Francis Ford Coppola Life's Journey

Director, producer, writer, and businessman. Born on April 7, 1939, in Detroit, Michigan. Francis Ford Coppola emerged as one of the twentieth century’s leading directors in the 1960s. Stricken with polio as a child, he was bedridden and found creative ways to entertain himself, including producing his own puppet shows. Coppola developed an interest in film early on and studied theater at Hofstra University in New York.

After graduating in 1960, Coppola moved to California to attend the prestigious film program at UCLA where he learned from many great instructors, including pioneering female director and screenwriter Dorothy Arzner. While in graduate school, he worked with B-movie king Roger Corman. It was Corman that gave him first shot of directing a feature film, 1963’s Dementia 13, which Coppola also wrote. While that film failed to take off, he found directorial success with the 1968 musical Finian’s Rainbow.

Coppola first gained international critical attention for his screenwriting talents, earning an Academy Award for 1970’s Patton. Two years later, he released what is considered to be one of his best works, The Godfather (1972). Based on a novel by Mario Puzo, the critically acclaimed saga centered on the Corleones, an Italian American family involved in organized crime. Marlon Brando played the family’s patriach and Al Pacino as his son and reluctant successor. Coppola received his first nomination as director from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He also scored second screenplay win, and the film won for Best Picture. The sequel, The Godfather Part II (1974) was equally well received.

Continuing to make outstanding films, Coppola produced the riveting Vietnam War drama Apocalypse Now in 1979. Starring Martin Sheen, the film was an imaginative retelling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In the 1980s and 1990s, he made several films, ranging from personal drama surrounding a group of wayward teenagers in The Outsiders (1983) to glittering jazz age saga The Cotton Club (1984) to the faithful adaptation of the classic vampire tale Bram Stroker’s Dracula (1992). He also created the final chapter to his mafia trilogy, The Godfather Part III (1990).

After The Rainmaker (1997), Coppola stepped away from directing for a time. He focused much of his energies on other ventures, especially his California winery. Working behind the scenes, Coppola served as a producer on his daughter Sofia’s first directorial effort, 1999’s The Virgin Suicides. He has also been an executive producer for a number of films and television series, including Lost in Translation (2003), Kinsey (2004), Marie Antoinette (2006), and The Good Shepherd (2006).

In 2007, Coppola returned to hands-on filmmaking with Youth Without Youth, which he adapted from a novella by Mircea Eliade, a Romanian philosopher. At the time, Coppola told Entertainment Weekly, “I’m announcing a new phase where I make more personal films.” Next up for this famous filmmaker reportedly is Tetro, a drama about an Italian immigrant family.

Speaking of family, Coppola has many relatives in entertainment. His sister is actress Talia Shire, and his nephew is actor Nicolas Cage. In addition to daughter Sofia, he and wife Eleanor also have a son named Roman who directs and acts as well. Their late son, Gian-Carlo Coppola, was an actor. He died in a boating accident in 1986.

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Roger Corman Life's Journey

(born April 5, 1926, Detroit, Mich., U.S.) motion picture director, producer, and distributor known for his highly successful low-budget exploitation films and for launching the careers of several prominent directors and actors.

In 1940 Corman's family moved from Detroit, Michigan, to Beverly Hills, California, near Hollywood—a move that inspired young Roger's love of motion pictures. After serving in the Navy during World War II, Corman earned an engineering degree from Stanford University. He broke into the film industry in 1948, where he began working as a messenger at Twentieth Century Fox. He was soon promoted to script reader. After a one-year hiatus during which he studied English literature at the University of Oxford, he coproduced his first film, Highway Dragnet, in 1954.

His third film, Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), was made in six days on a budget of $12,000; it was the first of his movies to follow what was to become his standard method of operation: inexpensive productions shot in the minimum amount of time. The titles of many of Corman's films of the 1950s—The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955), It Conquered the World (1956), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), Teenage Cave Man (1958), Night of the Blood Beast (1958), The Brain Eaters (1958), The Cry Baby Killer (1958; the film that marked the screen debut of actor Jack Nicholson), and A Bucket of Blood (1959)—indicate why he earned the nickname “King of the Drive-in.”

In 1960 Corman produced and directed a cult classic, The Little Shop of Horrors, which was shot in two days and one night on a leftover set. During the 1960s he directed eight gothic horror films based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, including The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Raven (1963), The Haunted Palace (1963), and The Masque of the Red Death (1964), featuring such established actors as Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff, Ray Milland, and Peter Lorre.

In 1970 Corman formed New World Pictures, an independent distribution company that produced the work of such struggling young artists as Francis Ford Coppola, John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, and Peter Bogdanovich. New World's first film, The Student Nurses (1970), was shot in three weeks for $150,000 and grossed more than $1 million. Other early New World releases included horror, biker, and women-in-prison films. The profits from these low-budget features allowed Corman to act as the American distributor for a number of prestigious foreign films, including Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers (1972), Federico Fellini's Amarcord (1974), and Volker Schlndorff's The Tin Drum (1979).

By the beginning of the 21st century, Corman had produced or directed more than 350 films. Despite their blatantly low production values, the majority of Corman's films are surprisingly entertaining, literate, and often characterized by a campy, self-deprecating humour. His influence on contemporary American cinema has been enormous, in large part because of his discovery and promotion of young actors and directors. Though Corman officially retired from directing in 1971, he made a comeback with the well-received Frankenstein Unbound (1990), 

starring Raul Julia and Bridget Fonda. In that year he also published his autobiography, the aptly titled How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, cowritten with Jim Jerome.

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