Mike Fleming Jr: What’s Behind Francis Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ Roadshow

EXCLUSIVE: Over the course of his five-Oscar career, Francis Coppola has many times gone back under the hood of even his greatest films like Apocalypse Now and The Conversation, to recut and improve versions for posterity. But he’s gone into uncharted territory with Megalopolis, the $120 million-budget film he self-financed.

Last Sunday, Coppola headed to the Count Basie Theater in Red Bank, NJ to introduce to a packed theater his provocative hot stew of radical futuristic ideas and tawdry melodrama, taking the stage after a big-screen showing of his film to deliver a discussion called “How To Change Our Future.” It was the first stop of a multi-city roadshow that continued in New York and Chicago, and finishes in Denver and San Francisco.

What in the world is the 86-year-old icon doing on a barnstorming tour, after his movie played through theaters to a disappointing $14 million gross? He does not believe he’s like Ahab and his White Whale. Rather, he believes his film has a message worth hearing, and that this might help overcome a conundrum. Coppola made the movie to provide a hopeful vision of the future to younger audiences, but he has so far rejected the fastest way to get it in front of the biggest number of their eyeballs, which is to sell streaming rights. While he wants audiences to be able to chew on the themes and analogy between our current democracy and Rome before its fall, Coppola has so far been insistent that the film be seen on the big screen, even though a streaming deal would also help him recoup some of the outlay in the riskiest gamble in a career full of big dice rolls.

The first date was a near sellout, as have been most of the subsequent dates ticketed through Live Nation, Coppola said. He didn’t plan to continue barnstorming beyond the six dates, but hopes it will rekindle interest by exhibitors in making it a midnight-style offering.

“I didn’t make the movie available anywhere where people can own it or have a DVD or all that because I wanted to keep the hope of a theater experience going,” Coppola told me. “So because of that, there are a lot of people who said to me, well, how come you can’t get it on all the normal ways? I said, well, because I’m going to go and bring it in a public way at first to prime the pump, where I’ll talk about the movie at the end, or rather illustrate some of where the movie could take you if you wanted to discuss it that way. And that gave birth to this idea of a tour. Also, it was in a theater shown in the format it was intended. And the tickets go into the fund of keeping it alive.”

He’s hoping the tour helps the movie catch on enough that it might get more theatrical dates without him being there in person, and this is just one of the ways the film’s tentacles have spread out. Megadoc, a Mike Figgis-directed documentary on the twists and turns of making the film meant to be like the classic docu Hearts of Darkness made by Coppola’s late wife Eleanor about his ordeal making Apocalypse Now, will premiere at the upcoming Venice Film Festival before being distributed by Utopia. There is also a 160-page graphic novel on the film being released by Abrams ComicArts.

When Coppola obtained a line of credit to fund Megalopolis, he believed he was doing it through a windfall that came with the sale of a majority of his wine holdings. That wasn’t why he made the deal, which was mainly to ensure the future health of his vineyards and the bottles of wine that come from it. Turns out, that cushion has lessened with developments in the beverage business – vintners are crying over sour grapes because of a looming threat the World Health Organization will place on wine labels that alcohol causes cancer. This would be similar to the cancer warnings emblazoned on cigarette packs. A downturn in wine revenue after his sale has left Coppola saddened. In all, the investment of so much personal money in Megalopolis has created a bit of hardship.

Not that he’s that worried or even regrets his big gamble one little bit. This is nothing new for the filmmaker, who battled back from bankruptcy a couple times because of his risk-taking nature. He once feared he might lose his breathtaking Inglenook wineries in Napa Valley after he went in the hole on Apocalypse Now. He won big that time, but risk taking has been part of his oeuvre. After Apocalypse Now strained his finances to the point where Eleanor could not get credit at the grocery store, he gave her millions so it wouldn’t happen again … only to ask for it back almost immediately when the opportunity arose to buy the other half of Inglenook, which proved a stroke of brilliance. Another time, when he was flush with The Godfather money, he bought the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood for $5 million. When his wife kicked back at that, he used a termite clause to get out of what would have been another great deal. He still has several luxury hotel holdings that have filled in the revenue picture to cover the wine business shortfall.

Coppola has another movie he’s written ready to go immediately, but he’ll need to follow a time-honored Hollywood practice: getting someone else to pay for it. Called Glimpses of the Moon, the film is a modestly budged unusual musical which he adapted from an Edith Wharton novel, he said.

“Well, the thing is, I used my last hundred million dollars,” he explained. “I know it sounds funny, but usually people who do things like this have a billion dollars. This was my last … well it was $120 million, more than intended. Financially, it’s a little complicated. Basically what you have to realize is that I had a number of wine companies, one of them, the one that was the cash cow was called Francis Coppola Winery.

“That usually produced the money for everything, but I had no one to run it, and that was strong on my mind. My kids are all film directors. So there was this company we had been doing business with for years, an Italian company called Delicato. I knew them and got along with them. The wine business was changing, and it was becoming much more that you had to be bigger because of the post-Prohibition rule that made it a three-tier industry, where you can only make it or you can distribute it or you can retail it.”

It is a tricky pursuit dictated by politics and influence, but the sweet spot comes in being the distributor, since you don’t grow the grapes or ferment, you mainly disperse the bottles to retailers and get about one-third of the proceeds.

“The wine distribution was where the money was, and it got bigger and bigger and bigger,” he said. “So it kept consolidating until there were only two or three huge billion[-dollar] companies distributing everybody’s wine. So when that happened, that company that I’m talking about was about the 12th or 13th largest wine company in America. You had to be that big or you were out of the business because the distributor was only interested in billions of dollars. They weren’t interested in you if you were only talking a mere few hundred million. So there started to be a lot of consolidation, and this company wanted to buy my company because they had management. I didn’t have the management. So I was absorbed by the Delicato company, and I ended it up with 26%. When I made Megalopolis, that 26% of that company, which was worth upwards of a half a billion dollars, I was the collateral.

“I never intended to have to finance the whole movie,” he said. “On Apocalypse, I put the money up, because no one else would. I figured, well, once we have a cast, then they’ll want it. Well, we had the cast and then still no one wanted it. Of course, this is what’s going on in the film business now. It is run by people whose main job is to make the debt service payments, and that’s all they’re concerned with. If they don’t service the debt, they’re out because all these companies are heavy in debt. Obviously, no one picked up Megalopolis after that one screening we had. Then it went to Cannes, and now of course, it’s once something fails at the box office, then everyone revisits [with a bad narrative]. What really happened, we had a tremendous reception at Cannes. It was a big standing ovation, very long. It’s not reported that way anymore.”

The media narrative of the film became about the budget and other things like allegations that Coppola was pawing young female extras on a closed set. The latter prompted him to sue.

“The sense is it didn’t get good reviews … it got very good reviews from the people who we value, the New York Times and the various places where we care about the reviews,” he said. “And then in the sort of more typical review areas, we didn’t get as good reviews. It was very much like Apocalypse. So I decided what I should do is to try to rev it up as a live attraction. And that’s what led me to want to do this.”

What’s his hope here?

“After we do this with my involvement, that then it can have a longer life,” he said. “Most of my movies have had a very long tail.”

That longevity extends to many of his films beyond The Godfather films, from Apocalypse Now to The Conversation, The Outsiders, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and others.

“I think it’s going to have a trajectory, sort of like Apocalypse Now did,” he said.

Megalopolis was received with an exuberant reaction on the opening night on the Jersey Shore. Coppola returned to the stage and gave a dissertation about history and juxtaposing the fall of the Roman Empire and contemporary events. The crowd seemed most stimulated when Coppola took questions, and by the time he said good night, every audience member was addressing him by “Uncle Francis.” A few expressed surprise the film got maligned the way it did by the press, where the narrative became about actors like Jon Voight, Shia LaBeouf and Dustin Hoffman, the budget and those disputed allegations. Coppola suspects a deliberate effort to sabotage his efforts through the press, which prompted the lawsuit.

The film’s themes of rebuilding came to mind after the Los Angeles wildfires, as homeowners had to decide whether to build back at all, and if they did, would they use the same material or alternatives that would not burn so easily. The film’s anarchy and media manipulation and slander played out during the last presidential election, and with subsequent things like the sacking of Trump critic Stephen Colbert as Skydance and Paramount Global were desperate for FCC approval of the $8 billion acquisition. This after paying the president a $16 million settlement over a dubious Kamala Harris edit by CBS News and 60 Minutes.  

“Another thing that happened after the election is, people were more interested seeing the film again, because what the film predicted was that basically Rome had a republic and lost it. That is possibly what has happened with this last election, which no one knows how to interpret yet. It’s already happened with Stephen Colbert getting fired, and what was done with PBS. These are American jewels and many people don’t understand our FCC is there to protect locality, and the guy who was the charge, Tom Wheeler, was great at that. Then Trump puts a guy in who doesn’t understand what the FCC traditions were. He was put there to press Trump’s agenda.

“What I intend to talk about is a thought experiment. I say, what would it be like if we look at the 10 or dozen things that rule our lives, one of which is money, law, time, all these things, what we invented, how those things rule us. What would it be like if we reinvented them?”

Coppola believes a couple of cornerstones from his world are in need of overhaul.

“Two things are dying, and I’m in the middle of it,” he said. “One is journalism and one is the movie studio system. But I have learned that when things die, they get reborn in new ways. I know there will be journalism. I just don’t know that it’s going to be, I mean, this present state of journalism and the reliance on unknown sources … anyone can come up with unknown sources and say anything. I mean, if you don’t have to ever say who was the unknown source … I know that a lot of the bad stuff that followed me each time I went in an important direction, I know those were always the same people, but I don’t know who they were. That’s why I sued, because I really want to know who these people are. I find it very interesting that wherever Megalopolis has gone the same people have tried to damage it.”

He believes it was a concerted effort to sully the film and his reputation, and that it had a negative impact.

“I think it hurt it,” he said. “It said a lot of terrible things, which were not true. I mean, the whole thing of even the #MeToo aspect of it, which is absolutely not my … anyone who’s not my daughter’s age or older, I look at as a kid. I don’t come on to kids. I love children. I’m being sued in Georgia by a young woman who said I fondled her. But it’s all on film. I don’t know how she can say it if you can look at the film and see nothing like that happened.”