Word: paramounts
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...cannon wearing a fine black beard and a jaunty smile but perhaps (there was a lot of public relations smoke) no leotard. Would he land in a bed of rose petals thrown by critics enraptured by his new film One from the Heart? Would his feud with Paramount Pictures, which had rescued his Zoetrope Studios from financial disaster a year ago, bring down ruin on his head? Or would he succeed in his cheeky gamble of personally hiring Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall for the first public showing of One from the Heart, without informing Paramount, which...
...moment it did not matter whether, as Coppola claimed and Paramount denied, the film company owed him $1.6 million in completion money for the film, whose budget had ballooned to the astonishing sum of $26 million. Coppola had been distressed last August when Paramount showed an incomplete print to distributors and some critics; last week he explained his Radio City gamble by saying that he simply "wanted to see the film clean one time before it went into the funnel" of the distribution system. As the preview deadline neared, Coppola made last-minute changes in the film and sent them...
...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...
...Coppola's audacity- as brilliant film maker and profligate showman-that raises both hopes and hackles in the industry. Last week Paramount executives were grunting "No comments" through clenched teeth-perhaps because, as Zoetrope President Robert Spiotta suggests, "they're more disturbed by not being told than by Francis' marketing strategy." One Paramount insider did allow that "we might well have backed the idea-if Francis had come to us with it." But surprise is all in a flanking maneuver. Besides, as one screen writer friend of Coppola's says: "Francis is a genius at manipulating...