Editorial Content for The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
Apocalypse Now is regarded as one of the best anti-war films ever made. Based on Joseph Conrad’s HEART OF DARKNESS, it tells the story of one military man’s mission to locate a veteran who has gone mad, giving in to the craziness of jungle life in the name of finding a more authentic and honored way of life. In Francis Ford Coppola’s cinematic version, the war is Vietnam, the soldier is played by a young Martin Sheen, and the madman in the jungle is played by Marlon Brando. The story of how the movie was made is just one of the scads of insane adventures in moviemaking that Coppola has steered through in order to become one of the world’s greatest film directors.
In THE PATH TO PARADISE, accomplished biographer Sam Wasson builds his tale around the insanity of the Apocalypse Now shoot. It was a years-long travesty of bad luck, bad weather, bad health and bad vibes that somehow managed to capture in real time the madness that is war, and it has become a go-to primer in war movie photography and storytelling.
"If you have any interest in film history and the remarkably fecund and thrilling era of American moviemaking in the ’70s, THE PATH TO PARADISE is a must read."
The book takes a look at Coppola’s upbringing, his famous flutist father (who wrote all the iconic music for The Godfather), his travels in the screen trade before and after celebrity, and the personal triumphs and tribulations that drove him to become the passionate and prescient auteur that he is today.
Wasson writes with a fevered pace that is appropriate for the dramatic, passionate Coppola, weaving the story of the frenetic shoot with his introduction to important figures in his subject’s work and personal life. Among them are Roger Corman, who gave Coppola his first directing job, and George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and John Milius, other young directors with whom he helped redefine American films in the ’70s.
Wasson does not want for drama and enhances it all with a wealth of quotes and narratives from those closest to the Coppola chaos. They include his wife, Eleanor (the documentarian who captured the Apocalypse Now shoot behind the scenes), his children (all of whom have gone into the family business), and the men and women on his crews who helped him distinguish himself from the pack with a fierce brand of storytelling that rarely has been paralleled since these classics were made.
Stuck between the studio days of old and the renegade independence of the ’70s, Coppola’s filmmaking style and ability to coerce money and business people to trust him and give him what he needed while he established his own production company, American Zoetrope, makes his story incredibly compelling. Wasson captures every tiny detail, building them into a whirlwind that manages to grasp the complexity and fervor of this master filmmaker.
Coppola is now in his 80s and is just finishing up a new complex film, Megalopolis, which is set to be released in 2024. If you have any interest in film history and the remarkably fecund and thrilling era of American moviemaking in the ’70s, THE PATH TO PARADISE is a must read. It tells its tale without brakes, storming from one intense period of Coppola’s life to another, leaving you breathless at the end of every chapter. It is a fantastic whirlwind of a biography that will make you feel as if you just finished a truly amazing film about a truly amazing man who never takes no for an answer and still believes that dreams can change the world.
Teaser
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 30. Through Zoetrope’s experimental, communal utopia, Coppola attempted to reimagine the entire pursuit of moviemaking. Now, more than 50 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. Granted total and unprecedented access to Coppola’s archives, conducting hundreds of interviews with the artist and those who have worked closely with him, Sam Wasson weaves together an extraordinary portrait.
Promo
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 30. Through Zoetrope’s experimental, communal utopia, Coppola attempted to reimagine the entire pursuit of moviemaking. Now, more than 50 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. Granted total and unprecedented access to Coppola’s archives, conducting hundreds of interviews with the artist and those who have worked closely with him, Sam Wasson weaves together an extraordinary portrait.
About the Book
The New York Times bestselling author of FIFTH AVENUE, FIVE 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 50 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.
Granted total and unprecedented access to Coppola’s archives, conducting hundreds of interviews with the artist and those who have worked closely with him, Sam Wasson weaves together an extraordinary portrait. Here is Coppola, charming, brilliant, given to seeing life and art in terms of family and community, but also plagued by restlessness, recklessness and a desire to operate perpetually at the extremes.
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 co-founder 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 of 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 been fully told, until this extraordinary book.
Audiobook available, read by Timothy Andrés Pabon
