Eleanor Coppola's Life

Family has always been a core value for Francis Ford Coppola and his family—his father as well as his children—has usually been part of his filmmaking. He met his wife Eleanor on the set of his first movie, Dementia 13 (1962), where she was assistant art director. She was on hand with notebook and camera during the filming of the epochal Apocalypse Now. Eleanor’s book, Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now (1979), and her documentary, Hearts of Darkness (1992), opened windows onto the troubled production of one of the most important American films of the 1970s.

Her new book, Notes on a Life (published by Doubleday), is a series of diary excerpts spanning 1986 through 2005. Many of her observations echo with the frustration of filmmakers who emerged during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s—a fertile period in Hollywood, a town that has largely been fallow ever since. Happily, Eleanor was able to chart the rise of one bright spot, her daughter Sofia, who by the middle of this decade grew into one of the most promising filmmakers on the strength of Lost in Translation.