Cinema buffs are all too familiar with the incredible tales director Francis Ford Coppola has brought to the silver screen—now it’s time to hear the story of the Academy Award winner himself. In his new book, The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story, author (and Alta Journal contributor) Sam Wasson presents the definitive account of Coppola’s decades-long dream to reinvent American filmmaking, if not the entire world, through his production company, American Zoetrope. Alta is delighted to partner with Book Passage to welcome Wasson and Alta newsletter editor Matt Haber (and you!) for a conversation on this seminal American filmmaker (and noted Bay Area local.) This event is free to the public but please register in advance.

DETAILS:

Thursday, December 14, at 6 p.m. Pacific time
Book Passage Corte Madera
51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
Corte Madera, CA 94925
REGISTER

About the author:

Sam Wasson is the author of six previous books on Hollywood, including the New York Times bestsellers Fifth Avenue, Five A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman; The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Days of Hollywood; and Fosse, the basis for the limited series Fosse/Verdon. With Jeanine Basinger, he is coauthor of Hollywood: The Oral History. He lives in Los Angeles.

About the book:

The author of Fifth Avenue, Five A.M. and The Big Goodbye returns with the definitive account of Academy Award–winning director Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-long dream to reinvent American filmmaking, if not the entire world, through his production company, American Zoetrope.

Francis Ford Coppola is one of the great American dreamers, and his most magnificent dream is American Zoetrope, the production company he founded in San Francisco years before his gargantuan success when he was only 30. Through Zoetrope’s experimental, communal utopia, Coppola attempted to reimagine the entire pursuit of moviemaking. Now, more than 50 years later, despite myriad setbacks, the visionary filmmaker’s dream persists, most notably in the production of his decades-in-the-making film and the culmination of his utopian ideals, Megalopolis.

Granted total and unprecedented access to Coppola’s archives, conducting hundreds of interviews with the artist and those who have worked closely with him, Sam Wasson weaves together an extraordinary portrait. Here is Coppola, charming, brilliant, given to seeing life and art in terms of family and community but also plagued by restlessness, recklessness, and a desire to operate perpetually at the extremes.

As Wasson makes clear, the story of Zoetrope is also the story of Coppola’s wife, Eleanor Coppola, and their children, and of personal lives inseparable from artistic passion. It is a story that charts the divergent paths of Coppola and his cofounder and onetime apprentice, George Lucas, and of their very different visions of art and commerce. It is a story inextricably bound up in the making of one of the greatest, most quixotic masterpieces ever attempted, Apocalypse Now, and of what Coppola found in the jungles of the Philippines when he walked the razor’s edge. That story, already the stuff of legend, has never been fully told, until this extraordinary book.

About the moderator:

Matt Haber is Alta Journal’s newsletter editor. He has previously worked as an editor at the Village Voice, the New York Observer, and the Atlantic. Most recently, he served as the San Francisco bureau chief for Inc. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, New York, Los Angeles, and other publications. He also cocreated and coedits Creative Growth Magazine, an annual arts publication put out by Oakland’s Creative Growth.•