The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story

The NY Times bestselling author of Fifth Avenue, Five A.M. & 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, & his most magnificent dream is American Zoetrope, the production company he founded in San Francisco years before his gargantuan success, when he was only 30. Through Zoetrope's experimental, communal utopia, Coppola attempted to reimagine the entire pursuit of moviemaking. Now, more than 50 years later, despite myriad setbacks, the visionary filmmaker's dream persists, most notably in the production of his decades in the making film & the culmination of his utopian ideals, Megalopolis.

Granted total & unprecedented access to Coppola's archives, conducting hundreds of interviews with the artist & those who have worked closely with him, Sam Wasson weaves together an extraordinary portrait. Here is Coppola, charming, brilliant, given to seeing life & art in terms of family & community, but also plagued by restlessness, recklessness & 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, & their children, & of personal lives inseparable from artistic passion. It is a story that charts the divergent paths of Coppola & his co-founder & onetime apprentice, George Lucas, & of their very different visions of art & 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.