Author Sam Wasson (“The Big Goodbye”, “The Oral History of Hollywood”) returns to the podcast to discuss his latest book, “The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story” (Harper Collins, 2023).
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 movie making. 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”. 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 in 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 fully been told, until this extraordinary book.
