“What has happened to our family? We were so promising!”
So ponders one elder member of the artistic clan at the center of Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro –– and so, one imagines, the film’s detractors will be eager to snark about the director and his filmmaking progeny. FFC is oft-mocked for having whored himself out to studios in the 90s, only to squander the generosity of an indie arm with his pretentious “return to personal filmmaking,” 2007’s Youth Without Youth. As for the younger Coppola generation, Roman went from making highly-cinematic music videos to directing the promising mod homage CQ, but has since apparently done little but shoot second until for his dad, sister and Wes Anderson. After winning an Oscar for the beyond-slight Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola made a personal gesture of her own with the masterfully stylish Marie Antoinette — which subsequently dropped her from the favor of much of the critical class.
Marie Antoinette is a useful film to talk about in the same breath as Tetro, not because they’re similar in terms of means of production (they’re not: the former was a studio-funded biopic banked on North American stars that was considered a disappointment when it failed to build on Lost’s box office and awards tally, the latter a self-financed, self-distributed late-career experiment that can substantively please or disappoint only its maker), but because the finished projects nonetheless share a common DNA. Both films are so drunk on the melding of disparate cultural references (for the daughter, corset porn and Gang of Four; for the father, partner dance musicals and Fellini) that they read as dewy confessions from the filmmaker, feature-length love letters to their own aesthetics, the specific things they personally think are beautiful.
While I very much appreciate the invitation, this is an independent film, self-financed and self released, and I felt that being invited for a non-competition gala screening wasn’t true to the personal and independent nature of this film. More important than Cannes, our team can focus all our time, energy and resources into the U.S. release this June 11th
Above: in a statement published on Mike Jones’ Blog, Francis Ford Coppola explains why he’s not going to bring his next film, Tetro, to the Cannes Film Festival next month. Remember, the one that inspired him to vlog about the brilliance of Vincent Gallo? The phrasing of the statement makes one wonder if Coppola’s indie spirit would have remained as paramount if Tetro had been invted to compete…
Same family, very different headline: FFC’s daughter Sofia has inked a deal to make her fourth film. Somewhere is described in Variety as a “dramedy” in about “a bad-boy actor stumbling through a life of excess at the Chateau Marmont. With an unexpected visit from his 11-year-old daughter, he is forced to reexamine his life.” Stephen Dorff plays the father, Elle Fanning plays the daughter. Sounds potentially unwatchable!
The Independentpublished some choice excerpts a couple of days ago from Notes on a Life, the recently published collected journals of Eleanor Coppola––wife of Francis Ford, mother or Roman and Sofia, and co-director of the making-of-Apocalypse Now doc, Hearts of Darkness. The book was already on my shopping list, but it’s moved up a bit in urgency now that I’ve read the excerpt about how Eleanor struggled to define herself in the mid-70s, while her husband was out winning Oscars and she was pretty much just expected to stay home with the kids.
Eleanor met artist Lynn Hershman (now Hershman-Leeson, she directed the excellent post-9/11 paranoia doc Strange Culture) through Roman’s nursery-school car pool, and the two moms became partners in conceptual art crime. Francis went out of town one weekend, and the girls threw a party where Eleanor moved her husband’s five real Oscars from a display case, and replaced them with her own five, keychain sized consolation prizes, apparently given to the wife of every Oscar winner. Then they had guests peel potatoes and, inspired by a Joseph Beuys quote, made everyoe decide whether or not their potato was art. It sounds like typical, 70s California stuff, but apparently Francis was not amused. From the book:
Bill Murray’s indie film career resurgence over the past decade, through which the sometime “funny man” has taken melancholic serio-comic roles in films like Rushmore,Lost in Translationand Broken Flowers, has been animated by a kind of communal, revisionist nostalgia. Filmmakers like Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola were teenagers during Murray’s first brush with fame in the early 80s, which would have made them extremely susceptible to the prototypical Murray character of the day, which hit its zenith with Ghostbusters.
The Shamus points to five silent microshorts starring Sofia Coppola, designed to promote her line of canned sparkling wine. I bet this is the kind of thing that will really infuriate those who hated Marie Antoinette on the grounds that Daddy’s Little Girl was getting away with self-indulgent murder. I loved Marie Antoinette, and as far as alcoholic beverages distributed in Red Bull canisters go, I think Sofia is pretty good. I’ve embedded my favorite of the clips above; you’ll find the rest here.
The Rome Film Festival is shaping up to be quite the Coppola family reunion. Francis Ford has long been scheduled to unveil his long-awaited Youth Without Youth at the event; now Variety reports that his wife, Eleanor Coppola, will debut a new documentary there, a follow-up to Hearts of Darkness calledCoda: Thirty Years Later. With mom and dad already on the bill, fest organizers are apparently “hope to get the whole Coppola family, including children Sofia and Roman, onstage” as well.
IFC First Take has acquired two, semi-high-profile projects: Savage Grace, starring Julianne Moore; and Finishing the Game, a “Bruce Lee mocumentary” by Better Luck Tomorrow director Justin Lin. “Because each film sports bankable actors,” writes The Hollywood Reporter’s Gregg Goldstein, “IFC might test whether exhibitors resistant to day-and-date releases will book films also available on VOD.”
Vague “schedule” problems have led Disney to postpone the production and release of their third Narnia movie. Luckily, something called G-Force was standing on the sidelines, waiting to take over the May 1, 2009 release date.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Bill Murray’s indie film career resurgence over the past decade, through which the sometime “funny man” has taken melancholic serio-comic roles in films like Rushmore, 
The Rome Film Festival is shaping up to be quite the Coppola family reunion. Francis Ford has 
