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At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Megalopolis’, 24 October 2024

... on Megalopolis, a film he first envisaged in the 1970s and filmed (mostly in Georgia) in 2022, Francis FordCoppola recalled thinking about a famous definition offered by Jean-Luc Godard: a film is composed of a beginning, middle and end, although not necessarily in that order. With a little tweaking the phrase ...

Loving Dracula

Michael Wood, 25 February 1993

Bram Stoker’s Dracula 
directed by Francis FordCoppola.
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Suckers: Bleeding London Dry 
by Anne Billson.
Pan, 315 pp., £4.99, January 1993, 0 330 32806 9
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... bats and wolves and the night, he carries the imagery of rabies and syphilis into the age of Aids. Francis FordCoppola’s lavish, stylish, sometimes silly, always engaging movie also includes the lines quoted above, but we hardly notice them because we’ve just been treated to a much more spectacular encounter ...

Just one of those ends

Michael Wood: Apocalypse Regained, 13 December 2001

Apocalypse Now Redux 
directed by Francis FordCoppola.
August 2001
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Marlon Brando 
by Patricia Bosworth.
Weidenfeld, 216 pp., £12.99, October 2001, 0 297 84284 6
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... too, and takes off on an extraordinary literary ramble from which it never returns and in which Francis Coppola and his team seem to have decided to do The Golden Bough as their Christmas pantomime. The confused ending weighs on the film but doesn’t wreck it, so we don’t need to hush up the confusion or pretend it isn’t confusion at ...

I was invisible

Christian Lorentzen: Viet Thanh Nguyen, 18 November 2021

The Committed 
by Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Corsair, 345 pp., £8.99, March 2021, 978 1 4721 5253 4
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... narrator in hospital. (I never expected to see that character reborn as a caricature of Francis FordCoppola.) Recalling his first experience of masturbation, Nguyen’s narrator describes using a squid from his mother’s kitchen, an entertaining twist on Portnoy and the liver. The Committed expands on these ...

Eat grass

Jenny Turner: The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank, 15 July 1999

The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing 
by Melissa Bank.
Viking, 274 pp., £9.99, July 1999, 9780670883004
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... like Sleepless in Seattle and The Truth about Cats and Dogs. You may not be surprised to hear that Francis FordCoppola has bought the film rights to this story, and has hired Bank to write the screenplay. My Hollywood source says that Coppola these days is more interested in his ...

Who’s Got the Moxie?

A. Craig Copetas, 23 March 1995

The Mexican Tree Duck 
by James Crumley.
Picador, 247 pp., £15.99, May 1994, 0 330 32451 9
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One to Count Cadence 
by James Crumley.
Picador, 338 pp., £5.99, May 1994, 0 330 32450 0
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... and lies and apocalypse long before Sony cassette-players brought Jimi Hendrix to the jungle and Francis FordCoppola discovered it was cheaper to rent Asians in the Philippines. As the Christian Serbians evaporate the Bosnian Muslims, and the African butchers sharpen their machetes in the rain-forest, the song in One ...

Diary

David Thomson: Alcatraz, 26 March 2009

... crime to be the ‘Shame of a Nation’. But many people unashamedly rooted for the gangsters. As Francis FordCoppola would observe when he made the first two Godfather films, the set was crowded whenever they were doing shoot-’em-up scenes. And ‘Scarface’ was plainly an allusion to Al Capone, one of the first ...

Purple Days

Mark Ford, 12 May 1994

The Pugilist at Rest 
by Thom Jones.
Faber, 230 pp., £14.99, March 1994, 0 571 17134 6
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The Sorrow of War 
by Bao Ninh, translated by Frank Palmos.
Secker, 217 pp., £8.99, January 1994, 0 436 31042 2
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A Good Scent from Strange Mountain 
by Robert Olen Butler.
Minerva, 249 pp., £5.99, November 1993, 0 7493 9767 5
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Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation 
by David Wyatt.
Cambridge, 230 pp., £35, February 1994, 9780521441513
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... war generated, particularly when told by such as Tim O’Brien or Michael Herr or Philip Caputo or Francis FordCoppola, still seem a more effective way of dealing with its lingering legacy than the denials of black humour, or the ferocious fireworks display of Desert ...

Tsk, Ukh, Hmmm

Michael Newton: Forgetting to remember to forget, 23 February 2006

Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language 
by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Zone, 287 pp., £18.95, May 2005, 1 890951 49 8
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... a trace of the old, a remnant that memorialises its loss. There is a telling moment in Eleanor Coppola’s Hearts of Darkness, a documentary on the making of her husband’s film Apocalypse Now. An exasperated Francis FordCoppola attempts to persuade a strung-out Dennis Hopper ...

Time and the Sea

Fredric Jameson, 16 April 2020

... as many obstacles as in The Shadow-Line but reaches a different and more wondrous conclusion (Francis FordCoppola borrowed it for Apocalypse Now, his film version of Heart of Darkness). Touching shore at long last in the dark, Marlow wakes from the sleep of exhaustion to a silent dawn: I opened my eyes … and ...

Ojai-geeky-too-LA

Lucie Elven: LA Non-Confidential, 17 June 2021

I Used to Be Charming 
by Eve Babitz.
NYRB, 448 pp., £14.99, January 2020, 978 1 68137 379 9
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... from the New York Times to Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing. She describes shadowing Francis FordCoppola as an extra in The Godfather Part II. ‘What’s the matter with you, anyway?’ she asks, when he borrows her Brownie camera to take her picture and instead photographs mostly sky. ‘Don’t you ...

Retro-Selfies

Iain Sinclair: Ferlinghetti, 17 December 2015

I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, 1955–97 
edited by Bill Morgan.
City Lights, 284 pp., £11.83, July 2015, 978 0 87286 678 2
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Writing across the Landscape: Travel Journals 1960-2010 
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, edited by Giada Diano and Matthew Gleeson.
Liveright, 464 pp., £22.99, October 2015, 978 1 63149 001 9
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... purchaser might destroy the heritage. She won a charity raffle prize, a stay at a resort owned by Francis FordCoppola, and invited Ferlinghetti along. In a ‘run-down beach motel’ the poet composes ‘At Sea’ and dedicates it to Neruda, whom he published for the first time in Rexroth’s translation of Thirty ...

Bandini to Hackmuth

Christopher Tayler: John Fante, 21 September 2000

Ask the Dust 
by John Fante.
Rebel Inc, 198 pp., £6.99, September 1999, 0 86241 987 5
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Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante 
by Stephen Cooper.
Rebel Inc, 406 pp., £16.99, May 2000, 9781841950228
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... Towne came across Ask the Dust and took up Fante’s cause. He optioned the novel and persuaded Francis FordCoppola to do the same for the book Fante was then working on, The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977). In 1978, the poet Charles Bukowski mentioned his debt to Fante in his novel Women; Bukowski’s ...

Smilingly Excluded

Richard Lloyd Parry: An Outsider in Tokyo, 17 August 2006

The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 
by Donald Richie, edited by Leza Lowitz.
Stone Bridge, 494 pp., £13.99, October 2005, 1 880656 97 3
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... than passing acquaintances, are Marguerite Yourcenar, Christopher Isherwood, Susan Sontag and Francis FordCoppola (among several interesting photographs is one of Richie beside a gawky, 19-year-old Sofia Coppola, who looks thoroughly lost). He knew Ozu and Kurosawa, and wrote ...

Star Warrior

John Sutherland, 6 October 1983

Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas 
by Dale Pollock.
Elm Tree, 304 pp., £9.95, July 1983, 0 241 11034 3
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Olaf Stapledon: A Man Divided 
by Leslie Fiedler.
Oxford, 236 pp., £17.50, June 1983, 0 19 503086 9
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... John Paul or Mickey Mouse. Lucas’s second movie and first hit, American Graffiti (produced by Francis Coppola, conceived and directed by Lucas), was the most profitable investment in Hollywood history: it brought in $117m against a production cost of $750,000. Raiders of the Lost Ark (conceived and produced by Lucas, directed by Steven Spielberg) has ...

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