The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story

The New York Times bestselling author of Fifth Avenue, Five A.M. and The Big Goodbye returns with the definitive account of Academy Award-winning director Francis Ford Coppola's decades-long dream to reinvent American filmmaking, if not the entire world, through his production company American Zoetrope.

Francis Ford Coppola is one of the great American dreamers, and his most magnificent dream is American Zoetrope, the production company he founded in San Francisco years before his gargantuan success, when he was only thirty. Through Zoetrope's experimental, communal utopia, Coppola attempted to reimagine the entire pursuit of moviemaking. Now, more than fifty years later, despite myriad setbacks, the visionary filmmaker's dream persists, most notably in the production of his decades in the making film and the culmination of his utopian ideals, Megalopolis.

Granted total and unprecedented access to Coppola's archives, conducting hundreds of...