The name Francis Ford Coppola conjures a cinematic career crossed by contradictions: he set out to be a “European,” personal, small filmmaker, before creating some of the most popular, successful films in American cinema; he’s a star auteur whose struggles for independence nearly ended his career more than once; he helped to define the New Hollywood-era, but his methods always look back to the ensemble film-making of the golden era of the Hollywood studios.

FFC turned 80 over the weekend and Apocalypse Now is 40 this year. Here’s a great interview between Coppola and Paul Thomas Anderson…

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Several posts back I mentioned that this year is the 45 anniversary of Francis Ford Coppola’s production house American Zoetrope. It also happens to be the 35th anniversary of the 1979 film Apocalypse Now which was written by Zoetrope man of letters, John Milius and directed — of course — by Coppola himself.

Fellow Zoetroper George Lucas wanted to direct the film, shooting it with a small documentary crew on locations in California. Milius wanted to direct too — his plan was to film in Vietnam in the middle of a real war zone a la Haskell Wexler’s immortal Medium Cool which features a third act shot in the middle of the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. You know you’re in strange territory when the cooler head that prevailed was Francis Ford Coppola’s, who decided to helm the film himself in yet another bid to make a massive hit that would finally free him to direct the personal films he’d always yearned to make between his other massive hits.

The whole funny, willful, ignorant, hubristic, idealistic, psychedelic, militaristic, surf-tastic and cinematic story is told here, in this warm and generous interview of John by his old friend Francis, which illuminates the central role the writer played in the making of the classic film…

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Marlon Brando may have been the best American actor ever. He was a star of the stage before becoming a cinema idol, bridging a career between the two with his performance as Stanley Kowalski in both the Broadway production and the Warner Brothers film of A Streetcar Named Desire — both directed by Elia Kazan.

The actor was famously cantankerous and contradictory, becoming as well-known for his seeming-laziness and infamous pranks as he was for his unforgettable performances in films like The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris and Apocalypse Now.

While he was often flippant about Hollywood and his enormous dramatic gifts, Brando was an energetic civil rights activist, lending his fame, influence and voice to the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement, and making films like A Dry White Season which addressed Apartheid in South Africa.

This is our tenth year without the star who died in 2004. During the 1970′s, Brando made some of his most important films — he also died in nearly all of them. Check out this reel of his best final scenes from this important era…

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This year we will be celebrating the 45th anniversary of Francis Ford Coppola’s production house American Zoetrope. Conceived of as an alternative to the Hollywood movie machine, Zoetrope first opened its doors in San Francisco in 1969. Here is a note about the beginning of the dream from the American Zoetrope site:

Francis Ford Coppola decided he would name his future studio “Zoetrope” after receiving a gift of zoetropes from Mogens Scot-Hansen, founder of a studio called Lanterna Film and owner of a famous collection of early motion picture making equipment. While touring Europe, Coppola was introduced to alternative filmmaking equipment and inspired by the bohemian spirit of Lanterna Film. He decided he would build a deviant studio that would conceive and implement creative, unconventional approaches to filmmaking.

Upon his return home, Coppola and George Lucas searched for a mansion in Marin to house the studio. However, with equipment flowing in and no mansion found yet, the first home for American Zoetrope became a warehouse in San Francisco on Folsom Street in 1969.

A series of films later, the studio continues to strive toward innovative filmmaking strategies in the historic copper clad Sentinel Building, home to American Zoetrope since 1972.

From its giddy beginnings, through triumphs like Apocalypse Now and wipeouts like One from the Heart, Zoetrope continues to function as a dream factory even today. Here is a great documentary about the early days of AZ, featuring the key players who were there in the beginning: Francis Coppola, George Lucas, Brian DePalma, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Caleb Deschanel, John Milius, Walter Murch, Carroll Ballard, Willard Huyk, John Korty, Matthew Robbins and Robert Dalva.

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