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Filmmaker and Coppola family matriarch Eleanor Coppola dies at 87
Director Eleanor Coppola attends a special screening of Paris Can Wait in New York in 2014.
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Director Eleanor Coppola attends a special screening of Paris Can Wait in New York in 2014.
Brent N. Clarke/Invision/AP
Eleanor Coppola died on Friday at her home in Northern California’s Napa Valley, according to a statement from her family shared with NPR via her press agent. She was 87 years old. The cause of her death has not yet been shared publicly.
The documentarian was best known for chronicling the moviemaking process of family members Francis Ford Coppola, to whom she was married for more than 60 years and her daughter Sofia Coppola.
Eleanor Coppola was the mother of three kids when Francis Ford Coppola asked her to come to the Philippines to record the making of his 1979 magnum opus on the Vietnam War, Apocalypse Now, starring Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen.
“They got very casual about their weapons,” said Eleanor Coppola in a 1992 interview with WHYY’s Fresh Air of the bodyguards the Philippine government hired to protect the Coppola family during their time there, fearing insurgents would attempt to kidnap the famous Hollywood director. “Our main bodyguard would stick his pistol in his belt of his blue jeans and he’d get it out and show the kids how it worked.”
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The filmmaking process, which Eleanor Coppola captured on camera in candid detail, was famously fraught. Heavy rains delayed shooting and a typhoon destroyed sets. Sheen had a heart attack. Brando was overweight and couldn’t play the role as Francis Ford Coppola had originally conceived it; the entire part had to be rewritten. The production ran over schedule and vastly exceeded its budget, threatening to bankrupt its director.
“Everyone says, yes, well, Francis works best in a crisis,” Francis Ford Coppola told his wife during one of their many heart-to-hearts captured by her on camera at that time. “I’m saying this is one crisis I’m not gonna pull myself out of. I’m making a bad movie, so why should I go ahead?”
Released three years later, Apocalypse Now was declared a masterpiece — as was, in its own quieter way, Eleanor Coppola’s 1991 documentary about the tortured making of that film, Hearts of Darkness.
“It strips Coppola bare of all defenses and yet reveals him as a great and brave filmmaker,” wrote film critic Roger Ebert of the documentary in 1992. “It also reveals the ordeal he put his actors and crew through, on location in the Philippines – and what he endured at their hands.”
Eleanor Coppola grew up in Southern California and attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where she majored in applied design. She started out as a visual artist. In 1962, she met her future husband while working in the art department on Francis Ford Coppola’s low-budget feature film debut, Dementia 13. They were married the following year.
Apocalypse Now nearly broke the Coppolas’ marriage. In the Fresh Air interview, Eleanor Coppola spoke about sending her husband a telex — which she also shared with other production staff — telling him he was becoming like Kurtz (the madly intense character at the heart of the film) and creating his own Vietnam, through his excessive behavior. The couple went through many ups and downs over the years, including extra-marital affairs, mostly on Francis Ford Coppola’s side.
But they stayed together. “The constant in a constantly upheaving carnival of film art and film crazy was Eleanor,” said Kim Aubry, the former vice president for technology and post production at Francis Ford Coppola’s production company, American Zoetrope. “She always provided a shelter in the storm for all of us.”
Eleanor Coppola went on to make documentaries about The Rainmaker, directed by her spouse, and her daughter Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette. Late in life, she also wrote and directed her own feature films — Paris Can Wait and Love is Love is Love.
Sofia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola and Eleanor Coppola are pictured in 2013.
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Sofia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola and Eleanor Coppola are pictured in 2013.
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Eleanor Coppola was also an accomplished visual artist. Her drawings, photos and conceptual art pieces were exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. She designed costumes for contemporary dance productions and created experimental art installations.
“Eleanor was an extraordinary and gifted person who encouraged everyone with whom she came in contact,” said filmmaker and visual artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, a close friend and artistic collaborator of Coppola, in an email to NPR. “Her generosity and spirit profoundly resonated and enhanced those fortunate enough to know her. The gift of her art, in many disciplines, remain as her great legacy.”
She was also closely involved with the family’s extensive wine business in Northern California. Wine-making ran in Francis Ford Coppola’s family. In the mid-1970s, following his success with the Godfather movies, the film director purchased a Napa Valley estate and started making wine.
Eleanor Coppola was a writer as well. She was 87 when she completed her third memoir. According to her family’s statement, in the manuscript, the author wrote: “I appreciate how my unexpected life has stretched and pulled me in so many extraordinary ways and taken me in a multitude of directions beyond my wildest imaginings.”
Inde Navarrette and Michael Johnston in Obsession.
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Focus Features
Two big horror films, Obsession and Backrooms, just smashed all box office expectations. So much of their success has been driven by Gen Z, which is now the biggest moviegoing demographic. But what makes a movie a Gen Z movie? Today we’re bringing you an episode of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. Host Brittany Luse talks about this trend with Sam Adams and Reanna Cruz.
If you want to hear more about these movies, check out these episodes:
In ‘Obsession,’ love hurts. It really, really, really hurts.
‘Backrooms’ brings YouTube horror to the big screen
Zendaya brings ‘The Drama,’ we bring the spoilers
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I regret to inform you I’ll need to keep this introduction brief. Not because there’s any lack of things to say about July’s crop of notable new releases; it features award-winning journalists and several different flavors of anxiety about our bleak ecological future and data-dominated present, as well as the welcome returns of several beloved novelists.
No, these books certainly deserve some love, dear readers. It’s just that I’m finding it a bit tough to type while bearhugging a box fan. And since it seems that may be my last best chance to get through this latest U.S. heat wave here on the east coast without sweating through my shirt, I feel some urgency to get back at it.
So enough with the ado. With any luck, you’ll soon be cracking open one of these great reads on the beach — or in front of a decent air-conditioning unit, at any rate.
You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, by Rachel Aviv (July 7)
Aviv, New Yorker staff writer and finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, has a fairly extensive purview in her role as reporter at large. Still, when reviewing her latest work, Aviv noticed a crucial throughline: “I realized that, to some degree, I’d been writing about mother-daughter pairs for the last decade,” she explained to the Paris Review. Seeing this, she decided to collect and revise half a dozen of those stories, which cover ground from a daughter’s troubling fugue states to the immigrant nannies who must leave their own children behind, to Alice Munro’s daughter, whose claims of sexual abuse went unheeded yet regularly resurfaced in her mother’s fiction.
Country People, by Daniel Mason (July 7)
In Mason’s first novel since North Woods, 2023’s critical darling and book club stalwart, readers are plopped right back in the New England woods but the time scale has shrunk considerably. Whereas North Woods spanned centuries, his new novel confines itself to a single year, during which Miles, loving family man and lackadaisical Ph.D. candidate, plans to finally buckle down on that derelict degree of his and reassert his worth to one and all! At least, that’s the idea. But plans don’t stand much of a chance when there are eccentric neighbors to befriend and mysterious local legends to investigate.
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, by Pamela Colloff (July 14)
This is the first book from Colloff, a veteran investigative journalist for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. She has won multiple National Magazine Awards for stories focused on miscarriages of justice – such as her 2019 piece about Paul Skalnik, a grifter, fabulist, sexual predator and snitch, whose fabrications can be linked to dozens of wrongful convictions in Florida, including some sending the innocent to death row. Here Colloff expands upon that investigation, which gets a lot more room to breathe in the transition from magazine article to full-length book. What emerges in this disturbing account is a portrait of one man’s callous cruelty, and the law enforcers who had no problem tolerating a deal with the devil, provided it kept juicing the conviction rate.
Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich (July 14)
Though it’s his fiction we’re discussing here, it’s important to note Rich’s reporting has earned plaudits, too, as well as a few film adaptations. No matter the medium, climate change is usually on his mind, as well as the blunt, rather bleak, prognosis he offered on Fresh Air in 2019: “There’s a huge range of outcomes … ranging from the not very good to the apocalyptic.” Which is to say I’m surprised to find myself describing his newest response to global catastrophe as a rollicking good time – and not just because I’ve never said those words, in that order, in my life. This spry, funny caper features a freelance environmental reporter who inadvertently breaks bad, careening under the influence of lust and a light wallet toward the novel’s big centerpiece: the planned heist of a massive data center.
Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate, by Roopika Risam (July 14)
And now, for another book centered on data – albeit from a rather different angle. This illuminating history from Risam, a Dartmouth professor, traces the practice of collecting information – and the power conferred by possessing it – from the bones that were humans’ first archives, to the omnipresent systems that shape (or outright determine) life today. As Risam asks, “What has it meant – and what will it mean – when records that once served only to help us remember, come to rule?” A pressing question (see: those data centers), which you’re probably better served trying to answer with the help of Risam than, say, Alexa or Claude.
It Will Come Back to You: Stories, by Sigrid Nuñez (July 14)
For someone with nine novels to her name, Nuñez got a later start than you might expect, having published her first book when she was already in her mid-40s. More than three decades later, now a spry 75 years old, the National Book Award winner has gotten around to publishing her first collection of short stories. The 13 stories here have been culled from across her career, but each one resonates clearly with the warm timbre of her voice: simple, unadorned prose and mundane setups, from which she consistently manages to tease out glimpses of truth, elusive and profound.
They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy, by Lauren Collins (July 14)
The only coup d’etat to succeed on U.S. soil is, at most, a distant historical afterthought these days. To be honest, I can’t recall reading a single textbook entry that even remarked on the 1898 race massacre in Wilmington, N.C., an action led by white supremacists that left many (historian estimates say up to 300) Black Wilmingtonians dead and permanently scarred a community newly aware of its simmering animus and vulnerability to violent overthrow. So I’m grateful for Collins’ new chronicle of the infamous event, which fills in some serious gaps in the American collective memory and explains how its perpetrators cultivated the disorienting silence that persists in the historical record today.
Yellow Pine, by Claire Vaye Watkins (July 21)
I don’t think I’ve ever actually laid eyes on the Mojave Desert but after reading Watkins’ latest novel, it feels like I can picture it more vividly than some streets I’ve actually lived on. No, it’s “not a beginner’s wilderness,” as Watkins concedes in Yellow Pine, but this landscape so redolent of death is also deceptively robust with life, if only you’re patient enough to find it. Too bad, then, that it’s also on fire. And choked by drought, irradiated by military test sites and soon to be sacrificed to a massive new solar array named, inexplicably, Yellow Pine. But those aren’t the only complications confronting the book’s main character, Rose, whose aspirations of becoming a kind of climate hermit warp a bit under the pressure of a rekindled love and the pendulum swing of rage and despair at the state of the world.
Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead (July 21)
Ray Carney is back, for what regrettably appears to be the last time. The lifelong Harlemite, hard-luck furniture dealer and ambivalent crook starred previously in Harlem Shuffle and its sequel, Crook Manifesto. His perspective is our window on the changing eras of the historically Black neighborhood, from the mid-1950s on. In this, the final installment in Whitehead’s brisk, exceedingly entertaining Harlem Trilogy, readers catch up with Carney around the start of the 1980s, following him deeply into Reagan’s decade. The novel also represents the end of an era for Whitehead, whose attention has been exclusively occupied with these characters since he won Pulitzer Prizes for consecutive novels, The Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys.
Beginning Middle End, by Valeria Luiselli (July 28)
The gifted young Mexican writer returns this month with her fourth novel, the second she has written in English and her first since Lost Children Archive launched to widespread plaudits more than seven years ago. Her new book, like her previous one, also concerns the travels of a small family – only this time, the road leads not through the American Southwest but Sicily. And the history sought by its mother-daughter main characters is not a record of bureaucratic cruelty but something much more intimately personal: the links shaped and tested by generations of shared heritage and experience.
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