The movies Francis Ford Coppola made to prevent his life from falling apart: “I knew I was in trouble”
Ambition and hubris are often separated by the finest of lines, with Francis Ford Coppola failing to pay heed to the distinction when he came dangerously close to ruining his career, reputation, and financial solvency on more than one occasion.
By the late 1970s, he had every right to believe that the rest of his career was going to be a breeze, with Coppola continuing to aim high despite having already reached the summit. Unfortunately, there’s only one way for anyone to go when they’ve made The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now consecutively, and it isn’t an upwards trajectory.
Those four are among the finest films of both their decade and American cinema in general, which meant that Coppola’s next move had the potential to either make or break him. Much to his dismay, it turned out to be the latter, with his desires to reinvent the face of the medium with One from the Heart backfiring so horrendously that he was staring bankruptcy and embarrassment square in the face.
He’d invested a massive amount of his personal wealth into a production that was supposed to mark the next great technological and artistic leap forward, only for the opposite to unfold. Coppola was on the precipice of ruin, and the only way he’d be able to prevent his entire existence from coming apart was to swallow his pride and become a director-for-hire.
That’s exactly what he did for the remainder of the 1980s, with One from the Heart being followed by a further six movies before the end of the decade. Underlining just how calamitous he’d become, the only one of that sextet he developed from the ground up as a personal passion project was The Cotton Club, another cataclysmic box office disaster that pushed him ever closer to the abyss.
The Outsiders was a much-needed hit, but Rumble Fish was another flop. Peggy Sue Got Married provided a brief ray of light after recouping its budget two and a half times over, only for Gardens of Stone and Tucker: The Man and His Dream to tank. From the highs of four classics in a row, five of the seven pictures Coppola helmed in the ’80s lost money.
Things weren’t going well, and Coppola was fully aware of it. As he explained to David Breskin, though, he always found solace in his work regardless of how many or how few people were willing to turn up and pay for a ticket. In fact, it was about the only thing keeping him together on every level.
“Well, I knew that I was in trouble,” he admitted. “And a lot of things in my life were falling apart. I was fighting to keep my home. And my response to trouble is to work hard. That’s my conditioned response. I was digging myself out of a hole. I enjoyed making Rumble Fish very much, making a stylistic flight of fancy. Tucker was pleasant being with George Lucas again.”
Coppola “didn’t like the script for Peggy Sue Got Married,” which sums up where his head was at because it was one of the only films he made during that period that turned a profit. Not that he regrets anything he’s ever made, however, with the five-time Academy Award winner finding “something endearing, or interesting, or that I was able to enjoy” in every single one of his big screen credits.
The 1990s did at least start off in his favour with the back-to-back success of The Godfather Part III and his lavish gothic fantasy Dracula, quickly washing away the stench the previous ten years had left him covered with. Thanks to his booming wine business, Coppola has never again found himself in a position where he was in danger of losing everything he’d worked so hard for, becoming so wealthy that he could bankroll the entirety of the big budget Megalopolis out of his own pocket.
