|
|
 |
|
| Feature |
Reel Risks
Elizabeth Harris
11/01/2007
|
On a stage in Manhattan, Francis Ford
Coppola leans over a wooden carton and gets ready to do some magic. From the
seemingly empty box, he suddenly pulls out a bottle of wine, an enormous pencil,
a director’s megaphone and a movie reel.
"Eat your heart out, David Copperfield," he says.
They are props that represent his various businesses—from
vineyards to the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story. The audience
applauds. It isn’t The Godfather,
but it is a sign that, despite years of
working behind the scenes, Coppola still knows how to put on a show.
 | (Photograph by Joe Pugliese.) |
Yet the biggest showstopper may be that, back from bankruptcy,
the legendary 68-year-old director is on the verge of releasing his first film
in a decade and he is financing it from the profits of his own businesses. "I
don’t mind risk so much," he says. "I just think we all know we’re going to live
our lives and die. You don’t want, in the moment before death, to say, ‘Oh gee,
I didn’t get to do this or that.’ You want to say, ‘I did everything that I
wanted to do,’ and I certainly would be able to say that—but sometimes it brings
risk."
It surely will this time. After years of financial strug-gle,
the profits that Coppola’s privately held companies generate are sufficient to
grant him a rare chance at artistic carte blanche. The result: Youth Without Youth, starring Tim Roth and costing Coppola just under $17 million to make, is
due in theaters this fall. Meanwhile, Coppola begins filming Tetro in Buenos
Aires on a similar budget.
He says that this is what he has always wanted: the freedom to
make films the way he wants, without compromise, without the Hollywood execs,
without Hollywood anything. His money, his risk, his way. "Miraculously, I
almost have to pinch myself to see if it’s really true, I seem now to be in that
position to do it."
TOP VIEW
This fall, Francis Ford Coppola releases his first new
film in a decade. Though he has long been one of America’s most esteemed
filmmakers, his business choices were not always stellar. But after suffering a
string of film flops, endangering his personal fortune and filing for
bankruptcy, it is Coppola’s business successes of recent years—from
vineyards to resorts—that now give him the freedom to finance his own films.
It’s all in his control. A risky move, but he wouldn’t have it any other
way. |
Mike Medavoy, chairman and CEO of Phoenix Pictures, understands what it’s
like to take a chance with Coppola. Medavoy, who has known Coppola since the
1960s, was one of the early supporters of Apocalypse Now, Coppola’s epic retelling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which was released in 1979 by United Artists, where he was an executive.
Medavoy helped persuade the studio to fund $10 million of the original $18
million budget. "Gambling with your own money, which is basically the way I
think he sees it, is hairy, but gambling with other people’s money is not so
hairy," Medavoy says. Setbacks pushed the budget to more than $30
million—Coppola kept filming, putting his personal property up as collateral.
Risky? To a point, Medavoy says. "He probably believed that people would take
his house away, and take his farm away and everything else. But having been on
the other side, I know nobody ever thought about doing that."
Things were different on One From the Heart. When the film went
over budget, Coppola again guaranteed it personally, putting his family’s assets
on the line. The film, released in 1981, never recouped its costs. Combined with
other commercial duds, Coppola and his company, Zoetrope Productions, filed for
bankruptcy protection in 1990. In retrospect, he realizes his mistake in tying
personal assets to business finances, rather than limiting liability and
protecting his family assets from potential business losses in the way he
structured his company. Instead, he negotiated a plan to repay the debts over
the next 12 years and accepted commercial gigs ranging from The
Outsiders to Peggy Sue Got Married.
"That was definitely a low point, but I was still relatively
young and I had a lot of confidence. I still had a film career I could turn to
and make, albeit movies I was hired to do as opposed to some of my dream
projects. But it was, I felt, the honorable thing to pay off that debt, which I
did," he says. "It definitely made things around the house a little tough,
because I had never been sophisticated in setting things up as separate
companies. So if we were in a financial quagmire, that included the grocery
account, too—not that we ever starved, but it definitely cast a shadow over
those years."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
