'Notes on a Life' by Eleanor Coppola
BOOK REVIEW
The wife of Francis Coppola writes about her life as an outsider in the movie world.
"NOTES ON the Making of 'Apocalypse Now,' " Eleanor Coppola's 1979 production diary of husband Francis' audacious, flawed film released that year, remains one of the best accounts ever written of the insane difficulties involved in shooting a big-budget movie on location. Nearly 30 years later, she brings the same scrupulous honesty and lucid, thoughtful prose to her memoir "Notes on a Life."
Ranging episodically over several decades, Coppola offers a poignant self-portrait of middle age -- she's just turned 50 as her text begins in 1986 -- thinking about the choices she's made. "I am an observer at heart," she writes, and we see her mingled admiration and envy of those who fling themselves into action. Francis and daughter Sofia direct movies while Eleanor shoots "making of" documentaries about them. Attending a tribute to her friend Alice Waters, she muses, "I haven't created a body of notable work in my life when many around me have."
The author could have come off as an overprivileged whiner as she describes jaunts to Brazil, Thailand and Bali, a cruise of the Caribbean in George Lucas' chartered yacht, the Coppolas' apartment at the Sherry-Netherland in New York and their mansion in the Napa Valley. But her detailed evocations of such lavish scenes are coupled with an awareness of how rarefied they are. At celebrity-studded occasions, she expresses emotions we've all felt. Underdressed for a celebration of the five Golden Globe nominations for Sofia's 2003 film "Lost in Translation," she flashes back to a "childhood memory of being eight years old and arriving in white shorts at what I thought was a beach party and finding all the girls in pastel party dresses." Perhaps because she still feels like an outsider, Coppola makes good use of her insider access in a variety of sharp vignettes. She paints a funny, touching picture of her husband, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg talking about past film productions "as if they were aging generals recalling their various campaigns." There are terrific accounts of moviemaking: Francis filming a snowy horseback chase on a Los Angeles soundstage for 1992's "Dracula"; a nighttime shoot of a samurai charge in the freezing Japanese countryside for Akira Kurosawa's "Kagemusha" (1980); Sofia explaining to Kirsten Dunst that her character's encounter with Madame du Barry in 2006's "Marie Antoinette" is "very like high school, like the Socs and the Greasers."
