Michael v gazzo biography of abraham lincoln
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Myth Maker: Francis Ford Coppola
ByKent Jonesin the March-April 2002 Issue
To celebrate the upcoming 50th Anniversary of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Film Comment will be making some classic pieces from our archive available online. This week, read Kent Jones’s appreciation of Francis Ford Coppola, FSLC’s 2002 Chaplin Award Gala honoree.
There are few spectacles in American cinema more touching than the career of Francis Ford Coppola, one-time Roger Corman protegé and script-doctoring wunderkind, now creative grand old man of Hollywood.
The mammoth undertaking of the Godfather trilogy; the exhaustively documented ordeal of Apocalypse Now; the impossible dream of American Zoetrope, that eternally returning, mythological entity, first as a mere production company, then as a cinematic artists’ utopia and multimedia empire, that once brought Michael Powell, Jean-Luc Godard, and Monte Hellman under its wing; the endless tinkering with The Escape Artist and Hammett, and the various presentations of Syberberg, Kurosawa, and Koyaanisqatsi, among others; the real-life misadventure of The Cotton Club; the long stretch of insolvency, nipped in the bud by Bram Stoker’s Dracula: what do all these various enterprises and legends add up to? Coppola has cultiva
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Writer-director Abraham Lincoln Polonsky, one of the most prominent victims of the Hollywood blacklisting of communists and social progressives in the post-World War II period, was born on December 5, 1910, in New York, New York. An unreconstructed Marxist, Polonsky never hid his membership in the Communist Party. (Indeed, it was known by the federal government during World War II, when he was a member of the O.S.S. working in France with the Resistance, given credence to the charge that the House Un-American Activities Committee wasn't interested so much in "ferreting out" communists and fellow-travelers as in making progressives of the F.D.R. coalition publicly repudiate their beliefs in a form of public penance.) After being named by former fellow O.S.S. member Sterling Hayden, Polonsky himself was arraigned before HUAC in 1951. After defying the committee by refusing to name names, he was blacklisted for 17 years by the U.S. film industry.
As director and screenwriter, Polonsky was an "auteur" of three of the great film noirs made in the last century: Body and Soul (1947) (screenplay; directed by fellow CPUSA member Robert Rossen, who kept his career by "naming names"), Force of Evil (1948) (which he wrote and directed), and Odds Agains
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A Hatful fairhaired Rain contempt Michael V Gazzo
A Hatful fairhaired Rain contempt Michael V Gazzo