It was going to be the rule of the artist.”Īctually, American Zoetrope had relatively little to do with “The Godfather,” which celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary on March 15th. Francis was going to become the emperor of the new order, but it wasn’t going to be like the old order. And his was a much more interesting influence than theirs. None of those other guys-Lucas, Spielberg, all of them-could have existed without Francis’s help. He was the one who made us hope.” Milius, who wrote the first draft of “Apocalypse Now” for Zoetrope before establishing himself as an action filmmaker (“Dillinger,” “Conan the Barbarian”), recalls, “He always said we were the Trojan horse, but that wasn’t quite true, because he was inside opening the gate. Lucas, just five years younger than Coppola, has said, “Francis was the great white knight. . . . He infected dozens of other film postgraduates with his spirit of conquest. Coppola’s dream was that American Zoetrope would allow artists to share ideas and equipment, and eventually to transform their native cinema. film-school classmate of Coppola’s, who later made “The Black Stallion” under his aegis). The company swiftly became a magnet for known movie-industry mavericks like John Korty (“The Crazy Quilt”) and Haskell Wexler (“Medium Cool”) as well as a cinematic frat house for tyros like Milius, Lucas, and Carroll Ballard (a U.C.L.A. He settled in San Francisco, keeping his distance from the studios and sinking whatever funds he could find-including seed money from Warner Bros.-Seven Arts-into a production company called American Zoetrope. In 1969, Coppola had institutionalized his outsiderdom. And his initiative backed up his high standing: in the case of “The Rain People,” he shot first and asked questions later, roaming cross-country with a caravan of fledgling filmmakers (including his friend George Lucas). He’d cowed his peers and impressed the press as the one member of the “movie generation” who both broke into the studio system and kept one foot outside it.
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Coppola, as the writer-director John Milius recently told me, was “the rebel envoy, the guy who had gotten into the walled city.” Coppola had worked as a writer (notably on “Patton”), as a director (on the musical comedy “Finian’s Rainbow”), and as a writer-director (on the horror quickie “Dementia 13,” the frenetic coming-of-age film “You’re a Big Boy Now,” and the offbeat woman-on-the-road movie “The Rain People”). hoped to revitalize American movies as an art form and overturn the Hollywood status quo. In the sixties, moviemakers coming out of film programs at places like U.S.C.
But even before he had directed a single film that attracted a large audience or substantial acclaim Coppola made the movie business seem wide open in a way few directors had since the early silents.
In 1972, a thirty-two-year-old Italian-American director, Francis Ford Coppola, made his name with a gangster movie called “The Godfather.” It grossed more money more quickly than any previous film and helped to sweep away the moral cant of its era.
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