From the San Francisco Standard, December 17:
The award-winning director may be selling off watches and pleading poverty after his “Megalopolis” flop, but he still holds a surprising collection of assets.
Francis Ford Coppola is broke. At least, that’s what the director of “The Godfather” told The New York Times in October (opens in new tab)to explain why he was auctioning off a collection of rare watches after his self-financed, $120 million opus “Megalopolis” flopped. One watch sold for nearly $11 million. For box-office scorekeepers, that’s nearly $4 million more than the movie made in the U.S.
“I need to get some money to keep the ship afloat,” he told The Times.
The auction came after Coppola sold off his namesake winery in 2021 for about $650 million to finance the poorly received film’s nine-figure budget.
The sales underscore a familiar truth about Coppola: Few filmmakers have tied their personal finances so tightly to their art — or to their real estate. From San Francisco landmarks to Napa vineyards and far-flung hotels, Coppola has spent decades borrowing against property to fund his movies, amassing a global portfolio even as his cash has sometimes run dry.
That boom-and-bust cycle has defined Coppola’s career. He famously mortgaged everything from his Napa home to his car to pay for “Apocalypse Now” in 1979 — a gamble that paid off both critically and commercially. He did it again with his San Francisco properties while filming “One from the Heart” in 1981, a misfire that plunged him into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
When asked about Coppola’s properties, an executive who works with him appeared to heed Michael Corleone’s advice to “keep your mouth shut and your eyes open.”
Gordon Wang, CFO of Coppola Companies and a regular signatory on its real estate transactions, said via email that “we would prefer not to detail our real estate holdings.”
What Coppola owns in the Bay Area....
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