Francis Ford Coppola

August Coppola, a former literature professor who was the father of actor Nicolas Cage and brother of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and actress Talia Shire, has died. He was 75. Coppola died Tuesday in Los Angeles after suffering a heart attack, Cage's publicist, Annett Wolf, said Thursday. Often described as flamboyant and eccentric, Coppola taught comparative literature at Cal State Long Beach in the 1960s and '70s and served as a trustee of the California State University system before moving to San Francisco State in 1984.

While the Cannes official selection kicked off last week with "Up," the tale of an old man seeking new pastures, the Directors' Fortnight, a parallel event that takes place at the other end of the Croisette, got underway with a film that marked the creative renewal of an old-timer, Francis Ford Coppola. A two-time winner of the Palme d'Or (for "The Conversation" and "Apocalypse Now"), Coppola, 70, is back on the Riviera with "Tetro."

"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."

Armed bandits raided Francis Ford Coppola's Argentine headquarters and stole a computer with the screenplay for the upcoming feature film "Tetro," according to Buenos Aires news media. The director of "The Godfather" apparently was not in Buenos Aires at the time of the robbery Wednesday night. A federal police spokesman confirmed that a robbery had occurred and that a judge was investigating, but he said he could not give details.

WHEN Francis Ford Coppola headed for Tulsa, Okla., in the early 1980s to film S.E. Hinton's "The Outsiders," a novel about alienated teenagers and class conflict, it came at a time in his career that he now likens to being an oil tycoon who'd lost everything. "If you were a wildcat in the oil business and you made a lot of money, then lost all your money, you'd go back to digging the hole," he said this summer, during a brief visit to New York.

Francis Ford Coppola has reworked somewhat and meticulously restored his ambitious 1982 romantic musical fantasy "One From the Heart," out of circulation for more than 20 years, but for all his efforts it stubbornly remains a bold experiment in style and technique that doesn't work.

Francis Ford Coppola can die happy. "To me, a happy death is the end of a happy life, when you sit there, wherever you are when you're about to die and you say, 'I got to have a nice wife and beautiful children ... and I got to be in the wine business, and I got to be in the movie business, and I got to see my father work with me,' and by the time you're thinking of all these things, you die -- you don't even notice it," says the 64-year-old filmmaker, who, rest assured, appears hale.