While Francis Ford Coppola is mostly known today for directing The Godfather films, Sam Wasson's latest book The Path to Paradise offers a fresh perspective on Coppola's importance to modern cinema. The book also will serve as an excellent contribution to books on the New Hollywood era. Its intense focus on Coppola also separates it from the rest, letting the reader get immersed in Coppola's bouts of megalomania and inspired moments of inspiration.
Path to Paradise is not a conventional biography, but appropriately took a cinematic approach, centering the narrative with Coppola and his family in the Philippines during the production of Apocalypse Now, while inserting flashback chapters. The prologue and final chapter provide a glimpse into Coppola's latest project Megalopolis, his decades long in the making vision of a modern Utopia. At the book's core is Coppola's film company American Zoetrope, which he started in 1969 with George Lucas.
Lucas is another major figure in the story. A star film student at USC, Lucas was an intern on Coppola's 1968 studio musical Finian's Rainbow. Both connected and shared a distaste for the studio system, leading Coppola to make The Rain People, a film mostly improvised and shot on the road. Invigorated by the experience, Coppola envisioned his own studio as an alternative to Hollywood, one that would use cutting edge technology and place art above commerce. Based in San Francisco, American Zoetrope quickly got a distribution deal with Warner Bros, and Lucas's THX-1138 was the first project.
Wasson provides a colorful account of the early years of Zoetrope, but the money quickly ran out, forcing Coppola to start directing films for the studios to save his company, which led him to The Godfather. Coppola disliked the Mario Puzo novel as a trashy potboiler, but felt there was narrative skeleton there for a great film. Lucas would eventually form his own companies, Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic, and the success of Star Wars allowed him to achieve independence from Hollywood. Lucas's conservative approach to business separated him from Coppola, designing films to placate audience tastes, creating a rift in their complex friendship.
After making three masterpieces in a row, the two Godfather films and The Conversation, Coppola decided to adapt Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness for the Vietnam War. Apocalypse Now was initially Lucas's project that he developed with screenwriter John Milius, conceived as a low budget war film to be shot on location in Vietnam. With Lucas tied up with the Star Wars films, Coppola imagined an epic statement more about the nature of man with the Vietnam War serving as backdrop.
Coppola planned for a four month shoot over the summer of 1976, but it turned into a project that consumed and obsessed him. While his wife Eleanor's film Heart of Darkness remains an iconic portrait, the book provides more of a psychological rollercoaster. At one point, Coppola decided he must become Colonel Kurtz to complete the film, nearly destroying himself and his marriage in the process. Once again, the book does a fantastic job of putting the reader into Coppola's headspace.
As a coda, Wasson ends the book with an account of One from the Heart, Coppola's follow up to Apocalypse Now that was a colossal flop. An expensive musical filmed on soundstages designed as an artificial Las Vegas, the project bankrupted American Zoetrope, and forced Coppola to work again as a director for hire through the 1980s and into the 1990s.
The Path to Paradise tells an intimate story about art, technology, and personality during the 20th Century. Coppola's vast imagination and personality seem to serve as elixir against the 2020s fervor over artificial intelligence. It will be curious to see Megalopolis once it's released to the world, but it will be a statement, and some will be paying attention.
Wasson, Sam. The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story. New York: Faber & Faber, 2023. Print.
