Coppola.

IX, 270 p., plates. From the estate of Kurt Scheel, German publicist. - Somewhat rubbed, otherwise very good and clean. - No director expresses the drive and invention of the new American cinema so brilliantly as Francis Coppola. At the age of 32 he became a superstar in Hollywood with his gangster movie, The Godfather, which rapidly climbed to the top of the all-time box-office hits. Two years later, he won the coveted Palme d'Or at the Cannes Festival for The Conversation, and his savage epic of the Vietnam war, Apocalypse Now, established Coppola as the most visionary and charismatic film-maker of his generation. This first major portrait of Coppola, the man and the movie-maker, goes behind the cameras to track the creative and financial turmoil involved in his productions. Peter Cowie has spent three years researching this project, interviewing Coppola's friends and colleagues, analysing a man who by 1982 had won five personal Academy Awards and was over $20 million in debt following the disastrous failure of One from the Heart. A superb director of actors, Coppola has introduced such talents as Frederic Forrest, Matt Dillon, Nicolas Cage, Talia Shire, and Tom Cruise. Many of the greatest screen actors of the past twenty years have done their finest work in his films: Brando in The Godfather, Gene Hackman in The Conversation, Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, Jeff Bridges in Tucker, Robert Duvall in just about everything. Peter Cowie paints a vivid and penetrating portrait of a man whose films have a strange knack of mirroring his own dramatic, sometimes tempestuous, life. - PETER COWIE is founding Editor of International Film Guide, the author of books on Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman as well as histories of film-making in various European countries. He contributes to newspapers and magazines around the world, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the London Sunday Times and Observer, and Sight and Sound. Peter Cowie is sometime Regents' Lecturer in Film Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. He was born in the same year as Francis Coppola. ISBN 9780233983332