Coppola’s obsession with Part III

Francis Ford Coppola still has regrets about

The Godfather Part III, said Bilge Ebiri in

New York magazine. After pulling off a rarity in filmmaking—directing a sequel considered as good as the beloved Godfather original— Coppola sought to turn the saga into a trilogy in 1990 with what was received as a stain on the franchise. “At that point, I had been through a bankruptcy,” Coppola, now 81, says. “Frankly, I had a family to support” and needed the money. When Winona Ryder backed out of playing Mary Corleone, daughter of Al Pacino’s Michael, in Part III, Coppola turned to his daughter Sofia, who at the time had minimal acting experience. (She later became an acclaimed director and screenwriter.) Critics savaged her performance and Coppola’s casting decision. “Of course, Sofia went on to have a wonderful career,” Coppola says, “but it must have hurt her terribly to be told, ‘You ruined your father’s picture.’ I felt I did this to her.” In the film, an assassin out to hit the Don accidentally kills Mary. “[Critics] came after Sofia so much that it was just like the story,” Coppola says. “The bullets that killed the daughter were really meant for the father.” Perhaps to seek penance, Coppola last month released a substantially recut version of Part III, in which Michael Corleone doesn’t die, but must continue suffering for his sins. “He has to pay for them,” says Coppola, “and he does.”

Why Robin Williams’ widow is on a mission

Susan Schneider Williams wants people to know why her late husband, Robin Williams, committed suicide, said Hadley Freeman in The Guardian (U.K.). When Williams killed himself in 2014 at age 63, media reports speculated that the comic and actor was depressed over his fading career or had succumbed to his alcohol addiction. His autopsy, however, revealed that he had suffered from severe Lewy body dementia, a rare form of dementia that brings on anxiety, memory loss, paranoia, and hallucinations. “The fact that something had infiltrated every part of my husband’s brain made perfect sense,” Schneider Williams says. She had witnessed him struggling with terrible insomnia, delusions, and trembling; on a movie set, he confided in the director, “I’m not me anymore.” He agreed to go to a neurocognitive testing facility, but a week before the visit Williams killed himself. “I think he thought, ‘I’m going to get locked up and never come out,’” his widow says. Lewy body dementia was diagnosed only posthumously. People who admired him “deserve to know the truth,” Schneider Williams says. She still feels his joyful presence “when I need him. I miss him.”