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| Feature |
Reel Risks
Elizabeth Harris
11/01/2007
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But Coppola did not plan on a decade-long break from film. His
last picture, The
Rainmaker, was released in 1997. Indeed, he
struggled, ultimately unsuccessfully, to make Megalopolis, a
film set in New York about a master builder searching for
utopia. "I hadn’t made a film for 10 years until this last year, but that wasn’t
because of the other business, but more because of a big, big dream project I
had been trying to work on that took all my effort. Ultimately, I wasn’t able to
pull it off," he says. "But it’s true that during that period, I did put this
excess creative energy into other projects."
Over the past 11 years
the Coppola companies have generated compound average growth in both
revenues and profits in excess of 30 percent, and the number of employees has
expanded from about a dozen to 400, according to CEO Jay Shoemaker, who has
worked for Coppola throughout that period. Shoemaker typically hears from his
boss 50 times a day, a hands-on approach that dates back to the early days of
the director’s career. Shoemaker says that when his boss was filming
Finian’s Rainbow in the 1960s, Coppola asked his star, Fred Astaire, how he
managed to get around supervising all of his dance studios, and Astaire replied
that he did not actually oversee them. According to Shoemaker, even then,
Coppola decided he never wanted to start that kind of company. The
entrepreneur’s companies and products all reflect his personal taste and
aesthetic. For example, the tropical resorts in Belize and Guatemala lack
air-conditioning "not because we’re cheap," Shoemaker says, but because Coppola
dislikes it. He also objects to large beds (he prefers doubles), but permits
queen-size mattresses at his resorts as a concession.
Then there’s the wine-by-the-glass story. As Shoemaker tells
it, Coppola had an idea to sell individually packaged glasses of wine. However,
after months of work, Coppola was frustrated that the project hit a snag when
the engineers couldn’t create an effective seal to prolong the wine’s shelf
life. Shoemaker recalls presenting a status report to Coppola explaining the
obstacle. "He took one glance and said, ‘I reject this data,’" Shoemaker says,
adding that they eventually solved the problem by developing different packaging
and using a new industry technique. "We kept working on it because we’re more
afraid of disappointing Francis than making fools of ourselves in the marketplace," he says. The product became available last summer.
Coppola also sought to make his children, Roman, 42, Sofia, 36,
and granddaughter, Gia, 20 (daughter of the Coppolas’ son Gian-Carlo, who died
in a boating accident in 1986), part of the business. They are on the company’s
board, and Roman shepherded an award-winning Syrah, RC Reserve, to market. "They
were raised in Napa Valley and went to school at St. Helena public schools
there," Coppola says. "They’re very much Napa Valley kids, which means they’re
wine kids."
And they are also film kids. Roman and Sofia now own American
Zoetrope, which emerged from bankruptcy protection in 1991. The legendary
studio, whose films received 16 Academy Awards, produced Youth Without Youth. Sofia directed the critically acclaimed The Virgin Suicides, Lost in
Translation and Marie Antoinette
there. She won an Oscar for best original screenplay for Translation in
2004. Roman has worked on everything from serving as second-director on
Bram Stoker’s Dracula to directing his own 2001 feature film, CQ. He is a
producer of and cowrote the screenplay for The Darjeeling Limited, directed by
Wes Anderson, which, as Worth went to press, was scheduled for
release on September 29.
Coppola sees his children someday succeeding him in the wine,
food and hospitality businesses and expects them to take his company over or
modify it, he says. "I don’t think they’re going to sell it all and buy
racehorses, but, you never know."
Back behind the camera, Coppola
savors the freedom that self-financing brings him, as well as a return to
personal filmmaking. Youth Without
Youth is the story of a septuagenarian
looking back at a life with regrets, but who gets another chance by growing
younger and younger. He shot the film in Romania last year.
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