James Telford
ND Media Studies Year 2
Media Context
Francis Ford Coppola and Auteur Theory
Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola was born in 1939 into an American Italian family in Detroit. Although he was born in Detroit, he spent most of his childhood living in a small neighbourhood on the outskirts of New York. His father, Carmine Coppola, was an incredibly talented composer and musician. And his mother was an actress.
Francis took a degree in drama at Hofstra Univeristy and did graduate work in film making at UCLA. His first job was an assistant for director Roger Corman and worked on several of Corman’s productions. After the years went by, Coppola directed his first feature film at the age of twenty four. In 1963, The Haunted and the Hunted hit the screens, revealing a name that would soon to be one of the biggest in the history of film making.
The next four years for Coppola were huge. He began writing screenplays and won his first Academy Award. The film Patton won Coppola the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. When Coppola directed his second film, he finished with a Master of Fine Arts degree. Then, in 1969, Coppola met George Lucas and established American Zoetrope, an independent production company based in San Francisco. American Zoetrope’s first production, directed by George Lucas and produced by Francis Ford Coppola was THX 1138, which hit the screens in 1971. Two years later in 1973, Lucas and Coppola took back to their roles and created American Graffiti. This film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
