Word: coppolas
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...rent a hall to preview his movie. But the guy was Francis Coppola, 42, director of the Godfather films and Apocalypse Now; and the hall was the 6,000-seat art deco monument in Rockefeller Center; and the movie was a $26 million love story whose ballooning budget carried Coppola's Zoetrope Studios further on its drift toward disaster; and in violation of all movieland protocol, the preview was arranged without notifying the film's distributor. And so, with one full-page ad placed in last Sunday's New York Times, Coppola turned One From the Heart...
...past year has not been kind to Coppola and Zoetrope. Three movies the studio was to have released in 1981-not only One From the Heart but also Hammett, German Director Wim Wenders' moody detective drama, and Escape Artist, Caleb Deschanel's saga of a runaway boy-have yet to be seen. The Chase Manhattan Bank, which had lent millions to Coppola, cut off the funding. Staff salaries were met with the help of Paramount Pictures, which bought one of Zoetrope's scripts and offered Coppola a low-interest loan. Paramount also secured the distribution rights...
...film, a stylized musical set in Las Vegas on Independence Day, recounts the affairs of a junkyard owner (Frederic Forrest) with two women: a travel agent (Teri Garr) and a circus star (Nastassia Kinski). Coppola calls Heart "a lounge operetta, pretty and sweet. I've made too many gangster and soldier movies. I like fantasy and fable-it's a large part of me." It is also a huge part of the film's budget: Dean Tavoularis' dazzling sets cost more than $6 million to build. The film went $11 million over the original budget, shooting...
...soon as things started going bad with Paramount I decided to open the film," explained Coppola last week, sitting in his luxurious San Francisco penthouse office. "It's like being rejected by your lover; it gives you an excuse to call someone else. Every day I heard that somebody new didn't like it. So I thought let's have a perfect screening-a big screen, good projection, a 1.33 ratio [the pre-CinemaScope screen shape, 1.33 times as wide as it is high] so the heads don't get chopped off. Let 6,000 people...
There is some dispute over who owns One From the Heart. According to one source, Coppola may have sold the film to Paramount without having bought it back from MGM, its previous distributor. Lawyers from Paramount and Zoetrope are also haggling over the contract. Did Paramount renege by not paying Zoetrope $1.6 million in "completion money"? Did Coppola lose his claim by going too far over the shooting schedule? The maestro maintained that these details do not matter: "There is no battle as far as I'm concerned. I'm just trying to give people the excitement...