A towering figure, both literally and metaphorically, of American contemporary cinema, Francis Ford Coppola's long and sometimes tortuous career serves as a paradigm for the opportunities and the dangers of Hollywood film-making. He has written and directed some of the greatest movies ever made but has been buffeted more than most of his contemporaries by the harsh realities of the commercial marketplace.
Born and raised in Queens, New York (his father, Carmine, was Toscanini's flute player) the young Coppola's route into filmmaking took him through Hofstra University and UCLA before arriving at that great proving ground for American directors, the exploitation factory of Roger Corman. In fact, Coppola's first feature for Corman, the low-budget horror film Dementia 13, was made in Ireland in 1962.
Throughout the 1960s, his output as a director was less impressive than his writing credits, which included Rene Clement's Is Paris Burning? and Sydney Pollack's This Property Is Condemned, culminating in the Academy Award for Best Screenplay which he won for Patton in 1970. But his reputation as a director was to soar with the release two years later of The Godfather, one of the great achievements of American cinema. In chronicling the saga of the Corleone family, Coppola achieved a fusion of intimacy and myth that arguably makes The Godfather, and its equally successful sequel, the defining portrait of post-war America. The success of the two films propelled him to the forefront of the new wave of directors who were taking Hollywood by storm at the time. In the interim, he had made The Conversation (1973), a brooding, claustrophobic thriller whose themes of surveillance, voyeurism and conspiracy chimed perfectly with the times. But Coppola had greater ambitions; he saw American Zoetrope, the production facility he had established with support from Warner Brothers, as a new studio, challenging the control of the old corporations that had dominated the business for so long. The main beneficiary of this grand plan, ironically, was George Lucas, whose 1973 hit film, American Graffiti Coppola produced, and who went on to achieve many of the objectives which have eluded his mentor.
THE 1970s for Coppola were a roller-coaster ride of risk-taking, triumph and success snatched from the jaws of failure, exemplified by the experience of Apocalypse Now, his spectacular, nightmarish transposition of Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness to the Vietnam War. Beset by disaster, illness and bad weather, the film's budget ballooned from $12 million to more than $30 million but the brilliant, if flawed, final product largely vindicated its director's huge personal investment, which was memorably chronicled in his wife Eleanor's documentary, Hearts Of Darkness: A Film-maker's Apocalypse.
The grandiose plans for Zoetrope turned to dust with the commercially disastrous One From The Heart (1980), an underrated attempt to revive the moribund musical genre using state-of-the-art technology. The film was mauled by critics and ignored by audiences, an unfair fate for what is a delicate and quite beautiful piece of work.
Coppola was out of tune with the times, his ideas about the uses of new technology used to far more commercial effect by his former protege Lucas and by Steven Spielberg. He directed two low-budget adaptations of S.E. Hinton teen rebellion movies, of which the better was the highly stylised Rumble Fish. It appeared that he was becoming a marginal film-maker, operating on the fringes of the brat-pack driven, comic-strip-based industry of the 1980s but he moved back towards the commercial centre ground with the elegiac, nostalgic Peggy Sue Got Married (the Surprise Film at the second Dublin Film Festival, incidentally).
Since then, the films have been a mixed bag, ranging from solid but unspectacular pieces like Tucker (1988) to sheer dross like last year's sentimental Robin Williams vehicle, Jack. Gardens Of Stone (1987) is a wellcrafted but strangely elliptical view of the Vietnam war from the perspective of an officer guarding Arlington military cemetery, its themes given added poignancy by the fact that his son was killed in an accident near the set during shooting.
The third instalment of the Godfather saga in 1990 was a pale reflection of its predecessors, and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) was beset by haminess. The drive and vision of the earlier work now seems spent, drained by the long, painful Zoetrope saga and perhaps even by Coppola's own realisation that there's more to life than making movies. Much of his directing work of the last 15 years has been undertaken to pay off debts and he often seems more proud of his California winery than his recent work.
With The Rainmaker, Coppola has written his own screenplay for the first time in a long while, bringing a classical style to this adaptation of John Grisham's novel about a young lawyer (the rapidly rising Matt Damon) who takes on the might of the American medical insurance companies. The David and Goliath subject seems close to this great artist's own experiences over almost four decades of film-making.
