Muad’Dib Shrugged
In a Year of Bad Movies, Francis Ford Coppola Says: “Hold My Beer.”

6,206 words

Francis Ford Coppola
Megalopolis: A Fable
Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Shia LaBeouf, Aubrey Plaza, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne
Produced, written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola

“This is typical of new directors, too many good ideas. Or, in this case, no ideas.” –Mystery Science Theater.[1]

“It was like watching a train wreck unfold day after day, week after week, and knowing that everybody there had tried their hardest to help the train wreck be avoided…. This sounds crazy to say, but there were times when we were all standing around going: ‘Has this guy ever made a movie before?’” – Crew member quoted in The Guardian

If I were YouTube a-logger Space Ice, reviewing yet another Steven Segal money-laundering vanity project, I might begin my account of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis this way:

Megalopolis is the mega-blockbuster hit movie, where legendary director Francis Ford Coppola showed the world that while anyone could spend huge amounts of time and money on a masterpiece, only he could spend just as much time and money on nothing at all.

But I can’t, because – copyright law aside – I really can’t call this a hit – apparently, Matt Walsh’s Am I Racist is taking it to the cleaners, although costing 40x less. [2]

At this point, rather than trying to outline the “plot,” such as it is, I would likely paste in the synopsis from IBDB.com, but at this moment no one has bothered to try to write one; there is this “plot summary” though:

The city of New Rome hosts the conflict between Cesar Catilina, a brilliant artist in favor of a utopian future, and the greedy mayor Franklyn Cicero. Between them is Julia Cicero, her loyalty divided between her father and her beloved.

“Hosts”? What is this, Olympiad? Anyway, this is not even accurate in its brief space: Cesar is an architect, not an “artist,”[3] and Mayor Cicero makes a point of saying he’s not Franklyn, but Francis, “like Sinatra” – but I assume the writer was already asleep at that point. And it does make it sound like there’s some kind of… I dunno, plot, narrative, action, conflict, what have you? It’s really more like “a loose collection of things that happen.”

Another, earlier synopsis read:

Megalopolis is centered around the aftermath and reconstruction of New York City following a disaster that wrecked the city and wiped off its urban infrastructure. Amid this chaos is an architect who is intent on braving the odds to rebuild New York City as a utopia after the devastating natural disaster. [4]

Now that’s a movie! Certainly an entirely different movie, and unfortunately, it only partially takes place, and only after the first 2 hours.

If you insist on a synopsis, here’s a good one, and he has some good observations. And this.

Now, you might be thinking that all these references to online reviewers means that I never bothered to watch the film itself. Oh no, you cynical bastards! I saw every last minute of it, in a theatre with about a dozen other people, not counting my sidekick, who, although this was his idea in the first place, bailed after an hour or so, citing a pressing need to score some Ibogaine.

As I watched in increasing disbelief – and after I gave up waiting for something resembling a Coppola movie to manifest – I began, as one does at such cinematic disasters, to sense the phantom presence of other, usually better, films – something like intertextuality, as the kids say. It was all I could do to hold myself down and not jump up shouting “You’ve seen these films, haven’t you, my man!” [5] – not that I would have disturbed anyone, other than a few who had mercifully dozed off.

Most obvious, of course, is The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1943; based on Ayn Rand’s novel), which certainly needs no introduction here. Our hero is a brilliant yet misunderstood architect, living and practicing in New York/Rome, at home in the clouds, both literally and spiritually, and beset by conflicts with spiritually lesser but more powerful men in politics (Mayor Cicero) and finance (Hamilton Crassus). Like Roark, he tends to speak in jokes and riddles when forced to communicate with us Lesser Mortals. Of course, our hero is somewhat more successful than Roark, being the head of the Design Authority of New Rome,[6] a rather fruitier kind of Robert Moses,[7] and already a Nobel Laureate, but as Coppola knows all too well, a few awards isn’t enough to prevent it taking forty years to create your dream.

The climax of The Fountainhead sees Roark dynamiting a public housing project, being in a snit about some minor changes in his masterful design; Megalopolis opens (well, a couple scenes in) with Cesar using his powers as Design Czar to implode an entire neighborhood to create space for his model city design, leaving thousands of Little People homeless (and later to provide mobs organized by his deadly rival, Clodio Pulcher). At trial, Roark then gives a long speech in his defense; here, the climax of the film has Cesar addressing the city, delivering Coppola’s message as a kind of TED talk; the mayor tries to shut him down but an aide tells him “He’s incriminating himself,” which doesn’t make any sense, but does make the analogy clearer, so thank you, screenwriter, for throwing me this bone.

Filming The Fountainhead gave us a chance to see Roark’s buildings, and as with Megalopolis, neither Rand (who wrote the screenplay) nor Coppola realize what a mistake this is; like most movie monsters, they are best left to our imagination. Roark’s on-screen buildings are garish combinations of Brutalism and Modernism, while Cesar’s seem like a combination of Le Corbusier Radial City and the interior of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax building, a mash-up of giant slot car tracks and toadstools that would be a nightmare to live in. But who cares about the Little People and their fear of the Future!

There’s a scene where Cesar and his new squeeze, Julia (Mayor Cicero’s daughter, because this is the kind of movie where everyone wants a piece of our hero) ride some kind of platform to the top of an unfinished building, which clearly must have been inspired by the similar scene with Patricia Neal. In an even smaller detail, Cesar often wears a cloak of some kind, and while I suppose this is meant to evoke Roman attire, one can’t help but sense both Wright [8]and Ayn Rand herself.[9] Actually, as he stumbles around atop various scaffolding, he evokes less Hamlet and more Quasimodo.

But there are also important elements of Atlas Shrugged . Most importantly, Cesar got that Nobel Prize for discovering Megalon, a “bio-adaptive building material.” It’s his own Rearden Metal, or Vibranium, what online movie reviews would call a “magical bullshit” device which will enable him to construct his future city out of chewing gum wrappers or something, making it, as one says in the Hollywood pitch room, surprisingly easy, barely an inconvenience.

But perhaps just as important is the influence of the trilogy on the cinematography, which has an overall gold palette, combined with generally cheap looking special effects. The trilogy was a plucky little effort to make a movie on a miniscule budget, whereas Coppola seems to have attained the same made-for-TV movie look at ten times the cost. Bravo! [10]

Gold and low budget F/X however also suggests another film, David Lynch’s Dune (1983). Cesar is, of course, Muad’Dib, master of space and time, subject to visions of the past and future, and prone to massive ingestion of drugs; it also helps that Adam Driver is best known as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars saga.

Story-wise, we have the warring families, the conflicted ruler who must hand his daughter over to our hero to make the peace (as Don Corleone would say), the chronological mash-ups of sets, costumes and names.

When Julia first visits Cesar in disguise, she seems to have mocked up some kind of Fremen garb – has she seen the movie? Cesar’s majordomo (Laurence Fishburne) is protective of Cesar and suspicious of this visitor, but after he observes her standing for herself with Cesar’s aforementioned jokey repartee, he murmurs to us “I like her”; it’s a standard Hollywood trope – stoic tough guy feels strange new respect for plucky outsider — but does remind one of Kynes’ “I like this Duke.”

We’ll be hearing more from Fishburne. Lynch or his producers used copious amounts of voiceover to drive points home, often reading texts verbatim, and so does Coppola, using Fishburne’s voice. The subliminal influence of Dune might also explain why when she too becomes subject to momentary, unexpected and unexplained visions (that’s what happens when you bang Cesar, I guess) she sees her father, the mayor, sitting at a desk which is buried at an angle in a pile of sand (a dune, if you will). (It’s not otherwise explained, so my guess is as good as anyone’s.)

Moving from the past and the relatively well-regarded to the present and the extremely questionable, I’m afraid the closest analogue to the Megalopolis experience lies in the oeuvre of the contemporary master of Bad Film, Neil Breen.

First off, I had been informed somewhere that Breen made his money in Las Vegas real estate, but seeking to confirm this information – for the sake of You, The Reader – I find, through Wikipedia, that Breen is actually … an architect! And apparently, as successful one, as all his films are, like Megalopolis, self-financed.

Although Breen is always the protagonist, I don’t think he’s ever been an architect on screen – his films, being vanity projects, provide him with the opportunity to embody many even more exciting, even more sexy roles: rogue CIA assassin, master hacker of “all the secrets,” strange visitor from another world, human cyborg alien hybrid, the Messiah, you name it. [11]

But as we’ve seen, our Cesar is no mere architect either. Apart from his Nobel Prize and his job overseeing the design of New Rome, he has a semi-secret superpower: he can stop time. In fact, this is how we meet him at the very beginning, in a scene that recalls yet another big budge bomb about magical bullshit in New York, Exorcist II: The Heretic.[12] And indeed, Breen’s protagonists have been known to manifest this and other such powers (e.g., I Am Here…Now).

Whether CIA assassin or God, Breen has a Message in each film, delivered, as in Megalopolis, by both voice-over and climactic speeches.[13] We’ll take a look at Coppola’s message soon.

Getting back to production, Breen is most famous for his use of Chroma key or “green screen” technology; some have taken to calling this the Breen Screen effect. Breen not only places actors in front of such backgrounds but also uses not just stock footage (a la Ed Wood) but also stock photos, apparently purchased from such outlets as Shutterstock. It produces quite a … distinctive look.[14]

Coppola make liberal use of similar effects, which though never quite as bad as Breen’s – I don’t think he uses any stock photos – the results are, as noted above, remarkably poor. In an extreme example, in the aforementioned implosion scene, Coppola has extras in front of a green screen, with some CGI smoke added, but no attempt is made to create any realistic sense of depth, just the extras gesticulating in front of the screen.[15]

Another example, of Coppola channeling Breen:

Adam Driver’s first day on set was particularly memorable, a source suggests. One aspect of the story involves Driver’s character’s body fusing with some futuristic organic material. Rather than using digital techniques, Coppola wanted to achieve the effect through old-school methods, using projectors and mirrors, much as he had done on Dracula, 30 years earlier. “That’s great, except nobody can move,” says the crew member. “So they basically strapped Adam Driver into a chair for six hours, and they literally took a $100 projector and projected an image on the side of his head. I’m all for experimentation, but this is really what you want to do the first day with your $10m actor?” The effect would have been quick and easy to create digitally, they say. “So he [Coppola] spends literally half of a day on what could have been done in 10 minutes.”

Is “imperfectionist” a word? Then this man is an imperfectionist!

Now about that “fusing” scene. Toward the end of the film Cesar has half his face shot off (Why? Don’t know) but thanks to Megalon ™ [16] repairing it is surprisingly easy, barely an inconvenience. [17]

However, he does get to stumble around for a few scenes with half his face covered in what looks like a towel, and while at first it might suggest Bryant Halliday in The Projected Man, damned if the same thing doesn’t happen to Breen at the beginning of Fateful Findings (a personal favorite of mine and many), although somehow this is caused by getting hit by a car. Also, Breen stumbles home and has sex with his wife in the shower, but I digress.[18]

But let’s get back to the movie itself. Remember: Cesar can stop time. Cool, right? Except that not only is his power never explained – where he got it, what the rules are, etc. – but it literally is never used, except in a couple of scenes where he just does it, the green screen goes motionless (more on that later), and then end scene, like an acting class.

One gets the idea that he discovered he had the ability at puberty, and just used it as a party trick, or to impress chicks, or… perhaps… do something else to chicks.[19]

It does, however, give the characters an excuse to talk about time a lot, like a bunch stoned philosophy majors. At a second-rate university. More on that later.

I think this also explains the main plot (or conceit, since “plot” implies action and motivation, both of which are sadly lacking here). Rome apparently became, somehow, “New Rome” which, somehow, is our New York (and, in typical Leftist fashion, New York = America; no other place is mentioned, although apparently the Soviet Union was a thing). Oh, and Elvis existed, or exists.

None of this is ever explained – was our Rome real centuries ago, or has it always been what we call New York? Or is this a continuation of Rome? Did the Empire never die, as Philip K. Dick believed? If so, why would things like chariot races still be a thing, or vestal virgins, or golden body armor, rather than quaint customs from the old days, enjoyed ironically, like a trip to a medieval themed restaurant. Does anyone remember our New York (which clearly existed, since Cesar lives atop the Chrysler Building, there’s a Statue of Liberty and a statute of George Washington on Wall St., Grand Central and Penn Stations, etc.) and if so when – and why on Earth – was it renamed after Rome?[20]

Maybe, in the spirit of Mystery Science Theater, I should just repeat to myself “It’s just a show, I should really just relax.”

There are a couple – typically, un-motivated – mentions of “string theory” so I think the idea is that this is an alternate timeline where Rome just evolved into New York/Rome. Of course, string theory, like “multiverses,” is complete bullshit, but the makers of comic book movies have found it to be a lucrative engine – magic bullshit indeed, but Science! — for generating reboots, remakes and “franchises”; still, it’s sad to see a film-maker of Coppola’s genius reduced to such tropes.[21]

Several scenes – such as a clandestine meeting of Giancarlo Esposito and Dustin Hoffman’s characters, who are wasted throughout the film – had me momentarily thinking how much better a director like Coppola would have done them, only to realize that was doing them, and a little bit of my soul died.

Hoffman’s role is one of the many plot threads that simply disappear; he’s in a couple scenes, plots some kind of nasty business, but oh, look, some columns fell on him so he’s dead. It’s almost like the sort of thing Monty Python would parody, ending scenes that were going nowhere by just dropping a 16-ton weight on someone. I suspect there’s no “Director’s Cut” with all these scenes but that Coppola simply didn’t have the time or money to actually film them, but left in all the set-ups, despite 300 rewrites.

In a typical example of the Left shooting itself in the foot, the only stand-out performance is from Jon Voight, and Coppola is to be credited with choosing an actor known for his pro-Trump comments. He gives a brilliant performance as a Trump surrogate – his vocal imitation is especially right-on, almost as if AI were dubbing in a Trump fake – and whether it was his secret intention or not, he completely subverts the idea of his character being stupid and evil; we know he’s supposed to be, because the characters keep telling us that.

And that’s the chief problem here. It feels like blasphemy to say this about the man who basically re-invented cinema in the 70s, but here he consistently violates the most basic rule of film-making: show, don’t tell.

Not only do characters just stand around firing lines from the script at each other, but Coppola uses his Rome trope as an excuse to have a narrator (I think Laurence Fishburne, who’s also good as a chauffeur/butler who’s also writing some kind of New Roman history a la Suetonius) to recite various Roman historical tags about the decline of empires, like British MP’s in the good old days, showing Coppola, or someone on his staff, was a very good student, Alpha Plus! Some are chiseled in stone as well. Since here Rome = New Rome = New York = America, we are also treated to similar American tags, spoken and sculpted, as well as a rendition of “God Bless America.”

Coppola/Cesar seems to really like Emerson, always the mark of a midwit,[22] and he gets quoted twice, the second time during some kind of duel of wits between Cesar and Cicero, where Julia wins by quoting Marcus Aurelius… three times in a row. I expected “Hannibal” Lecter to start slow-clapping.

Now, after all this intellectual one-upmanship, we’ve been sufficiently pump-primed to get The Message. It seems that this whole shebang has been an excuse to grab our attention – bread and circuses, if you will – and/or leave us punch-drunk with confusion and boredom, whereas no one would have tuned in for a lecture entitled “Francis Ford Coppola Explains It All.”

And speaking of tuning in, the lecture we get from Cesar, which is about as long as Roark’s speech in the Fountainhead film but seems as long as John Galt’s speech from the Atlas Shrugged novel, sounds like something AI would have generated after being trained exclusively on old episodes of the original Twilight Zone and Star Trek. It’s like a scan of a typical Boomer’s brain.[23] There’re even clips of those Bad Boys, Hitler and Mussolini (I suppose Coppola wants his people to get equal time, if only in Evil), as well as a bit of that clip of storm troopers burning books everyone has seen over and over (no indication of the content of the books, though).

I did notice some firmware updates; for example, much emphasis is put on “Everyone on Earth needs to talk about the future” along the lines of the “we need to have a conversation on X” trope so popular among liberal talking heads and politicians that, as we know, really means “Shut up while I tell you what’s going on.”[24]

The deceit here should be obvious to anyone over the age of twelve – “Let’s have a conversation so that you know that you should do what I want” – but it goes beyond hypocrisy to the false framing of the entire issue as “clinging to past vs. embracing of future.”

Mayor Cicero has a point; he’s concerned about the citizens of New Rome right now, starving, homeless, ultimately rioting and nearly toppling his regime, while Cesar is fiddling with his plans for the future. [25]

The real issue isn’t stubbornly clinging to the past versus bravely plunging into the future; the issue is that Cesar’s future sucks, and we don’t want it.[26] But the concerns of us “little people” don’t matter to the likes of Cesar, just as Howard Roark wasn’t interested in providing housing for the poor, but, like Frank Lloyd Wright, or the Bauhaus, making sure his designs were executed as ordered, without the “greedy” financiers (“evil” men like Crassus or Trump) sticking on  balconies or the “stupid” tenants adding Van Gogh prints or houseplants and other forbidden nick-nacks. [27]

Here’s the only online reviewer who seem to get this.

As for the past, it’s not all bad, you know. Some people even thought about the future for a living! Back in 1967, the “futurists” interviewed by Uncle Walter were a lot more sensible. Much is made of Cesar getting the Nobel Prize; well, Sir Peter Medawar really is a Nobel laureate, he doesn’t just play one on screen, and this is what he had to say about it.

The merit of the future is that it is not set, the merit of the future is that it is the area in which we can exert our will, exert our efforts and try to validate our values that is the merit of the future. Some people talk about predicting the future as if the future was going to unfold itself independently of our own wishes and desires. Now I think one can take it as one of the great lessons of modern science or modern technology that anything that is in principle possible will be done if people want to do it enough so when one asks what is going to happen the 21st century, what one really wants to ask is what do we want to happen in the 21st century.

At the very end, as the message in jackhammered into us with texts – including what one internet critic nicely referred to as a “pro-communist rewrite of the Pledge of Allegiance” — voice-overs and a tableau vivant of our main characters, there is a slow “iris in” effect, and I realized that, of course, Megalopolis is Coppola’s take on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis; and if production had been delayed by three more years it could have been marketed as a centenary event.[28] This explains the focus on skyscrapers and the elite living in penthouses and having wild parties while exploiting the earth-bound proles, the long speeches, the sometimes-absurd over-acting, the carved inscriptions serving as interstitial cards, and above all the attempt to promote Big Thoughts about the future. The child of Julia and Cesar unites not just the two warring clans but represents this movie’s version of Metropolis’ “HEAD and HANDS need a mediator. THE MEDIATOR BETWEEN HEAD AND HANDS MUST BE THE HEART!” I suppose this is why when Cesar “stops time” their baby still moves; he or she must represent some kind of future synthesis or something.

This also adds more layers of unintended irony. Cesar’s awful architecture is intended by Cappola as our advance into the future, while actually being creepy and foreboding, as Lang intended. Metropolis is another overblown film that’s largely forgotten, except for two tropes, the disturbingly sexy robot – later revived by Madonna, and then Lady Gaga – and Rotwang, the mad scientist with the mechanical arm, repurposed for Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove; both crowd-pleasing elements are missing here.[29]

The ultimate irony here, of course, is that Metropolis was written by Thea von Harbou, who may not have been a Nazi, exactly, but unlike her husband, Lang, she was happy enough to stay in Germany and continue to work in the regime’s film industry.

Moreover, while the midwit screenplay gives us brief flashes of Hitler and Mussolini as the Bad Guys, the conflict of Cicero and Cesar resembles nothing so much as the conflict between the Folkish and Futurist elements of the National Socialists, with Cesar being Hitler – an actual artist, and amateur architect. It’s easy to imagine a Leni Riefenstahl version of the film, with Cesar rebuilding Europe – destroyed by the Soviet satellite rather than Allied bombers — with vast new cities connected by Autobahns teeming with Volkswagens. [30]

With its incomprehensible plot, cheap (-looking) special effects, narcissistic self-importance (a younger Coppola might have dared to cast himself in the lead) and preachy, vacuous ending, Megalopolis most closely recalls the work of Neil Breen, yet I would rather watch Breen’s entire output than sit through another showing.

Why isn’t it “so bad it’s good”? The schoolbook answer is that it “lacks heart,” that, unlike the work of Ed Wood, we don’t find inspiration in a plucky no-talent kid compelled to put his dreams on film. However, the bad movie universe has expanded since those innocent, early days of the Golden Turkey Awards, and the examples of Coleman Francis, Tommy Wiseau, Neil Breen and others show that good bad movies are often made by right bastards.[31] Perhaps, despite his 40-year, self-financed struggle to make this film, Coppola is too much of a Hollywood insider to make this an example of “outsider art” rather than the bloated, over-produced product of a deluded movieland mogul.

No, I’m afraid that, like the reporter at the end of Citizen Kane, I can’t give you the answer to that question, the missing piece of the puzzle that explains what separates Megalopolis from Breen’s Fateful Findings. Like pornography, I know it when I see it.

But for now, all I can say is, in the words of another YouTube a-logger, “What an awful movie!”

Notes

[1] “Unfortunately for Coppola, his film failed to impress most critics, who thought the message was obfuscated by too many ideas.” See “Walsh’s ‘Am I Racist’ Outgrosses Coppola’s Anti-Trump Vanity Project, Cost 40x Less.”

[2] “Megalopolis made $4 million at the box office in its opening weekend and has a 34% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.” Ibid.

[3] Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I always wanted to pretend to be an architect.

[4] Again, either the writer fell asleep, or the scenario was changed, or Coppola doesn’t care about piddling matters like continuity, but as far as I could see the wreckage of the Soviet satellite could only have destroyed a few blocks here and there as it fell to earth, hardly the entire city. It simply clears a space for Cesar to develop his model city, not an entirely new city. All this takes about five minutes of screen time, from “Look out!” to “Try out my moving sidewalks” and, as YouTube’s Pitch Meeting guy would say, it’s “Surprisingly easy, barely an inconvenience.”

[5] Will Graham’s moment of Gnostic enlightenment in Manhunter, here. see “Phil & Will: Awakening Through Repetition in Groundhog Day, Point of Terror, & Manhunter, Part 2”; here and reprinted in my collection Passing the Buck: Coleman Francis & Other Cinematic Metaphysicians (Melbourne, Australia: Manticore Press, 2021).

[6] George Costanza would be horrified to find Cesar practicing urban design rather than architecture!

[7] “[Suburbanization] didn’t occur in a vacuum, as is frequently suggested. Public transit was being gutted in the inner city at the same time the automobile-centric suburb began to spring up; mobility was becoming more difficult for anybody on foot or by mass transit, making the need for an urban form suited to cars visible and desirable. In some cases, this transition was part of a megalomaniac’s master plan more generally; you can thank Robert Moses — a first-generation German-American Jew — for the waterfront-destroying FDR Drive in Manhattan.” Winston E. Bakewell, “The Real Cost of a Traffic Jam.”

[8] “Wright’s entire life was a study in extremes. A house builder and a home wrecker, he wore capes and lived large.” New York Post, here.

[9] “While many view Rand as an iconoclast, ‘her ideals of luxury in clothing and interior design are straight out of the costumes and sets of 1930s movies,’ Postrel said, and these styles showed up on her characters as well. Dagny Taggart, the executive heroine of Atlas Shrugged, notably wore a one-shouldered black evening gown that featured a cape that covered just one arm and shoulder. ‘Unfortunately, she had Joan Crawford aspirations and a squat peasant body so, at least from the few photos we have, she couldn’t wear the sorts of clothes she described in her books. But she wore nicely tailored suits, with a cape when she wanted a little drama.’” Andrea Billups, “Style-wise, Ayn Rand Claimed Her Look,”

[10] Here at least Coppola may have initiated a trend, with similar dismal results showing onscreen for Disney’s Acolyte (4 hours, 230 million dollars) and Amazon’s Rangz of Kangz (eight seasons, over a billion).

[11] “The characters he portrays hold advanced and often superhuman abilities and use them in grandiose struggles against corrupt forces and institutions. Fateful Findings features Breen as a hacker imbued with supernatural powers by a magical stone he found as a child, who uses his skills to expose government and corporate corruption, while in Double Down he plays a rogue CIA agent. In other films, his protagonist is a god-like, messianic, or otherwise chosen figure; Pass Thru, for example, has Breen playing a messianic entity who arrives from the future to wipe out 300 million “bad people” to usher in a new era of peace.” Wikipedia, op. cit.

[12] “A key scene of a sleepwalking Regan about to wander off a rooftop was filmed in New York City, atop 666 Fifth Avenue (where the studio’s offices were then located). With no stunt person and no special effects, the shot showed actress Linda Blair’s feet on the edge of the building with Fifth Avenue down below.” 666 Fifth is now owned by Jared Kushner, which connects it to the film’s version of Trump, of which more later.

[13] “Breen has said that his films have a ‘sense of social responsibility’ and reflect the ‘mystical or paranormal side of life.’” Wikipedia, op. cit.

[14] Imagine, say, the scene in Goldfinger where Bond wakes up in Goldfinger’s private jet, but shot by having Connery and Blackmun standing or squatting in from of a still photo (a real example).

[15] Apparently, Coppola was either short of cash or wanted to emulate the “old school” effects that worked so well in his Bram Stoker’s Dracula film. “Things came to a head in December 2022, roughly halfway through the 16-week shoot, when most of the visual effects and art teams were either fired or quit. ‘I think he had to work quite hard to then figure out how to replace them,’ says Figgis. ‘I think he just wanted to liberate himself while he was shooting. So he didn’t have to wait for stuff, and then he’d say “Oh, I’ll fix it later. I’ll fix it in post – which I guess he’s done.” “The virtual “volume” was abandoned in favour of more traditional ‘green screen” technology,’ according to one source: ‘His dig at us was always, ‘I don’t want to make a Marvel movie,’ but at the end of the day, that’s what he ended up shooting.”

[16] Again, I had to check this, for You, the Reader, but that’s what it’s called. However, I was right to suspect that “Megalon (メガロ, Megaro) is a giant insect kaiju who first appeared in the 1973 Toho Godzilla film Godzilla vs. Megalon.”

[17] This might be an Easter egg for fans of Breaking Bad, where Giancarlo Esposito’s Gus Fring has half his face blown off, although, lacking access to Megalon ™ he straightens his tie and drops dead.

[18] The six hours motionless in a chair must explain why Cesar in the next scene sports the bandage/towel, and in the remainder of the film is perfectly OK; the effect could not be duplicated in real time. As Crow T. Robot says about a particularly static scene in The Dead Talk Back, “We could use a flashback here, this is a motion picture!”

[19] There are a couple of moments in the beloved classic Groundhog Day that suggest Phil might be getting a bit frisky with the ladies during his same day over and over situation; see “Phil & Will: Awakening Through Repetition in Groundhog Day, Point of Terror, & Manhunter, Part 2”; here and reprinted in my collection Passing the Buck: Coleman Francis & Other Cinematic Metaphysicians (Melbourne, Australia: Manticore Press, 2021)

[20] I should mention, for non-American readers, or modern Americans, that the Roman “influence” or larping of the Founders – the Senate, Washington and the myth of Cincinnatus, etc. – was entirely inspired by the Republic – “A republic, if you can keep it!” said Franklin; Mayor Frank Cicero explicitly said he’s a Francis, not a Franklin. Did America, like Rome, transition to an Empire, or was that imposed at some point? For a talky movie, Coppola is loathe to clarify any such mere details. Not that the snooty Brits are any better: “This article [on Megalopolis] was amended on 14 May 2024 to correctly refer to the ‘Roman republic’, rather than the ‘Roman empire’, in relation to events of 63BC.” Hey, what’s the diff?

[21] As noted above, “‘His dig at us was always, ‘I don’t want to make a Marvel movie,’ but at the end of the day, that’s what he ended up shooting.’” Scorsese, at least, has had the decency to denounce the Marvel-ization of Hollywood.

[22] Earlier this dweeb tries to intimidate Julia by casually referring to his “Emersonian mind.”

[23] This could also explain why all of Aubrey Plaza’s scenes seem to be inspired by 70s porn; she even has a porn name: “Wow Platinum.” Coppola is being sued by extras for grabbing them and sticking his tongue in their mouths, and in turn, Coppola is suing Variety for reporting these accusations minute.

[24] I was reminded of Roger Scruton’s summing up the bloated, midwit ideas of Jurgen Habermas as “emancipation means shooting your mouth off, in a world where everyone has an equal opportunity to do the same.” Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), p.151; reviewed here.

[25] Like most people nowadays, especially Americans raised on the mythology of “The American Republic,” or perhaps just the Republic vs. Empire of Star Wars, the Roman Republic was not some democratic utopia but an oligarchy that regarded the common people as tax donkeys; Caesar, by contrast, promoted the interests of the people, hence his popularity (get it?). As in” today’s elections, oligarchs claim to be democrats, and the man or woman acclaimed by the people themselves is condemned as a “dangerous threat to liberty.” Hence the “conversation”: “Shut up, I’m speaking.”

[26] In Cesar’s new city, everything will be within five minutes distance; he’s so proud of this feature he tells us twice. Obviously, this echoes the “15 minute cities” idea, which some people find creepy; either Coppola didn’t notice, which shows that this kind of panopticon is inherent in the “futurist” idea, or he did, and is OK with it. This miracle is accomplished by the use of moving sidewalks, which have been a thing since forever (perhaps Dustin Hoffman could have ridden one, as in The Graduate), along with some kind of transparent globes, which resemble South Park’s “It” devices. Again, did Grandpa not notice this, or did he not care?

[27] One can’t help but recall the end of Das Rheingold:

Loge (calling down from the Rainbow Bridge toward the valley)
Ye in the water! why wail ye to us?
Hear what Wotan doth grant!
Gleams no more on you maidens the gold,
in the newborn godly splendor bask ye henceforth in bliss!

(The gods laugh and cross the bridge during the following.)

[28] Wikipedia notes ominously that “After the silent film era, the technique became less used, and has mainly been used only for ironic or comedic effect.”

[29] With Madonna far too old now, and perhaps Gaga unavailable – she’s in the competing Joker sequel – I wonder if Aubrey Plaza’s odd “Wow Platinum” was intended as a discount Gaga? Cesar (the name of the somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) is effectively a cyborg near the end, although his skin seems to have grown over his new metal face by the final scenes, in another unexplained plot thread.

[30] Even Coppola’s Roma redivivus conceit is echoed by his countryman Mussolini’s project of creating a New Roman people for a new Roman Empire. In the film itself, the mob turns on the attempted usurper, Clodio (Shia LeBeouf) and hangs him Mussolini-style.

[31] More recent scholarship has shown that Ed Wood was not the plucky kid of the Ed Wood movie, but was not a nice guy, and essentially a con man, like A. J. Nelson (who made The Creeping Terror and then disappeared; he gets the anti-Wood treatment in Pete Schuermann’s  “The Creep Behind the Camera) and, to a lesser extent, Coleman Francis. There is definitely something of the con man in most directors, good or bad; Patrick Dennis’ follow-up to Auntie Mame, Genius (Harcourt Brace & World, 1962; reprinted as #34 in the “Rediscovered Classics” series by Chicago Review Press, 2018) based itself on Orson Welles’ post-Hollywood career, as hinted at in the Ed Wood movie. Perhaps this explains how downright American the film industry seems, since, from Poe and Melville to Mad Men, the con man is the archetypal American; this shows why Coppola quote Emerson, whom Melville satirized in his own Confidence Man; see “Don Draper’s Last Diddle” among my many essays on this trope.