The Early Years of American Zoetrope

I first came across A Legacy of Filmmakers: The Early Years of American Zoetrope (2004) as a Special Feature on the 2-Disc edition DVD for THX 1138.

The winner of numerous awards, this one-hour documentary focuses on the creation of Francis Ford Coppola’s landmark San Francisco film company, American Zoetrope. The story is set against the changing landscape of American cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The documentary—which is narrated by Richard Dreyfuss and features interviews with Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and many others—is now part of the curriculum at several prominent film schools. Everyone interested in cinema should watch this documentary; it has particular lessons for the time in which we are living.

First posted: 12 October 2013

Francis Ford Coppola on Solitude

"Death is on the back of everyone’s minds whether they want to admit it or not." ~Francis Ford Coppola

The Evolution of Movie Sound

Francis Ford Coppola has been at the forefront of the technological advances of filmmaking. As early as the Apocalypse Now movie in 1979 when Francis Ford Coppola and sound designer Walter Murch pioneered a quadraphonic sound system for the film tour, Coppola has made sound and audio technology an important part of filmmaking, including building a dedicated mixing facility, American Zoetrope. 

In 2010, under the direction of Coppola, Zoetrope was turned into one of the first post-production facilities to install a Meyer Sound EXP cinema loudspeaker system on its rerecording stage and has since upgraded the other rooms to EXP. Tetro (2009) and Twixt (2011) are two of his movies that were mixed on an EXP system.

In this video, Coppola chats about the evolving role of sound in his storytelling and his sound facility in Napa.

The Early Years of American Zoetrope

I first came across A Legacy of Filmmakers: The Early Years of American Zoetrope (2004) as a Special Feature on the 2-Disc edition DVD for THX 1138.

The winner of numerous awards, this one-hour documentary focuses on the creation of Francis Ford Coppola’s landmark San Francisco film company, American Zoetrope. The story is set against the changing landscape of American cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The documentary—which is narrated by Richard Dreyfuss and features interviews with Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and many others—is now part of the curriculum at several prominent film schools. Everyone interested in cinema should watch this documentary; it has particular lessons for the time in which we are living.