By Jim Bloch
“I was born in the Henry Ford Hospital,” said the director of some of the most famous and lauded movies in American history, including the Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now.
The hospital sits on Warren Avenue in Detroit, across the street from the house that would become the home of Motown Records 20 years after Francis Ford Coppola’s birth on April 7, 1939.
Coppola, 86, appeared at The Henry Ford in Dearborn April 27 for two sold-out appearances. His talks were part of what Patricia E. Mooradian, president and CEO of The Henry Ford, said was a year-long celebration of his work, entitled Francis Ford at The Henry Ford.
The museum screened several of Coppola’s movies on its Giant Screen Experience throughout April. On May 30 and 31, the museum will reprise screenings of Coppola’s 2024 film Megalopolis, starring Adam Driver, a movie Coppola worked on for decades. An exhibit of costumes used in the film are on display at the museum through mid-August.
Coppola appeared and spoke at an afternoon screening of Megalopolis and again that night at “Behind the Lens: An Evening with Francis Ford Coppola,” featuring moderator Sam Wasson, a biographer and Hollywood historian.
“I had the nutty idea to do a Roman epic but set it in modern America,” Coppola said, about his new movie.
Wasson’s 2023 book The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story charted the mind-blowing history of Coppola’s production company and studio American Zoetrope, an ongoing utopian, communal experiment in moviemaking. The book recently came out in paperback.
“My father played for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra,” said Coppola, explaining his roots in Detroit, where he lived until he was three or four. His father, Carmine, played
flute in the orchestra. He also worked for the radio program “Ford Music Hour” as an arranger and assistant conductor.
“Henry Ford would come to the rehearsals and my dad would say hello to him,” Coppola said.
“When Francie came along in 1939, I gave him the middle name for the man I was working for,” Carmine said in a 1988 letter to the Detroit Free Press. The family called him the “Detroit baby.”
Carmine went onto to write music for Francis’s The Godfather movies, Apocalypse Now and The Outsiders.
“It was always important to me that I was born in Detroit,” Coppola told the Free Press recently. “As a kid, I rooted for the Detroit Tigers when my whole family was for the New York Yankees. Coming from Detroit gave me a unique identity in a family of New Yorkers.”
Moderating Coppola
Wasson had the easiest job in world. You don’t moderate Coppola. You launch him like a fireworks display and behold the results. He asked Coppola a half-dozen questions during the hour+ presentation, trying now and then to redirect him. But it’s hard to redirect a director.
Coppola called humans a “genius species,” one capable of turning the “wreck of the world” into a kind of nirvana in which we are not killing “little potential Mozarts in the Sudan” and other grim war-torn societies. He laid the blame for the wreck at the feet of patriarchy, which rose about 10,000 years ago in the Asian steppes when men first mounted horses.
“Men did not always run the world,” Coppola said. “We were once matriarchical.”
Hollywood historian Sam Wasson.
We could be matriarchical again, he said. Women are natural leaders, life-givers just like Mother Earth. For nearly 80 percent of human’s 300,000-year history, people lived in egalitarian matriarchies, Coppola said.
The director called for a white board to be rolled onstage and outlined phenomena that rule our lives, such as time, money and work.
“Let’s take everything that oppresses us and get rid of it,” Coppola said.
Let’s get rid of time clocks and dividing time into tiny fractions. How about a few simple enjoyable measures, such as dawn and dusk and the spring and fall equinoxes?
“Let’s erase work and have play instead,” Coppola said. “Let’s have robots do the toiling.”
Money is a fiction that tyrannizes us, he said. “Money is not reliable,” he said. “I’d rather have a million friends than a million dollars… A friend is something real.”
Get rid of career politicians.
“Treat politics more like jury duty,” he said.
Ditch our educational system, imported from Prussia.
“Education should be free and for everyone and for life,” Coppola said.
Art should be central to an existence in which “you don’t buy gifts – you make gifts.”
In the realm of the law, “punishment shouldn’t be sending people to El Salvador.” We should not inflict more misery on people. “Punishment should be taking away good things.”
Coppola put many of these recommendations into practice at Zoetrope, which offered free acting classes, free screenwriting classes and free rehearsal space. Work was play. People did what they loved: Making movies. Coppola had little interest in being
dictatorial. He encouraged collaboration and discovery. For Alfred Hitchcock, working in the generation before Coppola, once a picture was storyboarded, he considered it essentially complete. Coppola almost never knew how one of his movies should end, even after it was released. Making the movie was an open-ended, communal process of mutual self-discovery that would reveal the appropriate conclusion.
Instead of meeting in big halls for one-sided presentations, like the one taking place at The Henry Ford, Coppola preferred throwing a party with great food, riveting music and wild dancing. Which is what he did weekly at Zoetrope, inviting all of Hollywood. Time and money be damned.
Jim Bloch is a freelance writer based in St. Clair, Michigan. Contact him at bloch.jim@gmail.com.
