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Published Nov 2023
400 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
The New York Times bestselling author of Fifth Avenue, Five A.M. and The Big Goodbye returns with the definitive account of Academy Award-winning director Francis Ford Coppola's decades-long dream to reinvent American filmmaking, if not the entire world, through his production company American Zoetrope.
Francis Ford Coppola is one of the great American dreamers, and his most magnificent dream is American Zoetrope, the production company he founded in San Francisco years before his gargantuan success, when he was only thirty. Through Zoetrope's experimental, communal utopia, Coppola attempted to reimagine the entire pursuit of moviemaking. Now, more than fifty years later, despite myriad setbacks, the visionary filmmaker's dream persists, most notably in the production of his decades in the making film and the culmination of his utopian ideals, Megalopolis.
Granted total and unprecedented access to Coppola's archives, conducting hundreds of interviews with the artist and those who have worked closely with him, Sam Wasson weaves together an extraordinary portrait. Here is Coppola, charming, brilliant, given to seeing life and art in terms of family and community, but also plagued by restlessness, recklessness and a desire to operate perpetually at the extremes.
As Wasson makes clear, the story of Zoetrope is also the story of Coppola's wife, Eleanor Coppola, and their children, and of personal lives inseparable from artistic passion. It is a story that charts the divergent paths of Coppola and his co-founder and onetime apprentice, George Lucas, and of their very different visions of art and commerce. And it is a story inextricably bound up in the making of one of the greatest, quixotic masterpieces ever attempted, Apocalypse Now, and of what Coppola found in the jungles of the Philippines when he walked the razor's edge. That story, already the stuff of legend, has never been fully told, until this extraordinary book.
"Enthralling...A complex portrait of an artist whose unwillingness to compromise cost him dearly. Movie buffs won't want to miss this." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A vivid biography of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and his production company, American Zoetrope...A memorable portrait of an artist who has changed the cinematic landscape and whose work will endure." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Of all that has been written about Francis Ford Coppola, this book most accurately captures the film director's chaotic life...Wasson has written a string of successful books about the entertainment business...but this one might be his best so far. Rich in detail, it's full of surprises and revelations, and impeccably researched and documented. For fans of books about moviemaking in general, and Francis Ford Coppola in particular, this is required reading." —Booklist (starred review)
This information about The Path to Paradise was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sam Wasson is the author of seven books on Hollywood including the New York Times bestsellers Fifth Avenue, Five A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern American Woman; The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Days of Hollywood; and Fosse, the basis for the limited series Fosse/Verdon. With Jeanine Basinger, he is co-author of Hollywood: The Oral History. He lives in Los Angeles.
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