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The Path to Paradise

A Francis Ford Coppola Story

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

"Sam Wasson's supremely entertaining book tracks the ups and downs, ins and outs, of a remarkable career. . . . A marvel of unshowy reportage."—New York Times

The New York Times bestselling author of Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. and The Big Goodbye returns with the definitive account of Academy Award–winning director Francis Ford Coppola's decades-long dream to reinvent American filmmaking, if not the entire world, through his production company, American Zoetrope.

Francis Ford Coppola is one of the great American dreamers, and his most magnificent dream is American Zoetrope, the production company he founded in San Francisco years before his gargantuan success, when he was only thirty. Through Zoetrope's experimental, communal utopia, Coppola attempted to reimagine the entire pursuit of moviemaking. Now, more than fifty years later, despite myriad setbacks, the visionary filmmaker's dream persists, most notably in the production of his decades-in-the-making film and the culmination of his utopian ideals, Megalopolis.

As Wasson makes clear, the story of Zoetrope is also the story of Coppola's wife, Eleanor Coppola, and their children, and of personal lives inseparable from artistic passion. It is a story that charts the divergent paths of Coppola and his cofounder and onetime apprentice, George Lucas, and of their very different visions of art and commerce. And it is a story inextricably bound up in the making of one of the greatest quixotic masterpieces ever attempted, Apocalypse Now, and in what Coppola found in the jungles of the Philippines when he walked the razor's edge. That story, already the stuff of legend, has never fully been told, until this extraordinary book.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from September 25, 2023
      Film historian Wasson (The Big Goodbye) explores director Francis Ford Coppola’s artistic process in this enthralling chronicle of his production company, Zoetrope. Founded by Coppola in the late 1960s, Zoetrope was envisioned as a “creative playground” for filmmakers tired of compromising with big Hollywood studios, a principle the director stuck to even as it became financially untenable. Wasson focuses his account on the personal and professional risks Coppola took to make Apocalypse Now (1979) and One from the Heart (1982). The stresses of filming the former—during which Coppola and his wife, who captured the making of the movie for a documentary, endured typhoons and ballooning costs while shooting in the Philippines—nearly ended his marriage. After a key funder pulled out from One from the Heart, Coppola had to put up as collateral $8 million worth of his assets for loans to complete the movie; its box office failure spelled doom for Zoetrope. Wasson’s immersive prose vividly recreates the circumstances of each shoot (“Coppola returned home to... a house illuminated only by candles, tore off his wet shirt, and sat down at the living room table to imagine, on paper, page after terrible, incredible, terrible page, the next day’s scene”), offering a complex portrait of an artist whose unwillingness to compromise cost him dearly. Movie buffs won’t want to miss this.

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  • English

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