Francis Ford Coppola is one of the first and most successful graduates of the California film schools. Like many of his peers, he has been fascinated with movies since childhood and has drawn on the whole of American film culture as inspiration for his...

Francis Ford Coppola rests in an elite company of American film directors who often write their own screenplays and at times produce their own movies. He has won five Academy Awards and was the first director ever to win the Golden Palm Award at the...

Schooled in low-budget filmmaking, Francis Ford Coppola (born 1939) has gone on to direct some of the most financially successful and critically acclaimed movies in U.S. cinematic history. Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather and its two...

When Francis Ford Coppola searched for the right company to make his Mammarella organic pasta sauce, he personally interviewed no less than 50 vendors. Francis, as his employees affectionately call him, is a lovable, but exacting, perfectionist. Indeed, Coppola's master's hand has...

While Francis Ford Coppola is in Italy shooting "The Godfather III," his lawyers have filed for bankruptcy in his behalf in California. Coppola's debts from such big-time losers as "One From the Heart," "Rumblefish" and "The Outsiders" have mounted to such a height that...

Armed bandits raided Francis Ford Coppola's Argentine headquarters and stole a computer with the screenplay for the upcoming feature film "Tetro," according to local news media. The director of "The Godfather" apparently was not in Buenos Aires at the time of the robbery Wednesday night.A...

"We do have an asset that most people don't have: the power and glamour of entertainment and film," Motion Picture Association of America Chief Executive Dan Glickman told the Los Angeles Times. "We might as well use it." Mr. Glickman was discussing an exclusive movie...

In the following essay, Ferraro analyzes the relationship between family and business in Puzo's The Godfather, and how Coppola's The Godfather II and Richard Condon's Prizzi's Honor build upon the original Godfather narrative.

In the following essay, Whillock explores how Coppola set up oppositions in environment, characters, and story-motifs, and used mediators to bridge the opposites.

Coppola's insight into the [crime film] genre reveals itself in his handling of the film's structure, which features a gallery of criminal types with wit, charm, courage, and heroic stature (who never change or develop)—an achievement that can only by accomplished by limiting the film's sphere of life to the criminal element. Coppola certainly understood that if the world of crime obtruded into the realm of society's ordinary activities—if, for instance, the general...

This is a great biography of Francis Ford Coppola describing the many aspects of his life and the movies he has made.