Francis Ford Coppola Defies Hollywood and the Media with Megalopolis
Hollywood and the entertainment media have it in for Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming self-financed sci-fi movie, and the legendary filmmaker is digging his heels in and daring them to come and get him. I’ve talked before about the long, arduous road to getting Megalopolis made and the many speed bumps put in Coppola’s way since he began developing it in 1983. Now, the film is finally done and set to be released, with Lionsgate stepping up and distributing it. Megalopolis stars Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Giancarlo Esposito, Jon Voight, Shia LeBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, James Remar, and many others, and tells the story of an idealistic architect trying to rebuild a destroyed city while the mayor resists his forward-thinking philosophy. You can see the first trailer below:
The press has been going all-out to sabotage this movie, most likely because Hollywood and the media don’t like people going around the studios, as Francis Ford Coppola is doing with Megalopolis. They want artists to be beholden to them, not risking their own money on something different or challenging the accepted establishment wisdom. Something similar happened with John Carter, the excellent big-screen adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ landmark novel series about romance and adventure on Mars. Director Andrew Stanton used his Pixar cachet to make the movie as he wanted to, and Disney and its media henchmen did everything possible to destroy it, preferring a short-term loss over allowing a creative free reign, even if it meant faithfully adapting a book. (How’d that work out for you, Mouseketeers?)
To do this, they’ve trashed the film as boring, ran stories about how troubled the production was, and even tried to Me-Too Coppola, accusing him of harassing young actresses on the set by trying to make them “sit on his lap” and trying to kiss them. This final piece is particularly despicable because it’s an attempt not just to ensure Megalopolis bombs but to destroy the rest of Coppola’s career. The media even released a video of what they claimed was Coppola engaging in this very abusive behavior:
Damning? Well, not really, since it shows him kissing someone who seems perfectly fine with it. Moreover, the actress in question, Rayna Menz, spoke out in Coppola’s defense in a statement to Deadline:
“He did nothing to make me or for that matter anyone on set feel uncomfortable… I felt disgusted, I was blindsided by it because it was a closed set. That someone had video of that is just ridiculous and super unprofessional. It’s gross because he only ever spoke about how wonderful his wife is. His wife was on set with us, most days. It feels gross, seeing that video and they way they were trying to convey a message. Just gross.”
I give Menz a ton of credit for doing that; it would have been easy for a young actress to pile on Coppola and be treated like a hero by the media and Hollywood, using it to jumpstart her career. But she defended a man these forces are trying to destroy because it was the right thing to do. And I’m glad she mentioned Coppola’s wife; Eleanor Coppola, who had been married to Francis Ford Coppola for over sixty years, passed away in April of this year. That he is being falsely smeared as a sex pest a few months after his wife died is reprehensible, and those doing it are inhuman. Fortunately, this particular narrative seems to be dying off.
Another problem came last week courtesy of Lionsgate and the second Megalopolis trailer. It features a number of quotes from movie critics bashing some of Francis Ford Coppola’s classic films, such as The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to put the incoming bad reviews for Megalopolis into perspective:
Did you notice that trailer is not from Lionsgate’s official YouTube account? That’s because they’ve taken it down. You see, those quotes are all fake. These idiots thought it would be a good idea to antagonize an already antagonistic press by lying about movie reviews. Predictably, movie critics responded with anger (and self-righteousness, of course), and as much as I hate to say it, they had every right to.
As for Coppola, he’s sticking to his guns and sticking it to Hollywood and the press. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Coppola says that he purposely hired “canceled” actors to make sure people understood Megalopolis isn’t woke:
“What I didn’t want to happen is that we’re deemed some woke Hollywood production that’s simply lecturing viewers. The cast features people who were canceled at one point or another. There were people who are archconservatives and others who are extremely politically progressive. But we were all working on one film together. That was interesting, I thought.”
This response was prompted by a question about why he cast a conservative like Jon Voight and if he’s making a statement about President Trump with Megalopolis because the only lens these people can see anything through is their politics. The entire interview is excellent; Coppola talks about the Me Too allegations and the media’s attempts to destroy his film, his grief over losing his wife, his dislike for the classic Hollywood book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and what he plans to do next. But I get the distinct impression he knew what was coming with Megalopolis and preemptively fought against the press. He also probably knew the backlash against wokeness was coming and wanted to use it to his advantage; at one point in the interview, he says that one of his gifts as a filmmaker is a “Cassandra-like ability to see the future.” He also quotes Marcus Aurelius, and maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I like to believe he did that to rub their nose in everything that pisses them off.
I have no idea how Megalopolis will shake out. It could end up being a disaster of a film. But I definitely want to find out for myself, and I’m rooting for it to succeed, mostly because I despise what’s being done to one of our greatest filmmakers for the crime of wanting to be an artist.
Let us know what you think of Megalopolis and Francis Ford Coppola’s ordeal in the comments!
