Bad Times Behind, Coppola Dances to a Different Tune

Francis Ford Coppola stands on the lawn in front of his century-old Victorian farmhouse with its broad encircling veranda, its turret and gingerbread trim. Beyond the lawn, several acres of newly planted vineyard stretch toward the highway.

Coppola and his longtime friend and collaborator George Lucas, who lives a few dozen miles away in San Rafael, are admiring the vast and ancient live oak that dominates the yard.

“Now that is a great tree,” Lucas says.

“It’s between 300 and 900 years old,” Coppola explains. “I think it likes to be talked to. I talk to it.” He embraces the tree, his arms touching hardly a third of its 20-foot circumference. “Hello, tree,” he says.

“This land has been continuously occupied for 5,000 years,” Coppola says. “A tribe of Indians called the Wappo lived here. Before we started the new vineyard, an anthropologist came and made a dig.” There is a collection of arrowheads found on the property.

The estate, which Coppola bought in 1975, has 1,700 acres, 120 of them in grapes. It was assembled by Gustave Niebaum, the founder of Inglenook Winery, which adjoins Coppola’s land on the north.

Coppola, 49, and Lucas, 44, have been doing some press, as they say, in connection with their film “Tucker,” which Lucas produced and Coppola directed and which opens on Friday. Lucas had come back briefly from London where he is overseeing the third Indiana Jones film, again starring Harrison Ford and being directed by Steven Spielberg.

“What would you do if somebody gave you $2 billion?” Coppola asks unexpectedly and rhetorically. Lucas awaits the answer with an amused grin.

“I’d use it as leverage to borrow $30 billion,” Coppola announces, “and do something really big. Maybe build a city that really works. I went to see Brasilia once; I was fascinated by what I’d read about it. And here were all these dead, monumental buildings. Nothing for people . Cities have to be built for people.”

Lucas laughs. “Yeah, Francis, and then it would go bust and this time you’d have to go into bankruptcy and lose it all.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Coppola says. “But . . . maybe not .”

Homage to a Maverick

“Tucker” is the story of Preston Thomas Tucker, the charismatic entrepreneur who had been a regional sales manager for Pierce-Arrow and who between 1946 and 1949 tried to launch a brand-new car bearing his name, with revolutionary features like a rear-mounted engine.

Coppola saw a Tucker on display when he was 8, and never forgot it. In maturity he thought about the story variously as a musical and a tragedy, spent a decade researching it and finally evolved the bright, characterful and provocative period piece that now awaits the public’s judgment.

One of the 51 cars Tucker turned out, beautifully restored and painted a lustrous deep cherry, sits on Coppola’s circular drive. He bought it before he began “Apocalypse Now” and a second one, now being restored, five years later. Lucas is also a Tucker owner.

At the most obvious level “Tucker” is an homage to an automobile maverick by a pair of movie mavericks whose careers can be seen as declarations of independence from Hollywood’s major studio system.

But, over a lunch of bread, cheese, cold cuts and salad served on the veranda, Coppola and Lucas both insist that that is too simple a reading of the film, or of their feelings about the film community.

“What it says,” Coppola said, “is that creative people should never give up. They can’t give up. The society needs them.” He and Lucas worry that the work of creative people everywhere is more than ever at risk, imperiled by a philosophy that gives more importance to stock prices and salaries than to the inventing and making of things. It is a shift in priorities, Coppola says, that is already costing the U.S. dearly against goal-oriented countries like Japan.

As for Hollywood, Coppola says without elaboration that anonymous gifts from friends in the industry helped see him through his darkest hours trying to make his Zoetrope Studio work.

“There are people, plenty of people, in Hollywood who love the movies and who love their work. The men who built the town loved the movies.” But Coppola worries that a certain spirit of risk-taking and of adventure has been compromised by a later generation of money-focused managers.

“Creative people are seen as dangerous. And expensive. The question now is, ‘How cheap can you get them?’ and it’s asked by executives whose salaries are astronomical.”

There have been reports that Lucas and Coppola went through a period of disaffection with each other. Both deny it. “It’s absurd to say we didn’t talk for five years,” Lucas says. “The only fights we’ve had have been the four-handed wrist game; we take that very seriously.”

“These story angles become mythologies,” Coppola says.

“It goes with the territory,” Lucas agrees. “Like calling me reclusive. Everybody knows I’m a party animal. Shy, maybe, not reclusive.”

Among the Vineyards

Lucas leaves after lunch and Coppola gives his visitors a ride in the Tucker, which he loves to drive. He coaxes into life its powerful, temperamental motor (a modified helicopter engine Tucker’s men converted from air-cooled to water-cooled).

He roars in a cloud of dust down the drive to a blacktop lane beside the vineyards, pausing (slightly) for a narrow bridge, easing on to the highway, cutting through the Inglenook property and back onto his own land.

It’s hard to believe the car, with its tear-drop streamlining, is 40 years old. The interior is wonderfully spacious, the acceleration thrilling.

Tucker was acquitted of charges of fraud in connection with the launching of the car but the notoriety had cost him his financing and he could not go forward. Yet the film, significantly, is upbeat, celebrating his vindication and his effort. Lucas and Coppola have no doubt he was honest and that his heart was in producing the car. “And the car,” Coppola says, “speaks for itself.”

Yet attitudes toward Tucker remain ambivalent. “It is not enough to finish off your enemy,” says Coppola. “You have to destroy the memory of your enemy. Think about Napoleon. It wasn’t enough to defeat him, you have to put him on an island where people will presumably forget about him.” Coppola waits with interest to see what the responses by and from Detroit will be once “Tucker” is released.

Coppola feels that there has been something of that one-two punch attitude toward his Zoetrope Studio venture. It was not enough that it failed; the lingering idea must be that it could never have worked and should therefore be expunged from memory.

“Tucker thought his car was going to work. When I was doing Zoetrope, I knew I needed only one little hit to give myself a year to regroup and get going. But it didn’t work out that way.”

“One From the Heart,” which might have been the hit, was instead a fiscal disaster. By a familiar enough Hollywood irony it has become a cult film, admired for its originality and for its unusual images, which showcase the new-world electronics that fascinate Coppola.

(He shows his visitors a customized VCR-TV-CD-cassette unit Sony has installed in a Vanagon. It booms away in the warm afternoon and Coppola grabs wife Ellie and dances with her in the driveway.)

“Sixty-five percent of the apprentices we took on and trained are working in the industry,” Coppola says. “It was a rewarding venture and I’m proud of it.”

On an Upswing

Coppola has a theory that success and failure come in 7-year cycles. By that reckoning he seems to be moving into a good cycle after the financial bad times and after a demoralizing personal tragedy, the death of his son Gian-Carlo (Gio) in a boating accident in mid-1986.

“I could have filed in bankruptcy at the time of Zoetrope but I didn’t and it turned out to be a very fortunate thing,” Coppola says. He retained control of his assets, notably including his profit participation in his films, and they have appreciated in value.

“I’ve cleared all my debts on Zoetrope and I’m wealthier now than when I went into it. Movies make more money than you think they make. I believe I’ve made more money on ‘The Outsiders’ than I made on ‘The Godfather.’ All my projects kept kicking in dough and the creditors saw it and let me stay out of bankruptcy.”

Another film maker, Bernardo Bertolucci, has also known cycles of success and failure and, after “The Last Emperor,” is in his own success cycle again. “I talked to Bernardo a while ago and he said, ‘I have omniscience again.’ I love that word omniscience, “ Coppola says. “There was a time when Bernardo felt he couldn’t do anything right. I’ve been there, too, but then it changes.”

Coppola has just finished a cinematic short story called “Life Without Zoe,” which is part of three-episode film, “New York Stories,” with Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen contributing the other two episodes. Coppola’s script was co-authored by his 17-year-old daughter, Sophie, who also designed the costumes. Zoe is the daughter of a great concert flutist, played by Giancarlo Giannini.

A Robust Operation

The vineyard and winery operation, which Coppola started in 1978 and which was presumably going to be a cash-consuming luxury, has turned out to be a gain, he says. He ships about 5,000 cases a year of Niebaum-Coppola Rubicon, a robust wine in the burgundy tradition. He also makes a Chardonnay for himself and friends.

His payroll, up to 300 during the Los Angeles studio period, is down to 30, mostly at American Zoetrope in San Francisco, which does post-production work and where Commercial Films, a subsidiary overseen by his younger son, Roman, turns out a low- budget genre film every three months or so.

For himself Coppola swears that he is now retiring from the film business. “It had got to be thankless,” he says. “You’re limited in the kind of movies you can make. There are only types: the thriller and so on. And the economics of film making are so tough. The director’s in the position of being a point man and you can be behind the 8-ball in two days.

“For all the grief what you do make may not be what people want to see, but it eats up incredible amounts of your life.”

Coppola says he hopes to spend his time “writing, inventing and thinking.” He is nicely placed to do so. The Niebaum carriage house, its gingerbread exterior scabrously in need of paint, has been converted within to the winery operation, overseen by Steve Beresini, and a research library with 10,000 volumes (many more are still in storage Coppola says). Librarian Anahid Nazarian clips five newspapers a day.

Here the research for “Tucker” was done--the search for newsreel footage, home movies and stills, as well as the text. On the second floor is a state-of-the-art editing facility. There’s a hand-drawn sign tacked up: a triangle with its points labeled “Good,” “Fast” and “Cheap” and a caption that says, “Pick Any Two.”

A little way off a guest house has become Coppola’s den and studio, containing as well a small but well-tooled workshop. Here he also plans to do some sculpting. There’s a wood stove for heat, more shelves of books and a large display of family photographs, including some of the granddaughter who was born seven months after her father Gio was killed.

“I’ve been working for five years on a piece of writing,” Coppola says. “Now I’d like to be at it full time. At this point I know I have some good years left (he is 49) and I don’t want to spend time achieving time to get things done.

“There isn’t any success I want or need. I’ve had every break I could ask for.” What remains to be done is a text, whatever it is, and Coppola will only say that it is ambitious. It will evidently be in the dramatic form.

He imagines one day, when he has a draft to his satisfaction, he might assemble some actors and have it read like a radio play, tape and listen to it again and start rewriting. Somebody might want to do something with it, but Coppola says he doesn’t care; he is the audience of one who must be satisfied.

“You keep deferring your dreams. And then the doctors says he doesn’t like the look of your pancreas or your back, or you’ve waited so long you can’t even remember any more what your dreams were.”

It seems clear that Gio’s death has had much to do with Coppola’s decision to withdraw from film making at least for a time. The loss has deepened a sense of family that was profound to begin with, and has sharpened his awareness of how precious time is.

“Gardens of Stone,” which he was just beginning at the time of the accident, now seems to Coppola like a half-remembered dream. One day, he says, he will rent a theater and watch it, like a stranger.

Afterward he kept going on momentum and to be distractingly busy. Now he can re-address his life. In a notebook in which he jots his thoughts and quotations he likes, he finds some lines, from Aeschylus’ “The Libation Bearers”:

Pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our despair, there comes wisdom, through the awful grace of God.

Standing in the den-studio he is silent for a time. Then he get into the Tucker again to drive back to the main house. He shakes off the dark memory and, on the front lawn to see his visitors off, he suddenly breaks into a patter song from “Kismet,” remembering the fast and intricate lyrics flawlessly (he once directed an undergraduate production of the musical) and doing a bit of weighty choreography. It is, in its own way, extraordinarily affecting.