Francis Ford Coppola bet more than $100 million on his legacy. Now what?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Francis Ford Coppola was flush from The Godfather in 1973 when he bought an architectural jewel in San Francisco’s North Beach for $500,000. His new headquarters was a flatiron building clad in tile and copper, with an eight-story steel frame that withstood the great earthquake of 1906.
Coppola has held on to the Sentinel Building through a half-century of intense seismic activity in his career, including cinematic triumphs and Hollywood debacles, bankruptcies and windfalls—most recently, a fortune he amassed in the wine trade and then leveraged to fund a wild big-budget movie called Megalopolis, the 85-year-old director’s first release in 13 years. On a golden July day, Coppola’s building looks like a wedge of white cake rimmed with green frosting. Each layer is an example of his reflexive way of mixing art with entrepreneurship.
On the sidewalk level is Cafe Zoetrope, a European-style bistro named for the film company Coppola launched with George Lucas and other insurgents in 1969. On the middle floors, former American Zoetrope offices are being renovated into sleek hotel rooms, soon to receive guests at the seventh property in a string of boutique resorts Coppola owns in Argentina, Belize, Guatemala, Italy and Peachtree City, Georgia. On the top floor is Coppola himself.
He looks the part of the pooh-bah auteur in his loungewear—a marigold-color áo bà ba, a pajamalike outfit from Vietnam. His office, devised by his production designer Dean Tavoularis, is an art deco roost that seems to vibrate with the zigzags and curves in the woodwork and carpeting. This penthouse, too, will become a hotel suite, but for now it’s a time capsule of creations past and possibly future.
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