C6| Saturday/Sunday, August 17 - 18, 2019 ** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.**
shoulders with the likes of Jim Morrison of the
Doors.
Mr. Coppola has often chosen experimentation
over conformity. He was part of the bold movement
that began in the 1960s and sought to place auteur-
directors in the driver’s seat of the movie business.
His peers include Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg
and George Lucas. But no other filmmaker from the
so-called New Hollywood movement nabbed high
honors as quickly as Mr. Coppola.
After winning his first Oscar in 1971 for being
one of the co-authors of the screenplay of “Patton,”
Mr. Coppola was hired to direct “The Godfather.”
The 32-year-old director worked feverishly, some-
times fearing he would be fired for directorial
choices that the film’s studio disliked. “The Godfa-
ther” won several Oscars in 1973, including best
picture. In 1975, “The Godfather: Part II”—which
many critics deemed better than the original—again
won the Academy Award for best picture, nabbing
Mr. Coppola an Oscar for best director.
In his 30s, breathing rarefied air, Mr. Coppola
made two decisions that changed his career’s tra-
jectory. First, he chose to make “Apocalypse Now,”
despite the obstacles. “Nobody wanted to back me,”
Mr. Coppola recalls. “I couldn’t figure out why. I’d
won five Oscars, and nobody wanted to.”
Second, he and his wife, Eleanor, bought a 1,560-
acre property in Napa, Calif., which had once been
part of Inglenook, a wine estate founded in 1879 by
a Finnish sea captain. Mr. Coppola says he didn’t
initially plan to produce wine from the budding
grapevines on his newly purchased land, but wine-
making had been in his blood for generations.
“My grandfather, who lived in a tenement in New
York City, would, each year with some friends—
some paisanos , as they call them—buy a half a load
of grapes to be sent out from California, and then
these would arrive, and he had a fermenter in the
basement, and he would make wine,” Mr. Coppola
says.
The profits from his hits, including “The Godfa-
ther,” helped finance Mr. Coppola’s pursuits in Cali-
fornia wine country—and the winery eventually
gave him financial independence. He acquired more
land and restored Inglenook to its former glory, cre-
ating a wine empire that is worth hundreds of mil-
lions and ranks as one of California’s top producers.
All that has let Mr. Coppola work largely outside
the Hollywood system.
“I could’ve gone on and made another six mafia
pictures, but as a young person, I wanted to learn,”
says Mr. Coppola, who hasn’t directed a commercial
studio film since the 1990s. Instead, he has focused
either on producing movies for others through his
company, American Zoetrope—such as “Lost in
Translation,” by his daughter Sofia Coppola—or on
writing and directing smaller, personal films like his
own “Tetro” (2009), a loosely autobiographical
black-and-white film.
Mr. Coppola hasn’t directed a feature film since
“Twixt,” a dreamy, small-budget horror film inde-
pendently released in 2011. But he is ready to enter
the fray again—and as bold as ever. Dreams of cre-
ating heaven on Earth inform his next project,
“Megalopolis.” He says it may be his most ambi-
tious movie yet, chronicling an architect’s attempts
to turn a futuristic New York City into a utopia.
“What I want to say has to do with this very mis-
understood concept of utopia—the idea that the
world of the future could be beautiful and fulfill-
ing,” Mr. Coppola says. He first had the idea for the
movie more than 20 years ago and originally
started shooting in 2001 in New York, then pulled
the plug after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. We
have, he says, “this notion that man brings with
him perforce war and slums and wealth disparity
and violence, and that all these bad things that we
know happen are necessary. I don’t believe in nec-
essary.”
He hopes to begin filming later this year. “Now
[when] you make a movie, if it deals with the fu-
ture, it’s always like ‘Mad Max’ or something scary,”
Mr. Coppola says. He hopes to show a vision of the
future in which people use technology to work less
and spend more time together. “Let’s face it, we are
all genetically related as a family. And I don’t even
mean as a species. We are one family.”
Mr. Coppola also has his own ideas about the af-
terlife. “There is no hell,” he says, leaning forward
intently. “But the other news is: This is heaven.”‘Iownalotof
my own films.
Usually it’s
because no
one wanted
them.’Staying
juiced is a
modern
necessity—
and,
sometimes,
a nightmare.EVERY NIGHT , when I’m not
flying amid the skyscrapers,
fighting crime, I like to tuck
my children in and read them
a bedtime story—usually a fan-
tasy, about a talking dragon, or
a coherent cable news show—
or else read them a piece I’ve
written about golf, which usu-
ally puts them right to sleep.
Then I tuck in my other
children: my devices. I find an
outlet and some chargers, and
I plug in my phone, my wife’s
phone, the tablet, the other
tablet, the earphones, the
watch-fitness thingy, the bike
computer, the heart rate moni-
tor and, lastly, Quippy, the In-
credible Automatic Wall Street
Journal Column-Writing Ro-
bot.
OK, there’s no such thing as
Quippy. But there should be!Perhaps your neighborhood
airport is one of those reno-
vated ones, with luxury stores
and the Michelin-starred chef
slicing tender medallions of
grass-raised prime rib. Those
airports have power chargers
everywhere, because they un-
derstand the modern air trav-
eler.
My airport is LaGuardia. It
was built in 1302. It does not
understand the modern air
traveler. To find a power out-
let, I usually have to unplug a
cigarette machine, or the 8:45
a.m. plane to Syracuse.
If I’m lucky enough to find
an outlet, I’ll plug in my phone
and I’ll sit for 15 minutes,
twiddling my thumbs or read-WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL| R.T. WATSON
F
rancis Ford Coppola is famous for making a movie classic
that took him to hell and back. The legendary director now
hopes that experience will help him complete his most am-
bitious project in decades: a new film about creating
heaven on Earth.
More than four decades ago, Mr. Coppola set out to direct a movie
about Vietnam, a war that proved as unpopular with studios and fi-
nanciers as it had become with the American public. Bankrolling
“Apocalypse Now” nearly bankrupted him: He mortgaged his home to
cover the production’s budget. Weeks into shooting in the Philippines,
he traded leading men, only to have his actor of choice, Martin Sheen,
suffer a heart attack. A typhoon destroyed sets, making filming impos-
sible for weeks. Mr. Coppola had planned to shoot the movie in six
weeks; it ended up taking more than a year and a half to finish.
Mr. Coppola prevailed, and his psychedelic exposition of the heart
of darkness within America’s most controversial war remains a classic.
Now 80, Mr. Coppola is again revisiting “Apocalypse Now.” After his
longtime technical collaborators spent nearly two years restoring the
original film print, Mr. Coppola pared the film down—cutting it from
the extended version released as “Apocalypse Now Redux” in 2001.
The new edit, which he calls definitive, is entitled “Apocalypse Now:
The Final Cut.” It was released in select theaters on Thursday.
Sitting at a long wooden table at his Napa Valley wine estate inRutherford, Calif., a host of off-kilter family photos
hanging behind him, Mr. Coppola periodically gazes
out the window at acre after acre of immaculate
grapevines bathed in sunshine. He heads a Diony-
sian empire, including the winery, restaurants and
food and travel businesses. In this idyllic setting,
Mr. Coppola recalls how much willpower it took to
bring “Apocalypse Now” to the big screen.
“I own ‘Apocalypse Now.’ I own a lot of my own
films. Usually it’s because no one wanted them,” Mr.
Coppola says. “I made them by risking and taking
the chance myself, which was unnecessarily stress-
ful and a struggle, but it was the only way I could
see in how to do it.”
Mr. Coppola was born in Detroit and moved to
New York at a young age with his family. His father
Carmine—a Juilliard-trained flutist and prodigy, Mr.
Coppola says—worked as a composer. Mr. Coppola
says that his “magical and imaginative” mother ran
the house, looking after him and his two siblings.
He studied theater at Hofstra University before
heading west to California. While studying film at
the University of California, Los Angeles, he rubbedFrancis Ford Coppola
Looking beyond ‘Apocalypse Now’
ing a print
newspaper like
I’m a caveman,
until I look
down at my
phone and see
that the phone
is...not charg-
ing. The outlet
I have been us-
ing hasn’t
worked since
the Eisen-
hower administration. This is
known in the travel trade as
Gettin’ LaGuardia’d.
My phone is gasping: How
could you do this to me? I’m
down to 1%. I’m walking into
the light...
Fine. I’ll just charge my
phone on the airplane. Air-
planes today have video
screens tucked into seats, and
charging stations with USB
outlets...except for my flight
today, apparently. This plane
seems to have been dusted off
in the hangar 10 minutes ago.
There are no touch screens.
There are no outlets. There’s
an in-flight magazine with Lee
Marvin on the cover. What are
passengers supposed to do,talk to each other? Gross.
Youmaysaytome: Jason,
this situation is avoidable. You
should be carrying a remote
power bank and using it to
charge your phone. Why are
you such a moron?
Oh wait, that’s The Journal’s
tech columnist, Joanna Stern,
standing right next to me.
Eventually, my vintage air-
plane will land, and I’ll find
my way to the hotel, which
will not be one of those plush
hotels with the USB power
strip on the bedside table, but
one of those Luddite hotels
that hasn’t been updated since
1983.
I’ll have to shove aside the
bedside table and the entire
bed, throwing out my shoul-
der, but there it will be, an
outlet, and I’ll unplug an ugly
lamp and a clock radio, and
save my phone’s life.
That is, until tomorrow,
when my power struggle will
wage on. I really should look
into those remote power
banks. And I will, when my
phone actually charges. Turns
out this outlet doesn’t work,
either. JAMES YANGOne Man’s
Endless
Thirst for
Power
I’d be first in line.
Let’s move on:
It’s a lot to re-
member. The
Nightly Device
Charge-Up has be-
come a necessary
pre-bedtime ritual,
along with washing
my face, brushing
my teeth, practic-
ing my tennis serve
and, of course, eat-
ing a BLT sandwich with curly
fries.
Invariably, despite my best
fatherly intentions, I forget
one device, and I wake in the
morning to discover someone,
usually my own phone, on the
counter, unattached, moaning
softly:
Jason, you moron, how
could you do this to me? I’m
dying over here. I’m down to
2%. Play one video clip from
last night’s Mets game and
that’s it: I’m gone. Gone!
It gets even worse if I’ve got
to rush out the door and go
somewhere like the airport,
where I’ll have to try to save
my dying phone’s life in a re-
mote location.AUSTIN HARGRAVE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
REVIEW
JASON
GAY