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O.K., I'm a huge admirer of Francis Ford Coppola. Not only is he a great director, as shown by the Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now, and the five Oscars he has won but he has lived his life with enormous energy and verve.
He has also made a remarkable comeback in recent years. His movie One from the Heart is an all-time favorite of mine, but it was a box-office flop that pushed Coppola into Chapter 11 in the mid-1980s. Far from being chastened, Coppola, now 61, has continued to invest in his personal passions -- food, wine, literature, and film. He has gradually created an eclectic business empire that is, as he puts it, "an unusual company, to say the least."
Consider Coppola's many ventures: Niebaum-Coppola, a well-regarded Napa Valley wine producer; film and TV production company American Zoetrope; www.zoetrope.com, a virtual film studio designed to lure talented new writers, composers, and directors; Zoetrope All Story, a short-story magazine; the Blancaneaux Lodge, a small resort in Belize, and Mammarella (named for his mother) pasta, pasta sauces, and olive oils. He's also an investor (with Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro) in the Rubicon restaurant in San Francisco and recently opened the Cafe Niebaum-Coppola with an attached store in the City by the Bay.
His companies seem to be thriving, artistically and financially. In 1995, he greatly expanded the wine company, the main revenue-generator, by buying the remains of the historic Inglenook winery. The same year, he brought in Jay Shoemaker, a Harvard MBA, to help run the business ventures. Shoemaker has dramatically expanded the winery and helped Coppola curb his propensity for jumping into money-losing ventures, such as a project in the 1960s to show short movies on jukeboxes.
Coppola still sees himself primarily as an artist. He now spends most of his time writing the script for Megalopolis, a film he hopes to make next year. I checked in with Coppola by phone on Sept. 8 to discuss his various ventures and his struggles with his screenplay. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation:
Q: You're into an incredible number of businesses. How does it all connect together?
A: I know that to some people it seems diverse. But to me, there's an underlying theme...These are all projects at least vaguely associated with show business. They're all involved with presenting an idea, show, or story to people for their pleasure and orchestrating all the elements to some total result. You might ask: "Well, what does wine have to do with show business?" Wine is clearly a field in which the story, the history, the lore, [are] important to enjoying it. Most importantly, they're things that...I enjoy.
Our activities also interrelate. The short-story magazine reaches out to writers, which is the pivotal element of all theater. And www.zoetrope.com is in fact a studio. It functions very much as the studio we used to have in L.A. did -- with people collaborating...submitting creative work [online]. We've actually been able to option a couple of [the works submitted to the virtual studio]. The magazine has been wonderfully successful.
You couldn't have hit more of a home run than we did with The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which has gone from being a short story to a best-seller [book] and [will be] a film.
Q: A lot of these business and products are interconnected via the Internet, too.
A: Yeah. I was basically a boy scientist in high school. That's where the girls were at age 17. I was the one kid who knew how to work the electronic light board. I still am a reader of Popular Science. So, I was an early adopter of computers.
Q: What are you trying to do with the virtual studio? You have 5,000 people signed up and seem to be adding about 50 people a day. But by inviting amateurs to submit scripts and stories, don't you risk being deluged by junk?
A: That aspect of it has evolved into a sort of electronic workshop. New members submit projects -- be it scripts, screenplays, artwork, or music. In exchange for the right to submit something, you're required to read or observe or view four or five of other people's projects and give them ratings. That way, we can look at the ratings and decide whether our few executives are going to sit down and read the stuff.
More important...people get this very valuable feedback from other members, and they go back and rewrite their work and it gets better. One woman is being published by Hyperion Press, and in the forward [to the book], she says that the feedback she got in the workshop enabled her to get the project to the point where it could be published. Ultimately...it's going to be a source of literary material [for American Zoetrope]. I'm surprised that other big companies don't publish literary magazines and seriously try to cultivate talent.
Q: So you expect this to be a source of a lot of material for your own studio?
A: Yeah. It's a virtual studio that our own company [uses to communicate]. Our film company and magazine are in New York, the TV company is in L.A., I'm in San Francisco, we have a film shooting right now in Florida, one in Iceland, and we're starting in a few weeks in France. In effect, the [virtual] studio is the way that we collaborate and communicate with all the artistic groups we work with. We custom-built it for ourselves. But there's no limitation on other people using it, too, if they wish.
Q: Are Internet sales of your wine and other products going to be significant?
A: I'm more interested in the Internet as a way of reaching out to talent, a way to work with creative people. My feeling is that you always know in every era in history who are the ones in power because they're the ones hiring the artists. Let's face it, talent and creativity are the petroleum of the future. Collaboration is very important to creativity. It magnifies it. Learning how to work with artists all over the world and collaborate on projects -- that's a big, big potential.
Q: What sort of movie projects is your film company doing?
A: We're very proud of my daughter Sofia, who directed The Virgin Suicides. We're interested in independent films...more adventurous, more interesting, more inventive type of film.
Q: What are you personally spending most of your time on?
A: I confess that this screenplay I'm writing is a bear. It just fights me back. I try and I try and then I say, well, let's go back to the beginning. It's the real focus of my life. Someone once told me that in life you should expect more and accept less. So, I made it pretty ambitious. You know what it is if you write. You look at it and say: "Why isn't it doing what I want it to do?" I'm not giving up, though -- so that's a good sign. I hope to [shoot] it next year.
Q: Can you say what the film will be about?
A: It's called Megalopolis. The setting is modern New York. It deals with...the idea that the future world we're going to live in is being negotiated today.... It's kind of a shape-of-things-to-come film in which the characters are concerned with artists, businessmen, proletariat all having a stake in the future but very few of them having a hand in what it's going to be like. It's a little bit like an Ayn Rand novel.
Q: No wonder it's difficult.... Is your company profitable? Can you say what the revenues are?
A: Our revenues at the winery are approaching $100 million per year.... All our companies are profitable, in broad strokes. There are some divisions within them that are recent startups -- such as our food and pasta company -- that are growing. But we foresee that it will be a $300 million gross-revenue company in about four years. At least, that's our plan.
Q: Is it fair to say it's all connected to the Internet?
A: The main focus of our use of the Internet is in the studio and Zoetrope.com and our working with creativity. In a sense, we're really a creativity company. I'm interested in creativity in all its forms.
Q: I should preface my next statement by saying I loved One from the Heart. My understanding is that you were in bankruptcy...
A: (laughs) One From the Heart is what caused the bankruptcy...
Q: I know. I was trying to say, I think it was worth it. I loved that movie...
A: ...It was a perfectly good movie. But I had been so successful before that. We made The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather, Part II, and Apocalypse Now -- four years in a row. You know how it is. People are waiting to see you stumble, and One from the Heart is what they decided should cause us to stumble.
We survived...Chapter 11 is not death. It's a reorganization. We paid all our debts, I believe. And I must say that the winery was the big hit financially. We tend to invest most of its money back into it. It's a relatively big company now, and well managed. Jay Shoemaker, the CEO, is a Harvard Business School guy. I would have to say that a lot of our financial success in the last five years has been [due to] his guidance.
The future is generally rosy, and the great thing...is that we're still doing the things I love. What [could be] bad about it? You have beautiful hotels, drink great wines, and you get to see your kids be successful in the things that they love. I'm really very pleased by the way things have turned out so far.
Peterson is contributing editor for Business Week Online. Follow his column every Tuesday, only on BW Online Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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