This past summer, out came a trailer for Megalopolis, the movie Francis Ford Coppola has spent half of his life trying to make. It took the bold approach of opening with quotes from reviews of his previous pictures, and not positive ones: when it was first released, Rex Reed called Apocalypse Now “an epic piece of trash,” and even The Godfather was “diminished by its artsiness,” at least according to Pauline Kael. But film-criticism enthusiasts smelled something fishy right away, and it took only the barest degree of research to discover that not only had Reed and Kael (who liked The Godfather, as did most everyone else) never used those phrases, none of the quotes in the trailer were real.
All this evidence of critics perpetually failing to grasp Coppola’s visions seems to have been fabricated with an artificial-intelligence system. This was a piece of bad press Megalopolis could’ve done without, stories of its troubled production having been circulating for months. But then, Coppola has endured much worse in his long filmmaking career, like the hellish, enormously prolonged shooting of Apocalypse Now, or the fire-sale of Zoetrope, the studio he founded, after the box-office disaster of One From the Heart. That he was able to get Megalopolis into production, let alone complete it, counts as something of a triumph in itself.
The Be Kind Rewind video above recounts the story behind Megalopolis, in essence “a story about Coppola himself, informed by his own ambitions, setbacks, times of fortune, and times of loss.” When he completed the first full draft of the script in 1984, he could have had no idea of what lay in store for the project in the decades ahead, not least its numerous derailments by his own personal and professional crises as well as large-scale disasters like 9/11 and COVID-19. The result, at a cost of $120 million Coppola raised by selling off part of his winery, is a spectacle that meditates on civilization, modernity, and utopia that, even this early in its release, has drawn reactions of astonishment, derision, and — most commonly — flat-out mystification.
The film “alternates grandiose rhetoric about government and the modern city with borderline screwball comedy, quotes Marcus Aurelius and other ancient thinkers, papers over story gaps with sonorous narration by cast member Laurence Fishburne, and fills the screen with superimpositions, split-screen mosaics, and images that aren’t meant to be taken literally,” writes Rogerebert.com’s Matt Zoller-Seitz. “Movies like this only seem ‘indulgent’ because we’re so deep into the era where everything has to be unmitigated fan service, the cinematic equivalent of cooking the Whopper exactly how the customer dreamed about ordering it.” Megalopolis is, in Be Kind Rewind’s final analysis, “the apotheosis of auteurism, unrestrained spectacle that amplifies Coppola’s best and worst instincts on a massive scale.” Personally, I can’t wait to see it.
Related content:
Francis Ford Coppola Breaks Down His Most Iconic Films: The Godfather, Apocalypse Now & More
Francis Ford Coppola’s Handwritten Casting Notes for The Godfather
George Lucas Shoots a Cinema Verité-Style Documentary on Francis Ford Coppola (1969)
Dementia 13: The Film That Took Francis Ford Coppola From Schlockster to Auteur
Is America Declining Like Ancient Rome?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
