The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story, By Sam Wasson, Review
Lest we forget, Francis Ford Coppola had one of the greatest runs of any filmmaker. Here it is: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather II, Apocalypse Now. Each one a masterpiece, three of which are epics in length, and one in scale beyond almost all other movies. Well, Sam Wasson’s riveting new book is about that, and then again it isn’t.
The Path to Paradise is really about Coppola’s ethos, his dream of what filmmaking can be as an art form, an expression of himself, and an act of becoming. (While making Apocalypse Now, he claims to have become Kurtz). And it is about how he tried to build the infra-structure that would allow this to happen, by creating his own studio, American Zoetrope, which would give him the freedom to work as he wanted on whatever he wanted, whilst creating a kind of utopia for artists who shared in his vision. If you thought Coppola’s movies were big, his dreams are so much bigger.
Wasson’s brilliant book is far from a standard biography. It weaves back and forth through time with remarkable fluidity. The horror and madness of Apocalypse Now is covered in depth, as is the making of One from the Heart, a film that could have been a sweet, crowd pleasing romantic musical, but which led to disaster, as Coppola, in pursuit of his artistic vision, threw caution to the wind and experimented with a new style of production he called Electric Cinema, built huge LA sets, and tapped the enormous talents of Gene Kelly and Michael Powell to act as consultants.
Wasson’s book evokes in ecstatic detail the dream that for a while Coppola managed to achieve. A small bubble of miraculous creative collaboration, that one struggles to believe could possibly have happened, and wishes they could have been a part of. It’s rather like reading about Orson Welles in the early days, from the Mercury Theatre, through to the War of the Worlds controversy, and the spectacular creative achievement of Kane. Coppola’s vision and achievement are of that scale, or close to it.
Wasson is to be congratulated on conveying the insanity, the ecstasy, the ego, the generosity, the self-indulgence, and the freewheeling energy of Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope. His prose is light and literary, the words dance and they put us right there. Reading it is a kind of paradise.
The Path to Paradise is available now, published by faber
