Why Francis Ford Coppola wanted his own movie to fail: “I just wanted to be done with it”
It’s a common misconception that Francis Ford Coppola emerged onto the Hollywood stage fully-formed with The Godfather in 1972. While it’s true that the mob classic was the first time Coppola had managed to put all the elements together to make a genuinely great film, he had actually built up to his tale of the Corleone family with four lesser-known films released in the ’60s.
In ’63, a 24-year-old Coppola got his start by making a low-budget horror movie for Roger Corman entitled Dementia 13. This wasn’t a scenario unique to Coppola, either, because Corman was well-known for taking chances on young filmmakers. Without him, the likes of Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, and Jonathan Demme may have never broken into Hollywood.
Coppola followed his debut with You’re a Big Boy Now in ’66, a movie which arguably pre-empted The Graduate, which came out the following year and dealt with similar themes. The film earned Geraldine Page a ‘Best Supporting Actress’ nomination at the Oscars, putting Coppola in the frame for his first major studio picture, the fantasy musical Finian’s Rainbow, which starred Fred Astaire and Petula Clark.
If the idea of Coppola making a musical with iconic dancer Astaire sounds strange nowadays, it sounded equally bizarre to the director himself when he was offered the film. In fact, on the DVD commentary track, the Apocalypse Now helmer admitted that, looking back upon his acceptance of the job, “What I should have said is ‘no.'” However, his father, Carmine, was always a huge Astaire fan, so he confessed to saying “yes” because he knew it would impress his dad.
So, against his better judgment, Coppola found himself as a hired gun making a musical about an Irishman and his daughter who steal a leprechaun’s pot of gold before fleeing to the American South, where lots of singing and dancing ensues. At this time, Coppola envisioned himself as “more of a European-style auteur director,” and had no experience shooting singers and dancers. Still, he had the unearned confidence of youth on his side, and admitted, “I thought I knew how to stage musical numbers.” He soon discovered, though, that this was not the case.
You see, when Coppola began editing the picture, he noticed something that made his blood run cold. “It was a source of great embarrassment to me that in a number of scenes, when Fred danced, his feet were cut off,” Coppola confessed. It was a rookie mistake, but in many of Astaire’s intricate dance scenes, his feet were either off-screen or unnervingly close to being cut off by the camera. Naturally, a more experienced musical director would have known to give extra room in the frame for the feet, as they are the telltale sign for an audience that the actor is truly dancing, and there is no camera trickery involved.
However, even considering this egregious error, Warner Bros was confident that Finian’s Rainbow would be a smash hit. So confident, in fact, that the studio made plans to screen the movie in 70mm as a roadshow picture, akin to a night at the theatre, with the audience being given a programme and shown to their seats while an overture played.
To Coppola’s horror, though, blowing the movie up to that print size simply made his mistakes all the more glaring. “When they did that, they blew the feet off Fred Astaire when he was dancing,” Coppola remonstrated in A Filmmaker’s Life. “No one had calculated the top and bottom of the frame.”
By the end of his difficult journey with Finian’s Rainbow, an exhausted Coppola acknowledged, “I just wanted to be done with it.” However, something else nagged at him, and it was worse than the idea that he’d made a flop he didn’t really care about. Instead, he was worried “that this thing might be an enormous success,” and remembered complaining to his wife, “God, why should I become rich and famous because of this?”
Ultimately, though, instead of making a hit musical and subsequently becoming known for that genre instead of the artsy, gritty picture he really wanted to make, Coppola’s rooting for his own movie to fail paid off. Finian’s Rainbow was a minor hit at the box office, but no more than that, and it wound up merely a footnote in his career when The Godfather took off like a rocket.
