Tema: Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

Francis Ford Coppola (Still) Believes in Art


The Godfather—Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 epic that is, arguably, the greatest American film ever made—opens with a rather startling line: “I believe in America.”

It is uttered by an immigrant undertaker in search of revenge against the men who disfigured his daughter, and it is an ironic statement: The Godfather and its sequels are movies about America, of course, but a sort of caustic, critical glimpse of America, of its various hypocrisies and the incongruous nature of the immigrant experience, about the merging of crime and commercialism and corruption.

If I had to summarize Coppola’s appearance at the Texas Theatre in Dallas this week, where he was screening Megalopolis for a sold-out crowd, it might be with the following statement: “I believe in art.” But this is a noble belief, not one tinged with irony like Bonasera’s line in The Godfather. Coppola believes in art; he so believes in art that he put nine figures of his own money into the creation of Megalopolis, liquidating his beloved winery to bring his vision to the world.

I’ve attended my share of screenings at which the director or some other figure associated with the film was present (most recently when Kevin Smith came to town as part of his Dogma anniversary tour), and these things tend to go the same way: After a brief introduction the movie is shown, at which point the director comes out—sometimes with an interlocutor to guide a discussion, sometimes just taking questions from the crowd—and he answers some questions until it’s time to go.

Megalopolis was . . . not like that.

The official title of the film, which I reviewed last year, is Megalopolis: A Fable, but the subtitle could well have been “Francis Ford Coppola Has Some Things He Needs to Tell You,” what with its monologues about the need for a great debate about the future, its paean to the unstoppable force of love, and its pleas to accept the importance of art and literature and architecture.


And then we got an in-real-life version of the same thing.



As credits rolled, Coppola sat on a chair in the middle of the stage and talked. And talked. For ninety minutes. He wheeled out a whiteboard with ten words written on it, then proceeded to ignore the order of the words on the whiteboard and free associate about everything from abolishing debt to restructuring national politics to the nature of work.

Francis Ford Coppola had something he wanted to tell us, and we were going to sit there and listen to him.

It was, frankly, a little surreal, the way the movie flowed into the speech, each complementing the other.

But it was also a strikingly real, strikingly earnest event: a great artist and a true visionary who hoped to shape the world through his artistry and power of persuasion, who hoped to inspire those in the audience to do something more, something greater. I’ll be honest, I’m not persuaded that we should, say, choose nine random adults to govern Dallas every year. But hey. No bad idea in a brainstorm, amirite?


I remain unsure that Megalopolis really succeeds as a piece of filmmaking. But I remain glad it exists.

La carta de Coppola al público que mencionaba el pasado viernes: