Product Description

Beginning with his birth in 1939 to Italian-American parents, through his early years as a maverick director and screenwriter, right up to his legal victory over Warner Bros in 1998, this book explores Coppola's professional development into one of the finest directors of his generation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #251605 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Maverick director Francis Ford Coppola is a biographer's dream: in an industry dominated by those who play it safe, the director of the Godfather trilogy has always seemed larger than life. As Michael Schumacher shows, Coppola's reputation for "equal parts talent and bombast" is overshadowed only by his willingness to stake everything on projects in which he believes, sometimes with dire financial consequences. Yet throughout the catalogue of disasters and setbacks detailed in this comprehensive biography, Coppola has carried on making films, even if they have frequently confounded audience expectation.

Coppola's interest in film making began at an early age when, incapacitated by polio, he experimented with a 16mm projector and a tape recorder. He would later attend film school and work for legendary producer Roger Corman, gaining invaluable training from the master of low-budget genre pictures. In many ways Coppola was a trailblazer, graduating to feature films earlier than the fellow film students--George Lucas and Steven Spielberg among them--alongside whom he would later form the New Hollywood. In its most entertaining chapters, Schumacher's impeccably researched book follows Coppola as he enjoys the incredible success of The Godfather, survives the madness of the notorious Apocalypse Now shoot in the Philippines, then spirals rapidly into debt after the disaster that was One From The Heart. Since this spectacular failure in the early 1980s, Coppola has never quite delivered a masterpiece, offering only fleeting glimpses of his idiosyncratic talent. But even in his failures, Schumacher depicts Coppola as a fiercely creative and independent figure struggling against the might of corporate Hollywood. It is a testament to the writer's devotion to his subject that on finishing the biography we are left with an unshakeable feeling that a return to form must surely be imminent. --John Oates

Customer Reviews

Nowhere near the heart of darkness
The main problem with this book is that there's nothing really wrong with it.It trundles chronologically through Coppola's life, explaining what he did when in a reasonably accurate and thorough manner.But,as that summary suggests, it fails to engage with Coppola on an artistic or a personal level.Near the end of the book, Schumaker records that Coppola responded to the poor reviews for "Jack" "With a shrug"... and Schumaker, like his subject, doesn't seem to really care. There's nothing in this book to explain away or to challenge Coppola's unfortunate epithet as "The man who worked his way down from the top".Schumaker has an exasperating tendency to offer plot summaries in the place of analysis (as if anyone interested enough in Coppola to consider buying a book about him would be unfamiliar with the plot of "The Godfather").More significantly, it's as if he wants to trace the events of Coppola's life and make them into a learning curve.He presents Coppola's recent life as wine-producer and efficient adaptor of John Grisham's novels as if it was something Coppola had been aspiring to all his life, as if "Apocalypse Now" was simply a youthful excess on the road to the palace of wisdom. Schumaker's desire to present a sympathetic portrait means that he's constantly apologising for his subject's egotistical excess, claiming that events which *may* appear to present Coppola in a bad light actually have a legitimate explanation.Thus, when Coppola reacts to the news of Sheen's heart attack on Apocalypse Now with the words "He's dead when I say he's dead", Schumaker is at pains to point out that he didn't really mean this the way it sounded.If the production circumstances of the film hadn't been so fraught, the finished film may well not have been so extraordinary.Schumaker's apparent desire to return everything to corporate blandness echoes the empty efficiency of Coppola's recent work. Readers who want an edgy, ego-fuelled, exciting account of major 70s films will have to return to "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls".Anyone who wants to see Coppola at work should settle down with "Hearts of Darkness" and be awed and horrified in equal measure.

Overall good read.
Having known little about Francis Coppola before reading the book. I feel the book has provided a good insight to Francis and his films. The book reads easily and provides a good background to his career and his work. Where the book falls short is engaging Francis on a personal level. You get the impression that Francis is a rebel and a maverick in the Hollywood director's circle, but you don't get to see why and don't feel you know what motivates him. The book reads a little like a C.V. It tells you what films he has made, some background and the experiences he had with making each film. The book also replays the plots of his films, which I found quite interesting as, I have not seen all of his films, but I can image could be annoying to any one who has. Overall I would say its a very good book, you learn a lot about his career, his films but slightly let down as you feel there is more to the man than is revealed by the book.