Francis Ford Coppola: Close Up: The Making of His Movies

by Ronald Bergan

Chronicles the making of Coppola's films and includes unabridged reviews and full credit lists for each film

Genres: Film, Biography

144 pages, Paperback

First published August 24, 1998

About the author

Ronald Bergan is a regular contributor to The Guardian and the author of several critically acclaimed books on film, including biographies of directors Francis Ford Coppola, Jean Renoir, Sergei Eisenstein, and the Coen brothers.

Reviews

[Dang Ole' Dan Can Dangle]

Not very in-depth. Each chapter covers one of Coppola's films, providing a few production, plot, and reception details, never going beyond a few pages. It's an okay companion to Coppola's filmography (or at least up until The Rainmaker) but save for a few interesting asides and insights from the author there's not much here you couldn't find on Wikipedia or IMDB (just don't expect the information on those sites to be as well written).

In the back of the book is reprinted all the Variety reviews of Coppola's films. I'd assume these were included in order to pad out the book to a more appropriate page count, but a lot of Variety's reviews were actually quite good and this section ended up being one of the book's highlights.