Francis and The Godfather: is Hollywood becoming creatively bankrupt?
In case you haven’t heard, they are making a movie about the making of the greatest movie ever made. No, not Citizen Kane – David Fincher covered that in Mank. Francis and The Godfather is about … (spoiler alert) … The Godfather. It looks to be a prestige affair. Directed by Barry Levinson and starring Jake Gyllenhaal (as producer Robert Evans), Elle Fanning (as his wife Ali MacGraw), Elisabeth Moss (Eleanor
Coppola) and, as the 31-year-old Francis Ford Coppola, the indecently handsome Oscar Isaac. No wonder the real
Coppola has given the project his blessing.
Sure, there is a juicy tale to tell here: the wild-card casting of Marlon Brando, brushes with the mafia, the triumph of New Hollywood. But there is an uncomfortable circularity creeping in when it comes to movies about movies, like a snake eating its tail, or an industry that has run out of ideas and wants to cling to the past.
There are strong incentives to do this. For one thing, actors love impersonating actors, and awards bodies love it, too. In recent years we have had acclaimed portrayals of Walt Disney (making Mary Poppins in Saving Mr Banks), Alfred Hitchcock (making Psycho in Hitchcock, making The Birds in The Girl), Marilyn Monroe (making The Prince and the Showgirl in My Week With Marilyn), and Jean-Luc Godard (Redoubtable – unlike Coppola, Godard called the movie “a stupid, stupid idea”). Plus jokier takes such as Eddie Murphy’s Dolemite Is My Name and James Franco’s The Disaster Artist (on cult atrocity The Room). Meanwhile,
Mank finds itself in similar territory to the 1999 movie RKO 281, which was also about the making of Citizen Kane.
From 8½ to Boogie Nights, Sullivan’s Travels to Singin’ in the Rain, fictional movies about film-making are some of the very best in cinema. True movie industry tales are never a chore: surely nothing in a Godfather makingof could match the chaos of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now shoot, as captured