The 'Auteur' in Hollywood: Francis Ford Coppola.

Abstract

Considering the career of Francis Ford Coppola poses a number of problems in terms of traditional "auteur" studies of film directors working in the contemporary Hollywood context. Such studies often suffer from imprecision in ascertaining a given director's creative process, frequently the result of difficulty in sorting through the many collaborators and influences typical of the Hollywood feature film. Simply viewing the films the auteur has directed will not completely clarify the director's role in the creative process. This study overcomes the imprecision by examining closely several areas of Coppola's career not usually considered in the traditional auteur study. In examining five of the most representative films of Coppola's Hollywood career, close attention is paid to not only Coppola's function as a director but also as a screenwriter/adaptor. By scrutinizing decisions made in the adaption process, much can be learned about both Coppola's ideology and the nature of his filmic vision. In the case of You're a Big Boy Now this involved an obscure English novel; with Finian's Rainbow, a twenty-year-old Broadway play; with The Godfather, a well-known best-selling novel; with Godfather II, parts of the same novel as well as an original screenplay, and in Apocalypse Now, an original screenplay as well as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The source material is not examined to ascertain how faithfully Coppola translated the original, but rather it is examined for what the translation reveals about Coppola. Furthermore, this alleviates the common critical habit of attributing narrative material to Coppola that more rightfully belongs to the original source. In t and em to the above method of analysis, close attention is paid to production accounts so as to establish the nature of Coppola's interaction with the Hollywood industrial context. Although Coppola often falls short of ambitious goals in ideological and narrative areas, his overall ability to subvert industry norms, to gain artistic control of projects commenting on significant issues in contemporary American culture, and finally to exercise his considerable visual expressivity have much to do with his status as one of the leading filmmakers working today.