The New York Times bestselling author of Fifth Avenue Five A.M. and The Big Goodbye returns
with the definitive account of Academy Award-winning director Francis Ford Coppola's
decades-long dream to reinvent American filmmaking if not the entire world through his
production company American Zoetrope. Francis Ford Coppola is one of the great American
dreamers and his most magnificent dream is American Zoetrope the production company he
founded in San Francisco years before his gargantuan success when he was only thirty. Through
Zoetrope's experimental communal utopia Coppola attempted to reimagine the entire pursuit of
moviemaking. Now more than fifty years later despite myriad setbacks the visionary
filmmaker's dream persists most notably in the production of his decades in the making film
and the culmination of his utopian ideals Megalopolis. Granted total and unprecedented access
to Coppola's archives conducting hundreds of interviews with the artist and those who have
worked closely with him Sam Wasson weaves together an extraordinary portrait. Here is Coppola
charming brilliant given to seeing life and art in terms of family and community but also
plagued by restlessness recklessness and a desire to operate perpetually at the extremes. As
Wasson makes clear the story of Zoetrope is also the story of Coppola's wife Eleanor Coppola
and their children and of personal lives inseparable from artistic passion. It is a story that
charts the divergent paths of Coppola and his co-founder and onetime apprentice George Lucas
and of their very different visions of art and commerce. And it is a story inextricably bound
up in the making of one of the greatest quixotic masterpieces ever attempted Apocalypse Now
and of what Coppola found in the jungles of the Philippines when he walked the razor's edge.
That story already the stuff of legend has never been fully told until this extraordinary
book.
