In 1992, as a sophomore in college, I finagled my way onto the press lists of several studios. (Let’s just say I co-founded an arts magazine that lasted for precisely two issues.) I then marveled as screening invites to major film releases started appearing in my mailbox. The crown jewel among these arrived early that fall, when I got invited to an early showing of Francis Ford Coppola’s latest, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The film had been heavily anticipated by just about everybody – after all, it had a great cast, a great teaser, and the director of The Godfather doing Dracula. But it was especially anticipated by my cohort: Our dorm room already sported an advance poster for the film (this badass one, provided by one of my roommates), to go alongside the posters of The Godfather Part III (provided by another roommate) and Apocalypse Now (provided by me — I’d left my Tucker: The Man and His Dream poster at home). We were the kind of people who’d go around saying things like “He’d kill us if he had the chance” and “Charlie don’t surf!” and “It was you, Fredo” and chuckling smugly to ourselves. You know: dorks.
And then we saw Bram Stoker’s Dracula. We were crushed. It was maybe the strangest movie I’d ever seen, at least up until then – a frantic, garish, melodramatic spectacle, with over-the-top performances, quaint special effects, and a score that never stopped crescendoing. I read interviews in which Coppola claimed he wanted to do for the vampire movie what he’d done for the gangster movie back in the day. I did review the film, and in my review I speculated that the director had lost his mind. But I also bought the soundtrack CD. And when the laserdisc appeared, I bought that too. In fact, even as I was maintaining that the movie didn’t really work, I revisited it several times during its initial theatrical run. Somewhere along the way, I realized it was one of the best things Coppola had ever made, a first-ballot entry into what I once called the Pantheon of the Not-Normal, “the misshapen heirlooms of our cinema.”
Francis Ford Coppola has always taken huge risks with his movies, and his latest, Megalopolis, which he’s been trying to make for about 40 years, appears to be no different. The ambitious sci-fi epic (which I haven’t seen yet) screened in Los Angeles for various distributors and other industry folk on March 28, and the responses that have leaked out are about what you’d expect. “There is just no way to position this movie.” “Everyone is rooting for Francis and feels nostalgic. But then there is the business side of things.” “It’s so not good, and it was so sad watching it. Anybody who puts P&A behind it, you’re going to lose money. This is not how Coppola should end his directing career.” Some, like Mike Fleming, Jr. at Deadline, were more receptive to the movie, though everybody seemed to have some difficulty attempting to describe it. “People asking us if MEGALOPOLIS is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ seek the wrong answers,” BeyondFest tweeted, sounding alarmingly like a dril classic. “It does not live in the binary. The fact that it exists is what is most important.”
Coppola self-financed Megalopolis, partly through the sale of his vineyard (a move that he was already contemplating when I interviewed him in 2020). Which should have been an early indication that a gaggle of executives weren’t going to emerge from a screening praising it to the skies. Presumably, if Megalopolis was the kind of project they were going to salivate over, one of them would have financed it already. And if it’s a project any of them is considering acquiring, it’s probably smart — by twisted Hollywood logic — to talk the movie down so as to reduce the purchase price.
Regardless, the fact that these quotes were full of self-satisfied business-speak (amplified by an industry press that seems to love bean-counting almost as much as do the execs they cover) didn’t help matters. As soon as these opinions appeared, they were met with online blowback from people who deemed these execs anti-art philistines and know-nothings. The press cycle entered a new phase with Tuesday’s announcement that Megalopolis would premiere in competition at Cannes — on the festival’s first Friday night, a prime-time slot. This ensures that the conversation around the movie will continue and gain in ferocity: Cannes coverage is not exactly a place one looks to for sober, measured assessments of anything.
At the same time, the back-and-forth has been, I’ll admit, kind of entertaining. And it has a certain whiff of we’re-so-back familiarity. Earlier this year saw a restoration and rerelease of Coppola’s ill-fated 1982 film, One From the Heart, an extravagantly colorful studio musical that the director sank millions of his own money into and whose critical and commercial failure nearly destroyed his career. (He declared bankruptcy three times between 1983 and 1992 — the third just a few months before Dracula opened.) This wasn’t the first rerelease One From the Heart has had, either. In the years since its initial drubbing (which at the time also had private advance screenings that left distributors and exhibitors mystified), it has slowly gained acceptance as one of Coppola’s most special, enchanting films, a visionary work that the culture was just not ready for.
That’s the thing about dreamers. By definition, the things they dream of do not yet exist, which means that we’re destined to be confounded by them at first — yes, even those of us who have posters of their previous triumphs festooning our walls. So audiences primed by The Godfather movies and Apocalypse Now (which of course was an out-of-control production that Coppola famously went deep into debt to finish) were baffled by One From the Heart. After he clawed his way back into the good graces of conventional wisdom, the director made Dracula, baffling them (us) all over again. More than a decade later, by the time Dracula had been reclaimed, audiences were baffled by Youth Without Youth (2007), a wonderfully bizarre (and, in my opinion, deeply moving) epic about an elderly Romanian man (Tim Roth) who is rejuvenated by a lightning strike.
Youth Without Youth was also self-financed. So too were the two highly personal films Coppola followed it with: the family drama Tetro (2009) and the knotty, nutty 3-D thriller Twixt (2012). I’m pretty sure he lost money on all of them. He hasn’t made a film since, though along the way he’s re-edited and restored a number of his pictures, which has helped in their reclamation. The most notable of these is actually not one of the director’s self-financed dream projects, but The Cotton Club, a period drama from 1984 that was supposed to return him to critical respectability but also flopped; the director’s cut, however, which restores 25 minutes of truly crucial footage, is a genuine revelation.
Coppola has been playing a long game right from the start, which is why his risks seem so crazy at first. The world is a better place because Apocalypse Now and One From the Heart and Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Youth Without Youth and The Cotton Club are in it. I don’t know that he’s ever been in this thing to make money. He certainly isn’t now. “I couldn’t care less about the financial impact whatsoever. It means nothing to me,” he told GQ last year. He added, “The greatest thing I bequeathed to my children is their know-how and their talent.” In other words, his family doesn’t need the money.
Who knows what you and I will think of Megalopolis when we finally see it. Perhaps more importantly, who knows what we’ll think of it five, and ten, and 20 years after we’ve seen it. But the real question of this most recent chapter of the Francis Ford Coppola saga isn’t about Megalopolis, a movie we’ll be arguing about plenty when it opens. It’s about whether Hollywood and the culture into which it releases its movies still have any room left for true dreamers.