Smoke Magazine, Spring 2004
Christopher Coppola, Digital Revolutionary
With cutting-edge
technology and an eccentric worldview, the cigar-loving
black sheep of the Coppola filmmaking dynasty is shaking
up Hollywood
 Coming soon to a TV near you: Coppola's "Biker Chef" |
It was a Hollywood moment that warmed the hearts of viewers across the land: Sofia Coppola taking the stage to accept her First Academy Award for Lost In Translation. As her father, Francis Ford Coppola, the legendary director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, sat beaming and misty-eyed in the audience of movie glitterati, Sofia gave her breathless acceptance speech, clutching the precious statuette, perhaps recognizing her new role as heir apparent. Earlier in the evening, her cousin, actor Nicolas Cage, presented another such award, an honor bestowed by his own Oscar win, for Leaving Las Vegas,. and a stellar career overall. It was a night for America's first family of cinema to celebrate — with just one playing the role of the outsider looking in.
"1 was extremely proud of Sofia; I love my family, even with all the ups and downs," says her cousin, who, like the vast majority of Americans, watched the Awards on TV "But I was a little sad, 1 saw some of my cousins there, and I know Nicolas had to be there to present an award, but all I could think of was that I wasn't invited, I don't 'belong' at those things."
He quickly dismisses any maudlin musing; of all the needs that have driven Christopher Coppola throughout much of his life. "belonging" is pretty close to the bottom of the list. It has been said that every family has its black sheep, and Christopher plays the role to the hilt. Maverick. Bad Boy. Bohemian. Outsider. Overused terms, perhaps, but Christopher revels in them all — though his personal preference is "pirate' of the family.
For the record, he is Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew, making him Sofia's cousin and — as is almost eerily obvious from hearing his voice on the phone — Nicolas Cage's brother. Despite the obvious proximity to such acknowledged star power, however. Christopher — long-haired, leather-clad, and often puffing a fine cigar — has followed the proverbial Road Less Traveled in his own career as an independent filmmaker. Proving the creative gene was not isolated to one branch of the family, his father, August Coppola, was a literature professor who played opera in the house and encouraged his children toward an appreciation of the arts. Whereas Nicolas gravitated toward acting (ultimately adopting the surname of his favorite comic book hero Luke Cage as his stage name), Christopher flirted with a career in music, learning the violin and crafting operas and "musical tone poems' while still a pre-adolescent, "One time when I was about seven, he came home and put a Stravinsky score in front of me." Coppola recalls of his father. "He played the music as I looked at the notes, and it started coming to life for me. He was really into striking sparks in our creative minds." Music wasn't enough for the young man, however, as his interest in experimental compositions carried over into film. His first experiments in the genre — Super-8 mm films starring his younger brother — are among the earliest of the very few Coppola brothers collaborations. Perhaps fittingly, it was August Coppola's influence, rather than the more famous uncle's, that truly guided the elder Coppola son's film career. "My father was always proud of his brother for being a success," Coppola says. "but he didn't really want us to go that way — get too commercial."
Commercial is not a term that comes readily to mind when one looks at the Christopher Coppola oeuvre — despite the undeniably great talent involved in many of the films. His first major studio effort, l993's Deadfall, which Cage starred in alongside Michael Biehn and James Coburn, was a critical disaster. "Having a famous name is a double-edged sword," he muses. "People return your calls because they don't want to offend others in my family, but I'm also judged more harshly. I looked at that movie and thought it was a pretty good little film, but since I'm a Coppola, it didn't make the grade they thought it should."
Other projects, while gaining some indie acclaim, continued to fly under the mainstream radar. Gunfighter, an old-fashioned Western bookended by Martin Sheen and Robert Carradine, sat on the shelf for 10 years before being released in 1998. And Dracula's Widow, an ill-fated collaboration with Dino DeLaurentiis, is held up by the director as the textbook example of an overzealous young artiste attempting to overcome a subpar script.
Looking back on the latter experience, Coppola recalls, "It's the first time I was thrown into a situation like that. [DeLaurentiis] knew i was an independent thinker. It was good training, because I had to be creative but still deliver what the show needed. That helped me hone my craft. [With Dracula's Widow.] I went into it with this belief that I was an artist and I'm going to make this as artistic as possible, even though it was a bad script. I started studying EC Comics, creating a whole visual style for the piece...and I remember being horrified when I was told, 'We don't need all that. We just want to see her tits.' Now I'm a little older and I understand the realities."
 TV icon Shirley Jones puts in a ghostly appearance in The Creature of the Sunny-Side Up Trailer Park |
These days, Coppola is creating his own realities. In grand, pioneering spirit, he has founded PlasterCITY Productions, an independent feature and television production company specializing in the high-definition digital format. "DigiFlicks" is the name coined for these productions, and "digivangelist" is the moniker bestowed upon Coppola by his colleagues. There is more to Coppola's love affair with HD digital than simply a need to be outside the mainstream. Like some celluloid St. Paul, Coppola recalls the moment of his conversion, after finishing the 1999 film Palmers Pickup: An American Roadshow. "I got a call from someone I thought was the negative cutter, telling me that the entire negative was destroyed. Apparently what happened was the negative cutter ran off with some woman, and left the film to be cut by two young guys who'd never done it before, who smeared glue all over the film. It was disastrous; that was a whole year of work! Then I started hearing about high-definition — that if I transferred everything to high-def and digitally removed all the glue marks, then went back to film, I could save it. It was nasty and hard, but it made me a believer. It saved my efforts. So I started embracing digital." On this one, Coppola may actually be setting the trends for the film business rather than turning them on their ear. George Lucas went all-digital for Star Wars: Episode II, for example. And if the 800-pound gorilla of film franchises is diving into the HD revolution, it's only a matter of time, the digivangelist feels, before the rest of the industry follows suit.
"I know there are a lot of purists out there and I sympathize," he says with conviction. "I love the look of film, but I've seen enough in my work with HD to know that you can make it look just like it. The cameras are constantly evolving, and soon it's going to be the norm. You'd better start gelling with the program or you're going to be left behind. Once they solve the issues of security and piracy, I think all Hollywood is going to go that way, because it just saves so much money."
 Coppola at work, with cigar |
The genre Coppola has adopted as his current obsession is what he calls "drive-in movies" — the kind of pedantic, black-vs.-white tales usually involving over-the-top monsters and cookie-cutter heroes and heroines — but with a decidedly modern twist. The latest is The Creature of the Sunny Side Up Trailer Park, which premiered at the 2003 Toronto Film Festival and recently screened at the 2004 San Jose Cinequest Film Festival. As bizarre as its lurid title implies, the movie stars Steve Hedden, Andre Ware, and a sophisticated CGI creature to tell a siory of two extreme racists — one black, one while — who must work together to defeat a monster that threatens their homes and families. The film features cameos by a gaggle of classic 1970s film and TV actors — Frank Gorshin, Shirley Jones, Lynda Carter, Bernie Kopel — another Coppola trademark. For the San Francisco Chronicle, he summed up the movie as "an anti-racist, campy monster movie with a message," It may be no Godfather, or even a Lost in Translaiion, but the intense filming in scorching-hot Joshua Tree National Park. where cast and crew were dropping from dehydration, moved Coppola to call it his own "mini Apocalypse Now."
Coppola has also dabbled in television, including "The Journey of Allen Strange'' and "100 Deeds for Eddie McDowd," two children's programs for Nickelodeon, a genre which he enjoys immensely. His latest project is "Biker Chef," a unique concept combining two of Coppola's passions: cooking and motorcycles- "It's basically my adventures across the country, visiting different towns, creating new dishes," he reveals. "Maybe I'll be in Idaho and find a cheap dim sum place with a Chinese cowboy cook, and I'll leam how he makes his dough. Then I'll meet up with a celebrity who makes great chutney, then go to a ball game and talk to the hot dog guy about the best spread for his Sabretts- So I’ll make the dough, put in the chutney and the hot dog. steam it, and create a dish that's never been done before. The show is travel, biker culture, cooking, and philosophy all rolled into one." A deal with the Discovery Channel fell through over ownership rights, but Coppola is confident the series will find a home, with a distributor that will be, in his words, "more collaborative."
Aside from bikes, a hobby he shares with his brother, another passion that Christopher Coppola lakes seriously is cigars. "I've been smoking either a pipe or cigar since I was 16." he reveals. "My grandfather Carmine used to smoke those Italian Toscanelli cigars; I thought those were kind of cool. Then I saw the 'spaghetti westerns,' like The Good, The Bad. and The Ugly with Eli Wallach and Clint Easywood, Eii Wallach meets his priest brother, and he wants to hug him and instead they get into a fight. Eastwood knows Wallach is upset about how his brother treated him. gives him a cigar, and says, There's nothing like a good cigar after a good meal.' It was the weight of that — like this cigar could make the whole emotional thing with his brother and family all better — which left a big impression on me. When I left for college, 1 felt kind of lonely — I started getting into cigars, and it made everything feel better emotionally for me- Now I usually smoke cigars in spring and summer, and smoke my pipe in fall and winter."
 Coppola's Creature of the Sunny-Side Up Trailer Park, shot entirely in high-definition digital, uses a CGI-Generated monster to get across its "campy, anti-rascist message." |
He has even incorporated cigars into his own male version of a traditionally female ritual: the baby shower. "Before my son was bom, I decided to have a 'Daddy Shower.'" he explains. "1 invited all my Friends to come to The Big Easy Smokeshop on Ventura Boulevard to have cigars, rum, and Scotch. I brought a 78 record player to play old mambo music-I asked them to bring a book for my kid — that's all — and we played poker until it was time to lake turns at the microphone. That's when you had to get up and tell a story about your father, any wisdom that he shared with his kids. Some of the stories started out bad but ended up good. A lot of the guys were crying. It was a beautiful evening. I thought, why don't men do that more often? It brings you an emotional release. Everyone seems so concerned about cigars being bad for you. You're not living if you're not experiencing those emotional moments, and if a cigar helps you experience that moment, then so be it. I'd rather take the risk and have those moments than be totally clean and be a zombie."
While Christopher Coppola initiates his own family traditions, it begs the question of whether he, one day, sees himself taking part in what many consider his larger family’s tradition: namely, being honored by the Academy for his work. "Hollywood would have to change for me rather than the other way around," he offers honestly- "I don't go out of my way to avoid it, but I'm recognized for what I do, I wouldn't have a problem with it."
As his cousin Sofia, and a host of other independent filmmakers now know, the next project just may be the one that truly resonates with Oscar voters — even if the man behind it has been branded, much to own liking, as a dangerously free-thinking person. So what is the next tale Christopher Coppola hopes to bring to the screen? "MacBeth, as a rock opera on motorcycles," he says with a self-satisfied grin. "And there will be lots of cigars in that one."
