The enormous worldwide success of Bram Stoker's Dracula positioned Francis Coppola as an artist who could make decisions based on choice rather than necessity. With the pressure of paying off debts removed, Coppola was free to allow his creative mind to take priority. For Coppola this was the blessing of all blessings. Since graduating from UCLA his major priority was to be an artist who could control his destiny by writing, directing, and producing his own projects. This was the original purpose for the 1969 establishment of Zoetrope.
In 1993 his initial desire was not to direct another film but to be involved as a producer on worthy projects where he thought he could make a contribution. This was not a new idea. Most public focus and certainly the press's attention had been on Coppola as a director; it was much more colorful, and the intrigues on the set and power plays with the money men were constant fodder for Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and the Los Angeles daily columns. The reality was that Coppola had always been committed to the community of artists. They were his extended family. From the beginning he had lent support to creative ideas that needed assistance in order to see the light of day. Coppola was a lover of film and film history. His producer credits are extensive and varied. From Coppola's earliest days in the film industry he used either his clout or his money or both. Pre–Star Wars George Lucas could not finance American Graffiti; Coppola's earnings from The Godfather underwrote the project. In 1979 he produced The Black Stallion, directed by his classmate Carroll Ballard. Coppola and a post–Star Wars Lucas underwrote Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Kagemusha when he was not able to obtain financing in Japan. Lucas and Coppola made certain the film had worldwide distribution. In 1982 Coppola produced The Escape Artist, directed by respected cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. That year he also produced Hammett, directed by Wim Wenders, and in 1983 he produced The Black Stallion Returns, directed by Robert Dalva, who had edited the first Stallion. Coppola's producing efforts in the late 1970s through The Black Stallion Returns were not without problems. They came at a time when Coppola was consumed with Zoetrope Studios, and his decision-making capacities were compromised. There was often friction between the directors and Coppola, and most of these ventures were not commercial successes, with the exception of The Black Stallion. As his circumstances stabilized, his commitments became well defined and other-directed.
In 1985 writer-director Paul Schrader was desperately trying to obtain funding for his project Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. This was to be a Japanese American production based on the writings of the enigmatic Yukio Mishima. Schrader, a UCLA graduate, author of Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dryer, screenwriter of Taxi Driver, and director of Blue Collar and American Gigolo, was passionate about this project. When Coppola was flush he wanted Zoetrope to produce the film. Now he was no longer in a position to provide funding but could still give his name to the endeavor. Lucas was able to underwrite the film, and Coppola and Lucas are credited as executive producers. Coppola would now begin a period where he provided producing support without the meddling that characterized some of the earlier endeavors. For the next 10 years, until he was offered Jack as a directorial opportunity, Coppola produced about a dozen films.
The story of the Children's Crusade, about a group of orphans who join Richard the Lionheart's Crusade, was a tale that was of interest to Coppola. At one point he thought about directing it. Apparently it also caught the attention of Franklin J. Schaffner, who was toward the end of his career. Schaffner went into preproduction. Coppola and Schaffner had a history. As a young screenwriter Coppola and Edmund North had written the screenplay for the Academy Award–winning Patton. Schaffner won the Oscar for Best Director and Patton was best picture of the year. Caught up in the sweep, Coppola and North shared an Oscar for the screenplay.
Producing Lionheart, also known as Lionheart: The Children's Crusade, became a family affair. Coppola's sister Talia Shire was now married to Jack Schwartzman, a New York lawyer turned producer, and they had established an independent production company. Their first venture was a complex and costly James Bond film, Never Say Never Again, in which Sean Connery agreed to reprise his James Bond role for a very hefty fee. It was a big gamble, but it paid off. The film made a fortune, and the production company was immediately in demand. In 1984 Schwartzman announced plans for four big-budget films; the first was Lionheart. Schwartzman indicated that Shire would be the producer on this first venture.
For Shire, her relationship with Schwartzman allowed her to blossom. She states, “I don't want to partner a powerful man as Irene Selznick did. I didn't want to pick another man like my brothers. This relationship with Jack is very exciting for me because it shows I've achieved something coming from my background. I'm finally allowing a man to give me an egalitarian relationship.’…”He doesn't ask me to forfeit my power.”1 Coppola had helped Schwartzman in the final hours of Never Say Never Again negotiations. For Lionheart, he and Schwartzman are credited as executive producers. The film did not go into distribution until August 1987. Apparently, Orion Pictures had little confidence in the picture. It had only a limited release and did not fare well. Schaffner made one last picture, a Vietnam film titled Welcome Home, before his death in 1989.
Coppola executive produced the 1987 film Tough Guys Don't Dance, directed by Norman Mailer, arguably one of the finest American writers of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, his expertise did not extend to filmmaking. The story of Coppola's participation on Mailer's project is a strange one. Mailer had written the novel in 1984. Mailer was cajoled into writing a script for the iconic French film director Jean-Luc Godard. It was a contorted version of King Lear. It was not his intention to see the script realized, but he had struck a deal with Menahem Golan, then the chairman of Cannon Films, to deliver a script. The arrangement was forged in a restaurant in Cannes. Godard contacted Tom Luddy, the film archivist and cineaste who was such a valuable figure as liaison for Coppola on many occasions. Luddy knew that Mailer wanted to develop a film based on Tough Guys Don't Dance, and a trade-off deal was made where Mailer would commit to a King Lear script for Godard and Canon would support both projects. There was a condition: Coppola and Luddy needed to oversee the projects. Therefore, both are credited as executive producers. It is difficult to know Coppola's participation on Tough Guys Don't Dance, starring Ryan O'Neal and Isabella Rossellini. The picture failed miserably. As for King Lear, Godard virtually blew off Mailer, and Godard's version of King Lear is considered one of the most bizarre and forgettable features he made in his illustrious career. The film industry is rife with such stories; executive producers may have financial involvement, creative involvement, may have once owned rights or be willing to relinquish rights for a producing credit, or may babysit a project, as was Coppola's assignment in the case of Tough Guys. Coppola and Mailer were known to be friends, and in 1991 while Coppola was filming Bram Stoker's Dracula, American Zoetrope purchased the rights to Mailer's gargantuan spy novel Harlot's Ghost with John Milius intended to write the screenplay. Fred Fuchs explains, “We got to see the galleys very early on. Francis and Norman are good friends. In fact, they met to talk about the book while Norman was still writing it. I think Norman felt all along Francis was the right person to direct the film.”2 In 1994 Francis Coppola and Columbia Pictures commissioned Eric Roth (Munich, Forrest Gump) after Roth had read Harlot's Ghost and was intrigued by it. But Coppola rejected Roth's script and abandoned the project, unable to relate to the unemotional characters. Columbia offered the script to a number of directors. Columbia personnel kept changing hands. Eventually, John Frankenheimer was to direct, with Robert De Niro acting in the film. When Frankenheimer died, Roth did rewrites that moved from the original inception of the script to create a Cold War drama. That had been De Niro's interest for many years. The result was The Good Shepherd (2006), which De Niro directed, produced, and in which he acted. It was a highly successful film about the inner workings of the CIA. The film is a serious and well-crafted vehicle, and because Coppola was involved with the initial property he is listed as one of six executive producers on the film.
When Coppola first screened Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, an experimental film with the subtitle Life Out of Balance, he was deeply moved and believed the film needed to have a wide distribution. The documentary film was the first of what would become known as the Qatsi (Hopi for life) trilogy. It was lyrical, with a full score written by avant-garde composer Philip Glass. Zoetrope struck a deal with Reggio for worldwide distribution of the film. The documentary was received enthusiastically. The advertising poster read, “Francis Ford Coppola Presents” in small print above the title of the documentary. Coppola lent his support to the subsequent films, particularly Powaqqatsi. To Coppola, the documentaries represented the power of pure cinema.
In 1989 Francis Coppola championed Belgian filmmaker Dominique Deruddere's film Wait until Spring, Bandini. It was another instance of Luddy's matchmaking.
Coppola's UCLA classmate Carroll Ballard had been directing film documentaries and had developed Wind, a story about yachting races and the America's Cup in 1987. Coppola and Fuchs were executive producers, and Luddy was a producer. It was produced through American Zoetrope.
In 1993 Francis Ford Coppola Presents sponsored the adaptation of the infamous William Burroughs short story The Junky's Christmas—a claymation/live action short released to DVD and directed by Nick Donkin and Melodie McDaniel.
Coppola and American Zoetrope next sponsored Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic English tale The Secret Garden. Warner Bros. had brought the property to him in the 1980s, but it did not arrive at the filming stage. Francis had been drawn to a talented Polish director, Agnieszka Holland, who was mentored by the revered director Krzysztof Kieślowski. In the United States she was best known for Europa, Europa, which had been distributed widely in America. Coppola asked her to direct the film. In 1999 American Zoetrope had Holland direct The Third Miracle, written by Richard Vetere, a serious film with a religious theme. Holland continues to work steadily and has shown her versatility by directing two episodes of the cable hit The Wire. Both were written by Richard Price.
Coppola lent the American Zoetrope name to a film titled Don Juan DeMarco, directed by Jeremy Leven. Marlon Brando was to play a psychiatrist with Johnny Depp as his patient. This was in 1994. As a follow-up to Coppola's authentic version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Coppola was intrigued by the notion of a treatment of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Superb British actor and director Kenneth Branagh had decided to build the project and would direct and play Dr. Frankenstein. Coppola would act as producer and was quite an active participant in the development of the production. Robert De Niro played Dr. Frankenstein's monstrous creation. The film's title of record was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. With a $45 million budget, its showing in the United States was disappointing, but it achieved success with its worldwide distribution.
In 1995 Coppola was one of the executive producers of My Family/Mi Familia, directed by UCLA film school graduate Gregory Nava. That same year he was one of several executive producers on the British production Haunted. Also around this time the script called Jack was given to Coppola. He considered it a warm story and thought it might be time to direct. The story is about a boy who has an unusual disease that causes him to age at four times the rate of a normal human being. Coppola related to the theme on a number of levels. He considered how isolated this boy would be, having no friends and relating only to his parents and tutor. It reminded him of his feelings during the year he had polio. He also thought of his son Gio and how short his life had been, contemplating that if Jack's life would be cut short like Gio's, the important factor would be to live his shorter life fully and happily.3 His cherished granddaughter Gia was always asking her grandfather to make a movie she could see. This childlike story would fit the bill. Finally, he knew the perfect actor to play Jack—his San Francisco friend Robin Williams. A deal was struck; in September 1995 filming commenced. As Coppola has done on virtually every film project, he set up a theatrical rehearsal schedule. This time he set up a youth camp for the cast so they could begin to relate to each other. Diane Lane was cast for a third time in a Coppola film in the role of Jack's mother. Bill Cosby played a pivotal role as Jack's tutor, who convinces his parents to send him to school so he can be among his fifth-grade peers. Because this was a star turn for Williams, who is a versatile comic and serious actor, the film has poignancy. There is, however, an awkwardness attached to Jack's overwhelming physical presence paired with kid-size kids. Probably based on Williams's charisma, the film did well at the box office. Coppola dedicated the film to his granddaughter Gia because she could see it. The dedication read, “For Gia”“When you see a shooting star…”
In 1996 Francis Coppola was travelling, and in an airport bookstore the number one bestseller caught his eye. It was John Grisham's The Rainmaker. Coppola had never read a Grisham novel and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. The Rainmaker appealed to him, and he could visualize it translating to film. The dialogue engaged, and he felt he could build on the characterizations. American Zoetrope purchased the rights, and Coppola wrote the screenplay with voiceover assistance from Michael Herr, who had done the narration for Apocalypse Now. The cast was colorful and spot-on. In the role of the young ambulance-chasing lawyer, 26-year-old Matt Damon is superb. That same year (1997) Damon had his breakout role in Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting. He and his close Boston buddy Ben Affleck won an Academy Award for best screenplay. Coppola included stalwarts Dean Stockwell and Mickey Rourke in the cast, and Teresa Wright gives the final performance of her career in the film. Roman Coppola did second unit. Francis Coppola directed the film with expertise and finesse; it crackles, and the pacing is superb. Perhaps many professional journeymen could have directed The Rainmaker, but the film artist Francis Coppola did.
The Rainmaker was released around Thanksgiving 1997, and Coppola had much to be thankful for. The John Grisham plot translated successfully to the film medium. Coppola had read The Rainmaker to get a better idea of the public's taste and found he was part of the public, too. He recalls, “I became a sucker for Grisham just like everyone else. I couldn't put it down.”4
The success of the film mattered to Coppola on a personal, emotional level. Since Bram Stoker's Dracula eliminated the nagging debt that had hung over him for years, he was determined to live a creative, fulfilling life. He wrote in his journal in 1993, “I plan only to work on what my heart is in—simple to say, but difficult to do.”5 Coppola knew he had demons; he could be anxious, moody, and depressed and volatile. These were emotions he needed take care about—they were part of his complex nature.