Francis Ford Coppola

1997 Edizione Pennino Napa Valley Zinfandel ($32).Admittedly, this a a high price to pay for a California zinfandel. But the level of complexity is extraordinary. It is packed with powerful blackberry, blueberry and smoked earth flavors. A few hours of breathing does it enormous good, unleashing flavors of smoked meat and fresh sage. Most zinfandels don't age that well after release, but this could be an exception. It's a full wine that some red-wine lovers would love to find under the tree.

The trailer for the Dan Deacon-scored, Francis Ford Coppola movie "Twixt" has premiered. Michael Sragow has the trailer over at Gets Reel . Coppola first heard Deacon on National Public Radio last year, and said in an interview he was drawn to Deacon's unconventional aesthetic. "I was fascinated with his intelligence, and also with his sense of adventure," he said. But it was Deacon's background in composition - he was trained at State University of New York at Purchase - that inspired Coppola to tap the musician to score his new movie, which stars Val Kilmer and Elle Fanning.

The trailer for the Dan Deacon-scored, Francis Ford Coppola movie "Twixt" has premiered. Michael Sragow has the trailer over at Gets Reel . Coppola first heard Deacon on National Public Radio last year, and said in an interview he was drawn to Deacon's unconventional aesthetic. "I was fascinated with his intelligence, and also with his sense of adventure," he said. But it was Deacon's background in composition - he was trained at State University of New York at Purchase - that inspired Coppola to tap the musician to score his new movie, which stars Val Kilmer and Elle Fanning.

Francis Ford Coppola must be listening to Baltimore electronic music at his California vineyard. The Academy Award-winning filmmaker of the "Godfather" movies tapped local musician Dan Deacon to score his upcoming movie, "Twixt Now and Sunrise," which stars Val Kilmer and Elle Fanning. Deacon, who was classically trained at the State University of New York at Purchase, is now better known for founding the artists' collective Wham City in Baltimore and making hyperkinetic dance music.

Put "Jack" back in the box.Robin Williams, the ultimate clown, is unfunny and overbearing in this irritating fable about a boy who ages four times faster than his peers and thus looks like a 40-year-old when he's just 10.Director Francis Ford Coppola has undisputed classics to his credit, among them "The Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now." Rack "Jack" up with that dreadful short film about a little girl that Coppola plopped in the middle of "New York Stories.""Jack" begins with promise, when Jack's mom (Diane Lane)

LOS ANGELES -- Michael Landon's last movie, a reunion of the gang from "M*A*S*H" and Francis Ford Coppola directing live television dramas were among the major programming moves announced by CBS yesterday.* "Us" is the two-hour movie pilot for a new series that Landon had been working on for CBS before his recent death. It will air during the fall premiere week of Sept. 16, Jeff Sagansky, the president of CBS Entertainment said yesterday at a press conference here.In the film, Landon plays an innocent man convicted of murder, who is released from prison after 18 years.

One of the greatest films of all time gets an airing tonight and tomorrow night in two parts on USA.Francis Ford Coppola was pretty much an unknown when he was chosen to direct "The Godfather" (9 p.m.-11 p.m. both nights). So were stars Al Pacino, James Caan and Robert Duvall. And Marlon Brando, chosen to play Don Corleone, was a has-been. All that changed when the film became not only a critical favorite, but a box-office smash.Coppola's film presents the saga as not just the story of an American family, but of an American myth: Don Corleone as a Lear surrounded by men with guns.

The raw material for the Showtime documentary "Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse" languished in Francis Ford Coppola's garage for more than a decade.Gathering dust was more than 60 hours of footage shot by Mr. Coppola's wife, Eleanor, of her husband and his cast and crew at work in the Philippines during the making of this before-its-time epic on the Vietnam war."After 'Apocalypse Now' we were really trying to consolidate our lives and make it through," said Mr. Coppola during a recent interview in Los Angeles.

Francis Ford Coppola is about to start directing the winery, Part 2.The film director, perhaps best known for the "Godfather" series, and his wife, Eleanor, have just added the Inglenook estate, a historic Napa Valley property in California, to their wine country portfolio.The couple have owned the adjacent Niebaum estate for nearly 20 years and released their first wine under the Niebaum-Coppola label in 1978. Neither Mr. Coppola nor Heublein Inc., which owned the estate, would disclose the price for the 95 acres and 39,000-square-foot chateau.

Carmine Coppola, an Academy Award-winning composer and conductor who wrote the theme music for several Hollywood films, died Friday in Los Angeles after suffering a stroke. He was 80. Mr. Coppola, the father of director Francis Ford Coppola, shared an Academy Award with Nino Rota in 1974 for best original dramatic score for "Godfather II," the second of three "Godfather" movies made by the younger Mr. Coppola. He also wrote the theme music for the original "Godfather" and scored three other of his son's films, "Apocalypse Now," "The Outsiders" and "Gardens of Stone."

For anyone in America's fabled "movie generation" - men and women who were in college or just out of it when The Godfather came out in 1972 - Francis Ford Coppola's Mafia epic had the impact that Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band had in music or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test had in prose. I spent half my lunchtime in my junior and senior years listening to budding actor Jack Gilpin (Something Wild, 21) do his impeccable imitation of Robert Duvall's Tom Hagen advising the Corleone crime family, "Right now we have the unions, we have the gambling; and they're the best things to have.

Francis Ford Coppola doesn't just absorb the identities of his movies; he carries pieces of them with him as he goes on. He still resembles the Godfather of American moviemaking that he was after The Godfather (1972), except now he's executive-producing for his daughter Sofia or his son Roman, rather than George Lucas or Carroll Ballard (The Black Stallion). He has modulated the madness that he showed during the making of his runaway Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now (1979) into a fascination with extremes of consciousness and feeling.

I don't take `no' easily," says director Sofia Coppola, stopping mid-conversation in a Japanese restaurant. "I just keep asking until someone says `yes.' It's good for directing, but in real life it can be obnoxious." Real life, in this case, is finding someone to bring her a ginger ale. The first time this petite, whispery-voiced director asked for a refreshment, she stopped a restaurant staffer who didn't speak English very well. But no matter. While in Tokyo filming her sophomore effort Lost in Translation, starring Bill Murray and Ghost World's Scarlett Johansson, Coppola worked with a crew that mostly didn't speak English.

1997 Edizione Pennino Napa Valley Zinfandel ($32).Admittedly, this a a high price to pay for a California zinfandel. But the level of complexity is extraordinary. It is packed with powerful blackberry, blueberry and smoked earth flavors. A few hours of breathing does it enormous good, unleashing flavors of smoked meat and fresh sage. Most zinfandels don't age that well after release, but this could be an exception. It's a full wine that some red-wine lovers would love to find under the tree.

One of the greatest films of all time gets an airing tonight and tomorrow night in two parts on USA.Francis Ford Coppola was pretty much an unknown when he was chosen to direct "The Godfather" (9 p.m.-11 p.m. both nights). So were stars Al Pacino, James Caan and Robert Duvall. And Marlon Brando, chosen to play Don Corleone, was a has-been. All that changed when the film became not only a critical favorite, but a box-office smash.Coppola's film presents the saga as not just the story of an American family, but of an American myth: Don Corleone as a Lear surrounded by men with guns.

Put "Jack" back in the box.Robin Williams, the ultimate clown, is unfunny and overbearing in this irritating fable about a boy who ages four times faster than his peers and thus looks like a 40-year-old when he's just 10.Director Francis Ford Coppola has undisputed classics to his credit, among them "The Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now." Rack "Jack" up with that dreadful short film about a little girl that Coppola plopped in the middle of "New York Stories.""Jack" begins with promise, when Jack's mom (Diane Lane)

Actor Robert Duvall provides the best review of a fascinating new movie-within-a-movie premiering on the Showtime cable network tonight."Men play strange games," he says with a rueful shake of the head.The movie-making business is a strange game, but was perhaps never stranger than in 1976 when director Francis Ford Coppola marched into a Philippine jungle with a huge crew, intent upon re-creating the Vietnam War experience.The result, of course, was the mesmerizing 1979 film "Apocalypse Now."

Rutherford, Calif. It is a crisp and windy afternoon in late November, exactly a month before the long-awaited opening of "The Godfather Part III" in 1,800 theaters across the country, and the director Francis Ford Coppola is rushing to complete the movie he hopes will restore his reputation, his autonomy and his finances.As he strolls into the garage cum commissary of the Napa Valley estate and vineyard where he lives and works, a team of film editors who have been mixing the sound are already eating lunch and loudly discussing the work that lies ahead of them.

Francis Ford Coppola is about to start directing the winery, Part 2.The film director, perhaps best known for the "Godfather" series, and his wife, Eleanor, have just added the Inglenook estate, a historic Napa Valley property in California, to their wine country portfolio.The couple have owned the adjacent Niebaum estate for nearly 20 years and released their first wine under the Niebaum-Coppola label in 1978. Neither Mr. Coppola nor Heublein Inc., which owned the estate, would disclose the price for the 95 acres and 39,000-square-foot chateau.

"Bram Stoker's Dracula" is about the naked and the dead -- together, at last. Opulent and lustrous, it never makes much sense at the character level, but glistens with such dark, carbuncular magnificence and is fueled by such an elixir of sexual yearning that I defy any manjack among you to deny its murky tidal pull. In fact you could say that in his quest for visual glory, Francis Ford Coppola has left no baroque unturned and Klimt every mountain -- Gustav Klimt's baroque art nouveau genius seems to irradiate the movie.