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A friend of mine recently had the opportunity to meet the filmmaker and father of The Godfather trilogy, Francis Ford Coppola. The occasion was an event at one of Coppola’s newest California wineries, this one called Rosso & Bianco, in Sonomoa County. For those of you who don’t know, back when Coppola was just 36, and fresh off the critical and boxoffice success of 1974’s The Godfather II (it won 6 Oscars), he began investing his film fortune in California wine properties. Overtime, Coppola famously united the historic Niebaum and Inglenook wine estates in Napa Valley, which he recently re-named Rubicon Estate, after one of his best labels. (It was formerly called Niebaum-Coppola Estate Winery).

Anyway, Coppola, now 68, so impressed my friend with his almost geeky passion for winemaking — it is, after all, the man’s 2nd award-winning career — that we decided we’d try to pluck some of the fruit of Coppola’s crafts for the benefit of *Found|READ*ers.

It turns out that there is much to learn from Coppola’s life as a creator, in particular, from the young director’s seminal experience making his Vietnam War epic, Apocalypse Now (1979; two more Oscars). Trolling around for some of Coppola’s own writings on his career, I stumbled upon this fantastic 1999 Salon.com profile. In it, author Michael Sragow reviews a 1991 documentary of the making of Apocalypse Now called Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. The documentary showcases many challenges that faced Coppola on location: natural disasters in the Philippines; political upheaval; the heart attack of his lead actor Martin Sheen, etc. As Sragow’s piece reveals, by overcoming these and other hurdles, Coppola honed the qualities that cemented him as a creative force and a leader whose “zeal and riskiness are as elating as they are dismaying …in the gambling tradition of American entrepreneurs.”

Read Sragow’s piece for yourself, but below are our highlights — a few of the reasons why we think Francis Ford Coppola is someone worth modeling.

The Qualities of Young Coppola

1) Whether you view him as a tortured poet, an ostentatious showman, a martyr or an ogre, it’s impossible not to get caught up in his drive to overcome. (Passion)

2) The child-wizard flirtatiousness that continues to draw creative people to Coppola…He is going all out for art and persuading hundreds of people to take the plunge with him. (Charisma)

3) The excitement comes from watching him go out on a limb [and] seeing him saw it off behind him. (Committment)

4) He has a knack for making himself larger rather than smaller by revealing his insecurities. (Strength through vulnerability)

5) He is totally disarming when he pinpoints the biggest fear of any audacious moviemaker; that his work won’t live up to the subject matter, that it will be merely ‘pretentious.’ (Sragow dubs this Coppola’s ‘Heroic frankness’)
Substitute ‘moviemaker’ for ‘founder’, and ‘work’ for ‘startup’ = YOU

6) There isn’t a single corporate-like censor in his consciousness. (Rebel)

7) His consiousness of publicity and damage control, especially when he tries to maintain stability after Sheen’s heart attack [shows] his astounding capacity for leadership, not just when he’s dynamic and eloquent, but when he’s bewidered. (Focus and Discipline)

8) He was also readier than any of his peers to pay his dues…Coppola hocked his own assets to keep Apocalypse Now in production. (Integrity)

9) “I don’t know how brilliant we were,” Coppola told Sragow, “but we were very enthusiastic about movies and the chance to make them.” (Humility)

10) Through it all, Coppola [believes] that the film’s meanings will come into focus partly from the experiences he has making it. (Wisdom)

BTW: up until 2001 Salon.com produced a series of terrific pieces called Brilliant Careers, which we recommend, especially for the profiles of non-business characters, like the one on basketball coach “Phil Jackson”:http://archive.salon.com/people/bc/2001/05/29/jackson/index.html.