And the winner is…Francis Ford Coppola. If there ever were an Oscar for Best Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is, Coppola would surely win his sixth Academy Award. As has been reported ad nauseam, the director invested $120 million of his own dough to make Megalopolis, an over-the-top allegory (the film’s subtitle is A Fable) about the fall and redemption of a mythologized New York City. No studio had been willing to finance for well over two decades. And that’s actually a tragedy for the film biz, for filmmakers, and for us, the audience.
But first, a pair of disclosures: I am an unabashed Coppola fan, someone who could watch The Godfather and Apocalypse Now in forever rotation on alternate weeks, despite having been fired by Coppola in 1999 after a six-month stint at the production company he cofounded with George Lucas, American Zoetrope. It was then that I first read the Megalopolis screenplay, already in the works for more than a decade, and it seemed right on the money: a story about a visionary architect—clearly a stand-in for Coppola himself—who wanted to save New Rome (i.e., New York) from bumble-headed city planning and political demagoguery. In Coppola’s case, it was a desire to save the movie business from its numbing sense of sameness. The 1960s and ’70s, when he and friends like Lucas and Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese had turned the business upside down and inside out, were long gone; the ’80s had brought a dull procession of remakes and sequels, hatched by empty suits sitting in studio marketing departments.
In the version I read, Coppola’s clever twist on a somewhat hackneyed story (you could make the same potboiler criticism of The Godfather) was using visual cues to compare the corruption of power that had led to the downfall of the Roman Empire to the greed and excess of Wall Street. The “greed is good” film of the same name had come out in 1987, when Megalopolis was in gestation; a year later came Connie Bruck’s book The Predators’ Ball, about the rise of junk bonds.
“Our American republic is not all that different from Old Rome,” the script’s narrator declares, adding that we could “fall victim to the insatiable appetite for power of a few men.” Sound contemporary enough? Coppola was clearly onto something. And despite his extraordinary business acumen—very few people excel in two disparate endeavors, film- and winemaking in his case—he was really a rebel at heart, despising the machinations of corporate skulduggery, especially as they had infected his beloved film business. I accompanied Coppola to a day of meetings in Los Angeles at his attorneys’ Century Park offices, where he pitched the film to several studios…and got no takers. He was a brilliant raconteur; you could virtually see the movie flickering across the screen as he gave each studio representative the pitch. At the end of the day, one of his lawyers pulled me aside to say, “Nobody is going to give Francis a hundred million dollars to make a picture.” Then he wondered if I could persuade my boss to whittle down the budget…a bit like asking the guy who cleaned Rembrandt’s brushes if he could persuade the painter to cut his canvases in half. While I could understand their concern, I also thought it incredibly myopic: The same studios had shunned Apocalypse Now in the late ’70s, forcing Coppola to finance a portion of the film’s then–$30 million budget himself…only to have it ultimately gross half a billion. The man turned out to know what he was doing…just as I did not: I hated Apocalypse when I saw the film at its Radio City debut in 1979.
Clearly, Coppola still knows what he’s doing: Megalopolis almost literally starts with a bang. We first meet Adam Driver’s Cesar Catilina, an architect who’s won the Nobel Prize for inventing a wondrous metal called Megalon, and who’s been falsely accused of murdering his wife, just as he’s about to swan-dive from the Chrysler Building. Come on: If you were an architect, that’s the landmark you’d choose for your leap…unless you were in San Francisco, of course. But magically, Catilina can stop time, exactly what film directors do 24 times a second. So he pauses his fall, or Coppola does, and steps back into his office, and then we cut to an old building in the New York projects. And here’s the bang, the bang every good composition teacher tells every student is necessary to begin any excellent story: Catilina has activated a detonator to raze the run-down apartment building, and once again Coppola freezes the action, so we can register the beginnings of the building’s demise. But of course it’s not just the building that’s falling apart: It’s the city, it’s the culture, it’s the civilization.
Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis”
Megalopolis is the dream city that Catilina wants to build from his magic metal; it’s the utopian construct that he believes will blot out everything awful in New Rome, a bit like Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s ode to libertarianism The Fountainhead. There’s a wonderful moment when a Tammany Hall fixer played by Dustin Hoffman shouts “concrete, concrete, concrete,” conjuring up a classic line from Preston Sturges’s own Tammany Hall send-up, The Great McGinty, when Akim Tamiroff’s boss character explains why the city needs another reservoir that to the naïve McGinty seems like overkill: “A dam is something you put a lotta concrete in.” Even though Catilina is the chair of the city’s so-called Design Authority, Mayor Franklyn Cicero would, of course, rather build a casino. “Utopias turn into dystopias,” says Cicero, wonderfully embodied by Giancarlo Esposito, the diabolically evil Gus Fring in Breaking Bad. About a year after I first read the Megalopolis screenplay, along came the downfall of Enron, with all its concomitant tales of corporate chicanery. And I thought, “Francis really needs to make that picture.”
And he has, although in an odd way that’s caused many of the people reviewing it to call the movie…lots of things, many of them derogatory gibes, going so far as “catastrophe,” in a Wall Street Journal headline, and “wacko disaster,” in the itself wacko New York Post. From a purely financial perspective, that may be precise: The film grossed only $4 million on its opening weekend. But strictly applying a return-on-investment analysis seems unfair, myopic in its own way. Some of the best films—Jaws immediately comes to mind—are built from stories that are so clichéd as to seem frivolous. And if we reduce Megalopolis to just the story, it’s fairly slim.
But this is a film filled with so many wondrous scenes that it will certainly be remembered for changing the way stories are told visually and for delivering an endless procession of priceless images. They may not all add up to a coherent single piece of storytelling, but they are nonetheless the stuff that makes movies what we love, a succession of juxtaposed moments slammed next to one another in a way that creates something new and different: Driver’s delivery of Hamlet’s “To be” soliloquy, seemingly out of place but perhaps the best rendition ever nailed on film; the battered Citroën in which Laurence Fishburne, who serves as the film’s narrator and who’s worked with Coppola since Apocalypse Now, ferries Driver around New Rome; a luminescent flower shop that conjures up Hitchcock’s Vertigo; Aubrey Plaza as a TV financial reporter named Wow Platinum, known as the Money Bunny (shades of Maria Bartiromo), explaining how she got the Platinum moniker (“I gave it to myself somewhere between Downtown and Penn Station,” much as Bartiromo turned herself into a Trump acolyte on Fox News); the truly odd performance from Shia LaBeouf as Clodio Pulcher, who spends half the film in drag and declares, “Revenge tastes best while wearing a dress”; and, naturally, a baby, the child of Catilina and his new love, Mayor Cicero’s daughter Julia. Coppola is many things to many people, but perhaps best enjoys his role as doting Italian nonno to his six grandchildren. The film ends with an iris in on the baby, of course.
One of the most common criticisms of the movie business is that it’s now run by idiots who went to Harvard Business School, have never seen an Orson Welles or John Ford picture, and only green-light sequels of sequels based on comic books. They’d never hand Francis Coppola enough scratch to make anything like Megalopolis. And they didn’t. But we desperately need movies like this, which break all the rules and show us things we’ve never seen before. So I’d say it’s not Cesar Catilina who’s contemplating a suicidal lunge from the Chrysler Building; it’s Coppola himself, taking a leap of faith in his vision and in his audience. It’s an Oscar-worthy effort, one we should all applaud and support.•
Tom Zito is a serial entrepreneur. He came to California to report a piece on startups for the New Yorker, but launched a company instead. In addition to the New Yorker, he has written for the Washington Post, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, Life, Newsweek, and many other publications, and has started eight companies.
