Many film directors with long careers have planned projects that do not come to fruition. Sometimes the projects just don't get off the ground. At times, the director cannot get financing. Some seemed like a good idea, but the concept turns sour; and then there are projects that are long-time dreams, yet they are not realized. Like Francis Ford Coppola, some of the world's most renowned film directors have had this experience. Iconic film director Stanley Kubrick had a project for which he had great passion that was never realized. For most of his directorial career, Kubrick intended to direct a major epic on the life of Napoleon. There are script versions, casting plans, volumes of research, location scouting reports, costume samples, and all manner of preproduction details, but the maker of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove—or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Paths of Glory could not get studio financing. It falls into the category of an unrealized dream.
Danish director Carl Th. Dreyer, responsible for the magnificent films The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr, planned to make an epic on the life of Jesus. Although a script exists, Dreyer was never able to secure backing for the film.
Josef Von Sternberg, who directed six films starring Marlene Dietrich, including The Blue Angel, was in production of I Claudius, produced by Alexander Korda and starring Charles Laughton and Merle Oberon, when Oberon was in a car accident. There had been conflicts between the director and Laughton, and during the delay the studio abandoned the project. The BBC produced a documentary entitled The Epic That Never Was using footage from the unfinished film.
Not every unfinished project has a dramatic explanation for failing to see the light of day, but for Coppola the unrealized Megalopolis had been a major part of his creative process since the early 1980s. The inability to develop it into a finished feature film was a painful experience for Coppola. Coppola began to conceive Megalopolis around the time The Outsiders was released. He was writing it in two forms, part novel and part screenplay. As the title implies, it had to do with an urban environment. He was just beginning to map out a larger storyline, one he conceived would be epic in scope. After writing about 400 pages, the requirements of a new commitment, The Cotton Club, pulled Coppola away from the gestating idea. Once again a director for hire, his attention was elsewhere, and the emerging conception was on hold.
After the popular and financial success of Peggy Sue Got Married, Coppola summoned the energy to grant his first interview in two years. The years since the death of his son and the continuous demands of directing for a paycheck had taken their toll on Coppola; he had become increasingly weary. The scheduled interview was about wine, not motion pictures, and was conducted by a neighbor and wine writer from Napa. In the course of their discussion, Coppola mentioned he was at work on two scripts. He called one Secret Journal (which may have been Megalopolis), and the other was Elective Affinities.
As the decade of the 1980s wound down and Coppola completed Tucker, The Man and his Dreams, he returned to Megalopolis with rigor. The plot began to emerge. Characters from ancient Rome at the time of the Catiline Conspiracy1 would merge with contemporary New York City's corruption and the evils of modern urban life. The resultant film was purported to be on the scale of a Cecil B. DeMille epic. In an interview with Mother Jones in September 1988, Coppola told Jill Kearney,
the thing I'm writing now, which is a long film—maybe 3 hours and 45 minutes, I've been writing it for four years. At the end of Zoe I'm not doing any publicity, any film festivals. I'm just going to be free to implement this idea. It's not just about writing—it involves actors, and music, and art, and all the other things except the production level. I have a lot of new theories about composing film that represent a different way of working that's possible now because of computer and video revolutions.2
The urge to focus on this independent project was enormous, but Coppola was not really a free agent, and so again he moved on and directed The Godfather Part III. Other elements of the epic were unfolding. It had a utopian theme, and one of the major characters in New York City was an architect, so it was likened (not by Coppola) to The Fountainhead.
When Francis agreed to direct The Godfather Part III he kept the Megalopolis plan going by beginning to visually conceptualize it while in Rome. Dean Tavoularis and his team rented space at Cinecittà Studios, and detailed storyboards of the proposed film were prepared. Coppola's plan was to concentrate on Megalopolis after completion of The Godfather Part III. However, after Part III Francis Coppola was forced to declare personal bankruptcy, and he proceeded to map out Bram Stoker's Dracula to pay the bills. Once again Megalopolis was on the back burner.
After filming The Rainmaker in 1997, Coppola embarked on executive producing and producing projects. His businesses outside of film were burgeoning, yet his commitment to Megalopolis moved forward. His intention was to complete the script and begin production in 2001. In July 2001 ABC News reported a potential all-star line-up for the film. Coppola told Army Archerd of Variety that Russell Crowe, Robert De Niro, Nicolas Cage, and Paul Newman were under consideration. There was already a preproduction crew in Brooklyn, and Coppola was there tweaking the script. Coppola projected the cost of the film at $60 to 80 million.3
When Coppola appeared at Cannes in May 2001 to present Apocalypse Now Redux, he announced he was “working on an even larger project than his cult Vietnam epic. The film is entitled Megalopolis and it is the story of one man's battle to build an ideal world.” Coppola told Reuters the film was “bigger and more ambitious’…‘because it deals with a vision of the future’…“with that unspeakable word ‘Utopia.’”4 It would be self-financed. After September 11, 2001, Coppola was stymied. He did not immediately say he would not proceed with Megalopolis; in fact, he suggested that 9/11 motivated him even more. However, as time passed and the schedule was not met, it seemed apparent that the film was on hiatus. Ultimately, he began making plans for a much less ambitious project—Youth without Youth.
After Gio Coppola's death, Coppola began thinking of the story of Pinocchio as he knew it from Carlo Collodi's nineteenth-century book. Coppola's version would be a departure from the sanitized, animated Disney version that tinkered with the story. Coppola considered the project homage to Gio. Coppola approached Warner Bros. about the project, and they preliminarily discussed a three-film relationship to include Pinocchio, The Secret Garden, and Hoover (based on the life of J. Edgar). On Coppola's part there was dissatisfaction about Warner's money offer, and he set the negotiation aside. In 1992 Warner Bros. announced that Coppola (Zoetrope) and Jim Henson Productions would collaborate on a live-action production of Pinocchio with Fred Fuchs executive producing.5 Coppola still did not agree with Warner's financial package, and he approached Columbia to gauge their interest. Coppola had researched Collodi and already written a screenplay along with series of songs for the venture. Columbia did not choose to proceed while there was an open issue at Warner Bros. The development went dormant. Kim Aubry notes that he worked on the unrealized Pinocchio project for Coppola. “It was to have a computer generated human operated photo-realistic puppet living in a live action universe with human actors.”6
In 1996 The Adventures of Pinocchio was released without Coppola's involvement. Ultimately, Coppola sued Warner Bros., arguing he had lost the ability to freely negotiate with Columbia Studios and, therefore, was blocked from making the movie. In a jury trial in 1998 Coppola was awarded $60 million in punitive damages and $20 million in compensation by a sympathetic jury. On appeal the judgment was overturned. In 2002 an Italian actor/director made a version of Pinocchio that was financially unsuccessful and viewed as an artistic failure.
Around 1980 when Coppola was in Japan meeting with Akira Kurosawa regarding Kagemusha and its release, he read Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novella Elective Affinities. The story involves a married couple, the liaison each has with another person, and the attendant consequences. Goethe's work attaches the affinities of men and women in love to the possible chemical nature of these relationships. Coppola's concept was to meld the cultures of East and West in an enormous project involving four films over ten years. The concept, which does not appear to align with the basic dynamics of the story, may have been attached to his recent visit to the East. In any event, it was unworkable. Coppola was in way over his head with Zoetrope, the backlash of Apocalypse Now, and friction in his marriage. Francis was in an emotionally fragile and precarious state after taxing himself psychologically and physically for over two years in the Philippines. Interestingly, the essential plot outline plays itself out in Zoetrope Studios's inaugural production, One from the Heart.