Francis Ford Coppola

C o n t e m p o r a r y F i l m D i r e c t o r s
Francis Ford Coppola
Jeff Menne
Menne_text.indd 1 8/5/14 3:23 PM

Contemporary Film Directors
Edited by Justus Nieland and Jennifer Fay
The Contemporary Film Directors series provides concise,

well-written introductions to directors from around the
world and from every level of the film industry. Its chief
aims are to broaden our awareness of important artists,
to give serious critical attention to their work, and to il-
lustrate the variety and vitality of contemporary cinema.
Contributors to the series include an array of internationally
respected critics and academics. Each volume contains
an incisive critical commentary, an informative interview
with the director, and a detailed filmography.
A list of books in the series appears

at the end of this book.

Jeff Menne
Universit y
of
Illin o i s Pr e s s
U r ba n a ,
C h icago,
a nd
S pr ing fiel d

2014 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
12345cp54321
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Frontispiece: Francis Ford Coppola and his daughter, Sofia,

on the set of The Godfather, Part II.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Menne, Jeff, 1974
Francis Ford Coppola / by Jeff Menne.
pages cm. (Contemporary film directors)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
isbn 978-0-252-03882-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-252-08037-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-252-09678-5 (e-book)
1. Coppola, Francis Ford, 1939 Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
pn1998.3.c67m362014
791.4302'33092dc232014018098

Contents
| ix
Acknowledgments

and the Underground Corporation | 1
Is the Ford in John Ford the Ford
in Francis Ford Coppola? 10
The Cinema of Finance Capital 15
Hippies, Inc: The Rain People

and the Making of American Zoetrope 23
The Form of the Firm: The Godfather,
The Conversation, and Tucker 42
Family Capital 52
The Paranoid Style in Corporate History 59
Grounding the Corporation 67
Vocal Apparitions and Corporate Personhood:

Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, Part III, and Tetro 76
Mechanized Family 90
Zoetrope Postmodernism
and the Amazing Technicolor Family 100
Interview with Francis Ford Coppola | 123

| 129
Filmography
| 141
Bibliography
| 145
Index

Acknowledgments
This material went from being a small part of a larger project to a book
all its own thanks to Jennifer Fay, who encouraged it in germinal form
and helped it along with smart readings at each stage in its development.
She is a brilliant reader, and a deeply generous scholar. It was my great
luck, then, to have feedback on this high order from a series of readers.
Justus Nieland, I should note in particular, gave wonderful conceptual
responses to the project, and Jon Lewiswhom I have long held to be
the best, most innovative Coppola scholarsupported this project, and
this gave it instant legitimacy for me. Without his work, I wouldnt have
done mine in this way. I am most grateful, as well, to have worked with
the editors at Illinois, who were smart and helpful at each turn. Thanks to
Danny Nasset, for seeing me through the project, and to Matt Mitchell,
for his superb help in copyediting.
My last three years in the Screen Studies program at Oklahoma
State University have provided a collegial setting for my researchgood
conversation, and kind supportand for this research in particular I re-
ceived an internal grant from the college, and an external grant from the
Oklahoma Humanities Council. This enabled my trips to the Margaret
Herrick Library and to the Pacific Film Archive. At the latter, Nancy
Goldman was especially helpful in making materials available to me. I
am grateful for this assistance that proved so vital in realizing this book.
But I want to recognize, too, the stray leads given me by Josh Glick and
by my research assistants, Clayton Dillard and Jacob Floyd. I thank
Francis Ford Coppola most emphatically for granting me an interview.
Finally, I owe the most unpayable debt to my inner circle. To Anne
Kuhbander, there are not enough thanks. She understands the gravity
of work, and the levity of non-work. Our sons, Owen and Max, make

everything take longer, and because I think life should be longer, they
seem helpful. I dedicate this book to Melvin Kuhbander, who believed
in other people, and I am forever grateful that he believed in me. We
talked about this book at its inception; Im sure hed be thrilled that its
been accomplished.
x | Acknowledgments


and the Underground Corporation
This playground is no place for permanency.

Michael Pye and Lynda Myles, The Movie Brats
Because in most accounts Francis Ford Coppola is a governing force

behind the New Hollywood, it seems that people cant help referring
to him as the Godfather, whether its to recognize his patronage (his
associate John Korty calls him the impresario, essentially the Godfa-
ther), or the network formed around him (Steven Bach calls Coppola,
George Lucas, Walter Murch, and others the Mill Valley Mafia), or
even his personal manner (a Vanity Fair profile likened him to one of
his onscreen Mafia dons).1 The term suggests itself, such is the strong
identity in the public mind between him and his famous movie franchise.
If the term is anything more than clich, it might illuminate the extent
to which Coppola has been the maker of his own informal economy.
This economy, we might say, is a shadow economy of Hollywood, where
once moviemaking had been arranged like clockwork.
Clockwork describes not only the production rate of the Old Holly-
wood studio system, where the integrated majors had turned out movies
one a week, but the U.S. economy in general, as throughout the first half

of the twentieth century it fell under the sway of scientific management.
In production of this kind, labor was treated in terms of quantity, not
quality. Hollywood movies might protest this, as did Modern Times (dir.
Charlie Chaplin, 1936), which opens on the image of a clock face and
shows the laboring Little Tramp dominated by its accelerated tempo;
but Hollywood was itself known, often in the person of Irving Thalberg,
for cutting its production process to this measure. Placing the creative
labor of moviemaking on the same foundations as any manufacture,
though, had a twofold effect of rendering the movies suspicious as an art
form, because they were too much an industry, and of forcing would-be
advocates of the seventh art into curious theoretical defenses against its
industrial character. The only great films to come out of Hollywood,
claimed the postwar intellectual Dwight Macdonald, were made before
industrial elelphantiasis had reduced the director to one of a number
of technicians all operating at about the same level of authority.2 The
great directors, for Macdonald, were Griffith and Stroheim, since they
were able to make movies before investment banking had made their
art so capital-intensive that the efficiency movement had to take note.3
When it did, Stroheim famously had his wings clipped by management-
minded Irving Thalberg.4
Macdonalds view is instructive, in that its reworking as the auteur
theory would let those coming of age in the 1960s cast the terms of
art and industry in more complex relationship. If, for instance, film
became art only by fully vesting authority in the directoras was so
in the pre-1930 cinema, according to Macdonaldthen any theory
of film art applied to Hollywood might also double as a theory of its
industrial reorganization.5 This was true of auteur theory, I argue, as
its main tenetthat certain Hollywood directors had sensibilities bold
enough to neutralize industrial hierarchy in the name of creativity and
self-expressionturned out to have similar prescriptive force in post-
war business culture. Hosannas to unruly sensibility, though in cultural
memory they belong to the counterculture, arose too in a business world
wishing itself rid of a company-man ethos.6 In short, business wasnt
scandalized by the 1960s and the style of the counterculture; it learned
from it. The entrepreneurial culture that became the basis of the New
Economy bears much of the counterculture within it.7
2 | Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppolas career should be understood in this con-
text. Taking a page from his mentor Roger Cormanwho had a great
knack, its said, for finding talented people who were willing to work
for practically nothingCoppola gathered his film-school friends to
form American Zoetrope, an off-Hollywood production firm that, like
American International Pictures (AIP) before it, would make its way
by setting up operations beyond the reach of the regulatory controls
that had frozen young talent out of Hollywood.8 Unlike AIP, though,
American Zoetrope was underwritten by a Hollywood studio. When
the return on investment of Easy Rider (dir. Dennis Hopper, 1969)
suggested to studio Hollywood that there was money it didnt know
how to make, and that there were audiences that it didnt know existed,
Warner Bros. turned to Coppola because, as John Milius jokes, he had
a beard and knew hippies.9 Coppola chose San Francisco for Zoe-
tropes base, indeed, because it was an epicenter of the counterculture,
and he wanted bohemian life, he says, to pervade the corporation.10
And it did. Its brash colors showed in the dcor of Zoetropes Fulton
Street headquarters, and its celebritiesJerry Garcia, Bill Graham (the
concert promoter), and otherswere drawn to Zoetrope as a center of
gravity. It was all extremely exciting, Walter Murch says, Zoetrope for
him being a professional extension of the film school ideal.11
However, what kept Zoetrope from being another experiment for
what Fred Turner calls the New Communalists, common enough then in
and around San Francisco, was that the device organizing the endeavors
of these like-minded friends was the corporation.12 They bent the device
to their own ends, no doubt, but the effect was that corporate form
partook of the informal energies on which the art world runs. Contrary,
then, to many film historians who place American Zoetrope outside the
bailiwick of Hollywood commerce, as a short-lived refuge for film art, I
see it as an agent of renewal in corporate history for the way it formed
a micro-economya place apart, with codes all its ownthat nested
inside the economies of scale of the conglomerated corporations.
Coppola has shown an unusually sophisticated sense of the part he
had in economy and that it had in him, and not only in his initiative
to self-operate through Zoetrope. His movies read as declarations of
New Economy, as chances to allegorize in film form the social relations
Francis Ford Coppola and the Underground Corporation | 3

that have permitted their making. Consider the final scenes of Tucker
(1988), which use the same technique of parallel montage on display in
the climax of The Godfather (1972). In The Godfather, we see Michael
Corleones (Al Pacino) power consolidated by way of intercut images
of his baptismal observance and his authorized murders. In one set of
images, Michael says vows as his nephew is baptized into the church; in
the other, his henchmen kill rival mob bosses so that power is Michaels
alone. The tension lays between his public standing in the community
and the behind-the-scenes machinations that underwrite it. In Tucker,
however, while we find dirty work hidden behind the rituals of com-
munity life, it is of a different sort. There, we watch Preston Tucker
(Jeff Bridges) stand trial for alleged fraud, but as he is detained in the
courtroom, the workforce of Tucker Motor Company is at his factory
assembling the last several cars that they are accused of having no inten-
tion to build. The tension, once more, gathers in the mismatch between
professed norms and actual practices. Hypocrisy is the effect produced
by the crosscutting technique in both movies.
But in The Godfather, if it seems hypocritical that Michael denounces
Satans work inside the church but executes it outside its walls, its a
hypocrisy that everyone has fully internalized. Connie knows the price
of her familys power. The community accepts their dons protection.
Theirs is a polity within the larger polity, and informal law is all they can
institute for themselves. Kay cannot live with the hypocrisy, of course,
because as an East Coast WASP she enjoys full membership in the larger
polity and need not find recourse in the informal law of the smaller,
ghettoized polity. In Tucker it is much different. The hypocrisy is not
that Preston Tucker says one thing in the courtroom, for show, but then
does the opposite on his personal time. He says the exact same thing in
both circumstances. What first strikes the viewer as hypocritical, rather,
is a national ideology that exalts a man like Tucker, a rugged individual,
while a federal court is stacked against the actual flesh-and-blood Tucker
by the Big Three automakers and the politicians effectively on their
payroll.
Despite producer George Lucass wish that the movie have a Capra
feel, with a little guy taking on a corrupt system, Tucker is a story of
another kind. What we see in the Tucker factory cuts against our nor-

In The Godfather, Michael stands as the
godfather at his nephews baptism . . .
. . . while his henchmen, at his bidding,

assassinate rival mafia bosses.

mative view of labor: four men throwing in together, working around
the clock not for overtime but for no pay at all, the work issuing from
their hands rather than specialized machinesthey present an image of
heroic labor, as it were, a holdover from an age of proud craftspeople.
Their work is motivated by love, not by baser incentives. Wont be
the first time weve worked for free, one employee jokes. On meeting
their contractual quota, they embrace each other and toast champagne.
This is not a lone instance of alcohol on the shop floor, as beer-drinking
has been part of their work culture. And not as contraband, for no line
divides licit and illicit work behavior other than the one they themselves
decide to draw.
Its not even clear where the borders of the shop floor might lie.
Tucker has built his workshop, the Ypsilanti Tool and Machine Company,
a stones throw from his home. When asked to describe the companys
factory, a witness replies, What factory? Its a barn. The prosecution
claims that for Tuckers engine, most of the work had to be done on a
kitchen stove. These claims, they believe, prove that Tucker did not
carry out his work with serious intent. The only proof of that, though,
would be a poorly made car, or no car at all, but the coup de grce for
the defense is that a fleet of stylish, roadworthy Tucker 48s has been
parked curbside outside the courtroom windows. What the prosecution
has proven, instead, is that a premium car has been produced by labor
unregulated by the juridical standards of the land. Seeing the inelucta-
bility of this logicnamely, that labor might self-organize, without any
intervention from the statethe prosecution can only assert the nonex-
istence of Tuckers cars. There is physical evidence for their existence,
of course, and it lies in plain view of the jury. But it cannot constitute
juridical proof: the cars are inadmissible in the hearings, for reasons the
plot leaves unclear. Once acquitted, Tucker baits the court by inviting
the jury to take a ride in one of those Tucker cars that dont exist.
Willed blindness of this kind typifies informal economy as a concept,
Manuel Castells and Alejandro Portes say, noting Spains practice of
exporting millions of dollars worth of shoes and other articles produced
in factories that do not legally exist.13 The hypocrisy, if we should stick
with that term, is that formal law cannot recognize the growing presence
of an informal economy that threatens to upset all it had held in place.
Such recognition, in particular, would throw into crisis what is known

as the liberal consensus, the Keynesian dtente that had been struck
between business and labor, with the state its mediator. This equilibrium
was considered the great, if volatile, achievement of postwar political
economy.
Because the industrial arrangement in place characterized not only
the postwar car industry but Hollywood too, its easy to take Tucker as
Coppolas midcareer reckoning with the conditions in Hollywood as
he once found them, then changed them, and now experiences them
once moreagain as oppressivein the wake of his changes. Latter-day
critics tell the story of Coppolas entry into the industry as if he were
some striding colossusthe rebel envoy, as John Milius called him,
in the walled city.14 The hagiography of Coppola, and others in his
generation, was prepared by the auteur theory, the critical approach
Andrew Sarris adapted from the French New Wave that suggested that
any Hollywood (i.e. mass-produced) art must come from a few brave
spirits who have miraculously extracted it from their money-oriented
environment.15 But Tucker undoes the simplistic dyad of individual
contra industry that had given auteur theory its broad appeal. It is the
group spirit, finally, that compensates Tuckers individual failings (He
just doesnt understand how a corporation runs, says a board member,
and hes not much of an engineer, either) and lets the Tucker company
realize their prototype design. The men in the plant build the car, after
all, while Tucker is a courtroom spectacle; this is what the cross-cutting
has told us. Coppola himself would downplay the auteur theory. Every
element, when youre lucky, comes together, he says of The Godfather,
recognizing the wonderful composer, the great photographer, the
production design, and so on. When people ask him what role he had,
given all their talents, he responds, Well, I chose them.16
If Tucker does not support auteur theory, neither does it dispel it
altogether. The movie takes Tuckers name for its title, after all, as does
the car his company built, suggesting an essential function left to the
individual signature. When a promotional film is being made for the
Tucker car, and its filmmaker needs personal footage of Tucker, they
explain that in order to sell stock they need to sell Tucker as a person, an
image. This might let us think Tucker is but a cynical backward glance
at Hollywoods auteur phase: it advertised individual glory, briefly, so its
massified audience would more gamely consent to its culture-industry

vassalage. This, indeed, is auteur theory understood from the standpoint
of circulation. And though any interpretation of Tucker needs to make
sense of its style, which is clearly a pastiche of gaudy marketing effects,
a good-faith reckoning with the movie requires that we consider its
interest in the production process. Whatever the downstream fate of
goodsthe cars that may one day become collectors items, the movies
that may one day ride high on American Film Institute liststhis is
nothing but the afterlife of production.
In this regard, the movie makes the case, as Coppola will do fre-
quently elsewhere, that auteur theory is a form of business-management
theory. Consider several scenes from the movie. When the car designer
Alex Tremulis (Elias Koteas) overrides an idea in Tuckers original model,
Tucker tells him, You ever do that again, something I told you not toso
help me, Ill give you a raise. Tucker sought the better idea, the movie
insists, no matter where it occurred in the hierarchy. Coppolas modest
claim that his role as director is limited to choosing personnel is here
complicated by the fact that choosing talent is itself meaningless if one
doesnt also construct the environment in which talent might realize
itself. Tucker, we see, gets his employees to work at full capacity by
spreading his dream of self-realization to them. The site of labor be-
comes for them the arena for the whole self. This cuts against the doxa
of scientific management, a.k.a. Taylorism, which coordinated the total
operation of a plant precisely by disaggregating the individual into a set
of functions, energies, and skills in order to recombine them at a higher
level. Tuckers style, in contrast, sets loose the creative energy in those
around him, and leads to the absolute trust of his team. Abe Karatz
(Martin Landau) confirms as much when asked under cross-examination
if, as an ex-convict, he expects one person to believe what hes saying,
and he responds, One, while locking eyes with Tucker. The corollary
to absolute trust, finally, is absolute commitment. When, after working
around the clock, Eddie Dean falls asleep in a chair, a coworker rouses
him and reminds him of their deadline the next day. The managerial
function, we see, has been democratized throughout the shop floor, such
that, in essence, the voice of management is ones own.
Art never sleeps read a note that Coppolas son, Gio, posted in
his workspace.17 The artist, that is, works overtime. In a real sense, we
have to believe that auteur theorya theory that an artist is reflected in

his or her labor, but a technician is notis the only doctrine suited to
realizing the postwar management ambition, most notably proselytized
by Douglas McGregor, of making unimagined resources of creative
human energy ... available within the organizational setting.18 This,
in fact, is how Pauline Kael describes Orson Welless auteurist achieve-
ment, Citizen Kane (1941). Kael belittles the need to think of Welless
great work as the result of a single artistic intelligence and instead
celebrates his ability to break the yoke of Old Hollywood, where almost
everyone worked beneath his capacity, in order to liberate and utilize
the talents of his co-workers.19 This was Coppolas raison dtre early
on. He did not begin his career with a series of dazzling movies. Neither
Dementia 13 (1963), Youre a Big Boy Now (1966), Finians Rainbow
(1968), nor The Rain People (1969) would make his name. Its true,
he said then, that Ive never made a successful film.20 He would soon
make The Godfather, and then this statement would be spectacularly
reversed. But when he admitted that he had never made a successful
film, I shall argue, his chief interest was to make American Zoetrope, a
corporate form bringing together a congeries of underground practices
that, were they mainstreamed, would spell the end of Old Hollywood. I
dont think therell be a Hollywood as we know it, Coppola predicted,
when this generation of film students gets out of college.21
It is not wrong, therefore, to consider the auteur theory the wa-
tershed between Old and New Hollywood, so long as we dont think it
signaled the individuals messianic overcoming of the stubbornly profit-
minded corporation. What it did, rather less romantically and more
efficaciously, was help reconfigure corporate capital. In a telling scene
in Tucker, when the industrial filmmaker asks Preston Tucker to gaze at
the sign atop his manufacturing planta photo-op of the man seeing his
name in outsize letterswhat Tucker should see is himself reflected in
corporate enterprise. It is only a reflection, though, for the name does
not belong to him but to the firm. In fact, when in real life Tucker later
tried designing a new car after he failed to mass-produce the Tucker 48,
he could not use his name for it because, legally, he did not own it. He
had let it sponsor other projects. In the courtroom he argues just this
prerogative (for Edison, the Wright Brothers, Mr. Ford as namesake
mechanisms of better idea production); and in the workplace he puts
it into practice, conferring his own name, in perpetuity, on a generative

In a lap dissolve, Preston Tucker fades
into insubstantiality behind the more durable
brand name, Tucker.
process. This conferral is best understood as the paradoxical work that

the auteur theory performed for Hollywood in synchronizing the projects
of the individual and of the corporation.
Is the Ford in John Ford the Ford

in Francis Ford Coppola?
If Preston Tucker placed himself in a lineage with Mr. Fordor at
least Coppola presents it this way, claiming, We might have had a Henry
Ford in the forties and his name was Preston Tuckerwe might here
work out the analogy to include Coppola in its historical logic.22 It is one
of the poetic felicities of Hollywood tradition that the emblematic movie
director of the studio era, John Ford, shared a name with the emblematic
movie director of the post-studio era, Francis Ford Coppola. The name
Ford, we might say, was given these men by the system of which they
were a part every bit as much as they (or their parents) might claim to
have chosen it of free will. The name was in the air, that is, and it named,
ultimately, a system more than a car. The system refers generally to
the American economic order in which they were rearednone in their
generation could be ignorant of Henry Ford, and many performed their
daily labor in the style he patentedbut it also refers to Hollywood, the

system in which culture had been mass-produced on the principles for
which Henry Ford was famous.
John Ford would disavow the association. He and his brother
changed their last name from Feeney to Ford, and though they dis-
agree on the source of their adopted name, John Ford assured that it
was no tribute to the automaker. The irony, of course, is that the Hol-
lywood industry in which John Ford made his career was, during his
active years, very much a tribute to Henry Ford and his production
model. Nothing was more routine than the production schedules of
the Hollywood majors. Some debate surrounds the putative Fordism
of classical Hollywood cinema, to be sure, with the sticking point of
movies not being precisely standardized sometimes obscuring how
centrally Hollywood belonged to the Fordist regime.23 It is with this
in mindthat Hollywood cannot make the same exact movie over
and overthat Janet Staiger carries out one of the more thoroughgo-
ing studies of the developing Hollywood mode of production.24 While
Staiger acknowledges that in Hollywood a contest between standard-
ization and differentiation meant that filmmaking did not achieve the
assembly-line uniformity prevalent in other industries, she charts the
systematic drift away from craft labor to a detailed division of labor that
made Hollywood a factory system at home in the context of other
concurrent U.S. business practices.25 In this context, Hollywood in-
dustry certainly looked like Fordist manufacture to its contemporaries.
Motography saw the early Selig plant, for instance, as an art factory
turning out movies with the same amount of organized efficiency, divi-
sion of labor and manipulation of matter as if they were locomotives or
sewing machines.26 It was the management of the work, rather than
the results of the work per se, that revealed its essential Fordism. As
Hollywood evolved its economies of scale, System and Efficiency
set in, its insiders would say, such that its total operations could be
brought under a management hierarchy.27 The sequence that Staiger
documents (the director system, the director-unit system, the central
producer system, and the producer-unit system) attests to the stages of
refinement in Hollywoods commitment to scientific management.28
Pursuing his career within this maturing industry, John Ford not only
disavowed his association with Henry Ford, which his brother found

unproblematic, but he chose a storytelling idiom, Hollywoods Western,
that was interested exclusively in a world of preindustrial labor. Westerns,
he confessed, were his chance to get away from Hollywood, with its
smog of industry.29 The aesthetic claim of the genre, in all its imagery
of open land, was put on the space that still spread beyond and outside
the articulations of Fordism. There, John Ford felt he could do a job of
work.30 If his movies find a way to narrate the business culture that was
home to his everyday labor, it is only by negation: industrialism, which
makes everyone subordinate to its system, is replaced by agrarianism,
which had room left for sovereign individualism. Or anyway, the agrarian
society could be nostalgically recalled this way.
Here the difference between John Ford and Francis Ford Coppola
is pointed. The latter director addressed, as squarely as possible, the
system in which he worked through the movies it let him make. This
is not to say that Coppola thought critically, whereas Ford did not. Its
only to say that, for historical reasons, critique would look different
for the two directors. The Fordist subject, by design, is deterred from
focusing on work close at hand because the goal of this labor system
has been to minimize ones work, and hence too ones investment in it,
and to remove its total process from view. Even in the grips of Fordism,
though, there is critique; it just looks different. When John Ford narrated
the unfulfilled project of industrial citizenship, say, in How Green Was
My Valley (1941), he did so by displacing the problem into a European
past. This is because Fordism, when successful, goes cognitively unpro-
cessed. History suggests that it only became available as an object of
critiqueand this will mark the difference between the Old and New
Hollywood, and, the Old and New Leftwhen Fordism found itself in
full-blown crisis.
Beginning his career when he did, Coppola enjoyed a different rela-
tionship to Fordism altogether. On April 7, 1939, a few weeks after John
Ford released Stagecoach, Francis Ford Coppola was born in Detroit,
the epicenter of Henry Fords production methods. His family lived
there, somewhat transiently, because his father, Carmine, was flautist of
the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Francis was born in the Henry Ford
Hospital, and his names were given him in recognition of his maternal
grandfather, Francesco Pennino, and of the sponsor of his fathers radio
show, Ford Sunday Evening Hour.31 Coppola became famous under that

name, which likely means that hell never be known otherwise. But in
1977 he dropped the middle name, Ford, because he believed no one
could trust a man with three names.32 Though I have no reason to
dispute his explanation, it seems unlikely that Coppola, being so expert
at fashioning meaning, would miss the symbolism in his ridding himself
of Ford. One might argue, after all, that he did as much for Hollywood.
In what follows I will pursue a modest version of such a claimnot
that Coppola singlehandedly changed the inner workings of Hollywood,
but that he played a part within his own industry, as members of his
generation did in other industries, to redefine the labor of individuals
that, taken together, makes an economy. Coppola fits next to other such
spokespeopleStewart Brand, say, and later Steve Jobs in the informa-
tion sector, and before them Betty Friedan in behalf of women debarred
from industrybut the antagonist they all had in common was Henry
Ford and the ideas that, in his name, had firmly cast the arrangement
of labor in public and private life. If from one end of the telescope they
look like mavericks, ready to smash the system, from the other end they
look like its custodians. The change they exacted in what we might call
the regime of accumulation, Fordist-Keynesianism, had the effect,
some say, of unleashing capitalism.33 Milton Friedman, a Chicago school
economist, was happy for this; David Harvey, a Marxist critic, was not.
But these individuals who radicalized postwar labor relations could not,
its safe to say, always guess the direction in which history would channel
their activism. They moved with the tides of history, though, and this
is what gave their efforts such force in the first place. My study hence
presumes that the movement beyond Fordism must be seen within two
orders of activity: one the vast historical order of global economy, and
the other the smaller individual order of local industry.
This book tracks the extent to which Coppola used his movies to
make this history intelligible in individualist terms. In them, he coor-
dinated the domains of the private and the public self, removing the
partitions that had made ones personal labor seem unrelated to global
processes. Coppolas cinema, its theme and variations, aspired after an
integrated whole. His canniest insight into Henry Ford, in fact, was that
Ford wasnt just designing cars; in effect, he was designing cities as
well.34 And this would hold true, too, for the studios, which often were
literally citiesUniversal City, Foxs Movietone Citywith assorted

municipal services, mayors, police, and so on. Once we recognize the
studios as totalized spaces for living, we must in turn treat their manage-
ment as not only workplace policy but as social philosophy.
In a brilliant analysis of Fords project, the management theorist Pe-
ter Drucker states Coppolas insight in different words: [M]ass produc-
tion is not a mechanical principle but a principle of social organization.35
It gives rise to a society, a city beyond the shop floor, because it organizes
men and their work. The society it creates, Drucker concludes, is one
in which the individual is ineffectual and the wholethe organized
groupis clearly not only more than, but different from, the sum of its
parts.36 This means that the individual must take itself to be different in
substance from a society that it must regard, functionally, as an organism:
the total action in mass production, that is, seems no less sophisticated
than craft work, and may seem even more so, yet the skill involvedthe
intelligence, as it wereis commuted further up the line. The job,
then, is more skilled than the people; the valorized being must be
conceived on a transpersonal order.37
This makes for the most intractable conceptual problem in industrial
society, which has only yielded the elegant, if largely sophistical, notion
of corporate personhood as its solution. But Fords failure, Drucker says,
lay in not fighting this problem nor desiring this solution. He nurtured,
instead, the utopian dream of reclaiming the Jeffersonian society of
independent equals. In his factories he tried to solve problems of a
bygone order, as it were, by making ones work a matter of neither skill
nor brawn nor mental effort and hence leaving these faculties fully
available for [ones] community life as an independent Jeffersonian citi-
zen outside of the plant and after working hours.38 This left a divided
society, with the functional grandeur of the River Rouge Plant on one
side and the social jungle that is Detroit on the other side.39 The root
problem of the industrial order had been left, all the while, to multiply
in the culture of Fords plant.
If Coppola has been criticized often for hubris, it is because he be-
lieved that he could solve Fords leftover problem with his firm, Ameri-
can Zoetrope, and that the new city that would flow from it might be
conceptually prepared in movie form, with Megalopolis. The unmade
movie, Megalopolis, lagged behind the unrealized firm, American Zoe-
trope, by twenty years: after Tucker wrapped, he began planning it. Of

Megalopolis he has said that the cinema has resources enough to offer a
precise social and architectural rendering of the world of the future.40
Coppola could not build it per se, he thought, not in concrete form; he
could, however, build its representation. If capital were supplied him,
if he had Bill Gatess fortune, he says, he would build the city of the
future, and in this city what will occupy people wont be work but
study, art, sport, and festival.41 Even when short the capital, though,
Coppolas career is marked by his endeavors to enact social plans in
what we might consider scaled settings. American Zoetrope would de-
regulate the workplace by enthroning art as its business principle. He
started a new operation, he said at the time, with the means of making
films at intelligent costs, because he had good relationships with and
promises from some of the more talented young filmmakers around.42
The conditions under which Francis wanted everyone to work were
more than spartan, the filmmaker Carol Ballard once said. They were
practically non-earning.43 But being spartan, Coppola thought, not
only greatly reduces overhead but also destroys the hierarchy that af-
fects a company when its people care only about their bonuses.44 This
notion of subtracting profit from business enterprise, we should note,
is not strictly Coppolas crackpot thinking, for Peter Drucker, whose
influence in management theory is unrivaled, would define it as the
essence of business. In The Practice of Management, Drucker asserts
that profitability is not the purpose of business enterprise and the ex-
istence of the so-called profit motive ... is highly doubtful.45 Rather,
a good business is defined through the capacity its culture of ideas has to
create a customer; profit can only signal the validity of its business
behavior.46 In Coppolas general disregard for money, we see that he
begins to orient business by something more durable still: a set of ideas.
The Cinema of Finance Capital

An important quality to remark in Tucker is that in it Coppola means to
secure a legacy for Preston Tucker that has very little to do with the car
he designed for production. In the movies final scene, when people file
from the courtroom to see the Tucker 48, Abe Karatz says, Look, they
love the car, but seeing their love drives him crazy because the Tucker
Motor Companys dead. Theyll never be made. Tucker, in contrast, is
satisfied that they made the cars at all; theyre a fait accompli for him.

When Abe objects, Fifty cars, as though the paltry output attests only
to their failure to mass produce, Tucker says, Well, whats the difference,
fifty or fifty millionthats only machinery. Its the idea that counts.
Indeed, we could say that Tucker was more significantly an idea than a
movie. It had been the regulating idea for American Zoetrope since a
1975 interview when Coppola promised to make a film of Tuckers story
someday.47 At the time, he conceived the movie as a sort of Brechtian
musical in which Tucker would be the main story, but it would also
involve Edison and Henry Ford and Firestone and Carnegie.48 When
in 1980 Coppola bought Hollywood General as the new facilities for
American Zoetrope, he planned to make One from the Heart (1982) as
a dry run before making Tucker. After doing so, he brought Leonard
Bernstein and Betty Comden and Adolph Green to his Napa Valley home
to develop Tucker in its musical form, but the box-office performance of
One from the Heart forced him to curtail its development. The form in
which Tucker finally appeared, not as a musical but as a Capra-like tale
whose financial backing was owed to the success of Lucasfilm, might
obstruct our view of the ideas behind it. In the coming pages I will
discuss the movies formal complexity, and how Coppola factored such
view-obstruction into the movie as a main principle of its form. For now,
its more to the point that Coppolas strange equanimity about American
Zoetropewhich for practical purposes was doomed as a studio when
Warner Bros. rejected its only production, THX-1138 (1971)comes
off as a foretaste of Abes dialogue with Tucker, cited above: The whole
idea of [American Zoetrope] caught the imagination of a lot people,
Coppola said a year after the companys so-called Black Thursday (i.e.
the Warner withdrawal), but the impracticality of it proved too great.49
If American Zoetropeas a firmnever quite succeeded in making
movies but might count as a success anyway because it produced the
idea for novel forms of manufacture, then it seems apt that Coppolas
grandest movie project, Megalopolis, was never made and has a legacy,
to the extent that it does, only as an idea. From all reports, Megalopolis
was the story of finance capital, which is a process without a product.
The whole project of finance capital, after all, is to continue valoriz-
ing capital without commodity production. With Megalopolis, Coppola
would narrate efforts to build a utopia in New York in the aftermath
of a financial crisis modeled on the one the city weathered in the mid-

70s.50 In this moment, New York City was an experiment in finance
capital, with its massive restructuration in which 750,000 manufac-
turing jobs ... disappeared, and in which the ratio of manufacturing
to office work [was] modified from 2:1 before the war to 1:2 today.51
This mutation in an economy, Fernand Braudel argues, is an expected
phase of capital in its longue dure perspective. We ought, therefore, to
imagine New Yorks replacement of manufacturing jobs with office work
as an expression of the same process Hollywood was undergoing during
the years Coppola was starting his career. Hollywood abandoned fixed
production, its celebrated studio system, in part for the external reason
that the 1948 Paramount decree cut the circuit between production
and circulation, and in part because television signaled an altogether
new kind of circulation. We should not, however, overlook the internal
reason that the rising cost and systemic inflexibility of fixed production
meant a falling rate of profit for Hollywoods mode of production.
For present purposes, then, we must understand finance capital
not only as a fully historical moment but as Coppolas moment. When
postwar Hollywood was reorganized by independent production, many
assessed this independence in honorific terms. But the companies that
helped undo Hollywoods vertical integration, however independent,
were less a heroic redefinition of the industry than a meliorative response
to its stagnancy. If Hollywood is changing, Coppola had soberly as-
sessed, then its because the whole world is changing.52 This is what his
more political-minded contemporaries in the New Left would observe
in their famous manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, which remarked
how suddenly the number of workers producing goods became fewer
than the number in nonproductive areasgovernment, trade, finance,
services, utilities, transportation. Since World War II white collar and
service jobs have grown twice as fast as have blue collar production
jobs. Labor has almost no organization in the expanding occupational
areas of the new economy.53 The New Lefts organizing statement, that
is, called attention to the disorganizing effect that capital had on labor,
once Fordism no longer brokered their truce. What some call post-
Fordism, others call informal economy, and still others call disorganized
capitalism.54
In the face of this, Coppola had meant to keep production intact by
making it more lean through technology and information. Throughout

his career he would continue to bet on America as the unit of new econ-
omy if not always the site, he would later say, because it had a tremen-
dous tradition of creativity. But its creative labor could only reorganize
if those framing it (and the identity of those framers, if nebulous, we
must imagine to be the usual suspects: state officials, industry captains,
corporations) were to seize on such new technologies as high definition
television tied to one international standard such that, for instance,
the concept of world television could be realized.55 Technology, for
Coppola, tends to deliver labor from whatever its straits, in potentia, and
the electronic cinema was long his pet figure for integral labor. But
America would need to adapt its juridical frameworkone international
standard, that isbecause the pressures of a world system meant that
capital would otherwise be valorized abroad. In the movie industry,
this is now known as Global Hollywood.56 Giovanni Arrighi argues that
precisely in this change in the spatial configuration, with production
moving from high-income to low-income countries and regions, do
we recognize the onset of finance capital.57 Coppola, unlike many of his
peers, claims our interest because he is at once an agent in this process
and the narrator of it. In what follows Ill track the conjugation of Cop-
polas technological utopianism from the in-transit production of The
Rain People, a practice otherwise called runaway production, into its
most grandiloquent exposition in Apocalypse Now (1979). There, the
catastrophic side of the one international standard is indexed in the
effort of bringing the so-called Third World under it.
Only with Apocalypse Now, we might say, did Coppola begin to
understand his projects in a political register. He would claim that when
he and George Lucas founded American Zoetrope, they were very much
not political.58 This makes sense, given that in the late 1960s politi-
cal behavior was popularly identified with the protesters Nixon called
noise-makers. But Coppolas emphasis on production, his goal of hav-
ing all the means of production readily available to him, became more
legibly political to him only when the stakes of production were cast in
geopolitical terms. When, for instance, Coppola was frustrated be-
cause he needed Philippine air force helicopters for his Vietnam movie
on the same day they were needed to fight rebels in the hills about
ten miles away from their film set, his ambitionswith business and

aesthetic ideas folded togetherbecame clear to him in their fuller
dimension.59 His work needed to gauge its effects in a world-historical
purview, needed an impossible view that might give measure of all forces
as they interact with each other, and this, ultimately, set an internal limit
on the future he and Lucas envisioned for American Zoetrope.
Lucas, by contrast, preferred buffering his own work against the so-
cioeconomic forces external to it. Consider, in this respect, his first two
movies, THX-1138 and American Graffiti (1973). The former movie is
interested in depicting spaces of production. In it, we see a spectacle of
clean and technological labor, seemingly a droid assembly (a preview of
C-3PO), but the point being made is that the workers are themselves doing
droids work. Nothing more than extensions of the total laboring apparatus,
the workers are clad in white scrubs and skull caps; they are drugged into
a kind of symbiosis with the machine operations. Indeed, the branches of
the operation are satirically namedDepartment of Biological Flowso
as to underscore how inorganic and artificial this site of labor is. It does
not look like the interiors of an American corporation, in short, but is an
exaggeration and transformation of whatever is most phenomenologically
oppressive in such labor. It transforms such sites, then, into art objects.60
If I had put everyone in crew cuts and gray suits, Lucas remarked, then
audiences would have understood it as an abstraction of 1970.61 But in
some sense one assumes that the laboring situation of 1970 is so highly
mediated in THX because only in raising such rote precision-work into an
aesthetic order does it become acceptable for Lucas. The more abstract,
the better. At a certain level of abstraction, there is no need to narrate the
passage from the site of production to its yield, the product. And indeed,
the difficulty Lucas faced when converting it from abstract film into fea-
ture film was that its mise-en-scne would not accept the implantation of
narrativenot gracefully, anyway. Lucas preferred documentaries and
abstract films, he has always claimed, and would rather have retreated
into institutions of the avant-garde as had his Zoetrope colleague, John
Korty, who had, with Stan Vanderbeek, shared billing on the first program
in America that used the term underground cinema. But Coppola would
not sequester his work, nor the work of his peers, from society at large; he
would shield it with corporate form but would not let it be pigeonholed
as coterie activity.

Though the sites of production seem dystopian,
THX-1138 presents them as art objects.
Hence THX is a conflicted statement from American Zoetrope, be-

cause in the movies commitment to dystopian outlooks on scientifically
managed labor, it cannot imagine its way outside the bifurcation of
labor and consumption. Its computers order workers, Buy more, buy
more now, buy and be happy, and in this its hard to see consumption
as anything but another version of laborbled white of pleasure, its
only another of the bosss commands. The movie views consumption
as labor, void of pleasure, where Zoetrope viewed labor as a version of
consumption, full of pleasure. Infrastructure, in THX, can only threaten
one. We could leave, LUH tells THX, and live in the superstructure.
In this submission to a two-world structureour enslaved labor on one
side, and our liberated consumption on the other sideTHX can only
represent the terms American Zoetrope was meant to cancel. THX does
finally, in the storys finale, escape the infrastructure, though there is
little optimism that he has escaped to a better place.
We might imagine, as a kind of thought experiment, that he has
escaped into Lucass American Graffiti, a world of hot rods, pop songs,
and all the sumptuary objects that let one forget the deadening labors
of ones daytime. That here infrastructure and superstructure remain
always asunder, however, might count as an effect of American Zoe-
tropes failure. In what follows I will describe American Zoetrope as
a business idea, Coppolas in better part, that would rely on aesthetic
means to manifest itself, and I will tell the story of American Zoe-
trope, in turn, by way of the vicissitudes an aesthetic project like this

must travel. The effort to merge business activity and aesthetic expe-
rience seems, after all, typical of the 1960s. If originally the project
seemed politically innocent, its likely because such matters of art, the
workplace, and consumption had been viewedby Coppola, Lucas,
and othersfrom the perspective of San Francisco. If THX renders
infrastructure (the Gas and Electric Building, the BART system, and
so on) not a practical matter but an aesthetic one, we can guess that it
squares with the felt needs of an educated class in general, no matter
how underground such needs were declared. But when for the sake
of a movie Coppola brought his own generator to Baler, a Filipino town
without electricity since it had been destroyed in a typhoon ten years
earlier and was never replaced, something of the contradictory forces
at work in such a production, as Miriam Hansen puts it, would give a
political character to Coppolas work.62 Henceforth there would be a
more complex sense of social totalitya sense, I argue, that Coppola
had courtedin which Zoetropes business and aesthetic ideas would
try to find their place.
At best, these ideas found their place intermittentlyoften com-
promised, sometimes fully defeated. This book means to be a record of
the forms allowed these ideas. In this endeavor, my study looks at Cop-
pola from a slightly unfamiliar perspective. The most rehearsed critical
perspective on Coppola is that he was a Hollywood outsider, too much
a dreamer to be a foursquare businessman, and that it was his creative
temperament that left him outsideeven safeguarded him againstthe
domains of commerce. This outlook depends on two academic preju-
dices: first, that business is not creative, despite all signs otherwise, and
second, that any art that makes money becomes harder to recognize as
art. My position on Coppola, rather, is that he innovated precisely from
within Hollywoods industrial system; that he took business and art to be
coequal terms, each depending on the other for its wholeness (he had
a grudge against Hollywood not because it was business when it should
be art, but because as a business it was poorly run, with too little art
and pleasure in its practices); and that he appreciated corporate form,
particularly the vexed idea of corporate personhood, to the extent that
it was aesthetically construed.
Coppolas notion of the aesthetic dimension of the corporation, I
argue, was that it required a figure of unity only possessed by opera.

Critics regularly deem Coppola operatic, but when the concept is rigor-
ously applied rather than remarked in passing, critics tend to see opera
only as what haunts his films, and sometimes even what gives them deep
structure. I make the strong claim, instead, that operatic structure gives
shape to his film and business projects alike. Opera, many have argued,
is a display of voice subtended by transpersonal forces, wherein what
looks like the autonomization of the voicethe ariais given its place,
ecstatic as it seems, by the community of voices. It is structurally unlike
lyric voice, a singular, individual voice that is part of the song tradition
drawn upon and sublated in opera. Family works on operas model, in
Coppolas philosophy, as does a corporation. The corporation makes
sense, in his view, to the extent that the integrity of its enterprise is
vouchsafed in a transferrable voicethat is, a non-dominating or oper-
atic voice. His movies can be analyzed as efforts to give what are often
reified themes (family, corporate personhood) the vitality of aesthetic
form (opera). Insofar as Coppolas ideas successfully took root, and even
insofar as they were perverted, his innovations belong to business his-
tory as much as aesthetic history. In the coming pages, I establish that
the consistently unsettling problem of how to mark groups as undivided
entitiesa problem of modernity insofar as traditional society never
required rational proof for ithas found varied solutions in the history
of political form (the nation-state), business form (the corporation), and
aesthetic form (the opera). These histories cross-pollinate throughout
intellectual history, and Coppola is an illuminating nodal point in such
a study.
In what follows, I will assess a set of Coppolas movies in relation to
what Im calling his business idea (that production be animated by the
same pleasures as consumption, that production and consumption hap-
pen in view of each other) and to what Im calling his aesthetic take on
the business firm. Because I assess Coppolas career in this way, brush-
ing somewhat against the grain of critical orthodoxies, I put pressure on
some works long considered minor, such as Tucker, and I ignore some
works altogether, such as The Outsiders (1982), The Cotton Club (1984),
and Bram Stokers Dracula (1992). This should not be taken as a silent
verdict on the merit of those movies. My discussion isnt guided by merit
alone but rather by how much Coppolas business idea penetrates the
content and form of his movies. This being so, I start by analyzing The

Rain People (1969) as the manifesto of American Zoetrope, one more
attuned to the upstart firms corporate purpose than its first movie,
THX-1138, would end up being. While not operatic in the least, The
Rain People is a poetic film, one that might count as a poetics of politi-
cal economy. It is of aesthetic interest because it eschews the pop-song
soundtrack and Hollywood-musical form of Coppolas previous films,
Youre a Big Boy Now and Finians Rainbow; it is of business interest
because its making doubled as the making of American Zoetrope.
From here, I consider a series of Coppolas movies that were deeply
informed by Zoetropes failureThe Godfather, The Conversation
(1974), and Tuckereach of which I take to be a meditation on, and in
moments an argument for, corporate purpose. This account of Coppolas
business ideas flows into an inquiry into his aesthetic ideas, starting
with opera as a bedeviled form of modernism in Apocalypse Now, and
then as a form tested anew and reconsidered in The Godfather, Part
III (1990) and Tetro (2009), and, finally, ending with forms of musical
decomposition (i.e. the song collection, the jukebox, the album)or
what becomes Zoetrope 2.0 when Sofia and Roman Coppola inherit
their fathers firm, what Ill also call Zoetrope postmodernismin One
from the Heart and later in Sofias movies, namely The Virgin Suicides
(1999) and Marie Antoinette (2006).
Hippies, Inc: The Rain People

and the Making of American Zoetrope
When in 1969 the Las Vegas tycoon Kirk Kerkorian bought a controlling
share in MGM only to gut the firm by liquidating $62 million in com-
pany assets over the next four years, including its Culver City backlots,
its Boreham Wood studio in London (MGM British), MGM Records,
and fifty years of costumes and props, he became only the most outra-
geous agent of Hollywoods transition into finance capital.63 Many of the
studios bought and absorbed into conglomerates in this era had been
valued as brands, as real estate to be parceled and sold, and, in the main,
as liquid assets. What was most outrageous about Kerkorian is that,
unlike the Gulf and Western CEO Charles Bluhdorn, he didnt even
seem to care about movies; he was simply a corporate raider to whom
the bearishly trading Hollywood studios looked like dollars. In using

the brand for his MGM Grand Hotel, he showed interest in corporate
identity but not much concern for how it derived.
In this historical moment, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas
were trying to pass from being the standout students at their respective
film schools to being figures of consequence in Hollywood industry.
Coppola had been well known at UCLA for having made inroads into
the industry. He had won the Samuel Goldwyn Award for his original
screenplay, Pilma Pilma, a prize that can earmark talent for industry
admission.64 He had also begun working for Roger Corman, the en-
gineer, as Coppola called him, of exploitation cinema.65 Corman, in
fact, took out space in the trade papers to announce Coppolas Samuel
Goldwyn Award.66 Fellow students viewed Coppola, he himself claims,
as the original sellout.67 In the meantime, George Lucas was the stu-
dent across town developing a reputation as the legend of USC. Not
as enterprising as Coppola, Lucas nonetheless impressed his cohort,
including Walter Murch and Caleb Deschanel, with short films such as
The Emperor and THX-1138 4EB.
Though Coppola was more boldly business-minded, he and Lucas
shared a critique of big institutionsan antiestablishment view, if you
likethat made reimagining business practices a first step on their career
path. This critique did not make them loners but rather members of the
burgeoning counterculture, which in the Port Huron Statement desig-
nated its opponents as Big Government, Big Military, Big Business, and
Big Labor too. If the documents authors, the Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS), would be remembered for addressing their most con-
certed efforts to government reform, it should not now be forgotten how
centrally workplace reform figured in their statement. Organized labor,
in their view, had succumbed to institutionalization, its social idealism
waning under the tendencies of bureaucracy, materialism, business eth-
ics.68 If SDS did not make its mark in business reform, Coppola and Lucas
would. Their disdain of workplaces in which the individual is regulated
as part of the system, and their unwillingness to tolerate meaningless
workto crib words from the Port Huron Statementmeant that their
countercultural appearances would do the job of declaring them outsid-
ers of the very industry they were busy making their way inside.69 When
Coppola met Lucas on a Warner Bros. backlot, they gravitated to each
other because they were both very young and both had beards.70

Coppola was on the Warner lot because he was, in perhaps a mis-
conceived choice on his part and the studios, directing the Fred Astaire
vehicle Finians Rainbow. On making Youre a Big Boy Now, an oppor-
tunity granted him by way of his screenwriting services for Seven Arts,
Coppola seemed the right (in his telling, a cheap) director for Finian
after the WarnerSeven Arts merger. Giving him a dated musical, the
studio hoped that Coppola could zip it up and do it la Big Boy, which
is to say they thought he might infuse youthfulness in a pat formula.
He did update it in some respects, such as casting the African American
botanist, Howard, to resemble Stokely Charmichael. This, however, is
where the seams most showed, the problem being, in Coppolas eyes,
how to reconcile the traditions of a 1940s musical theater with civil
rights and other issues of the contemporary time.71
The musical was by then an old and favorite genre of Jack Warners
that had been exhausted, as the recent box office of Camelot (1967) sug-
gested. The whole operation looked shabby enough that when Coppola
found Lucas on set and asked what he was looking at, Lucas replied,
Nothing much. Lucas was there after winning a six-month Warner
Bros. scholarship over fellow finalist Walter Murch, with whom he, while
awaiting the scholarship decision, entered a pact to work cooperatively
in future projects. Lucas came to the studio, history would have it, to
observe its moribund culture. He hoped to learn from the animation
department, but it had been shuttered at roughly the time he arrived.
By default, Lucas was left to observe Finians Rainbow, the only movie
then in production on the lot.
What Coppola and Lucas were witnessing, and in some sense intui-
tively comprehending, was the decay of one style of studio management.
Not only because the movie in production was the last made under the
aegis of the firms namesake, Jack Warner, as Ronald Colby claims.
Not only because they were the only two people on the set who were
under 50.72 And not only because it made no sense to apply the kinetic
pacing of Coppolas Big Boy, modeled as it was on Richard Lesters
Beatles movies, to a latter-day Fred Astaire musical. But, more basi-
cally, because the Warner management layer was unsettled by changing
ownership. Soon it would stabilize, when Warner Bros. was purchased
by the conglomerate Kinney National Services Inc., and a new class of
managers was installed. Until then, Coppola and Lucas critically beheld

The American Zoetrope corporate logo.
the vacuum that needed filling. In their discontent was the germ of
American Zoetrope.
In order to construct their own studio, though, they would need to
make a movie. The firm American Zoetrope, in a curious way, is first
explicated by the movie they made, The Rain People. This might not
seem so curious. Given that their craft was moviemaking, how better
to assert their professional prerogative than through plying their craft
conspicuously well? What seems curious about Coppola, though, is how
deeply he seemed to hold the conviction that prior to making a movie
or any product, for that matterone must first make a satisfying site for
ones labor. Hollywood, as he found it, was a sad, pent-up place.73 By
his lights, it ought to be providing not only a product, something it can
sell, but a hospitable place for creative people to work.74 The identity
between a product and the site of its making is so complete for Coppola,
with the structure of the one mirroring the other, that the imaginary
dimension of his movie, The Rain People, became a key resource for
envisioning the ethical life of the firm, American Zoetrope. That art often
imagines a better world is commonplace enough; that movies should
imagine a better movie studio, less so.

The Rain People, a Coppola-Lucas collaboration of sorts, was a coun-
tercultural statement on screen and off, bent toward imagining studio
operations in terms congenial to youth culture. What was put on screen
largely owes to Coppola, as the plot had splintered from his student
screenplay, The Gray Stationwagon, which followed three women who
had left their husbands.75 The three separate story arcs seemed too
ambitious for their modest budget$750,000 from Kenny Hyman
at WarnerSeven Artsand would have involved a social dimension,
cutting against the lyric states that are the movies core element. From
the larger story Coppola culled the story of Natalie Ravenna, a recently
married woman who awakes one morning determined to leave her hus-
band, we infer, because she married too young, is now pregnant, and
feels stultified by her suburban life. She drives cross-country, early on
picking up a mentally disabled hitchhiker, Jimmy Kilgannon, whom
she cannot shake thereafter. True to the picaresque tale, no plot takes
holdonly a series of disconnected adventures. Some critics have called
it a road movie in the classic sense.76
This classic designation, however, overlooks the significance of it
being a woman who has left home not in search of herself, as is typically
the case for male protagonists in the American romance, but in flight
from her circumscribed role in the family. The movie trades on Betty
Friedans problem that has no name.77 In The Feminine Mystique,
Friedan says, Sometimes a woman would tell me that the feeling gets
so strong she runs out of the house and walks through the street.78 She
notes, too, an article run by McCalls in 1956 called The Mother Who
Ran Away that brought the highest readership of any article they had
ever run.79 These are more fugitive stories than they are quest narra-
tives. If on the surface we see the story of a womans boredom, her iso-
lated moods and subjective dispositions as she goes to encounter a new
range of experiencethe surface Coppola commits to filmin another
register we see the rejection of one regime of labor, deeply entrenched
in postwar culture. The protagonist is a woman because, in this regime,
it falls to women to reproduce the values of such labor in their children;
and she is a woman because Fordism has confined her to the domestic
routine of the housewife, in Friedans phrase, in an inverted image of
her husbands public routine of the company man.80 The two spheres,
necessary complements that they are, must be critiqued at once. This,

we might say, is the reason the historian Daniel Horowitz argues that we
must understand Friedans work as a labor journalist in the 1950s before
we understand her feminist manifesto of the 1960s. The mechanized
housework, so Horowitz says, was one expression of the economy that
mechanized labor tout court.81
The gesture that Coppola and Lucas made off screen, I contend,
is meant to reflect and put itself in a mutually clarifying relationship
with Natalies gesture on screen. First they fled Hollywood to make
the movie, opting to shoot it anywhere but there: at Hofstra, on loca-
tion in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, before
establishing a beachhead in an abandoned shoe shop in Ogallala, Ne-
braska.82 The film crew occupied the store and shipped in extra editing
gear so they could begin a full-scale editing of the movie-in-progress
away from the supervision of WarnerSeven Arts, in a move that would
become characteristic for Coppola, who, even when making the God-
father movies squarely within Hollywood, would find clauses to let him
do post-production work elsewhere, in both cases San Francisco. The
press called this gesture to carry out their moviemaking in changing
areas of production supervision a daring experiment in new production
techniques.83
Coppola and the small crew traveled in a motorcade of station wag-
ons and microbuses; the most innovative vehicledubbed Silverfish,
though the editor Barry Malkin taped a sign on it reading, The Magical
Mystery Tourwas a fully rigged production facility on wheels (with
mixing boards installed within). Radio communication between the vans
was essential, Peter Cowie writes, as usually the next nights destina-
tion was not fixed.84 Their nomadism let them slip Hollywood unions,
but it added the diplomatic task of getting shooting permission in the
random municipalities. Hence, once they left New York, Lucas relates,
[E]verybody had to get a haircut and shave their beards off so that, as
incognito hippies, they could get the cooperation of the various cities
and towns that [theyd] go through in order to be able to shoot.85
In part this caravan lifestyle placed them at a removeWe were
isolated and on our own, Robert Duvall recallsso that they would be
allowed to create a business culture of their own that they could then
transplant to San Francisco, the final destination not for the movie alone
but for American Zoetrope, the firm being germinated by the movie. That

was the final term, after all, and the movie was but a means for it. Making
The Rain People, by every account, was fun for all involved. Those of
us who went along, Coppola notes, including Jimmy Caan and Bobby
Duvall, still talk about the cookouts in the back of the sound trailer.86
The pleasure, though, was professional pleasure. The cinematographer,
Bill Butler, impressive as his credits are (Jaws [1975], One Flew over the
Cuckoos Nest [1975], Grease [1978]), still counts The Rain People as
one of his best jobs. The challenge of having only a minimum number
of lights was considerable, he recalls, but Coppola gives you a lot of
freedom. He lets your creativity work for him.87 Like Preston Tucker, one
might say. Coppola would call this his creative management.88 It forced
one to be inventive, Butler says, and Coppola loves that particular kind
of inventiveness anyway. Butler continues, I dont believe Ive pulled
off more special things for anyone than I have for him.89
Lets consider The Rain People as an experiment in new relations:
labor relations on the set, family relations in the film narrative, and all
these, combined, making for social relations. We should dwell for a
moment on the movie itself, in its capacity as social text. In an effort
to forge new relations, the movie sets itself the task of imagining old
ones, as they disintegrate, becoming the chrysalis for new ones. Unlike
Coppolas subsequent movies, such as The Conversation, Tucker, or
the Godfather movies in their criminal way, The Rain People does not
Sociality on the set of The Rain People.

depict the site of labor. It depicts, rather, the economic substructure
that is the ground for labor. The movie begins with a peremptory re-
fusal of old relations, and the labor regime they fortify, when Natalie
(Shirley Knight) decides to leave her husband. Its most daring move is
the suppression of any direct cause for her decision, situating the story
this way shoulder-to-shoulder with the existential cinema of Europe, in
particular Michelangelo Antonionis LAvventura (1960). Coppola says,
in fact, that he screened a rough cut of his movie for Antonioni, who
liked it very much.90
Natalie, in this act, refuses family as given. This alone led many to
claim The Rain People as an early feminist movie, and further justifica-
tion for the claim is that the movie created a complex role for Shirley
Knight in an era when women had few such roles available to them.
Knight seemed, Coppola says, like an American actress who had some
substance.91 A more thoroughgoing logic for the claim is that feminism
understands, and brings to light, the social construction of the putative
naturalness of family relations. In the first sequence of the movie, Natalie
does precisely this. She flees her husband in the early-morning hours
and visits her mother, from whom, it seems, she expects sympathy. She
gets only her mothers bafflement, which marks the generational dif-
ference between the women. But when her father enters the room, the
scene is instantly reordered. The two women had been held in a single
frame. But the fathers entrance, his mere presence, is feltbefore it
registers visually or aurallyin a cut to Natalie, isolated in a profile shot,
who is then hailed by the voice of the Father. Hi, Nat, he says, in
loving fatherly tones. It is the abruptness of the edit, though, and the
faintly religious character of Natalies posturethe meek surrender of a
supplicantthat give the scene the rhythms of authority unquestioned
and unopposed. Is it alright if I talk in my own house? he will shortly
bark at his wife. No more loving tones, once pressed.
The Rain People gathers its force as social critique, such that it is,
through formal nuance. While Coppola would go on to master a kind
of social narrative, the Godfather movies being the finest example, this
movie is more like a poem. It achieves, Peter Cowie remarks, a blank
verse quality of its own.92 Its poetics are deployed to operate at the level
of subjectivity, its making and unmaking, its finally liquid condition be-
ing marked in the movies title. I will address only a few, representative

nuances in its form. Two aspects, Coppolas precise dialogue and Shirley
Knights flat affect, work in combination. In the dialogue we find a play
on pronounsfor instance, the possessory edge the father so easily gives
the phrase my own house. On hearing it, the audience knows implicitly
how naturally he inhabits his role in the family structure, how needless
a quibble he would find it to say our house rather than my house.
The concern with pronominal identification (I am I, you are you)
is elaborated in a subsequent scene. In flight from home, Natalie stops
at a gas station along the Pennsylvania Turnpike and calls her husband,
Vinny. He tells her to come home, but she declines. I just had to get
away for a while, Natalie explains. The married lady, she was getting
desperate. She begins shifting between first- and third-person pro-
nouns, displacing in her handling of grammar her own experience from
the structure meant to contain it. This is, on the one hand, a question
of who can possess: before marriage, Natalie says, I would wake up in
the morning and it was my day, and now it belongs to you. Vinny can
possess, while she cannot, not by decree of patriarchal arrangements.
On the other hand, what is at stake is Natalies capacity to identify with
the roles on offer. This can come off as madness: Shes pregnant,
Natalie confesses to Vinny. She, me, your wife. It is better under-
stood, however, as a keen sensitivity to the self-alienation so essential
to Fordism; the condition under which one labors, in this system, is in
a highly specialized role within a total operation, but in such a way that
Natalie Ravenna understands

herself from subjective and
objective standpoints at once,
making her seem a split
personality.

one is individually alienated from the yield of that labor. Natalies aware-
ness looks neurotic, even crazy, because she is divorced (to pun on the
marriage contract) from her role and is attuned instead to the system
enfolding it. Her experience is no longer ground-level but is rather that
of the administrator-on-high. Her marriage, experienced objectively
rather than subjectively, lacks the additive that makes the institution
seem emotional rather than what it is, legal.
She takes care to tell Vinny, Its not you, its not you, it isnt, and while
this rings with a familiar breakup rhetoric, we can understand ithaving
tracked the pronoun tensionsto be an entirely true statement. Not only
is her husband, Vinny, guilty of nothing in particular; he is absent in any
substantial form from the narrative. We hear his voice in a phone receiver,
like a sound from the past that travels more slowly to us than the visual sign
of a phenomenon. Mathias Nilges has argued that a narrative pattern of
lost fathers is a symptom of the transition out of Fordism. If Henry Ford
himself counted as the archetypal strong fatheras seen, for instance, in
Upton Sinclairs fictional account, The Flivver King, where Abner Shutt
takes not only a salary from Ford but also advice from the latters Dear-
born Independentit is because he ordered the world of work through
centralized authority. With Fordism outmoded, now a subject roaming
the world, an orphaned, involuntary nomad in search of [a] lost father
marks a large-scale transformation in the socioeconomic structure that
leaves behind Fordisms paternalistic logic.93
It is during the confrontation between mother and father, when the
father asks if he can talk in his own house, that the movie formally
undoes its investment in the family as structuring principle. First we
see the parents in contention, but then we flash back to the scene of
Natalies wedding, with people dancing joyously in a ring. Their joy,
however, assumes a malevolent quality when juxtaposed against the
quarreling parents, with the fathers domination taken so thoroughly for
granted. If Natalies wedding memories once had the effect of binding
her to family, these memories have now been emptied of their affective
content. Natalies flat affect throughout the movie, then, comes from
her lost object of cathexis. Its patriarch now demystified, the society to
come is of indeterminate character.
Natalie herself might will it into being, if she can flee the grips of the
old world. What she does, however, is reconstruct the dead patriarch, this

time in the form of a football player, Jimmy Killer Kilgannon (James
Caan), once a stock figure of masculinity but here a cipher. Killer suf-
fered a head injury at Belmont College, we discover, and having been
paid hush money to leave school, he is now, for all purposes, an orphan
on the road. There is something perverse in his figure, as though the
movie has begun to roll back Natalies fathers masculine authority and
show it in regressive stages. In Killer, Natalie has a man-child that, in
moments, she enjoys manipulating. She plays him a game of Simon Says,
for instance. Her pleasure ends, though, when she sees the long scar on
his head. It seems that the sight of this diminished football playerthe
effigy of bygone authoritysaps Natalie of whatever residual affections
she had for the family structure. She is sickened by Killer now, and is
receding farther from her husband, too.
From here, the movie becomes more and more awkwardly em-
plotted. The figure of natural authority, Killer, is swapped out for a
figure of formal authority, Officer Gordon (Robert Duvall). Neither is
credible authority. It all concludes with Killer, the sacrificial innocent,
dying in Natalies arms. Had the movie been a short subject, limited to
the opening stanza of her flight and her defense of it to her husband,
it would be a well-wrought poem. In the form of a narrative, though,
the movies stabs at mapping the social world (when what it seemed
good at was capturing the lyrical disorder of the subject) dissipate its
overall impact. From reports, we know that the shooting script was
incomplete when the road trip began.94 It was worked out impromptu
with the actors, often in the morning before shooting, or the story took
shape simply from events in progress, town by town. It had all emerged,
anyway, from an imagethe idea of a woman just leaving and staying
in a motel, Coppola saysand whatever might flow from this image
would, as a matter of course, constitute the movie.95 Improvisation was
the keynote, Peter Cowie says. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, Coppola
learned that an Armed Forces Day parade was about to take place, so
decided to use it as background.96
If few people today group The Rain People with Coppolas great mov-
ies, or even recall it at all, it might stem from the movie having planted
its feet in the different, perhaps immiscible spheres of private and public
experience. An image of subjective inwardness, that is, became the ob-
ject of group collaboration. The film crew, prompted by Coppola, was

telling the story of subjectivity, each day at work, but the subjectivity
they were asked to narrate was the kind that could hold in place as the
first term of a new economy. Coppolas later movies often behold the
economy from a topological standpoint. This movie is committed, by
contrast, to working out what we might call a tropological standpoint on
the economya set of tropes that from their narrow vantage could give
figure to a much larger field of activity. How, the movie asks, does the
image of the fugitive housewife alone in a motel give rise to the image
of a different social world?
Im tempted to say this is more than the film medium would bear for
Coppola, at least at this point in his career. The movies title, in any case,
calls attention to its system of tropes. A certain amount of poetic data was
forgiven the film imagewas withheld, too, from its narrationand was
commuted instead to language. The rain people, as Killer describes
them in conversation with Natalie, are people made of rain, and when
they cry they disappear altogether because they cry themselves away.
Peter Cowie, echoing several critics, finds the line pretentious.97 But
when Killer explains that they look like ordinary people, only she is
very, very beautiful and he is handsome, we sense that the movie can
only render its main theme in Killers limited perspective: the ideals
that make a social structure durableHollywoods beautiful dream,
say, of the man and woman at the center of the nuclear familycan
only be seen for their evanescence by the village fool, Killer, precisely
because he, unlike Natalie, has had all his social programming cleared
by compulsion (brain trauma) rather than by volition (self-knowledge).
If an artless device, it nonetheless explains why rain is the element
of the movie. Consider, for instance, the opening shot of a neighborhood
street taken from a worms-eye view. In it, a garbage truck moves toward
us, but what we see most prominently, as a function of our extreme low
angle, is puddled water with rain dappling its surface. Over that patch of
screen appears the movie title. The following shots are largely of water; the
effects of rain, mostly, but we also see Natalie in the shower. The opening
sequence of the movie deploys water imagery for some effect, and the
title affirms the thematic centrality of the effect. Water is the element of
the movie, we will see, because it contrasts with solid-state stability. It
contrasts with concrete structure, with reified social roles, with Killer the
football player, Gordon the police officer, and Natalie the housewife.

A concept from Gilles Deleuze might let us clarify how this trope
gives, or might hope to give, traction on a larger field of relations. In
theorizing cinema, Deleuze names a certain phase or orientation of
the perception-image, liquid perception.98 Within a large phylum he
calls the movement-image (the movement-image and flowing-matter
are strictly the same thing, Deleuze says, a world of universal varia-
tion, of universal undulation, universal rippling), Deleuze locates the
perception-image, which is a gap between the action and the reaction.99
When something is acted on, and there occurs an interval before its
reaction to the stimulus, we have proof of living images; the other
images, as he calls them, act and react on all their facets and in all
their parts.100 Quoting Henri Bergson, Deleuze explains that living be-
ings allow to pass through them, so to speak, those external influences
which are indifferent to them; the others isolated, become percep-
tions by their very isolation.101 Deleuze understands this operation as
precisely a framing, and he thereby takes the cinema as a figure for
understanding perception as it rises and falls, is made and unmade, on
the larger plane of matter. It was the French school, Deleuze claims,
that discovered a subjective frame (i.e. perception), but their habit, as
Jean Renoirs predilection for running water evinces, was to place
this frame in motion, such that the subject never enjoys a stable hold
on itself.102 The medium of water, for them, suggested the making and
unmaking of perception, and hence the possible dissolution of the sub-
ject. Deleuze calls this liquid perception and says that it requires us to
imagine a race of men that breaks links with solid earth, father with
son, husband with wife and mistress, woman with lover, children with
parents.103 The limit case of such cinema would be a drama without
characters.104 Perhaps Joris Ivenss Rain (1929) is the ur-text for this
liquid abstract.105 In any case, we might begin to interpret Natalies
radical break with family, with foundations as such, by way of the water
imagery of the opening sequence. The worms-eye view that initiates
the movie can be taken as the standpoint of the water, pooling on the
street, and if we think of an eye in matter, in a Deleuzian experiment,
we would have to imagine that the water thinks of the asphalt as being
impermanent, porous, and not at all solid.106 What from afar seems a
solid mass would seem, from the standpoint of particle-life, to be matter
easily seeped into and eroded.

While Deleuze often speaks in the language of cosmology (a state of
matter too hot to be able to distinguish solid bodies), I suggest that we
take him here as a thinker of political economy, dedicated, in particular,
to cracking the difficulty intrinsic in conceptualizing the open dynamics
of an economy.107 His concepts, after all, are often crypto-Marxist, as
readers of his and Flix Guattaris two-volume Capitalism and Schizo-
phrenia will recall from its brilliant acts of transcoding. When Deleuze
describes the Open, which refers to the ceaseless reframing of per-
spectiveby turn, the integration of a single-point perspective into the
sets of all activity beyond the frameI suggest that we take this as an
able concept for an economys dynamic operation,108 and for capitalist
economy, to wit, which gains vigor through its capacity to subsume all
practices once alien to it. A closed system is never absolutely closed,
Deleuze says. On the one hand, it is connected in space to other systems
by a more or less fine thread, and on the other hand it is integrated
or reintegrated into a whole which transmits a duration to it along this
thread.109 Deleuzes description can double as an account of capitalisms
inclusionary power in a fashion akin to Joseph Schumpeters efforts to
understand the economy in time.
Why we should take our thinking in this direction is justified by the
imaginative hold this model of economic thought would come to exercise
in American culture from the postwar moment to the turn of the millen-
nium. Schumpeter, matched with the Mont Pelerin economists, helped
eventually to displace equilibrium models to one side, and Keynesian
models predicated on a closed nation to the other side. Brought to bear
on The Rain People, a modest perspective indeed on this unfolding his-
tory, what we see is not some cosmological perspective on rain. In the
opening sequence, rather, we see a highly restricted locus: the suburb,
the emblem of postwar economic stability and of orderly family life. The
rain, most basically, signals the fluidity of this arrangement. Natalies
neighborhood will in time be awash in finance capital, as the ownership
society ushered in by postwar mortgage programs rested on a version
of wealth that does not entail production, only underlying assets. From
our moment in history, we can easily enough narrate Natalies moment
this way: her role in the home would dissolve in the element of finance
capital. Water, we learned the hard way, is a watchword in finance capi-
tal. In Natalies momentwhich is to say in Betty Friedans moment,

tooones eye was likely trained on the task at hand rather than, say,
the media conglomerates that were busy liquidating studio holdings
to cash out the underlying assets. To think of capital this way, we must
first think it through the subjectivities (angel of the hearth, domestic
goddess, the happy housewife heroine) it liquidates as it rearranges
itself. Natalie is something of a case study in such shape-shifting: her
pronoun aphasia is one effect, and the logical corollary to this, her blank
affect (she has no self to order affections), is another.
It is a movie that must be understood within two frames. Its story
qua social text concerns an individuals livelihood. But the production
enveloping itsupporting it, we might sayplaces industrial practices in
a frame. For Coppola, these frames had to be seen in view of each other.
There had to be a movie, an aesthetic act, as it were, to lay out a business
ethos. Ethical commitments first begin in acts of aesthetic reordering.
For American Zoetrope, the aesthetic act was The Rain People; its ethical
counterpart was Lucass making-of documentary, Filmmaker. Coppola
had allocated money in the budget for Lucas to shoot a documentary of
the movies production. In tandem, Coppola and Lucas created a movie
as American Zoetropes commodity and also a production mode as its
unlikely twin commodity.
The Lucas documentary chronicles an ad hoc manner, rather than
a tightly regulated one, in which production might take shape. It was
runaway production, first off, which was itself a mode: escaping Los
Angeles meant escaping its labor regulations. Coppolas statements
on unions, equipment and management thinking, Dan Simons writes,
had been the first phase of his assault on Hollywood practices.110 In the
documentary, he is shown arguing by phone with the directors guild
over their insistence that he take a card-carrying assistant director on
his project, when he had already opted to use his friend, Bart Patton.
This meant, in effect, that he had a redundant position in what was
designed as a lean crew. The same sort of battle would play out in San
Francisco months later, this time in the trades, when Coppola negoti-
ated a concession from the citys craft unions that granted him full
say over daily work patterns so long as he guarantee[d] a 55-hour work
week.111 This flexibility, more than Hollywood workers ever conceded,
signaled that the union [was] taking cognizance of the special problems
of small filmmakers.112 Making San Francisco Hollywood North, as

some called it, happened because the unions there, as Coppola put it,
are more enthusiastic and cooperativethat is, they wanted jobs that
would otherwise flow to Los Angeles.113 Coppola would accentuate his
small stature as a filmmaker, playing unions off each other, to make a
bogey of the big institutions ranged against him.
In Filmmaker, Coppola gives a bravura performance. In his telephone
argument, it is clear that he means it to be a public display, on camera
and likely before the movie crew. Lucas films a performance pitched to
his and Coppolas generation of filmmakers. Once The Rain People was
in the can, Coppola would think of its success as a bellwether for young
filmmakers writ large. The people who will be hurt most if the movie
fails, Coppola says, will be all those others who feel that a meaningful
picture can be brought in on a reasonable budget, and are willing to try
something new.114 On behalf of these filmmakers, therefore, he objects
to the directors guild: Today, you just dont need as many guys. These
young filmmakers can make small, non-union movies, Coppola assures
the guild. A lot of my friends who are ready to make films [ ... ] are
watching very carefullyhence Coppolas current performance!to
see if their films can be made within the establishment. If not, and if
these young filmmakers defect from unions, Coppla asks, What do you
do if suddenly fifteen of the best America filmmakers dont want any part
of the DGA? The assistant director the DGA assigned him, Coppola
later tells the camera, didnt know what we were doing because he was
trained in another kind of filmmaking. In his impromptu style, Coppola
was training this upcoming generation in new industrial methods.
What qualified Coppola to lead his filmmaking generation this way,
past his having already directed three feature-length movies (one for
Corman, Dementia 13, and two for Hollywood, Youre a Big Boy Now
and Finians Rainbow), and past his screenwriting credits (numerous by
then, but most notably Patton [1970]), was his intuition about technol-
ogy. He believed, and continues to believe, that technology creates a
permanent revolution for cinema. When Coppola made ongoing pleas
for reasonable budgets, and when he explained that he made Finians
Rainbow as a Roger Corman cheapie except with a hell of a lot of
guys hanging around, he was rooting his claims in a belief that new
technology had outmoded old production routines.115 After producing
THX-1138, he would boast, Theres no question that THX would have

taken 14 weeks for a major Hollywood studio to shoot. We shot it in
seven. Theres no question that it would have cost them at least $1.5
million; it cost us somewhere near $800,000.116 But before he could
cast off Hollywoods old-fashioned production equipment, and indeed
before he could complete post-production on The Rain People, Coppola
would need equipment.117 Once the principal photography was done
on The Rain People, therefore, he went to the Photokina in Cologne,
Germany, where he learned about the leading edge of technology and
became sort of a minor expert on it, he says, in virtue of inquiring about
it. Much of the problem in American film technology is that everyones
too fast to say, Its no good, he contended, but at least I inquired.118
He returned to the States with a haul that included Steenbeck editing
tables and Keller sound mixers. He already owned two 35mm Eclairs,
several 16mm Arriflexes, and a Super-8mm rigged up with a sync-pulse
generator.119 Indeed, in making The Rain People, he rented [his equip-
ment] to the studio, charging it against the budget of the picture.120
He needed a facility to house his equipment, however, and hence
American Zoetrope was born. It might be worth insisting, rather, that
American Zoetrope was born in the acquisition of the technology, not
in the leasing of the space. The space did not matter, would not define
them, because their utopian spirit rested on the portable technologies
that would emancipate the Zoetrope workers from any notion of fixed
labor. That was the credo, in that moment. It was all part of what we saw
then, Walter Murch later remarked, as the beginnings of the technical
democratization of the filmmaking processwith comparatively little
money you could actually go on the road and shoot a feature film, you
could locate wherever you wanted.121 It is in this respect that American
Zoetrope would realize the business reforms the Port Huron Statement
called for when it wondered why, when our own technology is destroy-
ing old and creating new forms of social organization, people continued
to perform meaningless work. This is the time, Coppola would say
of Zoetrope, for this kind of organization.122
Coppolas idea for the firms facility came from his visit, during his
trip to Europe, to Mogens Skot-Hansens Danish studio, Lanterna,
which was in fact a mansion located in the countryside. Looking like
a European commune, with pretty Scandinavian girls, as Coppola
has commented, it surely evoked the stateside counterculture and the

open lifestyle of Vilgot Sjmans recent sensation, I Am Curious Yellow
(1967). Without much capital, Coppola and Lucas searched in vain for
something comparable outside San Francisco, the city they had cho-
sen as a still-proximate escape from Hollywood. They found, instead,
an affordable warehouse space south of Market Street at 827 Folsom
Street and began to decorate it after a sixties mod fashion, with a pool
table with a pastel felt top, an espresso machine, and the namesake
memento given to Coppola by Skot-Hansen, a Zoetrope. The capital
they did have was advanced to them by the new management at War-
ner Bros., John Calley and Ted Ashley, as part of a seven-picture first
refusal contract Coppola had negotiated. Some would say, Lucas for
instance, that Coppola had buffaloed the executives, who were fresh on
the job after Kinneys takeover of the studio. Coppola, the story goes,
lied to them that he had a prior agreement with Warner. With the capital
outlay, and with the facilities of a nouveau studio, American Zoetrope
incorporated on November 12, 1969. Though a corporation in name,
they presented themselves in different terms. Hollywood took a very
funny view of the whole enterprise, Coppola says. They saw this as
just an old warehouse with a lot of hippies running around.123 Indeed,
the carpenters building the place, Ronald Colby and others recall, were
high on acid while at work. At the studio opening on December 14, 1969,
sponsored by Mayor Joseph Aliotos committee on city filmmaking, the
celebrities of San Francisco countercultureKen Kesey, Bill Graham,
Jerry Garciawere in attendance.
Although the firm was raised on something of a counterculture sensi-
bility, several parts European and several parts stateside, this sensibility
was nonetheless compatible with the family structure. Franciss wife,
Eleanor Coppola, for instance, designed his office in Swedish modern,
Eames chairs on a gold colored rug. In recalling the corporate digs,
she remembers not only the bright Marimekko textiles she hung, but
also the image of six-year-old GioFrancis and Eleanors son who
would die a young manpounding nails in the wall of the new mixing
studio.124 But if American Zoetrope brought family into the workplace,
in a reciprocal action it brought the workplace into the family home,
once sequestered from commerce. Think, again, of Preston Tucker and
the engines built on a kitchen stove. It is no wonder that Coppolas

children grew up to be filmmakers: no separation obtained between his
work life and his home life, a condition that sums up the new economy
for which Coppola agitated.
In this light, we ought to consider the final gesture of The Rain
People. The movie can be interpreted as an effort to imagine new rela-
tions, but these new relations can look like a mere salvage job of old
relations. In the closing scene, Officer Gordon is being battered by
Killer, who had watched Gordon intend Natalie harm. The scene is an
odd one, comprising the widower Gordon and his motherless daughter,
also the motherless Killer, and at its center the pregnant Natalie, the
object of Gordons unrestrained lust. Broken families, in short, contend
with each other outside Gordons mobile home. It looks like Killer,
true to his name, will kill Gordon, but Gordons daughter defends her
father by grabbing his state-issued handgun and shooting Killer twice
in the back. He crumples. In this moment Natalie stares at Gordons
daughter, their glance lasting nearly too long, before she assumes her
Piet ministrations over Killers body.
Some sort of relay has happened, here, between the officers daugh-
ter and the football players proxy mother. Formal authority has elimi-
nated substantive authority, on the one side, and a girl has been pitted
against a woman, on the other side. The law is in crisis, no doubt, as so
much sixties historiography attests it was at the time, but there seems to
be a Hegelian notion of the laws recalibration at work here: the family,
which gives substantive authority to the states positive law, must renew
itself and recover legitimacy on another order. Ill take care of you, Ill
protect you, Natalie tells Killer. Vinny will take care of you. Ill call
him, hell come here, and hell take us both back. What makes the
scene uncanny is that her pledgeAnd well be a familyis made to
a corpse; yet we know all the while that Natalie is pregnant, a pregnancy
she has considered terminating, and which her husband Vinny has finally
given his permission for her to terminate. In this momenton having
equalized relations with her husband, on having flirted with formal law
before returning to substantive authorityshe affirms her commitment
to family again. It might be a cop-out. Natalie may have done nothing
more than emancipate herself within the middle-class structure only to
make that structure more sound.

The Form of the Firm: The Godfather,
The Conversation, and Tucker
One of the more surprising leaps in any directors filmography is the one
Coppola made between The Rain People and The Godfather. If The Rain
People was concerned to recalibrate the lyric voice, and if it placed its
storytelling on the order of impact of a poem, The Godfather was more
like a realist novel, concerned with how people in their private corners
are necessarily cast into relation with a great, teeming society. Just when
I thought I was out, goes the line from the last Godfather, they pull
me back in. The difference is appropriate enough, given the production
situation of the two movies. The Rain People was a personal movie; The
Godfather, a studio movie. Coppola was fond of saying that, for his own
sake, he justified taking on the projectfamously, The Godfather was
offered him by Paramount when no established director would accept
itby committing to alter the type of movie it would be. He would
not make a gangster cheapie but instead would carve from Mario
Puzos novel the more compelling story of the family, this father and
his sons, and questions of power and succession.125 In his hands, the
movie veered from the genres staple theme of class rise and instead took
on the more collective topic of American business. In paralleling mafia
life and our biggest industries, Coppola said, he meant to interrogate
corporate philosophy.126 He shaped the material this way so that he
might convert a genre movie into a personal movie. What Coppola cared
about, after all, was the succession story of corporate philosophy, what
the next generation would do with the firm as a figure of thought and
an organizing device of capital. The Rain People cared about subjectiv-
ity because it aimed to disrupt the social reproduction of certain kinds
of subjects on which Fordism depends. The Godfather took this lyric
subjectivity and pressed it into the social register of opera, where ones
inner voice is meaningful, and indeed gains amplitude, precisely to the
extent that it is projected outward and spread over the great, teeming
chorus of voices. In this sense, a formal analysis of the movie will reveal
that its investment in operatic principles is the same as its concern for
unity in group enterpriseor, in the language of American business, the
firm. In still another sense it is imperative to see how the countercultural
impulses of the era, though in Coppolas idiosyncratic case they were

filtered through the art of opera first, tended to find their way back to
the corporation as their object of rehabilitation. Group life, in this era,
was that much defined by it.
The Rain People was on its face concerned with family structure, but
behind the scenes it was concerned with business structure. The Godfa-
ther was intent instead to show no useful distinction between family and
business. One of its more famous epigrams, This is business, not per-
sonal, becomes incoherent when Michael Corleone shows that deeply
personal conviction must constitute business decisions. Its thesis seems
to be that such a division is arbitrary and can never hold. In this light,
Coppola was able to make a certain kind of argument with the movie.
Whats at stake is exactly what makes a business. This question, some-
thing of a philosophical fascination for Coppola throughout his career,
became one worth arguing when American Zoetrope lost its financial
lifeline. Once established, the firm produced THX-1138cheaply and
quickly, as Coppola braggedand submitted it to Warner Bros., where
John Calley and Ted Ashley rejected not only the movie but the firm
itself. All seven projects Coppola had brought them, including scripts
for Apocalypse Now and The Conversation, were defunded. Not only
that, but Calley and Ashley wanted to recuperate the advance money
that Coppola had already spent in Europe on state-of-the-art sound and
editing equipment. Short on capital, Zoetrope would make commercials,
rent equipment, and so on. In a sense, this stage in the life of Zoetrope
modulated Coppolas very notion of what made a firm: he once thought
owning the means of production was success itself, but now those
meansthe cameras, editing boards, and so onwere without capital
to prime them and rather less useful therefore. Owning the means, in
itself, only meant that he could sell the means, or rent them as he in fact
did, but the property transaction did not interest him, as it was merely
incidental to the workings of a firm, whose nature, Coppola had come
to see, must lie someplace else.
During this crisis, Paramount offered Coppola The Godfather. Since
the project was presold by Mario Puzos novel, it had a chance to be
lucrative and hence return American Zoetrope to solvency. Coppola,
who had cautioned his cohort against genre, first refused the offer. It
fell to George Lucas to persuade him that the fate of their corporate
idea rode on his directing the Paramount assignment. What happened

next, everyone knows: Coppola made a movie that would gross more
than any before it. This turn of the screw, alas, abets a messianic version
of Hollywood history. In it, the maverick little guy defies the hidebound
establishment and, in winning for himself, redeems the greater enter-
prise (the motion picture industry, in this case). Warner executives look
foolish now, such history says, having passed on Coppola and Lucas;
foolish because their passing on talent seems to scantoo easily, Ill
insistas having passed on The Godfather and Star Wars. They were
so focused on money, and the known formula for making it, that they
missed some of the biggest payouts in that decades box office. An em-
bittered Coppola gave the story this cast when, years later, he spoke of
Warners embarrassment over the fact that all these young guys that
they had abandoned were becoming successful.127 The story, though,
is more complicated and more interesting than that. Warner Bros. did
pass on Apocalypse Now, true, though in a time well before movies
were being made about Vietnam, and in a form quite unlike the one the
movie took later in the decade. And they did scuttle their relationship
with Coppola and Lucas, two definitive filmmakers of the 1970s. But the
past is always distorted in the gotcha perspective of the present, where
perfect judgment is vouched us by no longer needing to be exercised.
Calley and Ashley did not, in fact, reject blockbuster movies for lack of
foresight, though they did in this case lack foresight. What they rejected
was a management style, and a definition of the firm, that they found
unrecognizable.
Calley and Ashley were the products of what the business historian
Alfred D. Chandler Jr. has called the managerial revolution. Neither
made movies. Before being named the brass at Warner Bros., Calley had
worked in advertising and then produced television; Ashley had been
a talent agent his whole life, first for William Morris and then for his
own company, Ashley-Famous. That they had backgrounds in market-
ing and talent management, not moviemaking in any facet other than
its deal-making side, would have struck them as right and just. In this
episode of corporate history, after all, management had autonomized
itself. It was a meta-skill that, through its application, could enhance and
make more efficient any given business. The management credo had
allowed the corporation to metastasize into its current form. Breaking
the firms dependency on a charismatic owner, management had let

corporate structure subdivide into many unitswhat would become,
under the original company man, Alfred Sloan, the multidivisional
business. Janet Staiger traces this as a local history within Hollywood
when she notes the passage from the director-unit system, to the central
producer system, and then into the producer-unit system. Articulated as
they were, the studios surely looked like congenial structures to the cor-
porate conglomerate. With a shift onto these ownership scales, though,
the object of corporate management would no longer be movies but
business divisions. The conglomerate, in this respect no more than a
behemoth form of the multidivisional firm, would impose its externalized
management class on Hollywood upon absorbing it. The belief carrying
the daynamely, that management as such could master any sort of
unrelated businesshad the effect of confusing the project of business
management and the project of the corporation as such, making the one
seem a synonym for the other.128
Nonetheless, the corporation, legally defined, has nothing to do with
diversity; it has to do, as the term suggests, with incorporating loose
parts into a single substance. And hence nothing intrinsic to corporate
form requires that management transcend the firms varied functions and
become the unitary substance. Indeed, what American Zoetrope would
propose is that too narrowly business-minded an interpretation of the
firm had rendered it an ineffectual form. The conglomerate, for all its
economies of scale, only dilutes the identity of a brand. How American
Zoetrope would oppose corporate form, and help regenerate it in doing
so, is a main interest in a sequence of Coppola movies running from The
Godfather to The Conversation to Tucker. It is worth keeping in mind
that, after Warner Bros. had weakened Zoetrope as a going business
concern, it survived largely as an idea; but the corporation, we might
say, has lived its whole life as an idea.
The key to understanding The Godfather, I propose, and in particular
the romance it finds in family self-sufficiency and informal economy, is
to return it to the problem of the sixties from which, as a period piece,
it seems to exempt itself. On this note, we might compare it to Patton,
a Coppola screenplay that likewise refracted present history through
the past. Patton is a document of official culture, The Godfather a re-
pudiation of it. When the latter movie opens on Bonasera in full face,
he is being upbraided by the Don for the shameful position in which his

overconfidence in official culture has left him. You had a good trade,
you made a good living, Don Corleone says. The police protected
you, and there were courts of law. But when Bonasera needs justice,
he finds it miscarried by its would-be impartial officers. Official culture
is corrupt, in short, because its officers make it personal: they ethnicize
civil rights, say, when they ought to universalize them. It could never
be otherwise, the Don thinks, self-interest being so basic to the desire
for law in the first place.
This theme is central to Patton, too, in that General Patton was
committed to personal style, as his pearl-handled revolvers attest. Cop-
pola claims that the likeable side of Patton that he pushed forward, to
offset his vicious side, was his being a literary southern gentleman.
In other words, Patton was an anachronism in the armies of an admin-
istered society because he was driven by feudal personality in a time
when only impersonal procedure was thought able to run large-scale
operations. Central as that may be to Patton and The Godfather, a more
telling comparison lies in the formal decision to begin both movies with
direct addresses of the camera. Like Bonasera, Patton faces the camera
and delivers his oration to an audience outside the frame. His address
seems directed, audaciously enough, at us, the spectators. In important
senses, though, there are greater differences than similarities between
Bonasera and Patton: Bonasera beseeches the audience while Patton
hails it; Bonasera has learned he is never more than an immigrant,
hence always an outsider in America, while Patton considers it his duty
to decide what qualifies someone as an American (All real Americans,
he says, love the sting of battle); and Bonasera, for these reasons, is
experiencing a crisis of faith in America, while Patton has no doubt about
it. The difference between the two, in effect, marks the transition from
self-certainty about the American project to self-doubt about it. This,
in other language, has been called the end of consensus.
These two opening scenes overlay each other in significant ways.
In the late 1960s, in the thick of the Vietnam War, both movies fend
off the contemporary moment and opt to set their stories in a histori-
cal past. Coppola insisted on setting The Godfather in the immediate
postWorld War II period. When Mario Puzo adapted the novel, he
had made its setting contemporary, complete with references to hip-
pies.129 Coppola, however, pushed it back to the postwar moment and

General Patton directly addresses the camera.
made its opening scene a nod to Patton, because in some crucial way
the opening scene of the new movie, The Godfather, needed to overlay
the Prussian militarism and consensus politics of General Pattons World
War II. Michael Corleone, after all, gets his training in Pattons war.
Michael will turn out to be a failed product of the postwar consensus, as
it were, because he stops accepting the ideology of what has been called
Military Keynesianismthe comfortable arrangement between wartime
industry and the state that had been the driver of American prosperity.
Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone, the Don had wished for his
son, Michael. Another pezzonovante, Michael says, suggesting that
his fathers wish to formalize the familys success is more shameful than
keeping it informal as they have. A pezzonovante needs a recognized of-
fice to draw undue power in service of his own projects. Michael doubts
this structure. He is the voice from within the structure, casting doubt
on it. This is the relevance, finally, of his nice Ivy League suit and his
military decorations. It makes frustration with the system internal to it.
Consider this within the context of a remark made by Michael Rossman,
an organizer in Berkeleys Free Speech Movement (FSM). Somewhere
in the process of the FSM, Rossman says, the young, privileged, af-
fluent children of the culture began to see themselves as an oppressed
class. Those destined to be the managers of the society, he says, were
the ones rejecting the terms on which it ran.130
Michael Corleone might seem remote from Berkeley student pro-
tests in the 1960s, but this is only the strategic effect Coppola got from

pushing the movies historical setting back two decades. Michael is re-
mote from sixties youth, in consequence, but he still needs to be seen
in relation to them. To give this connection its due force, we ought to
consider another episode in the lengthy wedding scene that opens The
Godfather. After Bonasera, the next guest to petition the Don is the
baker, Nazorine. He asks the Don to stop the deportation of his assis-
tant, Enzo, who had been granted status as a guest worker in behalf of
the American war effort but was now being repatriated to Italy. The
theme of transition from wartime to peacetime economy is thus marked.
Underscoring it, the movie cuts from the Don inside his office to an
exterior shot of Michael in soldiers uniform entering the wedding party
with Kay (Diane Keaton) on his arm. The cut associates Michael and
Enzo, as young men starting careers in the postwar economy, and the
association is not strictly incidental; its reinforced in a later scene when
Michael and Enzo stand abreast on the steps of the hospital, making their
best show of force against the machinery of the statenamely, the cor-
rupt police officer McCluskey, who has in his own interest denied Don
Corleone the police protection to which he is entitled. What is thrilling
in this scene is that Michael, finding his father unguarded in his hospital
room, puts together a show of force through the scant means available,
an altogether impromptu act on his part, and the show of force, though
fake, is successful. Get rid of these, Michael says of Enzos flowers,
and by popping Enzos coat collar he transforms him from baker into
gangster. Put your hand in your pocket like you have a gun, Michael
instructs him. The scene stages the de facto transition of Corleone family
authority from father to son, with Vito on oxygen upstairs and Michael
down below reanimating his fathers power catch-as-catch-can.
Michael, in this sense, is an anachronistic expression of the counter-
cultures frustration with the crony capitalism and state-driven enter-
prises ensured in the arrangement that President Eisenhower would call
the military-industrial complex. If we flash forward to The Godfather,
Part II, which is to say to the mature phase of Michaels leadership, we
see that the first object of the narratives comeuppance is Senator Geary,
a senator the audience is ostensibly meant to oppose because he uses
racist grounds for denying Michael fair terms for a gaming license. Like
Patton, Geary would define the real American, and in Gearys case this
definition is no more than an updating of the Progressive-era defense

of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity as the soul of American identity. His racism,
however, might give us no more than an alibi for our other reason to
hate him while reserving sympathy for Michael. After all, the Corleone
family is not innocent of racism, and hence the audience isnt likely to
elevate Michael above Senator Geary on these grounds. The affective
mechanics that solicit our respect for Michael but our disrespect for
Geary are rooted in the official sanction that Geary enjoys but Michael
does not. Official culture is held in contempt because it impinges on
Michaels economic freedom.
Indeed, Jon Lewis suggests that the movies contemporary audiences
related to Michael not strictly because he fell on the youthful side of a
generation gap the movie was addressinga prominent theme in this
period Hollywood, notably worked out in The Graduate (1967)but
because he usher[ed] in a new, more modern way of doing business.131
This is roughly true, so long as it doesnt turn into a proleptic description
of future audiences who would celebrate the new business credo in a
figure like Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas) from Wall Street (1987).
Michael, in this view, would be an early rendering of the businessman
aggrandized for his greed and ruthlessness. David Thompson later makes
such a claim, noting that the executives for whom Michaels influence was
most enduring were those in Hollywood industry.132 What constrains him
in the role of homo economicus, however, must be understood in relation
not to the future moment of Reaganomics, nor to the past moment of
postwar optimism, which is to say to the diegetic moment of the movie,
but rather to the moment of Coppolas early career, the New Hollywood.
In this moment, while Hollywood tried clinging to tradition, it seemed
that everywhere else there were radical denunciations of the state and
the system being sounded by members of the New Left.133 If SDSs
Carl Oglesby, say, represented a more disaffected view of Americas
political system as an inner oligarchic power sphere that had the CIA
contract its skills out to ITT to destroy democracys last little chance
in Chileand its worth noting that, when Coppola claims violence as
part of legitimate business, he uses ITT as his examplethen its more
mainstream critics, such as Richard Kaufman in the New York Times
Magazine, decried it for placing in check the competition that he deems
the main engine of capitalism.134 In Coppolas moment, the senators and
their appropriations, the Department of Defense and its contracts, and

Ominously, Senator Geary represents white
Anglo-Saxon official culture.
the corporations and their lobbies were fixed in an official arrangement

that was corrupt enough to deserve whatever undoing it got. Imagined
from this perspective, the senator had, ex officio, earned the audiences
disrespect.
Before we consider what the movie is offering in place of official
culture, we should look at the scene in the first Godfather that holds
roughly the same structural place Senator Gearys episode does in the
second movie. This is the scene with Jack Woltz (John Marley), the
studio boss at Woltz Pictures. The movies are structured in roughly the
same way, with the important exception that the second movie inter-
calates the story of Vitos ascendancy into the story of the established
family. The first Godfather opens on the wedding of Vitos daughter,
with Vito carrying on business throughout, and the second opens on
the first communion of Michaels son, with Michael likewise discharg-
ing business all the while. Where Michaels business is an intransigent
senator, Vitos had been an intransigent studio boss. Johnny Fontaine,
Vitos godson, could not get a movie part he is perfect for, according to
Woltz, who for personal reasons wants to run him out of the business.
Its personal, too, for Senator Geary, who says, I dont like your kind of
people. The language Geary uses (your oily hair, dressed up in your
silk suits) echoes Woltzs (with his olive oil voice and guinea charm);

their scenes of comeuppance, in turn, mirror each other, with Woltz
waking in bloody sheets, a severed horse head buried within, and Geary
waking with a dead prostitute, the texture of bloody sheets once again
being the lurid visual effect. What needs to be remarked in these rhym-
ing scenes is that we start in the Hollywood industry and move beyond
to the more recognized arena of official culture, American politics; in
this movement we trace the itinerary of Coppola and Lucass project,
which took Hollywood as its first object of reform but would necessarily
reconstitute its object of critique as Keynesian economy at large. This,
despite their being apolitical otherwise.
What needs to be stressed now is that Coppola made The Godfather
in between the establishment of two businesses, American Zoetrope
and the Directors Company, which gives the movie the peculiar status
of being a lacuna in Coppolas experiments with corporate identity. He
was, for The Godfather, a director-for-hire. Making the movie gave him
a chance to cope with, and process, what seemed the failure of Ameri-
can Zoetrope and to consider what exactly constitutes business success.
In his next movie, The Conversation, Coppola had a greater degree of
independence, or at least it would look that way: he shot on location in
his adopted city, San Francisco, and for a subsidiary firm in which he
had an executive share, the Directors Company.
The following discussion charts, on the one hand, a progression
within Coppolas movies in how the firm, qua idea, is represented, hence
making for a highly localized intellectual history of the corporation in
the 1970s; and it registers, on the other hand, just how sensitive the
form-content admixture of Coppolas movies was to the companies that
authorized their making. It progresses through The Godfather, a movie
about family business; The Conversation, a movie about an owner-op-
erated business; and Tucker, a movie that averages both these business
structures, and as such becomes a movie about how a discourse of the
firm has regulated what business can do. The discussion requires three
steps. First, I offer detailed readings of scenes from The Godfather to
show what seems to be a refinement in Coppolas concept of the corpo-
ration. Next, I consider how the paranoia of The Conversation makes
sense in light of the intellectual compromise with Paramount that the
Directors Company proved to be. And finally, I analyze Tucker in formal
terms to understand what has been called Coppolas postmodernism,

on display there and in the sequence including One from the Heart and
Rumble Fish (1983). What counts as postmodernism in this series is a
tendency, both instantiated and critiqued within the movies, for signify-
ing practices to subsume the processes of production and warp them in
doing so.
Family Capital
For The Godfather Coppola needed an additional tte--tte between
Vito and Michael that would fill out their relationship, but never hav-
ing found time to write the scene, he famously farmed it out to the
screenwriter Robert Towne. This is the scene in which Vito confesses
to Michael his unrealized hope to have legitimized the family business
via Michaels installation in official culture. What needs remarking is
not simply the scenes narrative function but its structural function.
While the father-son relationship is here more fully characterized, it is
done by spoken means. By this I dont mean only that it is dialogue-set
exposition. Rather, it is a bit of spoken connective tissue between the
more extravagant set pieces that the movie uses elsewhere to convey
information. I want to suggest that by putting this scene in relation to
others, we will understand how the principles of opera give the movie
its form. This spoken exposition, a respite from the dramatic pitch, bears
to the set pieces elsewhere the same relation we find in the recitative
(singing patterned on ordinary speech) and aria (singing structured by
expressive melody) in opera.
The recitative scenes in The Godfather give shape and texture to
the social ties between characters; its arias show moments in which
characters try to extricate themselves from, and lift themselves above,
social ties. The ariatic moments, such as Michaels stand at the hospital
or Sonnys murder at the toll booths, are grand displays of voice, pro-
vided we understand voice in cinema in terms of visual demonstration.
These arias do depend on the dimension of sound, potentially even on
the score as such, but their quality of expressive voice is better described
as a fusion of audiovisual design. Consider, for instance, Sonnys aria,
which Ill mark as beginning with his sister, Connie, answering a phone
call from her husbands mistress. The scene begins with an empty, black
frame, over which we hear the shrill ring of the phone. The phones ring
introduces the refrain of strident noise that will mark time throughout

this aria. It will be relayed, next, through Connie and Carlos screaming
match, the cacophony of Connie breaking dishes, the slapping of Carlos
belt strap, and then a jump in location, from Connies apartment to the
Corleone home, cut together by Connies scream transferring to a babys
scream, as Sonny takes Connies phone call. Then, the near white noise
of car tires grinding around a gravel drive, followed by the excessive
rat-a-tat machine-gun fire at the toll booths, and then the final rise of all
this cacophony into the melody of Nino Rotas theme. The tight design
of this passage is revealed not only in sound design, but in the editing
pattern, which throughout Connie and Carlos fight is carefully staged
in sequence shots, cut together, at points of emphasis, by countershots
and orchestrated camera distances.
The careful design of this passage, we soon realize, mimics the care-
ful design of the plot: Carlo had it all planned, his beating Connie and
her bidding Sonnys defense, which would place Sonny at the toll booth
at the designated hour, where Carlo had sold out Sonny to the Barzini
family. Properly speaking, this should be called the Connie-Sonny aria,
because it casts in balletic form what we might call the agonistic bond
of family of which Connie and Sonny are the avatars. Family is affirmed,
for them, in scenes of violent love. Sonny will expose himself when he
turns to violently avenge his sisters injury. Sonny, therefore, could only
die a violent death, its gruesomeness in exact proportion to the charge
Sonnys aria.

of his emotional life. This passage, to put a fine point on it, needs to
be understood as an expressively saturated mode of characterization
in counterpoint to the mode of characterizationthe recitative, as it
werecarried out in ordinary speech. The former is, finally, the ordinary
life of the latter raised to the condition of music.
Interesting, in this context, is the fact that the Connie-Sonny aria was
shot as it was because the Paramount executive Robert Evans, feeling
that there was too little action in the movie, had threatened to send an
action director to deliver the scene. Coppola and Evans were often at
odds, and they have kept up hostilities over the years. But lets entertain
the possibility that Evans suggested more action not to harass the
young Coppola but on the intuition that, in a movie so symmetrical
weighted at both ends with ceremoniesthe Connie-Sonny set piece
was structurally necessary as the counterpart scene to Michaels set piece
at the hospital: in one aria, Michael ascends; in the other, Sonny falls. The
one complements, and indeed explains, the other. Sonny falls because
he too rashly arrogates the familys voice. He tries not to, by biting his
fist as though, like a cartoon character, he might bottle up the voice,
but his incapacity to mete out his words is part of his nature. Michael
rises on just this capacity. And his set piece at the hospital, though it is
predicated on his capacity for decisive action, is marked by the theme of
regulated speech. When Officer McCluskey arrives, Michael asks him,
Whats the Turk paying you to set up my father, Captain? McCluskey
then punches Michael and breaks his jaw. After this, Michael speaks
differently, his voice trained by a clenched jaw for only the most neces-
sary use. His cheek is swollen, at first, such that he resembles his father,
Vito, whom Marlon Brando famously gave bulldog cheeks by stuffing
them with tissues in his screen test.135 And even as Michaels swelling
goes down, he shows a bruise there throughout his stay in Sicily, which
attests that his jawbone has been restructured. Michael inherits the voice
of the family, in other words, only on the condition that he be pained to
use it wantonly.
In this light, we can think of the tte--tte between Vito and Mi-
chael as the structural complement to another recitative scene, the one
in which Vito does business with Sollozzo in the office of his olive oil
company. This scene outlines not only how the family does business,
but more fundamentally what counts as a business in the first place.

Michaels broken jaw is proof that he has
restraint enough to use the family voice.
Crucially, it is all routed through the exercise of voice. What is outlined

is the form of the firm. The firm, as theorized here, is not strictly a mat-
ter of voice; it is a matter of how the voice is given a transpersonal and,
indeed, a family structure. The scene begins with a canny edit. In the
preceding scene, Vito had been at home in consultation with Tom and
Sonny, planning their response to the backing Sollozzo requested of
them. This scene of the family home, however, is intercut with scenes
of Sollozzos arrival at Vitos office. As Tom profiles Sollozzo, it flashes
forward to their eventual meeting with him but then cuts back to the
Corleone home in parallel fashion. The effect is to interpenetrate not
only the temporalities of the planning and execution of business but
also the spaces of home and business. It gives us to understand that the
family plans its business style before acting it out. The home consultation
concludes with Sonny asking the Don, So whats your answer gonna
be, Pop? And though we have little doubt that he shares it with them,
the movie conceals his answer from us, for the moment, by way of a
contemplative rest from Vito and a cut to Sollozzo now in the Dons
office. The cut creates suspense, of coursewhether Vito will move
the family into the drug racket is deferredbut it also makes a point
of Vitos silence. He will not speak in anything but a unitary voice, and
only when addressed by Sollozzo and in view of the gathered family.

And the Don speaks in very deliberate tones (I must say no to you,
he says, and Ill give you my reasons).
Carefully considered, we can see in this modest scene the outlines of
the movies overall formal and thematic strategies. While Vito speaks on
behalf of the family, he does so in what first appears to be an individual
agon between himself and Sollozzo. This is formally signaled by a shot-
countershot pattern that alternates medium close-ups of Sollozzo and
Vito. Only when Vito asks Sollozzo about the interest of the Tattaglia
family does the shot pattern break to include, by way of Sollozzos eyeline
acknowledgment, a medium close-up of Tom. My compliments, toasts
Sollozzo, thereby showing that whatever Vito says is underwritten by the
research and the cunning of the entire family. The shot-countershot pat-
tern of medium close-ups, however, is only broken by a long shotand
a long shot that finally reveals that Vito is flanked by familywhen he
stands and readies to deliver his answer. What this form tells us is that
the work of many, by some odd calculation, must find articulation in the
voice of one.
This is the form of the firm, and it is thematically explicated, in short
order, by Sonnys seemingly uncalculated objection to Sollozzo, Are you
telling me that the Tattaglias will guarantee our investment? Sonny has
not been authorized to speak, we understand, and when he does he re-
veals that the thin justification for the firm is its defense against exposure
to the interests of the marketplace. The economist Ronald Coase had
famously explained the emergence of the firm in just these terms. Coase
argued against the orthodoxy that the price mechanism alone organized
the economic system, explaining instead that what marks the firm is
the supersession of the price mechanism by another relationan in-
ternal rather than external relation.136 We can call this internal relation
hierarchy. Sonny at once recognizes a solecism in Sollozzos promise
that the Corleone million will be guaranteed by the Tattaglias. Sollozzo
is saying something confused: the Tattaglias, though entering a market
contract, are willing to extend their internal protections to an external
party, the Corleones. It sounds like a world without risk, where the pro-
tections of the family extend endlessly throughout societywhere the
seam between one family and another, that is, never shows. However,
internalizing costsconstituting a firm, in other wordsis undertaken
explicitly in response to the costs incurred outside in a radically uncen-

tered and unpredictable marketplace. Sonny gets this, it seems, but in a
crucial way he doesnt get how the firm must act. The firm acts as a uni-
fied aggregate, as a lump of butter coagulating in a pail of buttermilk,
in the effort to deny the randomizing effects of atomistic markets.137
When Sonny speaks without authorization, he is meeting the market
on its terms and, in turn, annulling the form of order raised against it.
He isolates himself as an individualNever tell anybody outside the
family what youre thinking again, the Don reprimands himand he
will be sacrificed therefore.
Much as this delineates the form of the firm, it is hard to overlook
that in The Godfather its a family, not a firm. This, Fredric Jameson
has argued, is the movies utopian function.138 It redescribes business
in terms of family itself.139 Against contemporary anxieties that late
capitalism had eroded the family bond, Jameson says that the ethnic
group can seem to project an image of social reintegration by way of the
patriarchal and authoritarian family of the past.140 The ethnic identity
of the Corleones is arguably what makes their family seem close-knit
next to, say, Senator Gearys family of convenience (he visits prostitutes
for pleasure, we infer, but has a wife for professional appearances).
This is a fair take on the movie, but Jameson perhaps mistakenly deems
this recourse to family strictly an ideological sop when in fact it was, in
Coppolas case, something more like pragmatic advice for Hollywood
conglomerates. The insight is basic enough: the hierarchy of internal
relation seems noncompulsory when described in terms of family rather
than business. A parent is different from a boss, because a parents sup-
port is not tied to ones performance. Hegel called this an ethical relation
in its immediate phase, which is to say it happens without the media-
tion of an outside party such as the state.141 Employment relations, by
contrast, were thusly mediated; a legal history attends them. Coppola
needed to turn back the clock to gain this insight, not because it derived
from a chapter of mafia history but rather from early stages of corporate
history.
For the business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr., this insight
animates the personal capitalism that set late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century British firms apart from their American and German
counterparts.142 British firms did not, on balance, develop a management
class as did American and German firms. Instead they were personally

managed, Chandler explains, which means that the owner of the com-
pany also managed operations, and because it is biologically impossible
for the founder of a concern to manage it in perpetuity, management of
a firm would be extended through the family.143 In an important sense,
this makes the legal notion of corporate personhood intelligible, as the
person can still be construed in biological terms and legally anchored
by what Hegel calls family capital. As an example of the British family
firm, Chandler cites Cadbury Brothers, Ltd. Long a family-run firm,
Cadbury is a useful reference point for Coppolas latter-day designs on
a corporate utopia. The Cadbury brothers relocated their factory out-
side the urban center of Birmingham and planned open-air houses and
recreational areas for workers that would come to be known as a fac-
tory in a garden.144 The Cadbury brothers were utopians, in short, who
based their companys moral ethos in their Quaker beliefs.145 Limned
in this precedent, one can already see Mogens Skot-Hansens bucolic
production facilities that would one day inspire Coppolas blueprint for
American Zoetrope, flung far, as it would be, from the industrial quick
of Hollywood. For an example closer to home, one might consider Walt
Disneys Hyperion Avenue studio, which represents the halcyon moment
when the Disney Company was still run on a family ethos, with Walt
involved in every phase, before the firm expanded and faced the 1941
labor strikes that would signal the companys new juridical character.
The examples pile up. We might find one in Zoetropes contempo-
rary, BBS Productions, a Columbia small unit run by Bert Schneider,
son of Columbia president Abe Schneider. In view of these examples, we
have occasion to see how The Godfather can be indexed to a historical
imaginary of the corporation. Of equal importance, we might consider
The Godfather trilogy an interested survey of the historical vicissitudes
of the family firm: how it is, for instance, that the family idea is at risk
of being penetrated and organized altogether by business values. Busi-
ness must be run like family, in other words, but family cannot be run
like business. This is the lesson that The Godfather, Part II carries. It
is a critique of the various skewings to which Hegels family dialectic is
historically vulnerable. Even in Hegel, the equilibrated state in which
a family becomes one person and its members become its accidents
is thrown off by a situation in which women enjoy substantiality only
in inward life and not in full actualization.146 Men, by contrast, do

enjoy their wills becoming actualized substance in the state (i.e. in
public life).147
This occluded dialecticat the level of the family, but thence con-
taminating society at every levelis what The Rain People had meant to
redress. But in the closing shot of The Godfather, we see that Michael
has hijacked the family idea: in barring Kay from his office, he has taken
what fell to him as the Corleone identity, short-circuited any progres-
sive logic within it, and plunged it back into a bygone era. This is why,
we can now assert, the second Godfather is narrated within a historical
perspective: we see the feudal warlords of Sicily on one end, and the
guerilla rebels of Havana on the other end. Michael is wary of the reb-
els because their fellowship, unified in the name of Cuban autonomy,
raises them to another order of force. They can win, he says of the
rebels, because the soldiers are paid to fight, the rebels arent. In short,
money is weak incentive. This is true not only for an army but also for
a business. Vito Corleone understood this, seemingly, for he declined
Sollozzos offer of easy money in the name of his business identity. Its
true I have a lot of friends in politics, he conceded, but they wouldnt
be friendly very long if they knew my business was drugs instead of
gambling. He guarded the familys business identity, on the one hand,
while he protected it from the distortions of the profit motive on the
other hand. It is no surprise that Coppola should use Cubas situation
to make this point. The bottom-up spirit of their revolution, after all,
looks much like Zoetropes business model. After studying Cuba for the
movie, Coppola later visited and was impressed. In terms of this new
culture, Coppola said of Cuba, the first thing I started to see is that
the people seemed to be wired together in a singularity of purpose ...
everyone is connected to some idea and that makes people feel good.148
We see in Coppolas future movies a sober recognition that the idea of
a bottom-up ethos, in business as in politics, will often be exploited as
the appearance of an enterpriseeveryone likes the terms democracy
and autonomyeven after its substance is lost.
The Paranoid Style in Corporate History

This lesson gathers its force in the formation of the Directors Company,
a corporate entity that called up the appearance of Zoetrope but none
of its substance. And the lesson is given form in The Conversation, the

lone movie Coppola would make for the company. Per agreement, the
Directors Company would have had him deliver more movies. However,
the Directors Company, as Peter Bart has put it most laconically, was
never really a company.149 The narrative of its formation sounds differ-
ent depending on who tells it. Jon Lewis describes it as the brainchild
of Frank Yablans, Paramounts president, whereas Michael Schumacher
credits the initiative to the Gulf and Western CEO (and, thereby, Para-
mounts owner) Charles Bluhdorn, who felt that Hollywoods underclass-
men, a.k.a. the movie brats, had graduated from making arty, film-school
movies to the more grown-up world of big commercial pictures.150 In
this latter scenario, Yablans was largely the public front for a project
authorized above him. The project, no matter its long-term success, is
an interesting one, particularly for the perspective in which it places
Coppolas business philosophy.
In 1972 Paramount deputized Coppola and his fellow directors Pe-
ter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin as the heads of an autonomous
production unit within the larger studio. Under the initial plan, Bart
explains, the three were not only free to choose their projects (within
certain budgetary limits), but could also exercise complete creative
control. Moreover, each could name a youthful protg who would
also make a film for the company.151 If one were to ask why these three
directors, the answer would be as simple as recent box-office tallies: The
Godfather, The Last Picture Show (dir. Bogdanovich, 1969), and The
French Connection (dir. Friedkin, 1971). The company was formed,
in short, on the misguided notion that these three filmmakers shared
the goal of crafting their generations sensibility into some commer-
cially viable new cinema. This might describe Friedkins ambition. He
worried from the start, Bart recalls, about the projects his colleagues
were selecting and personally favored more commercial fare.152 But
Bogdanovich meant less to channel a new sensibility than an old one,
namely Orson Welless: when he brought Bart his protg, indeed, it
was Welles (not at all youthful), and when Welles suggested he read
Henry Jamess Daisy Miller, Bogdanovich made it his next movie for the
company.
Coppola, in contrast, was concerned less with a new cinema than he
was with the business unit that would allow its making. When taken as
a statement on career-making, The Conversation attests to the kinds of

distortion a business idea is vulnerable to once the source of its motiva-
tion changes. We should bear in mind that The Conversation was part of
the slate of movies Zoetrope sold to Warner Bros. as the original future
of their firm. That original future mutated, of course, and in turn the
Zoetrope version of The Conversation was never made. When Coppola
signed on for The Godfather, Paramount had to pay Warner Bros. the
money it had not recouped from Coppola. The effect was that Cop-
pola now owned this slate of movies once more, and his filmography,
in between Godfather commitments, would be dedicated to producing
Zoetropes ideasits future, as it wereunder different corporate signs.
And under the sign of the Directors Company, The Conversation became
a curious treatise on the reason for doing ones job. The reason for doing
ones job, it declares, is not to deny but to affirm ones connectedness to
people, but the singularity of purpose, or the source of connectedness,
cannot be money. This is why The Conversation thematizes prostitution
as a binding double of work life.
Coppola prefers to analogize work and prostitution not in moralistic
suspicion of either but rather as a prescription for adding love to make each
bearable. Thats being a prostitute, in a way, when youre making films as
a job, he says. But if I were a prostitute, I would only spend the night
with someone I could find something to fall in love with.153 The limita-
tions of this analogy notwithstanding, it works as thematic infrastructure
for The Conversation. In it, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is among the
best in the field of surveillance, perhaps the best bar none, as his com-
petitor Bernie Moran tells him. He is self-employed, an owner-operator,
and while the opening scenes of the movie suggest that others work for
him, it seems they do so on a job-by-job basis. Stan (John Cazale) is his
assistant, but that doesnt last. The logic of the material requires that Harry
and Stan cannot be bound in a lasting work relationship. For Harry there
is scarcely any form of internal relation, such as is constitutive of a family
or corporation; he knows only external relation, vouched in money and
hence abrogated as easily as any sales transaction. In his case, therefore,
everything outside the self is available only in the act of prostitution. In
some sense, this is Coppolas most pragmatic statement on working not
only in Hollywood but in capitalist society more generally. The point of
the movie is to caution against mere pragmatism as the grounds for doing
ones work. Harry, in committing absolutely to a model of work organized

by money, must fend off paranoia as the upshot of these beliefs. Were he
to remain an economic individualpragmatically attuned to the money
relation rather than ideally insulated by the corporate relation (this being
the force of the movies argument)then Harry would plunge irretriev-
ably into a paranoiac condition, in the effort to guard himself from others
and them from him.
Consider the scene in which Harry visits his girlfriend, Amy (Teri
Garr). Amy is, it seems, the closest Harry has to a personal relation-
ship, but the salient point of the scene is that Harry pays her rent. He
is a john, by the logic outlined above, and this means that it is not a
personal relationship but a professional one like the rest. What this
scene draws forth, though, is the paranoia that is the simple corollary
of Harrys fastidious effort to keep the personal and the professional
separate. Though it would seem that Harry and Amy have an ongoing
affair, she knows nothing about him: not his job, not his residence, nor
even that her not having his phone number is a result of him (allegedly)
not owning a phone. Amy learns that this, the day of his visit, is Harrys
birthday and suggests that it might hence be occasion for her discover-
ing something personal about him. Their relationship, such that it is,
comes offrather awkwardly, in factas the staging of a counterfactual:
what if we void the most personal of our interactions of their personal
content altogether and replace them instead with professional impera-
tives? What would a relationship be like if we knew absolutely nothing
about our partner? This scene suggests that the vigilance needed for
keeping apart the personal and professional would leave one always
paranoid that they were merging behind ones back. When Amy sings,
Wake up, you sleepyhead, her offhanded choice seems to Harry filled
with cosmic design: the song is the same one sung by the subject of
his surveillance, and now this unknowable fact of his professional life
is known by Amy, as though she has access to his headspace, which
should be, Harry thinks, his last impregnable space. In the moment,
we might think Harry is losing his grasp, that the labyrinth constructed
around his private self will now disintegrate, piece by piece. Indeed,
this is one way to interpret the plot as it unfolds from this scene. This,
however, is a weak interpretation, focused only on the movies investment
in generic protocolsits noirish treatment of privacy, urban space, and

their volatile combinationbut unconcerned with the stakes involved
in Coppolas using the genre. The stakes, I contend, are those of ones
labor. The counterfactual has been staged to show that the reductio ad
absurdum brought about by conducting ones personal life in profes-
sional terms will equally be brought about if one bars personal feeling
from professional life.
The lesson Harry learns herethat one can remain indifferent in
neither personal nor professional lifeis confirmed in the subsequent
plot. Harry leaves Amys that night with a newfound disregard for the
propriety of personal and professional spaces. What his work has con-
cerned, at this juncture in the plot, is the making of surveillance tapes
of a young couple enmeshed in a conspiracy about which Harry knows
nothing. They could be adulterous. They could soon be murdered. He
has no knowledge, since the limits of his assignment are, quite simply,
to make a recording. His assistant Stan asks, Whos interested in these
two anyway? Harry answers that he doesnt know and admonishes Stan
for needing to be entertained byi.e. interested inthe job at hand.
The interest lies elsewhere, Harry believes, with those paying for the
job. Harry assures Stan that he doesnt care what the couple is saying; he
only wants a nice, fat recording. He defines himself, at this stage, as a
technician. But his visit to Amys signals a change in his self-conception.
When Amy asks Harry about his job, he tells her he is kind of a musician,
a freelance musician. In the moment we might write this off as part of
a ruse to deprive her of personal connection with him, but the movie is
intent on us taking Harrys claim at face value. We know this because in
the next scene, he enters an office high-rise that, in all its modernist chic,
we are meant to associate with corporate rationality. When confronted
with the firms impersonal protocolsa secretary who will receive his
deliveryHarry resists, No, Im supposed to hand it to him personally.
Even the directors assistant, who tenders Harry his fifteen-thousand-
dollar compensation, is too impersonal a proxy. He refuses the money,
keeping the tapes instead. Harry resists the depersonalization of his
work at the hands of this large, seemingly unknowable capital structure.
The reason, we come to see, is that his work has effects, as his past has
taught him, and he needs to control them. He prefers to relate to his
work, in short, as an artist, not as a technician.

Harry Caul in the impersonal settings
of the corporation.
His status as a technician will come to seem more disingenuous than

his self-description as a musician. He has always cared about his work, it
turns out, but the liability this poseda family was killed, we learn, due
to his workled him to suppress any personal feeling in his professional
labor. It had nothing to do with me, he says of the murders. What they
do with the tapes is their own business. But Harry left New York after
this job, suggesting that his personal implication made it impossible for
him to continue working there. His guilt now pervades his dreams. Im
not afraid of death, Harry says in a dream sequence, but I am afraid of
murder. Much like the earlier staging of a counterfactual, the murder
that is the outcome of Harrys work is part of the films rhetorical strategy:
a hyperbolic way to imagine work as an expression of ones connected-
ness to others. If the way you performed your work sentenced people
to death, that is, would you continue to perform your work in that way?
The same was imagined in The Godfather, when it supposed that the
liability in exercising transpersonal power (that exercised by presidents
and senators, say) must be construed in terms of people being allowed
to live. Presidents and senators dont have men killed, Kay says. Oh?
Whos being nave, Kay?
What seems to hold interest for Coppola is not the probable truth of
such claims but their rhetorical effect. And in The Conversation, the plot

remains murky, noirishly aloof, so that its argument might be advanced
more bluntly. At no time is it stated more directly than in its second,
most unmistakable act of prostitution. Because Harry will not tender
the tapes (i.e. his work) to the firm, its officers must hire a woman to
seduce them away from him. Meredith hangs around Harrys workspace
after a party, and though things had been festive there only moments
earlier, Harrys thoughts are again dominated by his work. He listens to
the tapes once more, analyzing their content as a student of music might
a difficult composition. Shes frightened, he says of the recorded con-
versation, plainly concerned for the subject of his surveillance. Forget
it, Meredith says, its only a trick. A job. Youre not supposed to feel
anything about it, youre just supposed to do itthats all. She then turns
her own trick, sleeping with Harry and stealing his tapes, making her at
once the femme fatale of this noir tale and the avatar of its demonized
white-collar soullessness. We know to associate her with the ethos of
the organization man and the scientifically managed corporation; the
movie has told us to. Meredith had worked in New York, she says, first
as a receptionist, then as a secretary, then as a gal Friday, and finally
as a special assistant to the boss, and then I married him: telescoped
in Merediths character is Hollywoods satiric outlook on corporate hi-
erarchy, from His Girl Friday (1940) to The Apartment (1960), wherein
women do menial work for the firm so that they can marry money, and
men advance in the firm so that their power can attract pretty women.
Harry, we understand, works for different reasons. He studies his
work as an artist would because it involves his whole person. His claim
to being a freelance musician means, simply, that he has an affective
relationship with his work; he is not alienated from its effects. This fact
is conveyed in more ways than one. Coppolas movie, its often recalled,
was inspired by Michelangelo Antonionis Blow-Up (1966), in the main
lines of its plot, anyway, and perhaps too in its core philosophical con-
cern. Antonionis movie had depicted a photographer, Thomas, who
alternates between commercial and artistic workfashion photography
for-hire, and social documentation for himselfand who in the course
of his work is forced to reconsider what his medium can bear. The still
image, Thomas learns, imperfectly discloses the truth of a situation. In
order to frame an ontological disquisition on the medium, Antonioni
had begun and ended his movie with a mime troupe. The mimes recall

early motion pictures for us, and the way the subtraction of sound threw
the medium into a productive dependency on the visual dimension.
Consider how Thomas, when in the final scenes he plays along with the
mimes, begins to add sensory details where there are none: an invisible
tennis ball nonetheless produces a sound. The mimes hence bookend
an inquiry of another kind into the ontological difference between still
and moving images (Thomass pictures and Antonionis picture).
In The Conversation, Coppola riffs on this structure in a manner so
subtle that it risks passing our notice. The movie begins with a zoom-
in on Union Square, the site of the conversation, but the site too of
pedestrian traffic eclectic enough to motivate the appearance of both a
mime and a jazz band. Here, the mime merely evokes Antonioni, but it
does not appear again in the end. Rather, the jazz becomes this movies
bookends. In the final shot, Harry, now aware that he himself is under
surveillance (The bugger got bugged, as Bernie Moran quips), sits
in the corner and plays saxophone for the agents of the firm listening,
he presumes, on the other end. In short, the medium is deployedin
Coppolas movieto unsettle what had been a neat divide between
private and public space. There is no moment between two human be-
ings, Moran had boasted, that I cannot record. And the conflation of
private-publicwhen Fordist labor had turned on their separation (i.e.
you are off duty or on the clock)is now recast as the professionalization
Harry Caul plays sax for his corporate audience.

of ones personal life. Harrys final act of defiance is performed on the
self-expressive instrument par excellence, the saxophone: he renders
the firm his art, no remuneration needed. The statement, of course, is
that Harry works from his own motivation, not theirs.
What remains to be answered, then, is if the movie proffers this
rather utopian idea of unalienated labor, why it does so in such a paranoid
milieu? The movie carries a paranoid ground tone, I contend, because
it registers a failure to coordinate personal projects with the corporate
project. It is the failure of the Directors Company that The Conversation
foretells, a failure that is but an epiphenomenon of the original failure
of American Zoetrope. On the fate of the Directors Company, Coppola
has said, There was disagreement between us and Paramount, and the
reason we ultimately liquidated it was because Paramount never really
wanted there to be a company with the autonomy that we wanted.154
Paramount did not want to trust Coppola and his colleagues, Bogdanov-
ich and Friedkin; it only wanted rights to their most profitable movies.
It did not want to extend these directors protection under its financial
aegis, as Coppola saw it; it only wanted versions of them alienated in
their products. The Godfather mattered. The French Connection (1971)
mattered. Harrys tapes mattered. But Coppola, Friedkin, and Harry did
not. Harrys efforts, if interpreted from Coppolas standpoint, should be
coordinated internally (in a corporation, a family, i.e. a support system),
not externally (by the price mechanism). And in this light, the Directors
Company was nothing but a perversion of American Zoetrope.
Grounding the Corporation

For the moment, and for a strategic reason, we will bypass an important
phase of Coppolas careerfollowing his 1974 coup dOscar, when both
The Conversation and The Godfather, Part II received Best Picture
nominations and the latter film won it, Coppola began an embattled
decade-plus in the industry during which his corporate innovations,
while in some respect laying the bedrock for New Hollywood, would
make him persona non grata in the industry. His excesses of this period,
Apocalypse Now (1979) and One from the Heart (1982), and the public
spin given them, left Coppola a director-for-hire in the years 198387.
Our focus now will turn, instead, to the film narrative culminating this
period, Tucker, a work that counts as the last exegesis (to date, anyway)

that Coppola would dedicate to his business idea. If his work had hitherto
derived a kind of utopian energy from believing that by his own interven-
tion he might reshape the economymight set the conditions, that is,
for his own workthen its easy to see Tucker as Coppolas concession
statement that, in fact, business is not the domain of contending ideas.
Business, rather, is the domain of contending interests, where the sup-
pression of ideas is as likely as their realization.
Coppolas concession to this realpolitik outlook on labor is marked,
poetically enough, by the inversion of his relations with George Lucas.
Where once Coppola was Lucass patron, as Lucas was brought around
to the belief that his art need not be incompatible with Hollywood
business, by the time of Tucker it was Lucass turn to act as Coppolas
patron. When Lucas split from Coppola, precipitated by and marking
the end of Zoetrope, he formed his own company, Lucasfilm, which
signals in its very name that the community orientation of Zoetrope
had given way to more individualist enterprises. Now we have each
founded our own production houses, Lucas said. Coppola Film and
Lucasfilm.155 He said this in September 1977, just after the release
of Star Wars, the movie that would make Lucasfilm a massive suc-
cess relative to the intermittent successes of Coppolas companies.
In forming their own companies, Lucas and Coppola separated out
their sensibilities, which had worked in combined force for Zoetrope.
Francis spends every day jumping off a cliff and hoping hes going to
land okay, Lucas said, but my main interest is security. Though he
would claim they shared a goalWe want to make movies and be free
from the yoke of the studioshe did not see the project of redefining
business practices in the name of such freedom as a happy one. When
asked, Are you having fun being head of Lucasfilms? Lucas answered
decisively: No. I dont want to be a businessman.156 He considered
himself more of a technician, or, as though part of a craft economy,
an artisan-cameraman.157 And if it was great when he and Coppola
were together, because their differences complemented each other,
by the 1980s it was also an irretrievable part of the past.158 By then,
Coppola, having worked for-hire on Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and
Gardens of Stone (1987), required Lucass clout to regain his autonomy,
in some small measure, and get financing for his own project, Tucker.
He felt humbled, he claimed, in asking Lucas for support. I wanted

to do something with George, Coppola said, but I didnt know if he
wanted to do something with me.159
The adjusted power differential between Coppola and Lucas takes
expression in Tucker as an unequal partnership between form and con-
tent. While critics disparaged the movie for this reason, and audiences
were nonplussed in kind, this nonetheless makes it one of the more vexed
and interesting documents of New Hollywood self-knowing. This owes
chiefly to Coppola and Lucas holding such radically different views on
what gives the corporation its proper grounding. In my earlier discus-
sion of Lucass cathexis on underground and experimental art (despite
his having produced very little of it) as the counterpart to his phobia
of mainstream and routinized commerce (despite his having produced
great amounts of it), it should be clear that Lucas did not believe that
art should acknowledge in its very form the social demands placed upon
it, not insofar as these demands are overwhelmingly those of the mar-
ketplace. He believed, rather, in the denial of such demands; this is
why he doesnt enjoy being and doesnt want to be a businessman,
because when in that mode he cannot be an artist. The split, for Lucas,
is so absolute that his art must repress present-day commerce in favor
of nostalgic pasts (the artisan-cameraman) or far-flung futures (Star
Wars, here, as the daydreaming done during Lucasfilm board meetings).
His ex-wife Marcia, Lucas relayed, said that he either live[s] in the
past or in the future, never in the present.160 This is one way of saying
that he did not liveat least not in good faithin the moment of the
corporations hegemony.
This is why Lucas wished for Coppola to reconceive Tucker in the
mode of Frank Capra. As noted earlier, Coppola had first conceived
Tucker in rather more epic terms, drawing into its narration the lives
of historical personages such as Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie,
but presenting this narrative in musical form, replete with Brechtian
devices. Instead of a philosophical inquiry, Robert Lindsey says, as
Coppola might have had it, Lucas preferred, in his own words, an
uplifting experience that showed some of the problems in corporate
America.161 Lucas, in short, gave an odd prescription for both an expos
and a feel-good movie, two kinds of story that might not fit cheek by
jowl; and for him it would seem that Capraand what Jon Lewis calls
his peculiar populismwas a kind of philosophers stone that could

turn the former story into the latter, that would convert the highly me-
diated environment of the corporation into an individualized setting of
immediate action.162 And perhaps Capra had this value. The content of
the Tucker storyan indomitable little man has a dream, as Lewis
puts it, of defying an indomitable big systemsounds enough like
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
(1939).163 But Capra told these tales in the interwar years, and only Its
a Wonderful Life (1946) played for postwar audiences (whom Capra had
kept primed for such stories, its worth noting, with his Why We Fight
films). In Jack Nerabs account in The Hollywood Reporter, Coppola at
one point had even tried recruiting Capra himself for Tuckers story, but
Capra turned it down because the story is not, in fact, one of individual
triumph. However reliable this account of Coppola approaching Capra,
it is indeed the case that when developing the script, Coppola and Lucas
hired Arnold Schulman, who had written one of Capras last films, A
Hole in the Head (1959).
The point to be made is that telling a Capra tale after its historical
moment had lapsedafter the form assumed by such tales stopped
resonatingwould, Coppola understood, leave the content inert, a mes-
sage hanging in midair. Coppola took the real aesthetic problem to be a
historical reckoning with the contents formal calcification; a problem,
he believed, that would require an attack on form itself. This led crit-
ics to miss the point, as well see, and complain that Tucker is no more
than an exercise in style. But the critical force of Tucker depends on our
taking into account the corporate populism that licensed a Reagan-era
modification in what we might call the deep structure of the corpora-
tion whose yield would be a privileging of its signifying practices over
its labor practices. In short, what this meant in the Coppola-Lucas col-
laboration is that Coppolas hope of orienting the corporation around
satisfying labor had been superseded by Lucass compromise that the
corporation might give labor some berth in relation to its satisfaction
of the market. Corporate form, in itself, would offer no shield against
market forces but rather, in the form of the bottom line, would be led
entirely by them.
The most powerful account for how this played out in Hollywood
is Justin Wyatts study High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hol-
lywoood, which explains the industrial restructuration known as New

Hollywood as the effect of marketing strategies reaching down into the
very planning of film production. Steven Spielberg is the director most
intimately associated with high concept, as he was known for his pen-
chant for deliberating upon marketing schemes in advance of principal
photography.164 And it was, of course, with Spielberg that Lucas enjoyed
his most fructifying collaboration after Coppola. So when Coppola came
to collaborate with Lucas once more, it was in the context of the over-
turning of American Zoetropes credo of utopian labor spaces. Granted,
in Lucasfilm was preserved something of Zoetropes inviolable regard
for creative labor. Indeed, the president of Lucasfilm, Gordon Radley,
says of the firm, I dont know another company like this one because
Lucas is not motivated out of a desire to make money but rather to
follow his vision.165 However, now his firm protects not film labor writ
large but instead only its specialized sector of tech workers. The total
media enterprise must be profitable if the creative labors of one small
branch are to be free and untrammeled. This, anyway, seemed to be
the philosophy behind Lucass business activity.
Even if this dismayed Coppolahis utopianism, after all, was more
grand-scalehe understood it to be the new order of Hollywood busi-
ness. His only recent success, Peggy Sue Got Married in 1986, was
phoned in. If thats what they want from me, Coppola fretted, Ill
give it to them.166 If Coppola seemed to accept this business ethos, it
would only be prelude to him making a retreat similar to Lucass into
more sectarian forms of autonomy. He claimed that Tucker would be
his final Hollywood movie in an interview with Robert Lindsey for a
New York Times Magazine story. Two weeks from now, he said, Ill be
done here. Ill be free to do what I want. Ill be able to focus on things
I want to do, not what other people want.167 And, indeed, the domina-
tion of his labor by what other people want were the terms on which
he made Tucker. He assented to Lucass idea for the movie because he
knew George has a marketing sense for what the people might want.
And what Lucas wanted, Coppola explained, was to candy-apple it up
a bit, make it like a Disney film.168 In Tucker Coppola would make this
movie in the only way he could understand it: as a disillusioned account
of the illegitimate grounding of the corporation in a commitment to
signifying practices that told people what they wanted rather than to
labor practices that let people do what they wanted.

The real feat of Tucker, finally, is a deformation of content. The
critic Stuart Klawans claims that the movie poses a problem of imita-
tive form.169 The movies form, that is, imitates advertisingnamely,
a Tucker industrial film. It begins not as a 1988 Paramount Pictures
megaproduction, Klawans explains, but as a 1948 promotional piece
for the Tucker Corporation, complete with bad color and kitschy music.
But it does not stop. When Coppola cuts away from this frame to begin
the story proper, Klawans continues, he has the nerve to be more hokey
than the publicity film.170 The movie never lets us escape from market-
ing language, verbal or visual, and hence never gives us any distance
on its problem: this is not a movie about marketing cant, with movies
an art form and advertising a hoax, but a movie about arts complicity
with, and its perfecting of, advertising hoaxes. This is pop art; this is
Hollywood postmodernism. The movie begins with a series of corporate
logos, first the Paramount mountain, then a gold-plated Lucasfilm, and
then the Tucker hood ornament. These logos mirror each other in an
infinite regress that J. D. Connor says neoclassical Hollywood movies
anxiously perform to stabilize their brand. In a kind of logo bleed, as
Connor dubs it, the logo detaches from its title card and merges into
the very diegesis of the movie.171 Here, however, the two authorizing
brands, Paramount and Lucasfilm, pass into their authorized fiction, the
Tucker Corporation, which was once as real-world as the Paramount
and Lucasfilm brands that have authorized its necessarily fictionalized
reappearance. What is fictionalized, that is, and what has been autho-
rized to be so by Paramount and Lucasfilm, is that this movie is a form
of public relations between its firms and their audience. This must pass
for fiction, though Coppolas movie threatens its status throughout.
Even as the promotion begins, even as its stock sales voice crows
about the Tucker car, Pretty, isnt it? over an image track of the car
weaving through picturesque golden hills, the voice checks itself, as if an
admission that the selling cant begin straightaway: Mr. Tuckers car has
everythingpop-out safety windows, rear motor. ... Oh, but Im getting
ahead of my story. It then cuts to a photo album with the Tucker hood
ornament embossed on its front, as though Tuckers childhood images
have been retroactively shot through with the corporations brand. As
the Tucker film (the promotional film, that is, within Paramount and

Lucasfilms promotional film) rolls on, were told that Preston Tucker
never lost sight of his dream, which was to design and manufacture the
finest automobile ever made. And as the words design and manufac-
ture sound, we see in the frame two different forms of text, one diegetic
and another nondiegetic. In an image of Preston Tucker and his wife,
we see behind them a banner that reads Automobile Manufacturers
Exposition. This is the diegesis, as were accustomed to understanding
it. Over the same image, a credit for Tucker (Coppolas movie) reads
Sound Designer and underneath, Richard Beggs. The image and
sound track have been coordinated, in short, so that the salesmans
voiceover will read the words design and manufacture as we read these
very words within the frame, once in the diegesis and once outside it.
While we think of car manufacture, then, we necessarily think of sound
design as a phase of film production.
The design of the movie bares itself, and it will bare itself again and
again. To take only one instance of the movies ostentatious design, it
makes a point of staging all phone calls so that the people on opposite
ends of the line are in the same space, with only thin illusionistic effects
to suggest that they speak to each other from two distant spaces. Design
is so much the essence of the movie that its raised to the level of hyper-
design. For some critics, such as Terrence Rafferty, this is its problem.
Both people and objects seem overbearingly designed, Rafferty com-
plains, so that everything has a single, programmed significance and
nothing is accidental.172 No scene bears out Raffertys criticism better
than Abe Karatzs (Martin Landau) early visit to the Tucker household
to discuss venture capital for Prestons idea. While Preston asks Abe
whether Wall Street can float stock issues for an idea so revolution-
arywhen whats being revolted against is the Big Three trustthe
Tucker kids are in the next room playing the board game Monopoly.
The chosen childs game is, proof positive, the work of overall design.
This love of design transports us at once into the past and the future.
On the one hand, there is the nostalgic design of the period piece being
staged for us, everything in 1940s style. Here we perhaps make contact
not with Capras time, but with Capras images of that time. On the
other hand, there is the futuristic design of the Tucker car, its rocketship
likeness, being staged for the characters in the diegesis. When Preston

Tucker unveils drawings of his car, his brother-in-law asks, Who are we
gonna sell em to, Buck Rogers? Its easy to hear this as a reference to
Lucas himself, who claims to have loved the Buck Rogers serials (and
other old sci-fi serials) and to have based the formal design of the Star
Wars movies on them. Its a futurism inscribed in a remembered past,
a most complicated mediation, that is, of the present. And in this light
we can see Tuckers drawings of his car as something like storyboards
for the Star Wars movies, filled as they are with vehicles of the future.
And, of course, this subjectautomobilesunites Coppola and Lucas,
the two of them being owners of some of the only extant Tucker 48s, but
in this moment the automobile joins their interest in a very complicated
mediation of the present-day mode of production and the fetishized
product designs it supports.
The puffed-up formalism of Tucker registers a malfunction in the
mode of production that is always hidden by a most artful deflection of
our interest, from the thing to the imagined thing. Tucker, crucially, is
about the act of selling in the absence of a product. While Tucker had
imagined innovations in a product, he was forced to advertise the image
because he never had the capital to realize it as a product. The crux of
the narrative is when Tucker, at a soda shop with his family, sees that a
man is convinced that some advertised prefabricated housing is of high
quality simply because a magazine tells him it is. Have you seen one of
these houses? How do you know theyre any good? Tucker asks him,
adding, Theyre not even built yet. So what? the man responds. It
says so in the magazine! As Coppola remarks of the films form, We
wanted the movie, in a way, to look like 1940s advertising art. He
wanted the look and feel of the new advertising phenomenon in
the moment, he says, that color advertising started to appear in the
magazines, giving people a taste of what the new product and the new
period of postwar American preeminence would bring.173 The moment
of Tuckers epiphany, in other words, is sparked by the magazine format.
Coppolas act is hence what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call
remediation, an act in which one medium tries to internalize for itself
and transcend the properties of another medium.174
Coppolas remediation, though, is an interrogation not of the pow-
ers reposed in any given medium, and certainly not of the historical

moment of magazine glossy advertising; it is, rather, an interrogation of
the power that reaches across media platforms and merges cross-media
messages into something charismatically transmedial. It is an interroga-
tion of Coppolas historical moment of media industry conglomeration.
Lucas, from some perspectives, was seen as having an answer to media-
market fragmentation. Because he could exploit ancillary markets and
merchandising tie-ins, Jon Lewis says, he brought to the industrys
attention a model of pre-selling films as multi-industry products.175
But the movie seems to critique thisthe turn to Coppola Film and
Lucasfilmas the cynical application of auteurism. When the name
floats free of the medium to sponsor come-what-maywhen in the
movie Tucker is told, Were not just selling cars, were selling youthis
obviously threatens to sever naming power from material reality. And
the movie, of course, delivers us this premonitory warning: the Tucker
name sits atop a factory that produces nothing, and is the title of a
movie that rejects its own content. In short, Terrence Rafferty gives a
perspicuous account of the movie when he writes that its complexities
lie in the relationship between the movies content and the form that
the director has imposed on it, and this relationship, misaligned as it
is, protects us from coming into contact with anything real. Rafferty,
however, deploys this as criticism of the movie when it is nothing more
than a description of its project.176
Preston Tucker learns the value

of advertising language.

Vocal Apparitions and Corporate Personhood:
Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, Part III, and Tetro
We can now return to the period of Coppolas professional undoing,
from Apocalypse Now to One from the Heart, in light of the corporate
failure that Tucker documents. My gambit is that we can only understand
Apocalypse Nowan aesthetic fever dreamif we consider it in rela-
tion to the trajectory of Coppolas business idea, American Zoetrope.
My point, put another way, is that we will only understand Coppolas
unfolding aesthetic if we map it onto his theorizing of the firm as it is
expressed, piece by piece, in his business enterprises. One plank in his
aesthetic was this notion that representation, conventionally understood,
should be short-circuited, such that a movie could not remain a consum-
able artifact without reference to its site of production. The two sites,
I have argued, were reckoned together in Coppolas work. This can be
recognized, at times, as Brechtian method, wherein a main goal is the
audiences forced awareness that what they are consuming has been, and
is being, made. Miriam Hansen remarks that the devices in Apocalypse
Now create Brechtian distanciation so we might understand that the
war is being produced as we are perceiving it.177 But Hansen is canny,
I think, when she goes on to qualify the effect as dislocation, not dis-
tanciation. The spectator is not ejected from and made external to
the spectacle, she argues, but is caught in the mechanism with which
the filmlike war, like historyis being made.178 Hansens insight is
crucial, for it does not rely on figuration of the external and the inter-
nal, but rather on undivided figuration. The spectator has no escape,
being at once included in the process and captivated by its effect. The
real phenomenon of being in that situation, being in the middle of
that jungle, and dealing with all the unfriendly elements, Coppola has
said, was part of what the movie was about.179 The makers, in short,
could not help but make their production-side experience the audiences
reception-side experience.
Hansens insight can be taken to account for another plank in Cop-
polas aesthetic: namely, his credal formulation of opera as a unitary fig-
ure of just this kind. The purpose of what follows is to explain how opera
might be understood as a form of irreducible figuration, privileged by
Coppola because it could not be broken into parts and still remain itself.

Further still, my purpose is to show that Apocalypse Now is precisely
the moment in Coppolas career when doubt is introduced into operas
power of wholeness. It is still a high modernist movie, however, not the
postmodernist movie that, say, One from the Heart so surely is. That, I
argue, owes to Apocalypse Now being a record of Coppolas struggle to
shore up this unitary figure despite its functional impossibility. After it,
Coppolas cinema will lapseas will his belief that business can have
right orientationinto variants of the postmodern cynicism we find in
Tucker. When he tries to reconstitute it, as he will, his cinema becomes
consecrated not to opera as an active principle but as one irretrievably
lost. Once we grant this, The Godfather, Part III and Tetro become
fully intelligible, not only in their appearance as fallen versions of
the original Godfather (Tetro, I argue, is the illegitimate sequel to the
original, every bit as much as the eponymous third installment is) but
in their curious and nonstop internal divisions within, and consequent
misrecognitions of, the family.
Coppola was part of a generation of filmmakers that displayed an
outspoken debt to opera. Luchino Visconti might count as a forebear
rather than member of this generation, but his exampleas he moved
between cinema and opera, cultivating an aesthetic by crossing the
mediais central to Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, and
Hans-Jrgen Syberberg. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were
an equal influence for Coppola, as will become clear in the analysis of
Tetro. In discussing what it means for opera to influence cinema, I will
draw on Michal Grover-Friedlanders book on the topic, perhaps most
conspicuously her title, Vocal Apparitions, which asks that we consider
the stability of relations in what she calls the vocal-visual dyad. This
term describes the structure of image (audio-vision, for Michel Chion)
peculiar to cinema and opera alike, though the two arts negotiate such
structure in, as it were, different dimensions. In Coppolas cinema, its
worth remembering that operas influence is rooted in family; his father,
Carmine, was a musician of classical training (who later would contrib-
ute music to his sons movies). Francis grew up in a musical household,
where family life and opera nested one in the other. In our family life,
his brother August has explained, there was a belief in opera. If you
sat at the family dinner table, he claimed, you would understand why

opera was born. When one of us was singing an aria, the rest had to stop
and listen.180 And being a childhood mainstay, its not unexpected that
opera remained a point of reference throughout Coppolas adulthood.
Indeed, once The Godfather established Coppolas Hollywood career,
he chose to direct Gottfried von Einems Visit of the Old Lady for the
San Francisco Opera.181
Though this registers as his only professional endeavor in opera, he
often used the art as a mediating term in social situations. In Cuba, for
instance, he recalls that though his tour group was first greeted with some
suspicion by Captain Lindsay (a comrade, Coppola reports, of Fidels in
the Sierra Maestra), by the end of the first night he was drinking daiquiris
with him and singing songs from the famous Cuban opera, Cecilia Valds, a
work that Coppola had gotten to know with his father. In another anecdote,
Eleanor Coppola notes that while Apocalypse Now was in production in
the Philippines, she and Francis sheltered members of the crew from a
heavy storm in their rented home while Francis blasted La Bohme full
volume on their phonograph.182 Against the fragility of the social world,
that is, Coppola sets the operas logic of coherence. Because as a logic it has
been historically overcomethe cinema having a centrality in twentieth-
century culture that opera does not is a kind of proof for thisCoppolas
cinema is constitutively exposed to incoherence.
My purpose is not to theorize intermedial relations between cinema
and opera, nor even to account for the broad relevance that opera had
for Coppolas generation. I find it suggestive, of course, that it was es-
pecially relevant for German, Italian, and Italian-American filmmakers,
not simply because two main traditions of opera are German and Italian,
expressed in an ultimate contrast between the barked Sprechgesang
and the legato Bel Canto. But just as suggestive is what I take to be a
homology between opera and the corporation in intellectual histories
in which the German imagination conspicuously marked itself off from
the Italian. These suggestive facts give a deep background for my pur-
pose, which is to show how operaand the history of ideas it encodes
in its German and Italian traditionsgave compass for Coppola, since
he was interested, as few have been, in the principles of aesthetic form
and corporate form in equal measure.
Why these forms should overlap at all, when intuition tells us that art
and business exist in discrete zones, is best illustrated in their common

effort to solve a core problem of modernity: how it is that communi-
ties are organized and subjects integrated into them in the absence
of transcendent values? An irresolvable question, certainly, but opera
nonetheless can be understood as an effort to answer it. In the form of
opera, Ivan Nagel argues, we can find the crisis of authority that results
from the passage from traditional society into modernity.183 Once bound
metaphysically to authority, personhood now consults itself for self-
definition. Hence opera seria, Nagel says, always unfolds between two
estates, with the menacing one called god or monarch on one side,
and man as subordinate on the other side.184 The no-longer-natural
relation between these two estates is the social problem that opera
takes for its object. For Nagel, this finds its high expression in Mozarts
opera in the effort to circumscribe that place at which the sovereignty
of the One is supplanted by the freedom of the individual.185 Call it
the work of modernity, maybe the work of democracy, it is here being
carried out in an aesthetic key. And for this reason, many have found it
appropriate that Orpheus is the first figure of opera, for as an emblem
of self-expression, he is called upon to reconcile his subjective powers
with the object world. He is the lyric poet whose music, to gain a social
function, Joseph Kerman says, would have to inflame ... the most frigid
of minds. This is the ultimate step from the lyric to the dramatic,
and opera makes it by recruiting Orpheus for its project.186 How the
individual voice, i.e. lyric, is integrated into a community of voices, i.e.
drama, amounts to the architectonics of opera.
But for this Orpheus is an odd figure. In both Monteverdi and Gluck,
Orpheus loses Euridice outwardly in exchange for his inner formation.
Because Orpheus cannot finally shape the outside world, he will anneal
his inside world against ithis subjectivity will be reinforced, that is, by
canceling the object world. On the face of it, the source of the subjects
unitary form seems to be lyrical inwardness, but it comes from without.
This is the trick, so to speak, of modern subjectivity: its source, lying
in society, must be concealed if it is to give unityor its appearance,
anywayinsofar as the predicate of society, difference, cannot be ratio-
nal grounds for unity. Its an obstinate paradox, displayed throughout
the intellectual history of modernity, but for my purpose the point is
that opera has given this problem musical form. It is, Nagel argues, the
paradigm for Mozarts opera, where the act of autonomy is modeled

on magic, not on instrumental reasonthe individual can round his
existence into a whole, and absurdly enough, as Nagel says, if, in
Goethes words, quite unexpected things from outside come to his
aid.187 We see this dependent relation between the free self and the
sponsoring polity, too, at the heart of Georges Bizets Carmen, when
Don Jos is caught between the love given him by society, the orphan
Micala, and the love he gives himself, the Gypsy Carmen, and on fol-
lowing Carmens credo (Libre elle est ne et libre elle mourra [Free
she was born and free she will die]), he finds not his freedom but his
doom. And we see in Richard Wagners Lohengrin, too, this prohibition
on the subject discovering its source of autonomy. In it, Elsa is granted
freedom, and her community assents to it, so long as she does not inquire
into the identity of her liberator. Once she does, the strange mechanics
behind her autonomy are exposed: she was freed by Lohengrin, guard
of the Holy Grail, the sacred blood of which is the transcendental guar-
antor of community oneness. This bond obtainsit is transcendentally
inviolableonly insofar as no one asks about it. If proof is demanded,
the bond is gone. If any backing is demanded of the autonomy society
grants, that is, it quickly becomes clear that nothing lies behind societys
order; what it grants is provisional, not some endowment from above
but some loose pact made within. Hence when Don Jos sets out to
encounter his freedom in its absolute form, as when Elsa needs to know
her freedom beyond its tenuousness, there is nothing to find: the subject
finds its center gone and its self-issued autonomy collapsed.
I choose Bizet and Wagner here because Nietzsche chose them as
composers in whose aesthetic difference, it seemed, he could not help
finding political implications. In argument with Wagner, Nietzsche said
that Bizet better understood operas power: What is good is light.188
What light refers to, here, is not content (serious/frivolous) but struc-
ture (inwardly sound/outwardly fortified). When making a distinction
between the men, Nietzsche referred to regional climateBizets
southern, brown, burnt sensibility versus Wagners damp north
as if to make their aesthetic beliefs reducible to national character.189
Less a concern with climate than with politics, Nietzsches point would
be that Bizets opera is vigorous for finding sufficiency intrinsic in the
voice, whereas Wagners opera is moldering for its needing some ex-
trinsic resource to complete its effect. Wagner, Nietzsche finds, did not

trust his medium. Wagners claim that his music was not mere music
revealed this, insofar as no musician would say that.190 It could never
be music merely. Doubts that the medium can carry meaning in itself
are of the same substance as doubts in the audience. Bizets music
treats the listener as intelligent, as if himself a musician, while Wagner
treats us as ifhe says something so oftentill one despairstill one
believes it.191 Because no medium can alone bear the meaning of the
work, which is a disguised fear that no one audience member singly can
inherit the meaning of the work, Wagner turned to construction of the
Gesamtkunstwerk. The total work of art, as its known, concatenated
the various artspoetry, music, and dance originallyto form a site,
as did Greek theater, in which sociopolitical and cultural unity would
be fostered among its spectators.192 This is unity through massifica-
tion, which is gigantic, Nietzsche says, but not beautiful. 193 It might
overwhelm with what is great, sublime, gigantic, but it fails to imagine
the mutuality that Sartre would later state as the existential relation
between art and audience, wherein the work appeals to the freedom
of other men so that, by the reciprocal implications of their demands,
they may re-adapt the totality of being to man and may again enclose
the universe within man.194
This debate over aesthetics sounds different when transposed into
jurisprudence, but it bears on the same intellectual problem: namely, the
means of figuring the unitary character in a body of people. The problem,
in fact, called for solutions in aesthetics (opera), politics (the state), and
business (the corporation) that, no matter their efficacy individually,
mark the conceptual order of modernity. If Wagner bungled things, in
Nietzsches opinion, by requiring an associate work, thatching together
piece by piece the work of the separate arts, jurists would handle it dif-
ferently in theorizing the corporation. The parts do not matterthis
legal tradition saysto the entity created by way of them. This is the
tradition that German jurists such as Ernst Zitelman were articulating
against a Roman tradition of associative wholeness.195 Opposing a view
that a corporation is merely an abbreviated way of writing the names
of the several members, Zitelman held that there was a corporate
organism possessing a will that is for that reason a real person.196
The corporation is not shorthand for an enumerative act that might go
on ad infinitum; instead, it unites itself in its will, and here Zitelmans

language (emheitlichen Willen) recalls Schopenhauers Wille for the
good reason that he was born into a Schopenhauerian mid-nineteenth-
century Germany. His and other German theories of the corporation,
whose importation into common law would give its corporate theory a
coherence otherwise lacking, derived from Schopenhauers concept of
will, as did Nietzsches earliest thinking on music qua the immediate
language of the will.197 Corporate personhood and operatic subjectivity
may each be incoherent finally, but they are incoherent for reasons of
common intellectual descent. They form a discourse on unity within a
differentiated wholeunity-in-difference, in shortfor which Wagner
is one kind of emblem in the popular imagination.
That, anyway, is how Francis Ford Coppola would use Wagner in
Apocalypse Now. In one of the movies canonical scenes, Colonel Kilgore
(Robert Duvall) orders that Wagners Ride of the Valkyries accompany
the air-cavalry helicopter strike. The image of this helicopter fleet ris-
ing over the horizon with the sun, a display calculated to scare the hell
out of the slopes, according to Kilgore, is the image par excellence of
Wagnerian militarism. What I shall do here is consider Coppolas twofold
uses of Wagners opera. On the one hand, his movie deploys it as part of
its effort to produce total milieux, and this ought to be read critically as
the imperial projects need to impose artificial environments. Wagnerian
pageantry always conceals nature in artifice, and its military application
would simply be self-reproduction on the greatest scales. On the other
hand, Coppolas movie continues to express an interest in the operatic
themes outlined above, in particular questions of personhood in relation
to a unitary polity. In this context we can assess Apocalypse Nows choice
to narrate the Vietnam conflict in terms of a U.S. military operation to
terminate its own colonel (But this time it was an American, Willard
says, and an officer). Not only is Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) no
longer recognized as a citizen within the U.S. polity, but he seemingly
forfeited this national personhood when he became a membereven
the founderof another polity in the Cambodian jungle. The question
of his citizenship, or personhood more generally, holds interest in direct
proportion to the crew members accompanying Captain Willard (Martin
Sheen), who seem largely unmotivated by their nations imperial project.
This lack of motivation, I will argue, is a problem when contrasted with
Kurtzs power to motivate. While matters of motivated belonging here

concern the national polity, my point is to refer such representations to
Coppolas business career to show that the national disintegration on
display in Vietnam became a vehicle for Coppolas displaced meditation
on his corporate failures.
Lets begin by paying closer attention to the Ride of the Valkyries
scene. Two matters deserve attention: recording technology and surfing.
The enabling term of the films portable environments is technology.
From the opening scene, the widescreen image of swaying palm trees
is displayed pristinely, only so that it might be doctored and distorted. A
helicopter passes, and the palm trees are now seen through the rippling
surface of their fuel, and then the fleet leaves a dust of Agent Orange,
and the trees are seen through its tint. The movies very first image,
that is, shows technology as the agent of environment transformation,
suggesting that the theater of war here carries an aesthetic valence
every bit as much as a military one. Miriam Hansen remarks, however,
a preponderance of devices of mechanical reproduction among the
technology.198 This is the case. We first hear Kurtzs voice on reel-to-reel
tape; Clean (Laurence Fishburne) listens to his mothers cassette tape on
the boat; we even see Coppola himself cross the screen, Hansen notes, as
the man with the movie camera. This self-consciousness of technology,
and recording technology in particular, is raised to ironic heights in the
Valkyries sceneironic because it remains unclear which side is the
proper target of what Kilgore calls psy war ops. Though he claims it
scares the enemy, he claims too that his boys love it. The latter claim
seems more plausible, finally, than the former. Why, after all, would
the villagers below be any more afraid of amplified Wagner than they
were of the helicopters payload of bombs? The psychological battle is
more likely waged for the hearts and minds of the U.S. soldiers. That
helicopters are rigged with a sound system great enough to be heard
over their roar, though it may declare a technological asymmetry be-
tween the United States and Vietnam, is more a reminder of why the
U.S. troops should fight in the first place. The true irony, then, is that
the total spectacle of technology turns out to be less able to incentivize
a soldiers commitment than is the rogue soldier, Colonel Kurtz.
What incentivizes the U.S. soldiers, and indeed motivates the air-
cavalry strike, is surfing. The movies surrealist character, as Coppola
called it, emerges most powerfully in the scenes with Kilgore, though it

later returns most primordially in the scenes of Kurtzs compound. The
surrealism of it is that the soldiers carry out war operations as though
they were leisure activities, and what allows them to confuse the twoto
forget the violence of battle in the face of the pleasure of surfingis
that Kilgore is a good officer. Willard puts it in more begrudging terms:
He wasnt a bad officer. But he concedes that Kilgore had that weird
light around him that let others know he wasnt gonna get so much
as a scratch here. Kilgore is a good officer in a sense conventional for
the time, the same sense that would make him a good manager: he gets
his men to tolerate their work by loving its rewards. This is the spirit of
Fordism translated into battlefield morale. Kurtz, by contrast, has over-
come the legerdemain implicit in this style of management and inspired
a different order of motivation in his followers. He felt the need, as Greil
Marcus puts it, to be motivated by great feelings of love, and his was a
revolt against the ability of the U.S. government, the U.S. Army, to trivi-
alize the life-and-death situation and leave its soldiers not motivated
by great feelings.199 They are motivated by surfing, by the weak illusion
produced when leisure time masks the principle of necessity (expressed
here, as Marcus says, as the life-and-death situation). Charlie dont
surf, Kilgore says, as a way of noting the differential regimes of leisure
and necessity in Vietnam and America. They choppered in the T-bones
and beer and turned the LZ into a beach party, Willard observes. The
more they tried to make it just like home, the more they made everybody
miss it. That Willard should remark the strained credibility that this
portable milieu effects is the most serious critique the movie offers,
for his is the central heart and mind at stake. He represents detached
professional expertise, the form of labor most in need of conviction in
Americas postwar society, and its clear that Willard is unconvinced by
Kilgores efforts but deeply compelled by Kurtz.
Here we ought to mark the moral suasion, or lack thereof, in tech-
nology, not simply because it seems to be the subject of the movie but
because it had always been the upper hand that American Zoetrope
thought it had on the Hollywood establishment. So Coppola had rea-
soned, anyway. Its the fallacy of this reasoning, and the doubt it cast on
Coppolas business future, that makes Apocalypse Now interesting in
so many perspectives. The movie is interesting, to wit, from the indus-
trial perspective of New Hollywood practices; from the biographical

perspective of all that Coppola had at stake, his personal property and
his corporate prerogatives; andas its surrealism attestsfrom the
textual perspective of film aesthetics. And in this latter perspective, the
movie gains multivalent interest because it thematizes its uncertainty
about what technologys effects will be. At Cannes, Coppola said that
the movie was not a representation of Vietnam but a reenactment of it.
We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and Coppola
claimed that this caused them to little by little go insane.
Too much equipment is the obvious theme of the USO Playboy
Bunny scene. As Willard and crew approach an army outpost, decked
out as a makeshift USO stage, Clean calls the carnivalesque light riggings
a bizarre sight in the middle of this shit. On a river snaking through
the jungle, they come upon fairground electrification, with wheels of
light agleam and towering lit phalluses, as Hansen puts it, ringing the
stage.200 Lance later comments, This is better than Disneyland, which
is the handiest model of a portable environment, one whose artifice is
outspoken. The equipment, and the artificial environments, though, will
not make the movie. (In One from the Heart, we might say that this is the
lesson learned.) What will make the movie is charismatic performance,
and this is thematized within the movie in Willards acknowledgment of
Kilgores weird light and his fascination with Kurtz. Though Kilgore
has great linesNapalm in the morning ranks the twelfth greatest on
AFIs list of all-time movie quotesthey required Robert Duvalls voice
to bear them, because it has a plaintive catch in it, a kind of hoarseness
assuring us of the humanity of his barked orders. Eleanor Coppola says
that Duvall was radiating energy on the set, and everyone could feel
it.201 He is a good officer for this reason, but the energy is lodged in,
and is inseparable from, his personal presence. Willard feels it, but he
knows that its charismatic power cannot extend into the space external
to Kilgore. It is not technologically reproducible as an environmental
surround. The put-on beach party doesnt convince his soldiers of home
but reminds them of its absence.
This is why, I believe, Willard dwells so long on Kurtz in his mediated
form, the tape-recorded voice and dossier reports. He is impressed that
in mediated form some of Kurtzs charisma has communicated itself over
distances. I felt like I knew one or two things about Kurtz, Willard says,
that werent in the dossier. Surely Willard is in part persuaded by tales

that this Montagnard army of Kurtzs attend and worship the man like
a god, following his every order, no matter how ridiculous. Kurtzs
charisma, in other words, passes through his followers, whose obedi-
ence to him registers but cannot replicate whatever quality is intrinsic
to him. Yet this narrative of obedient followers is one Willard has only
heard, never experienced, and still he feels that he knows something
about Kurtz that exceeds these narrative means. For this reason, the
act that occupies Willardan act I take to allegorize the movies own
aesthetic projectis the act of coordinating Kurtzs voice and image.
The movie signals this as its project in the scene at Nha Trang when
Colonel Lucas (Harrison Ford) hands him a portrait and asks, Cap-
tain, youve heard of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz? He proceeds to play
the recordings of Kurtzs voice intercepted from Cambodia. The voice,
Lucas tells us, has been verified as Kurtzs, calling attention more to
the instability than the certainty of its attribution. And when Lucas hands
the photograph of Kurtz to Willard, he spills Kurtzs file on the floor,
as though a gesture needed to conspicuously indicate that construct-
ing Kurtz is their project. The voice is to be matched with the person,
in this game, and General Corman takes the photograph and narrates
it: Walt Kurtz was one of the most outstanding officers this countrys
ever produced, he says, as if to give Willard a how-to demonstration.
This project of designing an authoritative voice, Coppola would have us
understand, is the project of cinema as well as the project of the corpora-
tion. If there is crisis reposed in speech lacking the corporeal ground of
a speakers body, as Ivan Kreilkamp says of Heart of Darkness, then so
too are there the basic potentialities of cinema and the corporation.202
This, Coppola admits, was his earliest insight into recording technology.
His father took him to Studio 8H at NBC and put him in the glass
box to watch Toscanini, and there he had a knob to control the volume:
That just blew me away when I was a kid, when I realized that picture
and sound were not connected!203
Hence, an insight into cinema is being worked out in the Nha Trang
scene, as Corman and Lucas both show the separateness of Kurtzs voice
and image and suggest how one might connect them; but that the two
men are named Corman and Lucasafter Coppolas first boss Roger
Corman and Coppolas onetime corporate partner George Lucassug-
gests that this exercise with Kurtz is meant to illustrate the principles of

cinema and the corporation at once. Kurtzs charismatic voice, after all,
has an uncanny power to organize purpose within a group. These are
his children, the photojournalist (Dennis Hopper) tells Willard. You
dont talk to the Colonel, you listen to him, he says, adding that as a
reward for this obeisance, the mans enlarged my mind. Kurtz has not
enlarged his society, nor his circle of friends, but rather he has enlarged
his mind to include those relations within it. He has re-adapt[ed] the
totality of being to man, in Sartres words, such that man may again
enclose the universe within himself. This is corporate unity, rather than
its weak counterpartmembershipand the project assigned Willard
of putting together the voice and image of Kurtz (They think youve
come to take him away, the photojournalist says, and I hope that isnt
true) is finally an experiment in whether Willard can assume Kurtzs
charismatic voice. The experiment, that is, tests whether the body must
be the ground for the voice. Kurtz, we learn, is dying because he
hates all thisthis being, we infer, the pagan idolatry of his body
as origin of group purposebut the man really likes you, the photo-
journalist tells Willard, and hes got something in mind for you because
youre still alive. All of this, from Dennis Hopper, plays as an abstract
rant of the drug-addled. You cant go out into space, you know, he
later rants, with fractionswhat are you gonna land on, one-quarter,
three-eighths? Once we recognize, though, that our reference point
is the primordial unity between body and voice, Hoppers rant is fully
intelligible. Youre gonna help him, he tells Willard, because he dies
when it dies, and hence the project Kurtz has in mind is for Willard
to assume the voice that, in a primordial outlook, must attach to the
body but, in a modern outlook, must be capable of decoupling from
it. Fractions versus wholes, as Hopper puts it, are absolutely pressing
matters if one is to distinguish associated members from unified groups.
The genius of the groupwhich is what Kurtz emblematizesmust
survive its own embodiment. This is a curious thought experiment to
enact in the middle of a story about the Vietnam War, but its logic be-
comes inescapable when we recognize two things. First, Coppola had
understood that the Fordist habit of separating production and con-
sumption, labor and leisure, is most obviously flawed when seen in the
context of the Vietnam War. The surfing episode suggests that stateside
leisure is bought in the coin of exported misery. Hence a new corporate

model, whether commercial or political, is required. But second, after
his run of corporate failure, from American Zoetrope to the Directors
Company, Coppola had serious doubts that the modern solution could
withstand the abrasion of primordial beliefsthat, in short, the genius
of the group could survive its embodiment. His moment of doubt, it
turns out, would become infamous, not because making Apocalypse
Now drew forth his megalomania but because he documented it in a
memo to his staff at American Zoetrope.
In November 1977, Esquire published a memo intended only for
Coppolas associates, which, by a bureaucratic slipup, made its way
to the magazine editors. An outline of the nature of my Company, it
is a unique document for the reason that it reverses the principles of
American Zoetrope absolutely but seems to lack conviction in doing
so. This company, he declares, will be known as AMERICAN ZOE-
TROPE and, purely and simply, it is me and my work.204 As if needing
to overstate the embodied nature of his company, he writes, Wherever I
am will be considered the headquarters for the company, whether in the
United States or somewhere else in the world.205 He here invokes, for
himself, the same charismatic singularity that lets Kurtz bind together
his own polity, but in doing so Coppola can only justify it in atavistic
terms. You really are not employees of a company, he explains, but
instead, the staff of an artist.206 He requires the terms of an artists
workshop, the great master in relation to his apprentices, as though this
model held sway in settings other than a feudal economy. He goes so
far as to dictate the forms of speech permitted his staff: Please make
your statements or questions as short, simple, and as easy to answer as
possible.207
This business model, though, gives up the ghost of American Zoe-
trope, and Coppola registers great anxiety about this. In the past, he
admits, the nature of the company has been referred to as a family or
a club or a hangout. And thisfrom the time of visiting Mogens Skot-
Hansens Lanterna studio, where they would all have lunch together
in the garden, to the cookouts in the back of the sound trailer on The
Rain Peoplewas precisely what Coppola had wanted. He concedes
the point. I know in the past that I have encouraged this, he writes,
but, simply, I have changed and I no longer see this as a viable way of
working. The change he names sounds more like the breaking of his

spiritor the performance of a broken spirit for the sake of encircling
creditors, as the case might be, when he notes how very important
it is that he dispel the seven-year ambience of a hippy hangout. If
Zoetrope cannot stay true to its original spirit, then its failure, Coppola
seems to believe, attests to the triumph of the model it had meant to
overthrow. He advises his employees, accordingly, to think of Zoetrope
as your place of business, and this implies that people should dress
and behave as they would for any other company.208 They are no more
than organization men working at anothers behest. And yet what be-
lies his advocacy of status quo business practices is that, finally, he still
wants relaxed and warm relationships in the workplace. He does not
want anyone to feel like an automaton employee in an office job. And
while he is planning to help out talented newcomers in some viable
and practical way, this help will come not through Zoetropewhich
has been reduced to a one-client studio, its work dedicated to my
films and my theater projects solelybut through some undisclosed
agency.209 That is to say, somehow the corporation, which once he had
imagined as the agency for internalizing and hence equalizing rela-
tions, had failed its charge. His company was now radically collapsed
into himself, and, if we take this memo at its word, the only mode for
relating to others in the future was not as family (My family, as he now
restricts it, consists of my wife and three children) but as externalities,
on a playing field governed by contracts between economic individuals
which Ronald Coase deems prior to the firm.210
There is reason not to take the memo as the last word, especially when
Coppolas next enterprise would be a seeming recommitment to Zoetrope
but now on Hollywood scales. My point here is to look ahead not in the
direction of corporate endeavors but in the direction of opera aesthetics.
In Apocalypse Now, Wagner is the music chosen for the enhancement of
military theater because Wagner is the composer to deny that all opera is
Orpheus, as Theodor W. Adorno put itto deny opera, in effect, its great
power of testing the limits of voice, hopeful that no meaninglessness lay
beyond it; Wagners denial, as Grover-Friedlander explains, threatened
the future of opera as such.211 Wagners attempt at totalization, she says,
expresses itself as musical saturation, which overwhelms song. Hence
Coppola uses Wagner, unlike the Verdi used in The Godfather, to mark
the end of the old vision of opera, which is also the end of one fantasy

of personhood.212 The personhood at stake is modernist, we should say, in
that it believes that an upshot of the post-metaphysical age can be mutual
understanding (the voice qua subjectivity) rather than mutual destruc-
tion (aesthetic pageantry qua military display). If the personhood facing
extinction had been elaborated in various domainsthe philosophical,
for instance, or the politicalfor Coppola, its key failure is in the most
practical domain of a modern economy: the corporation. What we see in
Apocalypse Now is Coppolas concern with failed models of personhood
expressed as a concern with opera aesthetics, specifically as they are mis-
applied on the notion that operatic grandeur comes from the production
of totalized environments, such as the bedecked Bayreuth, when in fact
it comes from the voice, which is unitary when it compels in its audience
conviction in its medium.
Mechanized Family
Briefly, I want to consider later instances of opera in Coppolas cinema,
to show both what they say about his theory of cinema and how his
view on opera evolved. For this, his most compelling movies are The
Godfather, Part III and Tetro. The final installment of the Godfather
series has been variously assessed, not always as compelling, with
many critics considering it a steep drop in quality from the previous
movies. Coppola defends against this, in some respects, by calling it
an epilogue to the series rather than a full-fledged entry. But whatever
its overall merits, it is at the very least a rigorous coming to terms with
opera and its influence on Coppolas cinema, his career, and the role of
the franchise within it. Though the first Godfather had Verdis music in
it, and Apocalypse Now so boldly featured Wagner, the final Godfather
is Coppolas first movie to make an explicit place for opera in the story,
using an opera house as a set, opera singing as a career choice, and so on.
The Godfather, Part III is dedicated to opera as a kind of open dec-
laration that the Godfather franchise had been all along. In it, Michael
Corleones son, Anthony (Franc DAmbrosio), chooses to become an
opera singer rather than study law and become the familys consiglieri.
I will always be your son, Anthony tells his father, but I will never
have anything to do with your business. This scene is not much more
than a retread of the dialogue between Michael and his father in the
original movie, where Vito tells Michael that he had wanted him to be

Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone. The father wants legitimacy,
the son refuses itor anyway, he refuses legitimacy in this form. I think
that was a shameful ceremony, Kay says of Michaels criminal empire
being disguised by his church in return for his philanthropic support.
Here she only reminds him of what he knew already when his father
sought legitimacy in this form, and what his son Anthony still actively
knows: this is the legitimacy given to only another pezzonovante.
But if this, by now, is but a stock scene in the franchise, the alteration
in the framework accommodating it is entirely novel. The Corleones
retain their monopoly on power, as they had in each previous movie,
but what they now do that they had not in the past is gain sanction for it
through cultural rather than political means. The coercive force of power
had never held interest in these movies to the degree that the persuasive
force of power did. Michael has been a study in tragedy because he
misunderstood the source of his fathers power, believing that it derived
from the force of decisive action, when in truth it derived from the show
of decisive action. Vito held a family together through the consent of its
members, whereas Michael presided over a familys slow disintegration,
as he tried coercing its togetherness. By the final Godfather episode, we
understand why the two had opposite effects: Vito showed his family that
he decisively acted for their sake, with violence only incidental to this
actions efficacy, but Michael had violently insisted on their obedience,
all the while explaining to them that his violent insistence was for their
sake. Kay sees the difference. Reason backed up by murder, she tells
Michael, has done nothing to convince anyone that he spent [his] life
protecting [his] son ... protecting [his] family, a conviction that Vito
never had to do anything to solicit. The familys loyalty, such that any
remainsand Sonnys illegitimate son, Vincent (Andy Garcia), remains
utterly loyal, it should be said, and so too do Michaels children, Mary
(Sofia Coppola) and Anthonylooks like little more than a biological
function: I will always be your son, as Anthony says.
In this regard, the final Godfather is a matter of figuring out what
went wrong. Michael figures this out, somewhat reluctantly, by return-
ing the family to the opera. Coppola depicts the modest restoration of
Corleone authority on precisely the model that Slavoj iek explains
operatic personhood. The first rudimentary form of subjectivity, iek
claims, is this voice of the subject beseeching the Master to suspend, for

a brief moment, his own Law.213 Such a scene is enacted to the letter in
the opening scenes of the movie. Kay has come to Michaels ceremony
on Anthonys behalf, so that he might get Michaels blessing to quit law
school and pursue opera singing. The Master, Michael, declines at first,
but then, when it seems that mercy will be withheld, he grants Anthony
the autonomy he needs to go free and have his own life. There is, in
this, the Hegelian logic of Master and Servant, as iek observes there
must be in opera, disclosed in the fact that Michael now sees what his
work is and understands it from a perspective below, one allowed those
who worked under him (and were near rebelling against him), and it
is precisely this perspective that could redeem him, if anything could.
Letting his son sing opera, Michael restores his wholeness as sovereign
and inaugurates a new period of harmony in the familys life.
When Anthony has sung the tenor in Cavalleria Rusticana to the
acclaim of a Sicilian audience, Michael tell his sister, Connie, When
they hear the name Corleone, theyre gonna think of a voice. Here Mi-
chael is hailing the cultural legitimation of his family empire by eliding
the fact that the substance of their legitimacy comes from purchasing
a corporation, International Immobiliare, with the fact that the style of
their legitimacy is sealed in the operatic voice. Their wealth is now legally
protected by a corporation, but their authority is now culturally secured
in the acclaim of their unitary purpose, the Corleone voice. Coppola is
remarkably canny to show that the voice of the family, Anthony, on suc-
ceeding, is first greeted by the muscle of the family, Vincent. Anthony
and Vincent embrace, figuring the interlocked legitimacy and illegiti-
macy of the family, and Vincent remarks of Anthonys peasant-soldier
costume, I like this outfit. The response: I figured you would. The
violent barbarism of the family, in short, benefits most from misrecog-
nizing itself on stage as legitimate cultural expression. And in case we
do not understand this to be the movies clarion message, it has been
demonstrated for us already: in an early scene, Vincent bites Joey Zasas
ear while embracing, and in a later opera scene, Vincent looks on, smil-
ing, as Anthony repeats his action, in the role of Turiddu biting the ear
of Alfio. And formally, we cannot fail to see that the movies plotted ac-
tionsassassins placing Michael in their crosshairs, Vincents henchmen
performing assassinations of their ownare embedded in the operas

form. This was true of the Godfather movies all along, of course, but
now it is made explicit.
The story of the family attaining corporate and operatic form all at
once is still a tragedy, however, for the simple reason that Michael has
understood the familys peculiar structure of personhood too late, and
for the complicated reason that Coppola no longer believed corporate
personhood to be anything more than a ruse, in practice, even if he still
believed it to be liberatory in theory. On this count, Id like to make
a few speculative remarks about The Godfather, Part III as a kind of
preamble discussion for Tetro, which I take to be Coppolas rewrite of
the Godfather for his own purposes. Setting the final Godfather in 1979,
while it makes good narrative sense, has as much symbolic as narrative
value. The year marks the end of a historical period, on the one hand,
a period of political economy that finds its symbolic closure in the elec-
tion of Ronald Reagan and the rise of the conservative movement; on
the other hand, it marks the release date of Apocalypse Now and the
last good year of Coppolas career.
The diegesis of the Godfather trilogy covers an era of political econ-
omy, even if through a glass darkly. But the production years of the
trilogy, 197289, cover an era of New Hollywood in which questions of
ownership and authority were renegotiated. With this movie franchise,
Coppola says, there was the possibility of having a company that could
one day evolve into a real major company and change the way we ap-
proach filmmaking.214 No such thing happened, of course, and by 1989
Coppola was compelled to make a final Godfather installment simply to
get out of debt. Jack Singer had been demanding that Coppola repay
the $3 million he had loaned him to help finance One from the Heart.215
Not only did Coppola decide to take on the final Godfather because,
by this point, no other project gave him the same level of bargaining
power; he took it on, too, because he did not want to be displaced by
another director. Paramount seemed ready to do the movie one way or
another, and they had considered directors such as Martin Scorsese,
Sidney Lumet, and even Michael Mann. Its a little bit like hearing
that your ex-girlfriend is going out with so-and-so, Coppola said of the
situation. You dont care. But you do care.216 He made the movie his
occasion to get out of debt and to sum up the career possibilities left to

himself and his colleagues in New Hollywood. In the movie, Michael
Corleone buys a European conglomerate, a kind of fantasy relation
between Coppola and what by then was the principal corporate structure
in Hollywood industry. But also it uses the opera Cavalleria Rusticana
to cross-reference the career of Scorsese, who had used the interlude
from the opera in the opening scenes of Raging Bull (1980), and this
cross-reference is made, I submit, because Scorsese, like Coppola, had
spent the 1980s working for-hire in a New Hollywood increasingly un-
congenial for their talents.
The final Godfather is at once a reckoning with New Hollywoodthe
newness of which marks, for Coppola, the squandered chance to fuse
art and businessand a forecast of the ways in which good work might
still get done within such arrangements. If in this possible future Michael
owns the conglomerate, he seems to have set up an artistic wing (Anthonys
voice) that will be financed by the familys brutal economy (Vincents
violence). The family, not a unit now but a set of parts, has folds within
it where each part might fulfill itself irrespective of the others. This is an
accurate enough foretelling of 1990s Hollywood, one in which Coppola
would want no part, where independent production companies such as
Good Machine and October Films were formed on their own but then
drawn into the large conglomerates, and where, too, Coppola and Scorsese
would reestablish their industry power on very different terms (the former
from without, and the latter from within). What is most compelling in The
Godfather, Part III, though, is the extent to which Coppola has used it to
make an argument, in an aesthetic register, for why this foretold model
can only fail. Its failure, in fact, is marked in operas failureMichael (and
Coppola, as it were) will sacrifice a daughter to it. Mary leaves the opera
house and is hit by a bullet intended for Michael. ThisI suggest in some
reflections to come on Sofia Coppolas careerhas a very specific mean-
ing in respect to Francis Ford Coppolas corporate aesthetics: Anthony is
operatic personhood, the movie tells us, but Mary is pop-song individuality.
The final expression is the fathers anguish, which must be operatic anguish
but can only reach us through cinema: Kay holds Marys dead body on the
grand staircase, and Michael kneels by himself nearby, his mouth gaping
in a voiceless cry. As Michaels mouth widens, and as he throws his head
back, we hear Mascagnis strings rise in a kind of melodic voice that we
ought to hear as a substitute for Michaels own. His mouth is open, and

In a voiceless cry, Michael brings forth
his pain, too late.
drool runs down his chin in a string, as it does for opera singers as they
produce inhuman sounds, or sounds anyway that are the upper limit of
our humanity. The image of Michael waiting for his voice, as the score
matches his movements as would the score in Alexander Nevksy (1938),
is Coppolas audacious statement, nearly a valediction, on the cinemas
exceptional powers for reordering the vocal-visual dyad. In this sense the
Godfather trilogy is not the story of a man who must find his voice and
authority but is a demonstration that this voice and authority floats free
and therefore present themselves to various reordering. Cinema can do
this, and so too can the corporation. This is why, I speculate, Coppola
would need to conclude the story himself, so that another didnt miss the
point.
But Coppola, as his subsequent career attests, was not content scor-
ing points off Paramount by arrogating the last Godfather for his own
state-of-the-industry meditation. To depict a flawed corporate structure,
with sham family feeling at its center, was not enough to exhaust his Zoe-
trope ambitions. Instead, Coppola would use the 1990s to build a third
incarnation of American Zoetrope; this time its orientation owed more
to John Cassavetes than to the corporate utopians of the 1960s. More
can be said, in another forum, of the change these different versions of
American Zoetrope clock in Hollywood economic practices in particular

and global political economy in general.217 But for now we might risk a
simplified history in the progression of American Zoetrope from uto-
pian family firm (196972), to artistic soup-up of the Hollywood factory
(198082), and finally to a boutique company whose years of operation
are more ill-defined, split as the operation is between wine-making sub-
sidies (dating to his 1975 purchase of the Niebaum vineyard); producing
his childrens movies, Sofias notably (dating to her first feature, The
Virgin Suicides, in 1999); and independently making his own small-scale
movies (dating to the first movie of his second career, Youth without
Youth, in 2007). The problem with this model of American Zoetrope is
that it finances movies, as did Cassavetes, not from their intrinsic value
but from extrinsic sources. Cassavetes predicated his artistic vocation
on a robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul principle, taking income from what-
ever acting jobs so that he might direct movies that interested him; the
problem is that the seeming vocation starts to look like avocation, as a
day job might support ones weekend passion, the suggestion being
finallythat one cannot make a livelihood from what one loves.218 The
great frustration of my career, Coppola admits, is that nobody really
wants me to do my own work.219 This predicament, made axiomatic, is
a negation of the original ethos of American Zoetrope. Yet its roughly
true to say that Zoetrope, such that it now exists, is the inverse of its
founding business idea. Originally Zoetrope took money from within
Hollywood industry, whether from Warner Bros. or from Coppolas own
movie profits, and planned on using those resources against tendency.
When Coppola made Tetro, by contrast, he did so from the profits of his
outside enterprises, wine, but also including cigars, a line of prepared
foods, two restaurants, and three Central American resorts.220 This is
the synergy (in another idiom, hedging) that became the watchword
of the conglomerates. What synergizes his diverse products, Coppola
explains, is himself: My company, FFC Brands, sells my taste.221 It is
the final irony that he would need to make American Zoetrope a film-
making arm in his larger conglomerate in order to make movies again
in the age of conglomerated Hollywood.
It is therefore unsurprising that Tetro, the product of this generation
Zoetrope, should be so equivocal a statement. Coppola was able to make
the movie on his own terms, certainly, but Zoetrope, his critics said, had
failed to deliver on its grand plans. He conceded that, in early versions

of Zoetrope, they were in a cocoon, but still insisted that the studios,
as they were, would disappear. Art studios will replace them, Coppola
predicted. This is my dream.222 My purpose is only to explain why this
dream is still encoded in opera aesthetics, curious though they are, in
Tetro. In part, the explanation is that because the Godfather trilogy was
told in operas idiom, Tetro, being an alternative telling of The Godfather,
must take the form of opera as well. Larry Rohter remarked that Tetro,
another drama about an Italian immigrant family in conflict, ranges
over some of the same territory, albeit from a different direction, as
did the Godfather trilogy.223
There are more details placing it in line with the Godfather trilogy
than the mere subject of an Italian family in conflict. Bennie (Alden
Ehrenreich) arrives at his brother Tetros Buenos Aires apartment in
a navy uniform, as Michael had arrived at the family home in marine
fatigues. The joke, here, is that for Bennie the uniform is not a true navy
uniform but an imitation worn by employees of Infinity Line cruise ships.
Benne is a waiter, sort of. And Vincent Gallo, playing Tetro, had in a
sense already auditioned for a part in the Godfather movies, perhaps
Fredos, when he played Paul Leger in Arizona Dream (dir. Emir Kus-
turica, 1993). In it, he watches The Godfather, Part II and recites the
famous lines exchanged between Michael and Fredo: Fredo, youre
nothing to me now. Youre not a brother, youre not a friend. I dont want
to know you or what you do. But its Gallos recitation of Fredos lines
that show the most uncanny resemblance. Taking care of me? Youre
my kid brother and you take care of me, Gallo quotes in the tremolo
that marks Fredo as the weak brother.
The dialogue can be applied to Tetro, the story of a man who re-
nounces his family relations. How come you say Im your friend and
not your brother? Bennie will ask Tetro. This Godfather rewrite takes
on interest, I contend, because the rivalry between brothers is set not
against a backdrop of crime but of the arts. Tetro is a writer, and so is
his brother, Bennie, and the story Tetro begins writing, but gives up,
is the story of two brothers: one brother, a prodigy in music, and the
older brother, also a great musician. On hearing this, Bennie responds,
Youre writing the story of our father? The need to rewrite the fathers
story as ones own, it needs no heavy underlining, is what gives The
Godfather, Part II its pathos. Michael cannot replicate his fathers fam-

ily success, because Michael lacks an element of personality that was
inherited, we might infer, by his brother, Fredo. Its possible to imagine
that what occludes the telling of Fredos story, or anyway what denies
Fredos story narrative fulfillment, is that he is more an artist than a
businessman. He is the more sensuous of the brothers, at any rate, his
instinct for hedonism marked in the familys sending him to Las Vegas.
Were The Godfather retold as a family of artists rather than a family of
criminals, Fredos sensibility would be the heart of the story. A family
needs as much fun as it can get, Tetros wife tells Bennie.
Turning the gangsters into artists, swapping out the cunning of Mi-
chael or the violence of Sonny for the sensuousness of Fredo, moves the
story one degree closer to Coppolas own. In his telling albeit negative
review, Richard Corliss remarks that Coppolas father Carmine was a
flutist for the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and Carmines brother Anton
was, at first, the more renowned brother as the composer of a violin
concerto and the opera Sacco and Vanzetti; Tetro therefore plays as
Antons belated comeuppance.224 Critics of Coppolas late work, in short,
were accustomed to finding personal material allegorically reworked.
Jon Lewis catalogues some instances of this critical habit, notably Stuart
Klawanss response that Life without Zoe (1989) becomes explicable
only if you consider it an allegory for American Zoetrope.225 The per-
sonal material is there, no doubt, as Life without Zoe begins by defining
the Greek zoe as life, a kind of sly nod to the itinerary of his firm,
and it too features a father who is a flutist. But as Walter Murch has
remarked, one of Franciss great strengths has been to find ways to get
his films to tap into his own personal experiences.226 He identified with
the material of The Godfather by rendering corporate capitaland the
structure of the Hollywood studio in particularas a crime story. This
was, one presumes, the only way to tell this story on the studios dime.
Now that his stories are told on his own dime, as it were, he has moved
from allegory to biography. The critics who find this uncomfortable do
so, it seems, because now the storytelling is too on-the-nose. Without
mediation, Klawans finds unanticipated perspectives of egomania.227
What is telling in Corlisss criticism of Tetro is his claim that Cop-
pola fans want him to recapture the dramatic coherence and operatic
grandeur of his first Godfather movies.228 I will take the license to sug-
gest that Corliss, and other critics too, are registering their own regret

that American Zoetrope did not realize its original vision because the
dramatic coherence and operatic grandeur were only the sublimated
form of its business idea. The notion that a firm could be run like a family
of artists, and that a family needs as much fun as it can getthough
it now seems musty, like the sixtiesis what animated Zoetrope and
the films designed to realize it in an aesthetic foretaste of its material
instantiation. In Tetro, though, notions of authority and ownership are
shot through with cynicism that family is but a set of relations mechani-
cally performed. We know this because the opera it cites, in roundabout
fashion, is that containing Copplius (also Coppola, in E. T. A. Hoff-
mans original stories), maker of the dancing doll. Its citation of opera,
though, is routed through cinema, namely The Tales of Hoffman (dir.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1951). The opera Powell and
Pressburger adapted was Jacques Offenbachs Les contes dHoffmann
(1881), itself an adaptation of Hoffmanns stories. This delirious remedia-
tion is the counterpart of the plots similar involutions in family structure,
wherein Bennie finally understands that Tetro, whom he thought was his
brother (a next-generation Fredo), is revealed to be his father. Further
ancestry is given: the original Benjamin Tetrocini, the movie explains,
came to Argentina in 1901; he became rich in the wholesale chicken
business, but he liked to sing, and he played mandolin. Businessman
by day, artist by night. We recognize this as the Fordist ratio that it was
the charge of Tetros (and Michael Corleones) generation to overturn.
Benjamin Tetrocini died, his gravestone says, in 1968the year before
the post-Fordist firm, American Zoetrope, was born.
Critics who find the plots biographical backdrop too on-the-nose
might be surprised to see how heavily mediated it is. When Bennie (an
updated Michael) learns that Tetro (an updated Fredo) is not his brother
but his father, after all, it is from Coppola a revelation of what Michael
had misrecognized in his father: he thought the Dons authority came
from reason backed up by murder, when in fact it derived more funda-
mentally from the sensuous vulnerability of Fredo. The Don easily held
authority, that is, because he was more like Fredo than Michael. This
clarifies the confession Michael makes to the cardinal in the final Godfa-
ther, I killed my fathers son, to be a confession of an allegorical kind. It
is a confession that Coppola, in capitulating to Hollywoods termswhich
are only the terms of capital, after allhad killed his business idea. He

The opera of Copplias automaton.
might make movies again, but now he has cast himself as the rapacious
patriarch of an intact hierarchy. The automaton, designed by Copplia,
performs life without life (Life without Zoe), which is fallen labor and
fallen opera at once.
Zoetrope Postmodernism
and the Amazing Technicolor Family
There is an odd scene in The Godfather, Part III that might have been
lifted from another aesthetic world and smuggled into what had been,
for the life of the trilogy, a Godfather diegesis tightly ordered on operas
principles. In the movies second half, signaled by the Corleone familys
transplantation back to Sicily, we see a tableau shot of an Italian villa,
two open windows with curtains billowing on the left and right sides.
What jars, here, is the song issuing from the left-side open window,
Elvis Costellos Miracle Man. As noted, the movie uses Mascagnis
Cavalleria to refer to Scorseses Raging Bull, and in doing so marks New
Hollywood developments in the years intervening between this final
installment and Coppolas last Godfather movie in 1974. But the movie

uses Elvis Costello, we might suppose, to mark the pop songs incursion
against what had been the symphonic sensibility of the Old Hollywood
score. The song makes sense in a kind of twofold chronology: since the
last Godfather was made, Coppolas cinema had suffered an ongoing
abrasion of its opera aesthetic, and through its tatters emerged the rather
less-orderly logic of the Hollywood musical. Coppola had made a musi-
cal early onFinians Rainbowbut he had always described this as an
other-directed decision. One of his motives was to impress his father,
he admitted; another was to gain traction within studio Hollywood.229
If in the opera Coppola found a principle of centripetal force, with
family ethos drawing stray individuality into its coordinates, in the mu-
sical he found something else altogether, something like the operas
antithesis. There, individuals sing out, in isolation, while the society
enfolding them disintegrates. This explains why Tucker, when first con-
ceived in the mid 1970s upon the failure of American Zoetrope and
the Directors Company, was to be a Brechtian musical, with MGMs
Freed-unit veterans Betty Comden and Adolph Green its songwriting
team. One from the Heart, however, is the musical (scare quotes to
be explained) that in any telling must be said to put to rout Coppolas
opera aesthetic. After it, all is disunity: Zoetrope is shuttered, Coppola
works as director-for-hire the next decades, and never again is operatic
unity his object of nave aspiration. Costellos pop song, though, suggests
another chronology. Simply, the last Godfather was set in the late 1950s,
and in between then and 1979, the pop song had become the key form
of youth-culture self-expression. The Beatles converted Buddy Holly
into high art, and Elvis Costello, trading on Buddy Hollys image for his
1977 debut album My Aim Is True, became a kind of metacommentary
on the institutional status of pop music. Mary Corleone grew up against
this historical backdrop, as did Sofia Coppola, the actress playing Mary.
Sofia, lets remember, was widely panned for her turn as Mary, which is
expected given that the Godfather movies had been a showcase for mag-
isterial performances, consecrated, in some respect, to the Method,
which had favored emotional displays shaded with operatic sensibility.
Casting Lee Strasberg as Hyman Roth attests to this. Sofias flat affect,
in this context, fell short of all the established values. Far from a cast-
ing misstep, though, Sofia gives Mary flat affectthe ground tone, as
it were, of pop-song individualitybecause this had in fact been the

competing theme in Coppolas cinema since One from the Heart and
here, in his last for-hire concession, it had gained the upper hand.
Sofia would be the future of American Zoetrope. What I want to
show, in these final pages, is how this can be deduced from One from
the Heart and then, in turn, how it is that Sofias The Virgin Suicides
and Marie Antoinette can illuminate the former movie. One from the
Heart is notorious. This has nothing to do with the movie itself, which
is a brilliant work despite its critical panning. It has everything to do
with the movie being the occasion for Zoetropes regrouped effort to
change Hollywood, this time through technology (the ballyhooed elec-
tronic cinema) rather than the ethos of group-work (Ive also got good
relationships with and promises of films, Coppola had once said of
American Zoetrope, from some of the more talented young filmmakers
around).230 Coppola still outwardly stuck to the principle of the reper-
tory companyIn the Hollywood of today, everybodys an independent
contractor, he complained; I cant work that waybut inwardly his
studio was designed to overturn Hollywoods labor practices by way of
its technological organization.231
Rather than describe what Coppola called the electronic cinema,
and rather than give an account of his enterprise to install Zoetrope on
the Hollywood General lot, which Jon Lewis has done in his definitive
study, Whom God Wishes to Destroy, my purpose is to show how the
other Coppola emerged in One from the Heartthe one David Denby
bemoaned for his sacrificed realismand how it is that Coppola found
a new aesthetic register in that movie, which anticipated Sofias film-
making approach.232 Denbys critique that Coppola gave up realism for
artifice is interesting because it presumes that Coppolas realism, based
on verismo opera, wasnt already highly artificial. But it was, of course,
and I contend that Coppolas 1970s cinema (the Godfather movies,
The Conversation) is understood in half-light if not assessed in terms
of musical artifice. Movies are like music, he told visitors to Zoetrope
Studios, and should be composed along the same line.233 But between
the Godfather movies and One from the Heart, the musical experience
is of a qualitatively different order. In The Godfather, voice is tied to
its choral supports, even if the aria seems to lift it into autonomous
heights; in One from the Hearts boozy torch songs, though, it is the self
reflecting on the self, opening up a subjects inner spaces which seem to

stretch forever. The selfs longing for infinite realization, untrammeled
by social limitations, is here the structure of the pop song. This is the
story of One from the Heart: a couple that will never understand each
otherwill never, for that matter, accept an otherin any mood but
disappointment. This happens through a form of musical. But the mu-
sical form has undergone a technological mutation. There is and can
be content in technology, Coppola said. New tunes that weve never
heard before, because theyve never been possible.234 In moving from
the Godfather movies to One from the Heart, and from Lee Strasberg
to Sofia Coppola, one might say that we make the historical passage
from the concert-hall experience to the headphone experience. In the
former, a voice reaches us across great distances, and the structure of
performance remains auratic; in the latter, a voice is placed in our ear,
and the performance space is collapsed within. These, anyway, seem
roughly the correct metonyms for their technological regimes.
One way to begin is by determining how One from the Heart might
be classified as a musical. Coppola had contacted Tom Waits to write
songs for the movie, his idea being that the songs would create a parallel
track for the couples story. Unlike an old fashioned musical, Coppola
did not want the characters to sing songs but wanted them rather to
have a song-version of their lives running parallel to the mundane lived-
version of their lives.235 There is, in this, a loose approximation of the
Hollywood musical, insofar as there is a rupture in the narrative world.
In An American in Paris (1951), for instance, Gene Kelly plays a strug-
gling painter but a brilliantly successful dancer. However, his painting is
his real-life occupation, while his dancing is his fantasy-life expression.
We thrill at him in the latter capacity but pity him in the former. This is
the operation at work in One from the Heart, and clearly Coppola was
taking cues from studio Hollywood in various ways. He shot the movie
on sound stages, and he did so in the Hollywood General studios that
had formerly been used by Harold Lloyd. Gene Kelly, in fact, was Cop-
polas advisor on the movie, as was Michael Powell.236
But Coppola works the musicals discontinuity to different effect.
There is no Gene Kelly, no hoofer-in-disguise whom we recognize
through his powerful legs and trim physique set off by pleated slacks
and tight sweateras truly glamorous. Instead, Coppola has cast rigor-
ously nonglamorous actors, Frederic Forrest as Hank and Teri Garr as

Frannie, and given them dowdy wardrobe to match. The couple tells
each other as much. You were pretty appetizing, Hank tells Frannie,
but now. . . . Frannie shoots back, What about yourself? You used to
have a pretty good build, you know. The glamour has been commuted
offscreen, into the sphere of song, and into the lavishly art-designed sets.
Watching One from the Heart, we no longer cathect on the subjects but
on the object-world suffused in their fantasies. Coppola claims that he
wanted the scenery, the music, and the lighting, for example, to be part
of the film, an aim quite distinct from the classical high-key accentua-
tion of the Hollywood star.237 This flattening of the difference between
subject and object is consistent with Sofias latter-day flat performance
and with what Jameson has named a key feature of postmodernism, the
waning of affect.
We can already see this as an intensification of the logic of Apoca-
lypse Now, with the attention to totalized environments now overriding
the charismatic voices at their center. In a final show of feeble voice, in
fact, Hank tells Frannie, I didnt come here to fight with you. I came
to sing to you. Hank then delivers the shabbiest rendition of You Are
My Sunshine to Frannie in the airport terminal; the only thing about
it that touches Frannie (That was nice, she says) is how inadequate
his voice is for this stage. The stage, an unlikely reconstruction of Las
Vegas on Hollywood sound stages, is beautiful. In this scene, Hank
is awash in pale green light, and as he walks away in disappointment,
Vittorio Storaros virtuoso camera captures him from a vantage outside
the airport terminal and follows in a perfectly designed tracking shot.
It is more than a beautiful shot; it is an act of beautiful imagination.
But One from the Heart makes it clear that it cannot escape beautiful
imagination, that there can be no adequation of material reality to such
imagination. This is why Frannies job at the travel agency is to dress
the windows as imagined destinationsin a central instance, a Bora
Bora of the mind. Its gonna be Bora Bora, she says when asked what
her window diorama is going to be. Bora Bora doesnt look like that,
protests Ray (Ral Juli). Thats not the color of the sky. One stand-
point from which to analyze the movie is its color design. In his role as
consultant, Gene Kelly said that the plan was to use color the way it was
in MGMs musicals. Were going to paint the picture, he said.238 The
movie aspired to Technicolor, that is, which very much was a technology

with its own content. Stanley Cavell has theorized that such color was
used to unify the projected world in another way than by direct reliance
upon, or implication toward, the spatial-temporal consistency of the real
world.239 The content of Technicolor was the establishment of a world
of private fantasy, Cavell says, but this is complicated in One from the
Heart because it is not 1950s Technicolor but the simulation of it. The
ratio obtaining between private fantasy and public world in the 1950s,
whether balanced or not, is not the same in this Zoetrope musical but
is rather the object of nostalgic longing. Having failed to modernize
corporate form, Coppola began to think of Zoetrope in a reimagined
studio Hollywood. Theres no one like Zanuck around anymore, and
there are no studios like there used to be, Coppola said. I can envision
Zoetrope being that way.240
It would be wrong, though, to call One from the Heart a nostalgia
film, as Jameson treats the phenomenon. It may be an apt description of
Coppolas subsequent movies, Rumble Fish and Peggy Sue Got Married.
But One from the Heart functions more like a desublimation of the musi-
cals critique, as D. A. Miller has understood it. Like the musical, One
from the Heart defies the concept of the so-called integrated show and
pursues instead not the integration of drama and music found on the
thematic surface, but a so much deeper formal discontinuity between
the two that no makeshift for reconciling them could ever make the
transition from one to the other less abrupt, or more plausible.241 The
discontinuity in Coppolas movie is that Hank cannot perform the fantasy
he can project. Perhaps no one can. But denying us a performer of Gene
Kellys caliber at the center of this self-styled musical withholds from
us even the transcendent moment of performance. The true content
of show-tune transcendence, Miller claims, is simply the strength to
endure a depressive status quo, which is why its rarefied performance
comes off as an otherworldy asylum available to us only as show
business.242 Hence Hank and Frannie are offered the false promise
of entertainers, he the circus girl Leila (Nastassja Kinski), and she the
piano player Ray, entertainers whose only virtue is that they evanesce
so readily and never present the obstinacy of a depressive status quo.
Leila states this plainly enough. If you want to get rid of a circus girl, all
you gotta do is close your eyes, she says. Then she disappears. Leila
disappears shortly after, not with the aid of a cut, nothing like a Mlis

vanishing, but through an act of framing: the camera first holds Leila in
a long shot but then reframes to include Hank and tracks forward with
him as he walks away, his figure eclipsing hers. And then she is gone.
Evanescent, like a song.
One from the Heart is about imagination and its upshot. It is about
the immiscibility of imagination and real life, of the image and its mate-
rial infrastructure. In effect, it is about how much it takes to finance a
fleeting image. Those sold on Coppolas vision of an electronic cinema
would make bombastic claims that Hollywood should pay Coppola back
for the so-called excesses of One from the Heart because, not excesses at
all, they were rather a form of research and development that Hollywood
lacked the foresight to make for itself. Coppola invited such rhetoric.
The motion picture technology used today is the first technology that
we ever came up with, he said. And the cameras that were made in
1920 and 1940, or ones just like them, are still turning in every studio
today.243
In a recent study on digital cinema, Stephen Prince says that Coppola
and Lucas were the two early figures of the digital revolution, but that
Lucass Industrial Light and Magic displayed more practical commit-
ment in the development of its infrastructure. While Coppola cared to
rattle Hollywood infrastructure, he seemed more concerned to imagine
what superstructure might assemble itself on a new technological base.
One from the Heart is an assessment of the habits of imagination in re-
lation to the going resources of imagination. Outstripping Hollywoods
old technology, Coppola said, meant that wed no longer be doomed to
think mechanically; wed no longer be beholden, one infers, to Fordism.
The creative process, Coppola argued, is rather a series of thoughts
and impressions that kind of come out all at oncenot one, two, three,
four, five, [but] almost the way a Polaroid picture develops before your
eyes.244 If liberated from the mechanical tools, he believes the effect
would be the revelation of imagination as a kind of spatial process.245
Formally, this is what we find at work in One from the Heart. Con-
sider, as one example, the early scene of Hank in the apartment of his
friend, Moe (Harry Dean Stanton), with the two men sitting on the
couch commiserating. Suddenly, through a scrim lighting effect, the
tapestry behind them turns transparent and gives onto the scene of
Frannie in the apartment of her friend, Maggie (Lainie Kazan). We

Rather than using a cut, One from the Heart
stages separate spaces on a single set.
watch the two women discuss Frannies breakup, over the shoulders,
as it were, of Hank and Moe, in the shared space of a single set. As in
the previous example of Leilas disappearance, the change is achieved
without a cut. More like live theater than cinema, we traverse space
without regard for the temporality, governed by machines, that had
once given film narrative its structure. The shift from temporality to
spatiality is signaled in Tom Waitss soundtrack lyric: Knowing that you
fall in love once upon a town. This shift, as well see in Sofia Coppolas
cinema, has real consequences. No longer does narrative connection
hold swaya fact disclosed here in Hank and Frannies story being too
routine to need conclusionand what fills its structuring function is a
new propulsion given by spectacle, assembled and reassembled right
before our eyes.
What we find in One from the Heart, in short, is Sofia Coppolas
cinema foretold. One can map various paths between Francis and Sofia
Coppolas cinema, and for that matter between theirs and Roman Cop-
polas cinema. They all share the sound designer, Richard Beggs, and

as my argument attests, sound design is a key feature in their cinema.
Songs matter. One rather obscure connection is the Elvis Costello song.
Mary Corleone had listened to Elvis Costello in her Sicilian villa, and in
Sofias Lost in Translation (2003), during a night of karaoke, Bill Mur-
ray sings Elvis Costellos (Whats So Funny bout) Peace, Love, and
Understanding.
The connection is germane, I suggest, because the post-punk canon
would become the soundtrack to Sofias Marie Antoinette, perhaps her
most important work to date. That movie begins with the most unlikely
anachronism. Kirsten Dunst, onetime Virgin Suicide now dolled-up as
Marie Anoinette, luxuriates in a room within the Palace of Versailles (the
real Palace of Versailles, to which Sofia gained unprecedented access)
to the score of Gang of Fours Naturals Not in It. The anachronism
works at different levels. The problem, at its most basic, is that the pop
song is not a musical form for Marie Antoinette. The music she hears
is parlor-room piano with the female voice for accompaniment, say, or
the Paris Opera. Beyond this historical disagreement, though, there
is anachronism of another kind, concerned with what has been called
structure of feeling. The Gang of Four lyrics ask, The problem of
leisure / What to do for pleasure? The problem the song confronts is
the problem of commodity structure, an organization of social relations
that makes ideal love, a new purchase. And the irony is that Gang of
Four takes on this problem in the pop song, the ideal musical form of
commodity culture. The commodity is the problem hanging over the
age of the bourgeoisie, of course, and Marie Antoinette is still an aristo-
crat. The movie prefers her, nonetheless, as the archetype of pop-song
sensibility.
What this sensibility entails had been the object of Sofias first fea-
ture, The Virgin Suicides. And there the pop song had a built-in purpose,
given it by Jeffrey Eugenides in his source novel: It was the line of com-
munication between the shut-away Lisbon girls and the neighborhood
boys, diary entries the girls whispered into their ears.246 Sofia Coppolas
cinema explicates pop-song sensibility, from The Virgin Suicides on. We
might describe this sensibility, as opera might see it, as one wherein all
pleasure is interiorized at the expense of society. No plausible relation
can be thought to obtain, henceforth, between ones inner splendor and
the outer dowdiness of the world.

This can be understood variously. One important takeaway, though,
is that Sofias cinema defeats narrative, insofar as it can be defined as the
act of connecting oneself to society beyond. With Marie Antoinette, Sofia
Coppola took the flatness of Mary Corleones affect and reconfigured
it into flattened plot trajectory. Marie Antoinette, as presented, sees
no relationship between her desire, sealed off so thoroughly by royal
protocol, and the social life of the masses outside the palace walls. The
movie does not work, that is, as historical fiction. It depicts rather a
total diremption of private and public itineraries, as experienced from
Marie Antoinettes standpoint. The critic Nathan Lee argues that this,
the real worlds remove from Versailles, leads to the movies only serious
mistake in the form of an extension of the narrative beyond [Marie
Antoinettes] frame of reference. It doesnt make sense, in other words,
to see the storming of Versailles, not from her perspective at any rate,
and here the movie becomes nearly incoherent on a narrative level.247
I agree with Lees description, but not as an evaluation. This narrative
incoherence is not a flaw but simply the effect of the pop-songs her-
meticism in confrontation with the flow of history. We experience no
final catharsis when she must flee Versailles, and that, I would venture,
is because tragedy belongs to opera, not pop songs. Pop songs deal with
euphoria and its absence. Much of Marie Antoinettes life, in Sofia Cop-
polas hands, plays like a music video, euphoric but self-contained and
transient.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the scene of her feeling
oppressed within Versailles, her husband Louis XVI complacent and
happy to play cards with palace guests. Dont you want to go to Paris,
see the opera? she asks him. Im more comfortable just to stay here,
he responds. We have everything we need. On the one hand, this
speaks to the satiety of a king, on the other hand to the royal deprivation
of society. Denied the opera, Marie gazes out the window and imagines
her lover, Count Fersen, looking oddly Napoleonic on horseback. She
excuses herself, caught up as she is in fantasy, and runs down palace
halls, her footsteps coordinated with the staccato rhythms of the Strokes
What Ever Happened? The remainder of the song is scored to a jump-
cut montage of Marie lying on her bed daydreaming, pace Louis XVI,
about the things she needs but does not have. The interlude could be
mistaken for a music video.

Marie Antoinette claps at the Paris Opera.
In a visual rhyme, Marie Antoinette

confronts the masses.
If Sofia Coppolas cinema might be characterized as music video in

serial form, then we ought to consider how well this describes Francis
Ford Coppolas One from the Heart. Sofias movies tend to have scores
from pop bands, such as Airs soundtrack for The Virgin Suicides and
Phoenixs score for Somewhere (2010). This is the formula, too, for One
from the Heart, and while it might resemble MGMs songbook musicals

(Gershwin songs, Freed and Brown songs), it bears closer likeness to
what is called the jukebox musical (Rock around the Clock [1956] and
A Hard Days Night [1964]). This was a form ascendant in the 1960s, a
famous example being The Graduate (1967), which plays to the songs of
Simon and Garfunkel. Coppola had himself worked in this form in his
first feature, Youre a Big Boy Now, which used the songs of the Lovin
Spoonful for its soundtrack. One sees how this would have benefited
entertainment conglomerates, who could sell the same audience both
the movie and its soundtrack. There is in this, though, a principle of
formal breakdown, with the songs pulling against the larger unity of the
movie. This, I have argued, was the disunity threatening the corporate
conglomerate, too, and the value in considering Coppolas career in
historical perspective is that we see his corporation, American Zoetrope,
offered up as a business idea that might counteract the tendencies built
in to the corporation otherwise. The opera, I have argued too, was an
aesthetic rendering of corporate form construed in unitary terms. Op-
era cedes to pop song in the Coppola family cinema, and this tradeoff
gives what we might call American Zoetrope 2.0 its new aesthetic. In
2007 Francis Ford Coppola gave full ownership of American Zoetrope
to his children, Roman and Sofia, only officializing a transition begun
with One from the Heart. Their generation of directors, nearly to the
person, cut their teeth directing music videos. Roman did. Sofia did.
Sofias first husband, Spike Jonze, did. This, for better or worse, is the
outcome of New Hollywood.
Notes
1. Peter Cowie, Coppola (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 6; and Bruce
Handy, The Liberation of Francis Ford Coppola, Vanity Fair, December 2007,
accessed April 9, 2014, http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/12/
coppola200712.
2. Dwight Macdonald, A Theory of Mass Culture, in Mass Culture, ed.
Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (New York: The Free Press,
1957), 65.
3. See Janet Wasko, Movies and Money (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing,
1982), in particular chapter 1 on D. W. Griffiths career in relation to banks and
chapter 2 on the increased financial control of the film industry in the period
192739.

4. For one account, see Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 2935.
5. Macdonald, Theory of Mass Culture, 65.
6. See Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997); Rosabeth Moss Kanter, The Change Masters (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1983); and Art Kleiner, The Age of Heretics (New York: Doubleday,
1996).
7. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006). Turner presses against a standard argument that the au-
thentically revolutionary ideals of the generation of 1968 were somehow co-opted
by the forces they opposed to argue instead that the same military-industrial
research world that brought forth nuclear weaponsand computersalso gave
rise to a free-wheeling, interdisciplinary, and highly entrepreneurial style of work
(4). Stewart Brand, Turner shows, has long proselytized the latter values in the
name of the counterculture.
8. Chris Nashawaty, Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe
Nurses (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2013), 59 (the director Jack Hill makes
the remark).
9. See A Legacy of Filmmakers: The Early Years of American Zoetrope, a
documentary included on the THX-1138 DVD (Warner Home Video, 2004).
10. Ibid.
11. Michael Ondaatje, The Conversations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2011), 15.
12. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 4.
13. Manuel Castells and Alejandro Portes, World Underneath: The Origins,
Dynamics, and Effects of the Informal Economy, in The Informal Economy,
ed. Alejandro Portes, Manuel Castells, and Lauren A. Benton (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1989), 25.
14. Michael Sragow, Godfatherhood, in Francis Ford Coppola Interviews,
ed. Gene D. Phillips and Rodney Hill (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2004), 167.
15. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929
1968 (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1968), 31, 37.
16. Coppola says this on the audio commentary for the The Godfather DVD
(Paramount, 2001).
17. Eleanor Coppola, Notes on a Life (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 19.
18. Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise, Management Re-
view 46.1 (1957): 22.
19. Pauline Kael, Raising Kane (London: Methuen, 2002), 13132.
20. Dan Simons, Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope, Entertain-
ment World, March 27, 1970, 17.
21. Michael Pye and Lynda Myles, The Movie Brats: How the Film Genera-
tion Took over Hollywood (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1979), 81.

22. William Murray, Playboy Interview: Francis Ford Coppola, in Francis
Ford Coppola Interviews, ed. Gene D. Phillips and Rodney Hill (Jackson: Uni-
versity Press of Mississippi, 2004), 39.
23. See Murrary Smith, Theses on the Philosophy of Hollywood History, in
Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1998), 320. Smith objects to Michael Storpers descriptions
of Hollywoods transition from Fordism into post-Fordism, in particular the
equivocation that because films are not absolutely identicaltwo formulaic
genre films still have many more significant differences than do two cars of the
same model, produced on an assembly linethe Fordist nature of the mode
of production in the studio era was always somewhat compromised (78).
24. I refer here to Janet Staigers sections The Hollywood Mode of Produc-
tion to 1930 (85154) and The Hollywood Mode of Production, 19301960
(30938) from the well-known larger study authored jointly by David Bordwell,
Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
25. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema, 109, 90.
26. Ibid., 121.
27. Ibid., 135, 119.
28. Ibid., 135.
29. John Ford qtd. in Bill Grantham, Embracing Jurisdiction: John Fords
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in Jurisprudence of Jurisdiction, ed. Shaun
McVeigh (New York: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007), 225.
30. Shyon Baumann, Hollywood Highbrow (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2007), 60. Ford liked to call it a job of work, Baumann argues,
in an effort not to intellectualize it.
31. Michael Schumacher, Francis Ford Coppola (New York: Crown Publish-
ers, 1999), 3.
32. Cowie, Coppola, 11.
33. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Wiley-Black-
well, 1991), 12197. Harvey defines this term of analysis derived from regula-
tion school economics. I owe the phrase unleashing capitalism to Andrew
Glyn, namely his study, Capitalism Unleashed (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006), which continues to strike me as one of the more lucid accounts of the
economic transition under discussion here.
34. Harriet Rubin, Art of Darkness, Fast Company 18 (October 1998): 136.
35. Peter F. Drucker, Henry Ford: Success and Failure, Harpers Magazine
195.116 (July 1947): 4.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 5.
38. Ibid., 7.
39. Ibid., 1.
40. Rubin, Art of Darkness.

41. Ibid.
42. Simons, Francis Ford Coppola, 17.
44. Rubin, Art of Darkness, 136.
45. Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management (New York: Harper and Row,
1954), 36.
46. Ibid., 37.
47. Murray, Playboy Interview, 39.
49. Gerald Nachman, Coppola of ZoetropeOlder, Wiser and Poorer, Los
Angeles Times, November 7, 1971, 57.
50. Handy, Liberation of Francis Ford Coppola.
51. This description of New York Citys turn to finance capital is offered by
Fredric Jameson, The Brick and the Balloon, in The Cultural Turn: Selected
Writings on the Postmodern, 19831998 (London: Verso, 1998), 167.
52. John Cutts, The Dangerous Age, Films and Filming (May 1969): 10
(Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, Calif.).
53. Tom Hayden, The Port Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s
Revolution (New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 2005), 83.
54. See Claus Offe, Disorganized Capitalism (Cambridge: Massachusetts
Institute of Techonology Press, 1985); and Scott Lash and John Urry, The End
of Organized Capitalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
55. Francis Ford Coppola, Americas Talent Can Still Soar, Coppola files,
Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, Calif.
56. See Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Ting Wang, and Richard
Maxwell, Global Hollywood 2 (London: British Film Institute Publishing, 2005).
57. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1994), 7.
58. See Legacy of Filmmakers.
59. See Eleanor Coppola, Notes (New York: Limelight Editions, 2001), 27.
60. See THX 1138Made in San Francisco, in George Lucas Interviews, ed.
Sally Kline (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 813. There Lucas
explains his aesthetic motivation: My primary purpose in approaching the pro-
duction of THX-1138 was to make a kind of cinema verit of the future. However,
I wanted it to look like a very slick, studied documentary in terms of technique.
I come from a background of graphics, photography, art and paintingand Im
very graphics-conscious (10).
61. Ibid.
62. For the story of Coppola bringing a generator into the village of Baler, see
Coppola, Notes, 62. For Miriam Hansens political take on Apocalypse Now, see
Traces of Transgression in Apocalypse Now, Social Text 3 (Autumn 1980): 127.
63. David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Water-
gate and Vietnam, 19701979, vol. 9 of History of the American Cinema (New
York: Charles Scribners Sons, 2000), 303.

65. Ibid., 25.
66. Ibid., 24.
67. Joseph Gelmis, Francis Ford Coppola: Free Agent within the System,
in Francis Ford Coppola Interviews, ed. Gene D. Phillips and Rodney Hill
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 12.
68. Hayden, Port Huron Statement, 84.
69. Ibid., 72, 46.
70. See Legacy of Filmmakers.
71. Francis Ford Coppola, audio commentary on Finians Rainbow DVD
(Warner Home Video, 2005).
72. Stephen Farber, George Lucas: The Stinky Kid Hits the Big Time, in
George Lucas Interviews, ed. Sally Kline (Jackson: University Press of Missis-
sippi, 1999), 36.
74. Ibid., 38.
75. Gene D. Phillips, Godfather (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2004), 54.
77. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton and
Co., 1997).
78. Ibid., 21.
79. Ibid., 50.
80. Ibid., 30.
81. Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mys-
tique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst: Uni-
versity of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 3.
82. Phillips, Godfather, 56.
83. Dan Simons, Rain People by Rule Breaker, Los Angeles Times, Sep-
tember 9, 1969 (Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, Calif.).
85. See George Lucass Filmmaker, a documentary of the making of The Rain
People.
86. Bob Motley, Two Godfathers Are Better than One, New Times, May
3, 1974 (Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, Calif.).
88. Louise Sweeney, The Movie Business Is Alive and Well and Living in
San Francisco, Show 1 (April 1970): 35.
89. Dennis Schaefer and Larry Salvato, Masters of Light (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1985), 90.
90. John Cutts, The Dangerous Age, Films and Filming (May 1969): 8.
92. Ibid., 47.

93. Mathias Nilges, The Anti-Anti-Oedipus: Representing Post-Fordist Sub-
jectivity, Mediations 23.2 (Spring 2008): 32, 31.
95. Ibid., 55.
96. Ibid, 53.
97. Ibid., 52.
98. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986),
7180.
99. Ibid., 58, 59, 61.
100. Ibid., 61.
101. Ibid., 62.
102. Ibid., 77.
103. Ibid., 78.
104. Ibid., 77.
105. Ibid., 78.
106. Ibid., 81.
107. Ibid., 58.
108. We find something of the same thing in Jean-Franois Lyotards The
Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), although when Lyotard uses the
comparable term open system, he more forthrightly does the work of applying
it not only to science, which is his model of knowledge, but to the operations of
political economy (64).
109. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 17.
110. Simons, Rain People by Rule Breaker.
111. S.F. Film Craft Union Gives Coppola Full Control in Return for 55-Hr.
Week, Variety, September 24, 1969 (Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, Calif.).
112. Ibid.
113. Sweeney, Movie Business Is Alive and Well, 36.
114. Simons, Rain People by Rule Breaker.
115. Cutts, Dangerous Age, 6.
117. Ibid., 17.
118. Ibid.
119. Ibid.
120. Cutts, Dangerous Age, 5.
121. Ondaatje, Conversations, 15.
123. Nachman, Coppola of Zoetrope, 57.
124. Coppola, Notes on a Life, 257.
126. Ibid., 27.

127. Schumacher, Francis Ford Coppola, 85.
128. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Company (New York:
Random House, 2003), 120.
129. Ibid., 96.
130. See Berkeley in the Sixties, dir. Mark Kitchell, DVD (First Run Features,
2002).
131. Jon Lewis, The Godfather (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 25.
132. David Thompson, Michael Corleone, Role Model: Celebrating a Quar-
ter Century of Killer Executive Style, Esquire 127.3 (March 1997): 6062.
133. See Paul Potter, We Must Name the System, Speech delivered at
March on Washington in April 1965, in The Sixties Papers: Documents of a
Rebellious Decade, ed. Judith Clavier Albert and Stewart Edward Albert (New
York: Praeger, 1984), 21925. Paul Potter was then president of SDS.
134. See Carl Oglesby, The Yankee and Cowboy War (New York: Berkley
Publishing Group, 1977); and Richard Kaufman, As Eisenhower Was Saying
... We Must Guard against Unwarranted Influence by the Military-Industrial
Complex, in The Corporation in the American Economy, ed. Harry M. Trebing
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 4359.
135. This story gets repeated in many places. Paramount executives were
resolutely against casting Brando as Vito, largely because Brando had a repu-
tation for being undependable. One of the conditions they set on his casting,
therefore, was that he consent to a screen test, which they were sure would be a
great enough indignity for an actor of his stature as to bar his accepting the role.
Coppola, the story goes, got around this by doing an unconventional screen test,
one that did not feel at all like auditioning, and during this screen test Brando was
said to have physically transformed himself so impressivelyby painting his hair
with shoe polish and filling his cheeks with wads of Kleenexthat Paramount
executives were able to see him as right for the Don. For one version of this,
see Murray, Playboy Interview, 22.
136. Ronald Coase, The Nature of the Firm, in The Nature of the Firm,
ed. Oliver E. Williamson and Sidney G. Winter (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991), 19, 20.
137. Ibid., 19.
138. Fredric Jameson, Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture, in Signatures
of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992), 32.
139. Ibid.
140. Ibid., 33.
141. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (London: Oxford
University Press, 1967), 110.
142. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial
Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), part 3, Per-
sonal Capitalism, 235392.
143. Ibid., 240.

144. Ibid., 243.
145. Charles Dellheim, The Creation of a Company Culture: Cadburys,
American Historical Review 92.1 (February 1987): 14. See also Christopher
Smith, John Child, and Michael Rowlinson, Reshaping Work: The Cadbury
Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 5057.
146. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 115.
147. Ibid., 114.
148. Robert Scheer and Susan Lyne, An Interview with Francis Ford Cop-
pola, City of San Francisco, December 2, 1975, 21 (emphasis added).
149. Peter Bart, Threes Company, Variety, December 6, 2004 (Coppola
files, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, Calif.).
150. See Jon Lewis, Whom God Wishes to Destroy (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1996), 1517, and Schumacher, Francis Ford Coppola, 18082.
151. Bart, Threes Company.
152. Ibid.
153. Handy, Liberation of Francis Ford Coppola.
155. Claire Clouzot, The Morning of the Magician: George Lucas and Star
Wars, in George Lucas Interviews, ed. Sally Kline (Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 1999), 62.
156. Jean Valley, The Empire Strikes Back and So Does Filmmaker George
Lucas with His Sequel to Star Wars, in George Lucas Interviews, ed. Sally
Kline (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 96.
157. Clouzot, Morning of the Magician, 63.
158. Valley, Empire Strikes Back, 96.
160. Valley, Empire Strikes Back, 97.
161. Robert Lindsey, Francis Ford Coppola: Promises to Keep, New York
Times Magazine, July 24, 1988, 27.
162. See Lewis, Whom God Wishes to Destroy, 153. It should be noted that in
referring to Capras peculiar populism, Lewis means to vouch for Lucass hunch
that such populism would play well in conservative 1980s America (153). Lewis
thinks rather that Coppolas aesthetic uptake of the Capra themes compromised
Lucass plan, and in what follows I will agree with Lewiss assessment.
163. Ibid., 152.
164. See Jon Lewis, The Perfect Money Machine(s): George Lucas, Steven
Spielberg, and Auteurism in the New Hollywood, in Looking Past the Screen,
ed. Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007),
68.
165. Rex Weiner, Lucas the Loner Returns to Wars, in George Lucas In-
terviews, ed. Sally Kline (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 187.
166. Lewis, Whom God Wishes to Destroy, 153.
167. Lindsey, Francis Ford Coppola, 23.

168. Ibid., 27.
169. Stuart Klawans, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, The Nation 247.7
(September 26, 1988): 250.
170. Ibid.
171. See J. D. Connor, The Studios after the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood,
19702010 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, forthcoming), chap. 1.
172. Terrence Rafferty, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, New Yorker 64.27
(August 22, 1998): 62.
173. See the directors commentary track, Tucker: A Man and His Dreams,
DVD (Paramount, 2000).
174. See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation (Cambridge:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1999).
175. Lewis, Perfect Money Machine(s), 68.
176. Rafferty, Tucker, 63.
177. Hansen, Traces of Transgression, 127.
178. Ibid., 128.
179. Hearts of Darkness DVD (Lionsgate, 2010).
180. Cowie, Coppola, 8, 20.
181. Karen Monson, Coppola Directs American Premier of The Visit, Los
Angeles Herald-Examiner, October 31, 1972, C-4.
182. See Coppola, Notes, 6869.
183. Ivan Nagel, Autonomy and Mercy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1991).
184. Ibid., 6, 4.
185. Ibid., 6.
186. Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988), 19.
187. Nagel, Autonomy and Mercy, 26. This magic is invoked to heal the
ruptures of the new era and the disruption of the old, Nagel says, the rift in
time between the absolutist state and republican governance, which is rendered
by Die Zauberflte as the split world of good and evil and then overcome by
magic (1722). The opera was an unprecedented success. In 1794 the Journal
des Luxus und der Moden wrote, Something that can have this effect on an
entire nation must certainly be one of the most potent fermentation, and Nagel
explains its effect precisely in terms of its propaganda potential (22).
188. Ibid., 157.
189. Ibid., 158.
190. Ibid., 177.
191. Ibid., 157.
192. Juliet Koss, Modernism after Wagner (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2010), xiii.
193. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 167.

194. Jean-Paul Sartre, Why Write? in What Is Literature?, trans. Bernard
Frechtman (London: Routledge, 2001), 43.
195. See Arthur Machen, Corporate Personality, Harvard Law Review
24.4 (1911): 25367. This article is famously the first effort to asses German
jurisprudence on corporate personality from the perspective of common law.
It surveys a range of German jurists including Friedrich Karl von Savigny, Alois
von Brinz, Otto von Gierke, and Ernst Zitelman.
196. Ibid., x.
197. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, 103.
199. Greil Marcus, Journey Up the River: An Interview with Francis Ford
Coppola, Rolling Stone, November 1, 1979, 55.
201. Coppola, Notes, 52.
202. Ivan Kreilkamp, A Voice without a Body: The Phonographic Logic of
Heart of Darkness, Victorian Studies 40.2 (Winter 1997): 213.
204. Francis Ford Coppola, A Memo from Francis Ford Coppola, Esquire
88.5 (November 1977): 190.
205. Ibid., 195.
206. Ibid., 190.
207. Ibid., 194.
208. Ibid., 194.
209. Ibid., 194195, 196.
210. Ibid., 194.
211. Michal Grover-Friedlander, Vocal Apparitions: The Attraction of Cinema
to Opera (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 133. For Adornos
discussion of Wagners repudiation of Orpheus, see In Search of Wagner (Lon-
don: Verso, 2009), 113.
212. Ibid.
213. Slavoj iek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1993), 166.
214. Sragow, Godfatherhood, 169.
216. Ibid., 414.
217. My study-in-progress, Arts Economy: Post-Fordist Cinema and Hol-
lywood Counterculture, 19621975, attempts something along just these lines.
In it, I narrate a cultural history of such new corporations as Kirk Douglass
Bryna Productions, Robert Altmans Lions Gate, the Zanuck/Brown Company,
and BBS Productions, with reference as well to the first iteration of American
Zoetrope and the outlier enterprises of John Cassavetes.
218. In one interview, Coppola claims, Im no longer dependent on the movie
business to make a living. So if I want to make movies as other old guys would
play golf, I can. See Handy, Liberation of Francis Ford Coppola, 252.

219. Sragow, Godfatherhood, 169.
220. Handy, Liberation of Francis Ford Coppola, 252.
221. Rubin, Art of Darkness, 134.
222. Benedict Carver, New Dreams for Zoetrope, Variety, July 20, 1998,
7.
223. Larry Rohter, Family Dynamics, without the Bullets, New York Times,
June 3, 2009, 18.
224. Richard Corliss, Coppolas Tetro: An Offer You Can Refuse, Time,
June 11, 2009, accessed February 20, 2014, http://content.time.com/time/arts/
article/0,8599,1904079,00.html.
226. Ondaatje, Conversations, 156.
228. Corliss, Coppolas Tetro.
230. Simons, Francis Ford Coppola, 17. Early on, this was Coppolas claim
that he knew the guysover against the establishment. In George Lucass
Filmmaker, in the middle of a testy phone call, Coppola says, I dont need the
unions, because I know the guys who can make the picture just as well, and in
some instances better, than the craftsmen who are unionized.
231. Michael Ventura, Coppola Woes and the Zoetrope Revolution, L.A.
Weekly, February 13, 1981, 8.
232. David Denbys criticism that the day Francis Coppola abandoned realism
for artifice has to rank among the saddest in film history is quoted by Lewis,
Whom God Wishes to Destroy, 144. Peter Cowie, too, notes this bifurcation
in Coppolas career, though not in terms of realism and artifice. He claims that
Coppolas Academy Award presentation in April 1979, when he speechified on
the digital revolution, was his peak moment, after which critics and audiences
have confessed to a feeling if not of betrayal then of frustrated expectation where
Coppola is concerned (Cowie, Coppola 145).
233. Lillian Ross, Some Figures on a Fantasy: Francis Coppola, in Francis
Ford Coppola Interviews, ed. Gene D. Phillips and Rodney Hill (Jackson: Uni-
versity Press of Mississippi, 2004), 64.
234. Ibid., 65.
235. This quotes Francis Ford Coppola in the liner notes of a CD soundtrack
of One from the Heart restored and remastered in 2004.
236. Scott Haller, Francis Ford Coppolas Biggest Gamble: One from the
Heart, in Francis Ford Coppola Interviews, ed. Gene D. Phillips and Rodney
Hill (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 60.
237. Ross, Some Figures on a Fantasy, 67.
238. Ibid., 75.
239. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1979), 81.
240. Haller, Francis Ford Coppolas Biggest Gamble, 54.

241. D. A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 3.
242. Ibid., 78.
243. Ventura, Coppola Woes and the Zoetrope Revolution, 7.
244. Paula Parisi, A Conversation with Francis Ford Coppola, American
Cinematographer 72.8 (August 1991): 71.
245. Ibid.
246. Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides (New York: Picador, 1993), 190.
247. Nathan Lee, Pretty Vacant, Film Comment 42.5 (September 1, 2006):
25.

Interview with Francis Ford Coppola
This interview was conducted by e-mail in December 2013.
jeff menne: The party line on you has been that you were too
much an artist to be a good businessperson. But it seems history will
tell a different storythat is, that you have been responsible for creat-
ing different business models perhaps more than any other filmmaker
in your generation. Do you think your artistic sense has opposed your
business sense, or has it complemented it?
fr ancis ford coppola: I always had good entrepreneurial
instincts, even while a student in college; setting up and running the
student drama organization and sparring with faculty was the basis of
American Zoetrope. Later, my adventure buying the Hollywood General
Studios and trying to set up a hybrid of the old-fashioned studio system
fused with new technologies (Zoetrope Studios) was both a trauma and
great learning experience. After barely surviving that adventure, and
then having the opportunity to sit on the MGM-UA board for several

years, it added up to a sort of business-school education. I reorganized
my business interests (AZ, the wine business, publishing) and applied
what I had learnedmainly insisting on one accounting system through-
out. This gave me a way to move forward more sensibly and with a
healthy fear of debt and banks. Nearly getting wiped out after One from
the Heart was a shock, and so I proceeded in the later part of my life
more carefully, keeping a constant eye on debt as well as recruiting a
solid CEO to run business affairs. But to this day, the company is owned
and run by an artist rather than a businessperson, which is unusual for
this country.
jm: You made a point of starting American Zoetrope as not just a
place where you could do your work, but where others could do their
work. What kind of environment and what kind of ethos did you hope
to create at American Zoetrope?
ffc: My experience at Hofstra College was formative. It was the
first time I stayed in one school for more than eight months, and I
was given wonderful opportunities as a theater major. I loved working
shoulder to shoulder with the other students, mounting ambitious pro-
ductions, building scenery, doing the lighting, and all the fraternization
that comes with it. Graduate film school was very differentthe dif-
ferent colleagues locked up alone in their editing rooms, monopolizing
equipment, without the family-style experience thats part of theater.
So American Zoetrope was a way to combine what I had learned from
the theater with a film companyworking with colleagues to make the
films of our dreams.
jm: American Zoetrope might seem a failed venture, simply because
Warner Bros. pulled their funding, but its legacy has been great, and as
a business idea it has seemed to guide your career. And now you have
left it for your childrens careers. How do you now assess American
Zoetrope?
ffc: Well, if one looks at a list of all the productions American
Zoetrope made, those I directed and the many others that I did not,
I think it shows a level of excellence, variety, and innovation that is a
worthy legacy. We sponsored new filmmakers, reintroduced Jerry Lewiss
concept of video assist, pioneered electronic editing, previsualization,
introduced the concept of sound designer, brought back the perfor-
mance of a live symphony orchestra with silent cinema, hired the first

woman head of production (Lucy Fischer), aside from a filmography
which includes a number of classics. And yes, now it is owned by my
children (and grandchildren) who are all viable filmmakers in their own
right.
jm: Looking back on the break with Warner Bros., how do you un-
derstand it? Was it just that THX-1138 was too experimental? Was it a
philosophical difference? It seems odd that John Calley was willing to
stand by Stanley Kubrick, say, when he was taking risks and experiment-
ing, but was so put off by THX.
ffc: We were located somewhere other than Los Angeles, and were
not stylish or in vogue or certainly as established as Stanley Kubrick. John
Calley was always a Hollywood phenomenon, despite his beard and U.K.
sensibility, really no more intellectual than the other film executives. He
wanted to be associated with the trendy and with winners, and we were
only winners when viewed from later on.
jm: Since the 1960s, San Francisco has been the home of another
pioneering industryelectronicsand of course the spirit of American
Zoetrope was very open to technology. Were you affected by the parallel
developments in that field, and the kinds of personalities attracted to
that field?
ffc: I was always a kind of boy scientist, in love with science and
technology, the only subject I was any good at. I began in theater with
lighting, working for George Izenour, inventor of the electronic lighting
board. So yes, being in San Francisco, George and I were very interested
in visiting Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) to learn about their
innovations to computing and where many of the things related to the
internet and modern technology came from. Also American Zoetrope
wanted to own and control its own filmmaking equipment; for example,
American Zoetrope would sponsor a weekend each year in which we
invited many of the companies to talk about what they were doing, then
have all the sessions typed up and distributed to all, so we became a host
and facilitator to new ideas.
jm: Your father was obviously a great musical influence on you, and
your brother a great literary influence on you. Your work, hence, was
from the outset coming from a tradition of the arts rather than solely
from a Hollywood tradition. How has that shaped your personal theory
on the relation of cinema and the other arts?
Interview | 125

ffc: My father and brother were powerful influences in my ar-
tistic life. Our family was a hothouse experience in which you felt if
you didnt have talent, you were dead. All the aspects of music theory,
harmony, opera history and production, and its offspring the musical;
literature, philosophy, semiology, aesthetics: I was always over my head,
yet struggled to be in that universe.
jm: Opera, in particular, has seemed a strong influence on you all
along. How has it shaped your aesthetic sensibility?
ffc: Well, I knew the stories of the operas, and I loved the work-
ings of the stage, with its trapdoors, wind machines, and fly galleries;
the mechanics and magic of the stories, the music, the dancingall
culminating in a thrilling experience. I think the era of the great virtuoso
opera conductors (Wagner, von Blow, Strauss, Mahler, etc.) were the
forerunners of the filmmakers in that they were working in an enor-
mously popular field, had their own artistic companies, and the final
say over every aspect of the productions.
jm: With One from the Heart, some critics felt you had become too
formal, that the form had become more important than the content.
People say this less often about literature, it seemsrarely are there
complaints about sonnets and sestinas being too formal. What is your
outlook on the form-content ratio, and what do you think of the critical
appraisal that the ratio has shifted in your films in favor of form?
ffc: As I think back, I realize I had made The Godfather, The Con-
versation, Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now in short order, one
after the other. I wanted to do something totally different in style and
form, something with songs, like theater. Also, in my so-called mind,
with my marriage failing, I imagined it would be part of a great four-part
project based on Goethes Elective Affinities, with its story related to the
Man, the Woman, the Other Man, the Other Woman. To this day I am
fascinated with form. I know I am filled with emotion; I just need the
right envelope to put it in.
jm: In part I ask the last question because One from the Heart is
a favorite of mine that seems to deserve a place with your other great
works. Does it matter to you how your films have been rated?
ffc: Oh, I sort of failed my way up to success. Im used to my films
first being greeted with boos and am intrigued that they have been
viewed so much more favorably later on. When I make a film now, I

figure the real reaction will come in ten or twenty years. But of course
it matters; when they dont like your film, it hurts your feelings. Its as
though you worked on cooking a meal and everyone sat there at the
table and hated it.
jm: With Tetro and Twixt, its clear that personal content will always
find a place in your films, though often it will show up in allegorical or
other indirect ways. Why the indirection? Is there something in straight
autobiographical content that doesnt compel you?
ffc: Although I feel that all ones work has to be somewhat about
yourself, your life, and your understanding of contemporary life, it em-
barrasses me to be singled out as the focus. Throughout my life, the
thing I am most frightened of is to be embarrassed in public. Maybe it
comes from so often being the new kid in school, when all the eyes of
the other students (the girls) were on you and to be ridiculed in front
of them.
Interview | 127

Filmography
Dementia 13 (1963)
USA
Production: Roger Corman Productions
Producer: Francis Ford Coppola
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola
Photography: Charles Hannawalt
Art Director: Albert Locatelli
Editors: Mort Tubor and Stuart OBrien
Music: Ronald Stein
Cast: William Campbell (Richard Haloran), Luana Anders (Louise Haloran),
Bart Patton (Billy Haloran), Patrick Magee (Justin Caleb), Mary Mitchel
(Kane), Ethne Dunn (Lady Haloran), Peter Reed (John Haloran), Barbara
Dowling (Kathleen)
35 mm, black and white
75 min.
Youre a Big Boy Now (1966)

USA
Production: Seven Arts
Producer: Phil Feldman
Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola, based on the novel by David Benedictus
Photography: Andy Laszlo
Art Director: Vassele Fotopoulos
Costumes: Theoni V. Aldredge
Choreographer: Robert Tucker
Editor: Aram Avakian
Music: Bob Prince; Songs by John Sebastian; Performed by Lovin Spoonful
Cast: Peter Kastner (Bernard Chanticleer), Elizabeth Hartman (Barbara Dar-
ling), Geraldine Page (Margery Chanticleer), Julie Harris (Miss Thing), Rip
Torn (I. H. Chanticleer), Tony Bill (Raef), Karen Black (Amy)

35 mm, color
96 min.
Finians Rainbow (1968)

USA
Production: Warner Bros.Seven Arts
Producer: Joseph Landon
Photography: Philip Lathrop
Production Designer: Hilyard M. Brown
Costumes: Dorothy Jenkins
Choreographer: Hermes Pan
Editor: Melvin Shapiro
Music Director: Ray Heindorf
Sound: M. A. Merrick and Dan Wallin
Cast: Fred Astaire (Finian McLonergan), Petula Clark (Sharon McLonergan),
Tommy Steele (Og), Don Francks (Woody Mahoney), Barbara Hancock (Su-
san the Silent), Keenan Wynn (Senator Rawkins), Al Freeman Jr. (Howard),
Ronald Colby (Buzz Collins)
35 mm, 70 mm, color
141 min.
The Rain People (1969)

USA
Production: Warner Bros.Seven Arts
Producers: Bart Patton and Ronald Colby (American Zoetrope)
Photography: Bill Butler
Art Director: Leon Erickson
Editor: Barry Malkin
Music: Ronald Stein and Carmine Coppola
Sound: Nathan Boxer
Sound Montage: Walter Murch
Cast: James Caan (Kilgannon), Shirley Knight (Natalie Ravenna), Robert Duvall
(Gordon), Marya Zimmet (Rosalie), Tom Aldredge (Mr. Alfred)
35 mm, color
101 min.
The Godfather (1972)

USA
Production: Paramount
Producer: Albert S. Ruddy
130 | Filmography

Screenplay: Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, based on the novel by
Mario Puzo
Photography: Gordon Willis
Production Designer: Dean Tavoularis
Art Director: Warren Clymer
Costumes: Anna Hill Johnstone
Editors: William Reynolds and Peter Zinner
Music: Nino Rota, with additional music by Carmine Coppola
Sound: Christopher Newman
Cast: Marlon Brando (Vito Corleone), Al Pacino (Michael Corleone), James
Caan (Sonny Corleone), Richard Castellano (Clemenza), Robert Duvall (Tom
Hagen), Sterling Hayden (McCluskey), John Marley (Woltz), Richard Conte
(Barzini), Al Lettieri (Sollozzo), Diane Keaton (Kay), Talia Shire (Connie),
John Cazale (Fredo), Al Martino (Johnny Fontane)
35 mm, color
175 min.
The Conversation (1974)

USA
Producers: Francis Ford Coppola and Fred Roos (Directors Company)
Photography: Bill Butler
Set Decorator: Doug von Koss
Costumes: Aggie Guerard Rodgers
Supervising Editor, Sound Montage, and Rerecording: Walter Murch
Editor: Richard Chew
Music: David Shire
Technical Advisers: Hal Lipset, Leo Jones, and Jim Bloom
Cast: Gene Hackman (Harry Caul), John Cazale (Stan), Allen Garfield (Bernie
Moran), Frederic Forrest (Mark), Cindy Williams (Ann), Elizabeth McRae
(Meredith), Harrison Ford (Martin Stett), Robert Duvall (the Director), Teri
Garr (Amy)
35 mm, color
113 min.
The Godfather, Part II (1974)

USA
Producer: Francis Ford Coppola (American Zoetrope)
Filmography | 131

Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, based on events in the
novel by Mario Puzo
Art Director: Angelo Graham
Set Decorator: George R. Neison
Costumes: Theadora van Runkle
Editors: Peter Zinner, Barry Malkin, and Richard Marks
Music: Nino Rota and Carmine Coppola
Sound Montage and Rerecording: Walter Murch
Cast: Al Pacino (Michael Corleone), Robert Duvall (Tom Hagen), Diane Keaton
(Kay), Robert De Niro (Vito Corleone), John Cazale (Fredo Corleone), Talia
Shire (Connie Corleone), Lee Strasberg (Hyman Roth), Michael V. Gazzo
(Frank Pentangeli), G. D. Spradlin (Senator Pat Geary)
35 mm, color
200 min.
Apocalypse Now (1979)

USA
Production: United Artists
Producer: Francis Ford Coppola (American Zoetrope)
Screenplay: John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola, based on the novel Heart
of Darkness by Joseph Conrad; Narration by Michael Herr
Photography: Vittorio Storaro
Costume Supervisor: Charles E. James
Supervising Editor: Richard Marks
Editors: Walter Murch, Gerald B. Greenberg, Lisa Fruchtman, and Barry Malkin
Music: Carmine Coppola and Francis Ford Coppola
Sound Montage/Design: Walter Murch
Cast: Marlon Brando (Kurtz), Robert Duvall (Kilgore), Martin Sheen (Wil-
lard), Frederic Forrest (Chef), Albert Hall (Chief), Sam Bottoms (Lance
B. Johnson), Larry Fishburne (Clean), Dennis Hopper (Photojournalist),
G. D. Spradlin (General Corman), Harrison Ford (Colonel Lucas)
35 mm, 70 mm, color
153 min.
One from the Heart (1982)

USA
Production: Columbia Pictures
Producers: Gray Frederickson and Fred Roos (Zoetrope Studios)
132 | Filmography

Screenplay: Armyan Bernstein and Francis Ford Coppola
Special Visual Effects: Robert Swarthe
Electronic Cinema: Thomas Brown, Murdo Laird, Anthony St. John, and Mi-
chael Lehmann
Costumes: Ruth Morley
Choreographers: Kenny Ortega and Gene Kelly
Editors: Anne Goursaud, with Rudi Fehr and Randy Roberts
Songs and Music: Tom Waits; Performed by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle
Sound Designer: Richard Beggs
Cast: Frederic Forrest (Hank), Teri Garr (Frannie), Raul Julia (Ray), Nastassia
Kinski (Leila), Lainie Kazan (Maggie), Harry Dean Stanton (Moe)
35 mm, 70 mm, color
107 min.
The Outsiders (1983)

USA
Production: Warner Bros.
Producers: Fred Roos and Gray Frederickson (Zoetrope Studios)
Screenplay: S. E. Hinton and Francis Ford Coppola, based on the novel by
S.E. Hinton
Photography: Steven H. Burum
Special Visual Effects: Robert Swarthe
Costumes: Marge Bowers
Editor: Anne Goursaud
Music: Carmine Coppola
Sound: Jim Webb
Cast: Matt Dillon (Dallas Winston), Ralph Macchio (Johnny Cade), C. Thomas
Howell (Ponyboy Curtis), Patrick Swayze (Darrel Curtis), Rob Lowe (Sodapop
Curtis), Emilio Estevez (Two-Bit Matthews), Tom Cruise (Steve Randle),
Glenn Withrow (Tom Shepard), Diane Lane (Cherry Valance), Tom Waits
(Buck Merrill)
35 mm, color
91 min.
Rumble Fish (1983)

USA
Production: Universal
Filmography | 133

Producers: Fred Roos and Doug Claybourne (Zoetrope Studios)
Screenplay: S. E. Hinton and Francis Ford Coppola, based on the novel by
S.E. Hinton
Photography: Steven H. Burum
Costumes: Marge Bowers
Music: Stewart Copeland
Sound: David Parker
Cast: Matt Dillon (Rusty James), Mickey Rourke (Motorcycle Boy), Diane Lane
(Patty), Dennis Hopper (Father), Diane Scarwid (Cassandra), Vincent Spano
(Steve), Nicolas Cage (Smokey), Christopher Penn (B. J. Jackson), Larry
Fishburne (Midget), William Smith (Patterson), Tom Waits (Benny)
35 mm, black and white
94 min.
The Cotton Club (1984)

USA
Production: Orion
Producer: Robert Evans (Zoetrope Studios)
Screenplay: William Kennedy and Francis Ford Coppola, from a story by Wil-
liam Kennedy
Photography: Stephen Goldblatt
Production Designer: Richard Sylbert
Art Directors: David Chapman and Gregory Bolton
Costumes: Milena Canonero
Principal Choreographer: Michael Smith
Tap Choreographer: Henry LeTang
Sound Editor: Edward Beyer
Montage and Second-Unit Director: Gian-Carlo Coppola
Music: John Barry and Bob Wilber
Cast: Richard Gere (Dixie Dwyer), Gregory Hines (Sandman Williams), Diane
Lane (Vera Cicero), Lonette McKee (Lila Rose Oliver), Bob Hoskins (Owney
Madden), James Remar (Dutch Schultz), Nicolas Cage (Vincent Dwyer)
35 mm, 70 mm, color
127 min.
Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

USA
Production: Tri-Star
134 | Filmography

Producer: Paul R. Gurian (American Zoetrope)
Screenplay: Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner
Photography: Jordan Cronenweth
Electronic Cinema: Murdo Laird, Ted Mackland, and Ron Mooreland
Art Designer: Alex Tavoularis
Costumes: Theadora Van Runkle
Music: John Barry
Supervisory Sound Editor: Michael Kirchberger
Cast: Kathleen Turner (Peggy Sue Kelcher), Nicolas Cage (Charlie Bodell), Barry
Miller (Richard Norvik), Catherine Hicks (Carol Heath), Joan Allen (Maddie
Nagel), Kevin J. OConnor (Michael Fitzsimmons), Jim Carrey (Walter Getz)
35 mm, color
104 min.
Gardens of Stone (1987)

USA
Production: Tri-Star
Producers: Michael I. Levy and Francis Ford Coppola
Screenplay: Ronald Bass, based on the novel by Nicholas Proffitt
Photography: Jordan Cronenweth
Art Designer: Alex Tavoularis
Costumes: Will Kim and Judianna Makovsky
Cast: James Caan (Clell Hazard), Anjelica Huston (Samantha Davis), James
Earl Jones (Sgt. Maj. Goody Nelson), D. B. Sweeney (Jackie Willow), Dean
Stockwell (Homer Thomas), Mary Stuart Masterson (Rachel Feld)
35 mm, color
111 min.
Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1989)

USA
Producers: Fred Roos and Fred Fuchs (Lucasfilm Ltd. and Zoetrope Studios)
Screenplay: Arnold Schulman and David Seidler
Filmography | 135

Art Director: Alex Tavoularis
Editor: Priscilla Nedd
Music: Joe Jackson
Cast: Jeff Bridges (Preston Tucker), Joan Allen (Vera), Martin Landau (Abe
Karatz), Frederic Forrest (Eddie), Mako (Jimmy), Elias Koteas (Alex), Chris-
tian Slater (Junior)
35 mm, color
110 min.
New York Stories (Segment: Life without Zoe [1989])

USA
Production: Touchstone Pictures
Producers: Fred Roos and Fred Fuchs
Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola and Sofia Coppola
Art Director: Speed Hopkins
Costumes: Sofia Coppola
Sound Recording: Frank Graziadei
Songs: Kid Creole and the Coconuts
Cast: Heather McComb (Zoe), Talia Shire (Charlotte), Gia Coppola (Baby Zoe),
Giancarlo Giannini (Claudio), Paul Herman (Clifford)
35 mm, color
34 min.
The Godfather, Part III (1990)

USA
Producer: Francis Ford Coppola (Zoetrope Studios)
Screenplay: Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola
Art Director: Alex Tavoularis
Editors: Barry Malkin, Lisa Fruchtman, and Walter Murch
Additional Music and Themes: Nino Rota
136 | Filmography

Cast: Al Pacino (Michael Corleone), Diane Keaton (Kay), Talia Shire (Connie
Corleone), Andy Garcia (Vincent Mancini), Eli Wallach (Don Altobello), Joe
Mantegna (Joey Zasa), George Hamilton (B. J. Harrison), Bridget Fonda
(Grace Hamilton), Sofia Coppola (Mary Corleone), Franc DAmbrosio (An-
thony Corleone)
35 mm, color
170 min.
Bram Stokers Dracula (1992)

USA
Production: Columbia Pictures
Producers: Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Fuchs, and Charles Mulvehill (Ameri-
can Zoetrope)
Screenplay: James V. Hart
Photography: Michael Ballhaus
Visual Effects: Roman Coppola
Production Designer: Thomas Sanders
Art Director: Andrew Precht
Costumes: Eiko Ishioka
Editors: Nicholas C. Smith, Glenn Scantlebury, and Anne Goursaud
Music: Wojciech Kilar
Sound: David Stone
Cast: Gary Oldman (Dracula), Winona Ryder (Mina/Elisabeta), Anthony Hop-
kins (Van Helsing), Keanu Reeves (Jonathan Harker), Sadie Frost (Lucy West-
enra), Richard E. Grant (Dr. Jack Seward), Cary Elwes (Arthur Holmwood),
Tom Waits (Renfield)
35 mm, color
128 min.
Jack (1996)
USA
Production: Buena Vista
Producers: Ricardo Mestres, Fred Fuchs, and Francis Ford Coppola (American
Zoetrope)
Screenplay: James DeMonaco and Gary Nadeau
Photography: John Toll
Art Designer: Angelo Graham
Music: Michael Kamen
Sound: Agamemnon Andrianos
Filmography | 137

Cast: Robin Williams (Jack Powell), Diane Lane (Karen Powell), Jennifer Lo-
pez (Miss Marquez), Brian Kerwin (Brian Powell), Fran Drescher (Dolores
Durante), Bill Cosby (Lawrence Woodruff), Michael McKean (Paulie)
35 mm, color
113 min.
The Rainmaker (1997)

USA
Producers: Michael Douglas, Steven Reuther, and Fred Fuchs (American Zoe-
trope)
Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola, based on the novel by John Grisham
Photography: John Toll
Production Designer: Howard Cummings
Art Directors: Robert Shaw and Jeffrey McDonald
Music: Elmer Bernstein
Sound: Nelson Stoll
Cast: Matt Damon (Rudy Baylor), Claire Danes (Kelly Riker), Jon Voight (Leo
F. Drummond), Mary Kay Place (Dot Black), Mickey Rourke (Bruiser Stone),
Danny DeVito (Deck Schifflet), Dean Stockwell (Judge Harvey Hale), Teresa
Wright (Miss Birdie), Virginia Madsen (Jackie Lemancyzk)
35 mm, color
135 min.
Youth without Youth (2007)

USA
Production: American Zoetrope
Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola, based on the novella by Mircea Eliade
Photography: Mihai Malaimare Jr.
Production Designer: Calin Papura
Editor: Walter Murch
Music: Osvaldo Golijov
Cast: Tim Roth (Dominic), Alexandra Maria Lara (Veronica/Laura), Bruno Ganz
(Professor Stanciulescu), Andr Hennicke (Josef Rudolf)
35 mm, color
124 min.
Tetro (2009)
USA
138 | Filmography

Production Designer: Sebastin Orgambide
Art Designer: Federico Garca Cambero
Editor: Walter Murch
Music: Osvaldo Golijov
Cast: Vincent Gallo (Angelo Tetro Tetrocini), Alden Ehrenreich (Bennie),
Maribel Verd (Miranda), Carmen Maura (Alone)
35 min, black and white
127 min.
Twixt (2011)
USA
Art Director: Jimmy DiMarcellis
Editor: Robert Schafer
Music: Osvaldo Golijov and Dan Deacon
Cast: Val Kilmer (Hall Baltimore), Bruce Dern (Sheriff Bobby LaGrange), Elle
Fanning (V), Ben Chaplin (Poe), Joanne Whalley (Denise), David Paymer
(Sam), Alden Ehrenreich (Flamingo)
35 mm, color
88 min.
Filmography | 139

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144 | Bibliography

Index
Adorno, Theodor W., 89 Brand, Stewart, 13

Air (rock band), 110 Brando, Marlon, 54, 82
Alexander Nevsky, 95 Braudel, Fernand, 17
American Graffiti, 1920 Bridges, Jeff, 4
American in Paris, An, 103 business management: under Fordism,
American Zoetrope: as business idea, 34, 1112; managerialism, 4445 scientific
9, 2021; facility, 3940; and financial management, 2, 8, 11, 65
crisis, 43; formation, 2327; work con- Butler, Bill, 29
ditions, 15, 3739
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 30, 6566 Caan, James, 29, 33
Apartment, The, 65 Cadbury Brothers, Ltd., 58
Apocalypse Now, 18, 21, 23, 4344, 67, Calley, John, 40, 43, 44
7678, 8290, 93, 104 Camelot, 25
Arizona Dream, 97 Capra, Frank, 4, 16, 6970
Arrighi, Giovanni, 18 Carnegie, Andrew, 69
Ashley, Ted, 40, 43, 44 Carmen, 80
Ashley-Famous, 44 Carmichael, Stokely, 25
Astaire, Fred, 25 Cassavetes, John, 9596
Auteur Theory, 2, 79 Castells, Manuel, 6
Cavalleria Rusticana, 92, 94, 100
Bach, Steven, 1 Cavell, Stanley, 105
Bart, Peter, 60 Cazale, John, 61
BBS Productions, 58 Cecilia Valds, 78
Beatles, The, 101 Chandler, Alfred D., Jr., 44, 57
Beggs, Richard, 73 Chaplin, Charlie, 2
Bergson, Henri, 35 Chion, Michel, 77
Bernstein, Leonard, 16 Citizen Kane, 9
Bizet, George, 80 Coase, Ronald, 56, 89
Blow-Up, 6566 Colby, Ronald, 25, 40
Bluhdorn, Charles, 23, 60 Comden, Betty, 16, 101
Bogdanovich, Peter, 60, 67 Connor, J. D., 72
Bohme, La, 78 Conversation, The, 23, 29, 42, 43, 45, 51,
Bolter, Jay David, 74 5967
Bram Stokers Dracula, 22 Coppola, Anton, 98

Coppola, August, 77 Ford, Harrison, 86
Coppola, Carmine, 12, 7778, 86, 98 Ford, Henry, 914, 16, 32
Coppola, Eleanor, 40, 78, 85 Ford, John, 1012
Coppola, Francis Ford: awards, 24, Forrest, Frederic, 103
67; childhood, 12, 78, 86; economic Free Speech Movement, 47
change, 3, 7, 1219; film school, 3, 9, French Connection, The, 67
24, 27; technology, 17, 3839, 8384, Friedan, Betty, 12, 2728, 36
1023, 1046; wine-making, 96 Friedkin, William, 60, 67
Coppola, Roman, 23, 107, 111 Friedman, Milton, 12
Coppola, Sofia, 23, 91, 96, 1014, 10711
Corliss, Richard, 98 Gallo, Vincent, 97
Corman, Roger, 3, 23, 86 Gang of Four, 108
corporation: and conglomerates, 3, 2324 Garcia, Andy, 91
4445, 57, 94, 96, 111; incorporation of Garcia, Jerry, 3, 40
American Zoetrope, 40; and opera, 22, Gardens of Stone, 68
7879; personal firms, 5758; theory Garr, Teri, 62, 103
of, 5657, 8182 Gecko, Gordon, 49
Costello, Elvis, 100101, 108 Gesamtkuntswerk, 81
Cotton Club, The, 22 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 79
Cowie, Peter, 28, 30, 33, 34 Godfather, The, 4, 7, 9, 23, 4259, 64, 77,
Cuba, 59, 77 78, 89, 90, 93, 97, 98, 102
Godfather, Part II, 48, 5859, 67, 97, 101
Daisy Miller, 60 Godfather, Part III, 23, 42, 7677, 9095,
DAmbrosio, Franc, 90 99, 100
Deleuze, Gilles, 3536 Godfather trilogy, 1, 2830, 58, 61, 90,
Dementia 13, 9, 38 93, 95, 97, 98, 100103
Denby, David, 102 Good Machine, 94
Deschanel, Caleb, 23 Graduate, The, 49, 111
Directors Company, 51, 59, 67, 88 Graham, Bill, 3, 40
Disney Company, 58 Green, Adolph, 16, 101
Douglas, Michael, 49 Griffith, D. W., 2
Drucker, Peter, 1415 Grover-Friedlander, Michal, 77, 89
Dunst, Kirsten, 108 Grusin, Richard, 74
Duvall, Robert, 2829, 33, 82, 85 Guatarri, Flix, 36
Gulf and Western, 23, 60
Easy Rider, 3
Edison, Thomas, 9, 16, 69 Hackman, Gene, 61
Ehrenreich, Alden, 97 Hansen, Miriam, 21, 76, 83, 85
Einem, Gottfried von, 78 Hard Days Night, A, 111
Eugenides, Jeffrey, 108 Harvey, David, 12
Evans, Robert, 54 Hegel, G. W. F., 5759, 92
Exorcist, The, 60 Herzog, Werner, 77
His Girl Friday, 65
Feminine Mystique, The, 27 Hole in the Head, A, 70
Filmmaker, 3738 Holly, Buddy, 101
Finians Rainbow, 9, 23, 25, 38, 101 Hollywood General, 16, 102, 103
Fishburne, Laurence, 83 Hopper, Dennis, 3, 87
Flivver King, The, 32 Horowitz, Daniel, 28
146 | Index

How Green Was My Valley, 12 Macdonald, Dwight, 2
Hyman, Kenny, 27 Malkin, Barry, 28
Mann, Michael, 93
I Am Curious Yellow, 40 Marcus, Greil, 84
Industrial Light and Magic, 106 Marie Antoinette, 23, 102, 10810
Its a Wonderful Life, 70 Marley, John, 50
Ivens, Joris, 35 Mascagni, Pietro, 94, 100
Megalopolis, 1417
James, Henry, 60 MGM, 23, 101, 104, 110
Jameson, Fredric, 57, 104, 105 Milius, John, 3, 7
Jobs, Steve, 12 Miller, D. A., 105
Jonze, Spike, 111 Modern Times, 2
Juli, Ral, 104 Monteverdi, Claudio, 79
Mozart, Wolgang Amadeus, 7980
Kael, Pauline, 9 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 70
Kaufman, Richard, 49 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 70
Kazan, Lainie, 106 Murch, Walter, 1, 3, 24, 25, 39, 98
Keaton, Diane, 48 Murray, Bill, 108
Kerkorian, Kirk, 23 My Aim Is True, 101
Kelly, Gene, 1035
Kerman, Joseph, 79 Nagel, Ivan, 79
Kesey, Ken, 40 Naturals Not in It, 108
Kinney National Services, Inc., 25, 40 Nerab, Jack, 70
Kinski, Nastassja, 105 New Economy, 3, 1718, 41
Klawans, Stuart, 72, 98 New Left, 17, 49
Korty, John, 1, 19 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8082
Knight, Shirley, 30 Nilges, Mathias, 32
Kreilkamp, Ivan, 86
Kusturica, Emir, 97 October Films, 94
Offenbach, Jacques, 99
Landau, Martin, 8, 73 Oglesby, Carl, 49
Last Picture Show, The, 60 One from the Heart, 16, 23, 52, 67, 76,
LAvventura, 30 85, 93, 1017, 110, 111
Lee, Nathan, 109 Opera: and cinema, 7678; and the cor-
Les contes dHoffman, 99 poration, 2122, 7882; and modernity,
Lester, Richard, 25 7881; and the musical, 100104; Or-
Lewis, Jon, 49, 60, 6970, 75, 98, 102 pheus and Eurydice, 79, 89
Liberal Consensus, 7, 4647 Outsiders, The, 22
Life without Zoe, 98
Lindsey, Robert, 69, 71 Pacino, Al, 4
Lloyd, Harold, 103 Paramount, 43, 60, 95
Lohengrin, 80 Patton, 38, 4547
Lost in Translation, 108 Patton, Bart, 37
Lovin Spoonful, 111 Peggy Sue Got Married, 68, 71, 105
Lucas, George, 1, 4, 18, 1921, 2428, Phoenix (rock band), 110
3740, 43, 44, 51, 6874, 86, 106 Portes, Alejandro, 6
Lucasfilm, 16, 68, 7273 Port Huron Statement, 17, 24, 39
Lumet, Sidney, 93 Powell, Michael, 77, 99, 103
Index | 147

Pressburger, Emeric, 77, 99 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS),
Prince, Stephen, 106 24
Puzo, Mario, 43 Syberberg, Hans-Jrgen, 77
Radley, Gordon, 71 Tales of Hoffman, The, 99

Rafferty, Terrence, 73, 75 Technicolor, 100, 1045
Raging Bull, 94, 100 Tetro, 23, 7677, 90, 96100
Rain, 35 Thalberg, Irving, 2
Rain People, The, 9, 18, 2343, 59, 88 Thompson, David, 49
Renoir, Jean, 35 THX-1138, 16, 1921, 23, 38, 43
Ride of the Valkyries, 8283 Towne, Robert, 52
Rock around the Clock, 111 Tucker, 410, 14, 1516, 23, 29, 45, 51,
Rohter, Larry, 97 6776, 101
Rossman, Michael, 47 Tucker, Preston, 29, 40
Rota, Nino, 53 Turner, Fred, 3
Rumble Fish, 52, 105
Vanderbeek, Stan, 19
Sarris, Andrew, 7 Verdi, Giuseppe, 89, 90
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 81, 87 Virgin Suicides, The, 23, 96, 102, 108
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 82 Visconti, Luchino, 77
Schumacher, Michael, 60 Visit of the Old Lady, 78
Schumpeter, Joseph, 36 Vocal Apparitions, 77
Scorsese, Martin, 77, 93, 94, 100
Sheen, Martin, 82 Wagner, Richard, 8083, 89, 90
Simons, Dan, 37 Waits, Tom, 103, 107
Sinclair, Upton, 32 Wall Street, 49
Singer, Jack, 93 Warner, Jack, 25
Sjman, Vilgot, 39 Warner Bros., 3, 16, 24, 40, 4345, 96
Skot-Hansen, Mogens, 3940, 58, 88 Warner-Seven Arts merger, 25
Sloan, Alfred, 45 Welles, Orson, 9, 60
Somewhere, 110 Whom God Wishes to Destroy, 102
Spielberg, Steven, 71 Why We Fight, 70
Stagecoach, 12
Staiger, Janet, 11, 45 Yablans, Frank, 60
Stanton, Harry Dean, 106 Youre a Big Boy Now, 9, 23, 25, 38, 111
Star Wars, 44, 68, 74 Youth without Youth, 96
Storaro, Vittorio, 104
Strasberg, Lee, 101, 103 Zanuck, Darryl, 105
Stroheim, Erich von, 2 Zitelman, Ernst, 81
Strokes, the, 109 iek, Slavoj, 9192
148 | Index

Jeff Menne is an assistant professor of screen studies
and English at Oklahoma State University.

Books in the series Contemporary
Film Directors
Nelson Pereira dos Santos Terrence Malick

Darlene J. Sadlier Lloyd Michaels
Abbas Kiarostami Sally Potter
Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Catherine Fowler
Rosenbaum Atom Egoyan
Joel and Ethan Coen Emma Wilson
R. Barton Palmer Albert Maysles
Claire Denis Joe McElhaney
Judith Mayne Jerry Lewis
Wong Kar-wai Chris Fujiwara
Peter Brunette Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Edward Yang Joseph Mai
John Anderson Michael Haneke
Pedro Almodvar Peter Brunette
Marvin DLugo Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu
Chris Marker Celestino Deleyto and Maria del
Nora Alter Mar Azcona
Abel Ferrara Lars von Trier
Nicole Brenez, translated by Linda Badley
Adrian Martin Hal Hartley
Jane Campion Mark L. Berrettini
Kathleen McHugh Franois Ozon
Jim Jarmusch Thibaut Schilt
Juan Surez Steven Soderbergh
Roman Polanski Aaron Baker
James Morrison Mike Leigh
Manoel de Oliveira Sean OSullivan
John Randal Johnson D.A. Pennebaker
Neil Jordan Keith Beattie
Maria Pramaggiore Jacques Rivette
Paul Schrader Mary M. Wiles
George Kouvaros Kim Ki-duk
Jean-Pierre Jeunet Hye Seung Chung
Elizabeth Ezra

Philip Kaufman Todd Haynes
Annette Insdorf Rob White
Richard Linklater Christian Petzold
David T. Johnson Jaimey Fisher
David Lynch Spike Lee
Justus Nieland Todd McGowan
John Sayles Terence Davies
David R. Shumway Michael Koresky
Dario Argento Francis Ford Coppola
L. Andrew Cooper Jeff Menne

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C o n t e m p o r a r y F i l m D i r e c t o r s

Francis Ford Coppola

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The Contemporary Film Directors series provides concise,

A list of books in the series appears

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Frontispiece: Francis Ford Coppola and his daughter, Sofia,

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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Francis Ford Coppola

Hippies, Inc: The Rain People

Vocal Apparitions and Corporate Personhood:

Interview with Francis Ford Coppola | 123

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This playground is no place for permanency.

Because in most accounts Francis Ford Coppola is a governing force

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Francis Ford Coppola and the Underground Corporation | 3

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. . . while his henchmen, at his bidding,

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Francis Ford Coppola and the Underground Corporation | 7

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process. This conferral is best understood as the paradoxical work that

Is the Ford in John Ford the Ford

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The Cinema of Finance Capital

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