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Coppola the auteur

In 1969, Francis Coppola – beaten up somewhat by the experience of making the full-blown studio picture Finian’s Rainbow – rediscovered his passion for filmmaking through the running-and-gunning skeleton-crew production of The Rain People. He began to dream of a new production model, an antidote to the studios, a creative place purpose-built for (in the words of his wife Eleanor) “this group of poets, film-makers and writers who would drink espresso in North Beach and talk of their work, and it would be good.” In this extract from Peter Cowie’s definitive biography Coppola (published in the UK by Faber and Faber and in the US by Da Capo), Cowie describes how Coppola began to realise his vision, with reminiscence from Coppola himself.

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The dream was called Zoetrope. Literally, its Greek root signifies “life movement.” To film archivists, the zoetrope is familiar as one of the earliest precursors of the cinema – a drum circumscribed with images which when revolved rapidly gives the illusion of movement. Coppola yearned to go back to the basics, to create an environment where young, independent film-makers could work with state-of-the-art equipment without the disagreeable pressures of the big studio environment.

When we made Rain People we had this unusual format, a very small caravan that could strike anywhere. We began to feel like Robin Hood and his band, we really had the film-making machine in our hands and it didn’t need to be in Hollywood, it could be anywhere. So then we thought, well, if we can do it successfully on the road out of a few cars and things, imagine if we went to a beautiful city like San Francisco and implanted ourselves as a film-making community. We would have inde­pendence, and we’d still be close enough to LA to be able to draw on talent from there.

Two visits finally convinced Francis that Zoetrope was feasible. The first took place on Independence Day 1968, when along with George Lucas and Ron Colby, he drove up to John Korty’s mini-studio at Stinson Beach. They had come straight from the final days of shooting The Rain People and were exhausted. But the revelation that Korty’s cottage industry actually functioned was exciting. Korty had already made an impact in the States and on the European festival circuit with independent, oddball movies like The Crazy Quilt and Funnyman. Indiana-born, he was genial, laid-back and persistent, a survivor beyond the system and above the Underground. His equipment may not have been perfect, but it was at least all under the roof of his massive barn. Coppola and Lucas told him that the studio looked like a fulfilment of their fantasies.

Coppola's The Rain People

Francis was sufficiently enthused to begin planning the move to San Francisco. “We were standing in the lobby of the Mark Hopkins in July,” remembers Mona Skager, “when Francis suggested to Eleanor that she should move up here with the children.” Soon afterwards, Francis followed up another introduction:

My wife had travelled in Europe as a young girl, and she had friends in Holland and Denmark and elsewhere, and when we were in Copenhagen, someone mentioned Mogens Skot­-Hansen. I heard he ran a youthful film company. Part of the Bohemian idea of people doing shows goes back to my Hofstra [university] experience; socially it had been so much fun, and I always missed in film the sense of sitting around with your friends at the café and the pretty girls and that kind of theatre life. Somehow Denmark had romantic connotations for me. I re­member looking through the locked doors at Laterna Studios, and wishing I could make contact with Skot-Hansen. Later, I did find some people in Beverly Hills who knew him, so I got the Klampenborg address, down by the sea near Copenhagen, and visited Mogens Skot-Hansen and his family. Stayed there three weeks, in fact. I saw this mansion, and the pretty blonde girls I’d always associated with Denmark, and the editing rooms and so on, and when I came back I told George Lucas that we too had to get a mansion somewhere.

We found a place in Ross that was known as the Dibble Estate, but after negotiating for it, and my selling all I had to raise the money, someone else purchased the property, which was very disappointing. Now during my visit to the Cologne Photo-kina a few months earlier I’d ordered tons of new equipment. I didn’t have the money to pay for it, but seeing all these editing machines and mixing studios was like being in a candy-store of technology. So when this equipment began arriving in the States, we had to put it somewhere…

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THX-1138, the second American
Zoetrope production

In the dying weeks of the decade, American Zoetrope was estab­lished in San Francisco. Francis was owner, George Lucas was Vice-President and Mona Skager acted as Treasurer and Secretary. The actual facility was at 827 Folsom Street, a warehouse found by Korty and converted by Coppola with some money advanced by Warner-Seven Arts.

The Hollywood studio, headed at that time by Ted Ashley, had succumbed to Coppola’s glib assurances that George Lucas’s feature, THX 1138, was ready to roll, and so agreed to fund the development of five projects. “Warners were paying $2,500 a week seed money,” says Mona Skager, “but I had to rent out all the equipment just to keep things going.”

There was, however, a mood of optimism at the official opening of the Folsom Street HQ on 13 December 1969. Anybody entering the three-storey loft building on Folsom was immediately aware of the offbeat, anti-Hollywood flavour of Zoetrope. There was a silver espresso machine in the hall, Marimekko fabrics from Finland hung from the walls, their bold primary colours echoed in the purple, yellow and orange paint of the freight elevator. The facility comprised seven editing rooms, and in one stood the pride of Zoetrope, a Keller three-screen table, the only such machine in California. Closed-circuit TV enabled the big screen to be used for other purposes. There were rooms for wardrobes, props, design, transfer and coating, as well as optical work, film loading and unloading, and refrigerated film storage. Coppola did not hesitate to order a $40,000 Mitchell BNCR camera. Inspired by his visits to Photo-kina in Cologne, he resolved to match and even surpass the orthodox studios where technology was concerned. Soon, lightweight Arriflexes appeared at Zoetrope, along with portable sound-recording equipment. Cameras were lent to enthusiasts making shorts on everything from Buckminster Fuller in Mexico to tribal fishing rights in Seattle.

To Coppola’s dismay, the studio suffered from theft and in­efficiency. During the first year of operations, almost $40,000 worth of equipment vanished from the Folsom Street facility – simply borrowed or stolen by Bay Area filmmakers. According to Carroll Ballard,

The fatal flaw was that it was never a co-operative venture. Everyone was off in his own little corner, competing. After Warners had lent Francis a lot of money, scripts were com­missioned. I was working on a project, so were [John] Milius and [George] Lucas. The problem was that the conditions under which Francis wanted everyone to work were more than spartan – they were practically non-earning. My initial agree­ment with him called for me to make a feature for a fee of $10,000 – and I eventually made The Black Stallion for $35,000 and seven points of the net.

Roger Corman, godfather to Francis’s son Gio, was visiting in San Francisco soon after Zoetrope had started operations. “I was an executor of his will, and Francis asked me what I’d do with all this equipment if he died. 'I’ll put it in a truck and take it down to LA,' I said, because you’re in the wrong city, Francis!'”