Eleanor Jesse Neil was a young art director when she met Francis Ford Coppola on the set of the 1962 film. Dementia 13, a low-budget horror film that was one of the first feature-length films made by man. She was a few years older than the brash, ambitious, practically larger-than-life filmmaker who valued family as much as art. And once they married and she took his name, they quickly set about starting a family; their son, Gian-Carlo, was born in 1963.
For most of the next decade, Eleanor, who died Friday at the age of 87, headed this family and had two more children, Roman in 1965, Sofia in 1971. She was Coppola’s confidante throughout of his machinations in the world of cinema, a repository of the remembered currents of his inspiration. There is a bit in the wedding scene of The Godfather in which some children throw sandwiches. “It’s something (Francis) remembers as a kid: throwing those football wedding sandwiches, as we called them. It would be prosciutto on a roll wrapped in wax paper, and they would like to throw them at each other across the room.
When Coppola embarked on the gargantuan task of realizing Vietnamese fantasy Apocalypse now, he summoned Eleanor to the Philippines to shoot “making of” footage for potential publicity purposes. No one familiar with the history of American cinema needs to know that the making of Apocalypse now It was a tortured journey that probably wouldn’t produce anything comparable to publicity images. What Eleanor ended up saying was something between a Sisyphean effort and a career attempt/actual suicide.
Years later, documentarians George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr made Hearts of Darkness, a filmmaker’s apocalypse, a retrospective chronicle of the birth of what became an upset classic. The picture contains the usual arsenal of a talking head, participants in the process looking back – writer John Milius, Coppola collaborator George Lucas, actors Martin Sheen and Robert Duvall, among others. But what really makes the picture are the images shot by Eleanor, who also anchors the picture by narrating it. She certainly deserves a co-director credit.
Eleanor is quite circumspect when narrating the parts of the film in which she appears. We’re treated to cute photos of Gio, Roman, and Sofia as toddlers, all looking a lot like their mothers at the same time. She maintains an air of gentle reason throughout her vocal narrative. But the footage she shot demonstrates a devious ingenuity.
In much of Eleanor’s filmed material of Francis speaking directly to camera, she is in “let him cook” mode. From our first glimpses of the man, we can see that he is in what might charitably be called an enhanced mode, explaining why he does not Apocalypse now in the tradition of David Lean, maker of distinguished epic war films, but of schlockmeister Irwin Allen, the vulgar virtuoso of the disaster film. She is an exemplary record keeper. (And when it came to serious matters, Eleanor chose to commit a slight betrayal of trust by allowing Hickenlooper and Barr access to audio recordings of conversations with her husband that were intended as confidential references for Francis and Eleanor.) But in her. journal, which itself was later published under the title Notes: On the realization of the Apocalypse NOWshe wrote of her husband’s “frenzy” and his lack of “discrimination,” the discrimination that “draws the line between what is visionary and what is madness.”
Even after the madness of Apocalypse, Francis Coppola’s expansive personality and his incredibly daring adventures and misadventures in winning, losing and winning Zoetrope Pictures, his production studio (founded in 1969), gave rise to unusual behavior on and off the set. The sequel to his gargantuan war film was to be an intimate musical, titled One from the heart. But that too metastasized into an oversized production, this time in interiors rather than unpredictable exteriors. Rumor has it that Coppola directed much of the film from the indie film of a trailer parked on the Zoetrope soundstage. Some sources suggest cocaine was involved. In 1982 by Wim Wenders The state of thingsmade following Wenders’ quarrelsome collaboration with Coppola over the film, Hammett’s character, a Coppola surrogate played by Alan Garfield, flees loan sharks and is driven around Hollywood in a 24/7 Winnebago out of 7.
Peter Biskind’s 1998 book Easy riders, raging bulls is full of (often anonymous) accounts of Coppola’s blatant feminization during this period, with which the director has problems. (I had breakfast with Coppola shortly after the book’s publication, and he said indignantly: “And what’s with this kid Peter Biskind? What is this nonsense? about a spa? I never bought a fucking spa) all his cinema peers and friends, Coppola’s marriage being one of the few to have lasted. (Another is Steven Spielberg’s marriage to Kate Capshaw, which lasted 33 years to Coppola’s 61 years.) If Eleanor has ever spoken about tales of infidelity, I couldn’t find any quotes. In Hearts of Darkness, appearing on screen, she simply states: “I always support him as an artist. » And when, after years of documenting the artistic efforts of Francis and other members of her family, Eleanor dared to take full ownership of the art of cinema, Francis supported her: Zoetrope co-produced her first feature film, 2016. Paris can waitand fully produced his second, that of 2020 Love is love is love. Both are personal films: Love is a three-story anthology meditating on professional and family tensions, as well as grief. In Paris can wait Diane Lane’s character mourns the loss of a child.
In 1986, the Coppolas were struck by an unspeakable tragedy: their first son, Gian-Carlo, was killed in a speedboat accident. He was only 22 years old. Francis was distraught by the tragedy, and it influenced much of his later work, including The Godfather III and its experimental features, including Youth without youth And Twixt. Eleanor created an art installation inspired by Gian-Carlo called Memory circlewhich has toured galleries around the world.
Following Eleanor’s death, various figures on social media and elsewhere said that the women who worked with major Hollywood directors of the 1970s were not given enough recognition. This is indisputable, and I will not go into detail here about all the solid evidence. Eleanor’s case is particularly interesting, in part because she kept her own advice about how “recognized” she wanted to be. She did not hide her light under a bushel, she did not act as a “muse” for Francis. When she wanted to be seen, she was seen, but you sense that most of the time she just didn’t want to. She was an artist, but she was also an extremely loving and devoted mother, and parenting was something she did outside of the spotlight because that was the best place to do it. And when she wanted to speak as an artist, she did.
Let’s come back to this question: what is East visionary and what is madness? Eleanor’s death comes at a time when her husband, now 85, is showing Megalopolis, a passion project in which he invested $120 million (money raised from the sale of parts of his remarkably successful winery). The trade reports surrounding this effort appear to favor Coppola’s failure – as do the trade reports on Apocalypse now looked at it, come to think of it. We can only wish Coppola the grace, love and blessing of his memory as he continues without her by his side.
Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews what’s new at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times and, as befits someone of his advanced age, AARP magazine. He blogs very occasionally at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly as a joke, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the next The World is Yours: The Scarface Storypublished by Hanover Square Press, and now available for pre-order.
New York Post
