Coppola’s Rainbow

The flagship vintage of Napa Valley’s Neibaum-Coppola winery is called Rubicon--after the river famously crossed by Julius Caesar in 49 BC. The crossing sealed Caesar’s decision to return to Rome from a military expedition to face his archrival, Pompey, in a struggle for ultimate power. A dictionary entry on the name has been printed, in blood-red ink, on a paper fan displayed at the winery’s headquarters, in a handsome old building on the estate founded in 1879 by a seafaring Finnish immigrant. Among the alternative definitions listed for the expression “crossing the Rubicon” is “. . . to commit oneself irrevocably.”

The current owner of Gustave Neibaum’s Napa Valley estate, Francis Ford Coppola, a sometime student of Roman history, fends off attempts to read metaphorical significance into the name of a wine. He says he chose the tag because it echoed the Italian word “rubio,” for “ruby,” an apt reference, he thought, to the rich redness of the cabernet grapes the property is famous for.

The metaphorical impulse is hard to resist where Coppola is concerned. Since the glory days of the “Godfather” films and “The Conversation” in the early ‘70s, through his later attempts to build a self-contained production unit in the heart of Hollywood, a filmmakers’ refuge from the financial puppet strings of the majors, he has often seemed a representative figure. Indeed, he has often seemed to think of himself that way--as a standard bearer and pioneer.

Today Coppola relishes pointing out that he was right more often than not. His many “eccentric” technological innovations--”video assist” for directors on the set, computer intranets--are now commonplace industrial tools. And with the rise of the independent film scene, Coppola’s vision of a market niche for adventurous and intelligent “small” films has come to fruition. As Peter Biskind writes in his book “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood,” “Coppola had a clearer idea of the opportunity the ‘70s presented for revolutionary change than anyone else. He always claimed he was a visionary, and he was right.”

Today, the winery is buzzing with activity, well into what one staffer calls “this press week we’re having.” A TV crew from CNN was packing its equipment as this reporter arrived, and precisely an hour later Coppola would be hustled off to his next appointment. (“Can’t I even take a few minutes to have lunch with my granddaughter?”)

He is working hard to let people know that he has put his business affairs on a firm and more responsible footing; that Francis Ford Coppola is a good investment again. He is taking advantage of a window of media interest generated by his recent courtroom victory against Warner Bros. The studio was ordered to pay the director $80 million in compensatory and punitive damages for blocking his attempt to take a project it had rejected, a live-action adaptation of “Pinocchio,” to another studio.

It seems to be time to regroup and forge ahead, and not only because of the morale-boosting Warner’s judgment. Since 1995, Coppola has been working to reconstitute and restore the original Neibaum estate, adding 95 acres of vineyard and the legendary Inglenook Chateau to the chunk he’s owned since the late ‘70s. As Coppola told a journalist from Gourmet last year, “ ‘Godfather III’ helped us to [save the estate during a period of reorganization], and ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ allowed me to buy the other half.”

Whatever the cause, there does seem to be a spring in Coppola’s step as he comes to the table in his fragrant, sunny hilltop garden, with his famous bushy beard neatly trimmed, ready to work. While not exactly button-down (his colorful shirt flows freely), neither is he the visionary mad man of Hollywood myth as he focuses sternly upon his plans for his far-flung business enterprises: the winery and related food-products concerns; the resort hotel in Belize, Blancaneaux Lodge; the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story; and above all the American Zoetrope film production company, which is being revamped on a more secure financial footing, complete with a board of directors and an energetic CEO, Jay Shoemaker, who used to work for GM. No visionary flights of fantasy allowed.

As Coppola begins his presentation, it’s hard to resist another metaphorical sally. The effort to reassemble an estate that had been split apart resonates invitingly with familiar accounts of how his own life and career were dismembered in the mid-’80s.

But Coppola isn’t buying it. “I don’t know how some of these stories get out there. There’s this idea that I went bankrupt three times. I never went bankrupt. We had a reorganization, and it happened once.”

He admits, however, to causing the specific financial tangle that led to the loss of his dream property, the Hollywood General studio complex at Santa Monica and Los Palmas, which he purchased in 1980 and rechristened Zoetrope Studios. When the high-tech film slated as Zoetrope’s first release, “From the Heart,” finally opened in 1982, and bombed, loans were called in, and Coppola lost most of his heavily mortgaged holdings, including the studio. All that remained when the dust settled were the flatiron headquarters building in San Francisco and the glorious Rutherford winery.

“That was my failure as a businessman,” he allows. “When I was younger, I didn’t know what a business plan was. I just took the money that came in and used it to do the things I wanted to do. Now I know a lot more. I served as a board member at MGM/UA, which for me was like going to business school.”

CEO Shoemaker laid out the concept of a portfolio, of developing a business plan with a slate of films that would reassure potential investors by spreading the risk. Originally thinking in terms of four or five films a year, one of which he would direct himself, Coppola now says that “investors seem to be looking for a slate of up to 30 films.”

So the development process is a priority. “At the heart of the new Zoetrope,” Coppola says, “there will be just two things: writing and acting. People think it’s strange that I don’t mention the director, but if the acting and the writing are solid, the directors will come out of the woodwork.”

Coppola hopes to apply the lessons of his other business enterprises to his work in film. The literary magazine he publishes, Zoetrope: All-Story, launched last year, grew out of a suspicion that film writing has suffered from an overall decline in the craft of storytelling.

All-Story has printed its share of big-name authors. The forthcoming fall issue includes a long excerpt from the memoirs of novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

But the heart of the All-Story project is the nurturing of new writers. The magazine’s Web site (https://www.zoetrope-stories.com) isn’t just a promotional side issue: Visitors who agree to comment on stories submitted by others will be able to submit their own work electronically and receive feedback. The magazine’s editors monitor activity on the site, occasionally picking up stories either for the print edition of the magazine or for the online-only supplement, All-Story Extra.

Coppola admits that “Zoetrope gets the film rights to the stories we publish,” but adds, “It isn’t as if the writer gets cut out of the deal. A good example is a story from the fourth issue called ‘A Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing.’ The writer, Melissa Bank, just sold a short-story collection for $250,000, and the story is now in development as a movie.”

For more than a year, in other words, Coppola has been doing just what Tina Brown left the New Yorker to do for Miramax last month--with blaring headlines from coast to coast.

Coppola plans to extend the electronic workshop concept developed at All-Story to the realm of screenwriting. A new site (https://www.zoetrope.com/screenplay.html) will invite budding cineastes to e-mail their screenplays to the director of “The Godfather.” This effort will be the centerpiece of a project that Coppola, with something like the visionary gleam of old, calls the Virtual Studio.

Of course, for fans of Coppola’s best films, the success of his business efforts won’t be measured in black ink on an annual report. Over the last decade, on work-for-hire projects like “Gardens of Stone” (1987), “Jack” (1996) and “John Grisham’s The Rainmaker” (1997), Coppola has been a proficient but rarely brilliant director. If Coppola’s new, hard-won financial security helps to rekindle his zest for movie-making, fans can only rejoice.

He certainly seems to be taking risks again as a producer. Projects on Zoetrope’s plate include Guillermo Del Toro’s “Montecristo,” an adaptation of the Dumas adventure classic “The Count of Monte Cristo”: “It’s a great story, and in this version it’s a western, shot in the Southwest and in Mexico. It will look like a Sergio Leone film.”

And then there’s a film that sounds like a classic money trap, Werner Herzog’s projected historical epic, “The Conquest of Mexico.” The mental image it conjures up is hundreds of extras in breastplates and tights, wearing helmets shaped like chamber pots. But Coppola insists that the potential artistic payoff makes the risk worthwhile: “Herzog and [the late] Klaus Kinski may have gone off into the jungle for months, but they always came back with the picture. ‘Aguirre: The Wrath of God’ and ‘Fitzcaraldo,’ those are great movies.”

When asked about his own plans as a director, Coppola is less specific. “I want to do things that I write myself,” he says, “which I haven’t really done since ‘The Conversation’ [1974], which I think is my best film. I’m writing something now, a big film, on the scale of ‘Apocalypse Now.’ And I would like to direct a musical, which nobody is doing.”

No details of the big project are forthcoming, not even the title. Later, however, an informed source mentions Jon Lewis’ 1995 biographical study of the Zoetrope Studios period, “Whom God Would Destroy: Francis Coppola and the New Hollywood.” “Look in the last chapter of that book,” the source says. “You will find out what Francis has been thinking about.”

And sure enough, on the next to last page, Lewis quotes, from a Film Comment interview, Coppola’s description of what’s apparently a sci-fi project called “Megalopolis”: “[It] is based in part on Roman history, because it takes a period in Rome just before Caesar. . . . I researched this period, taking the incident of the revolt of the Catiline, and I wanted to tell a story in a kind of Plutarch vision of New York as the Roman city, although it’s not going to look like Rome, it’s going to look like New York.”

This early vision of “Megalopolis,” with its Fritz Lang-on-acid overtones, may not be exactly what Coppola has in mind today. Still, doesn’t the prospect of a humongous new project make his supposedly hard-nosed new “consigliere” a little nervous? Jay Shoemaker insists it doesn’t. “This is what Francis was put here to do,” he says. “He was sidetracked for 20 years by the success of ‘The Godfather.’ Now he wants to go back to doing his own projects.”

And in case you’re wondering if the grandiose Coppola of old is gone forever, Shoemaker recalls one of his favorite quotes. “There are so many,” he says, “but this is one I actually heard him say. Someone was going on and on about the judgment on ‘Pinocchio,’ asking him what he was going to do with all that money. And he said, ‘Why worry about $80 million? Ask me what it would be like if I was Bill Gates. If I had his money, I would use it to make a down payment on something really big.’ ”