Jumpin’ Jack Flash, and had an internship under Steven Spielberg lined up on the TV series Amazing Stories.
It was devastating for the entire family, especially with Gian-Carlo’s fiancee two months pregnant at the time of his death. Bittersweetly, his legacy lives on, with their daughter Gia anchoring the latest generation of the Coppola dynasty as the director behind Palo Alto and The Last Showgirl.
