The movie gods would turn against him in the next decade, and in quick lockstep so would the critics. He got distracted and he made other plans while life happened. Over 45 years later and one less winery in his portfolio, Megalopolis is ready for its close-up.
We'll all see the film in late September and we've been primed by the tantalizingly polarized reactions to its Cannes premiere, which seem to review the production rather than a film that doesn't seem to fit into any neat critical box. It has at least the benefit of people not having walked out muttering "It was... all right?"
I used to work in movie theatres. When they said that coming out I knew the film would be gone in 2 weeks.
Megalopolis sounds delicious and a little mad. I've gone to more than one film that I was told was either "the best thing he's done" and "the worst thing I ever saw", usually less than an hour apart. That means it's doing something interesting, something a bit confounding, and probably something right.
And the best way to get people talking about such an uncategorizable return to budgets over $3 million is to take over the narrative and upend what people expect based on what those pesky critics have been saying. Surprise them with an unexpected history lesson.
Lionsgate picked up the distribution rights for the U.S. and hired marketing consultant Eddie Egan, who's been in show business almost as long as Megalopolis has been in development, to make the film a must-see event of the Fall.
Do we still care about Coppola films? When's the last time we cared? In September the first full trailer started with a nice line-up of quotes showing how Coppola's films have often been misunderstood and initially weren't received properly by critics. This gambit obviously primes the pump (or proactively plays defense) to challenge what they already knew was going to be a troubled critical landscape.
Sure they hated Apocalypse Now but now it's a classic! (You choose which version is the classic.) Rex Reed: "an epic piece of trash." Andrew Sarris on The Godfather: "a sloppy self-indulgent movie." Owen Gleiberman wrote of Bram Stoker's Dracula "Absurdity." (Um, he's not wrong.)
I think these reviews will actually likely fit for Megalopolis. Pauline Kael didn't think The Godfather was "diminished by its artiness." I'm not in the habit of reading movie reviews from the 1970s (anymore) but I knew this was a gambit to position Megalopolis as a challenging film that the professionals won't initially "appreciate" but you can still trust Coppola. Try the wine. Who didn't get this?
It's a good bit, and cleanses the palate for something that may not want you to take as seriously as it could easily be accused of doing itself. Which apparently was the intent of the campaign according to insiders.
But the industry cried foul. It was quickly pointed out the quotes were fake. *duh* Lionsgate, back-footed, didn't lean into the bit but instead way way back. Sorry, it was an accident. They pulled the trailer within a day. "We screwed up," they said.
By the way the trailer isn't entirely gone:
Some intrepid reporter on the Hollywood beat thought, I wonder if they used ChatGPT to create these quotes instead of doing the actual work of finding them in the wild? A rudimentary test apparently created similar quotes. So the assumption, not verified as of this date, is someone in Lionsgate's marketing department looked up bad reviews for Coppola films and forgot to uncheck the "AI chat" button and when these came up they got dropped straight into the trailer.
And no one checked to make sure they were real before going live.
They dropped them in the trailer? And how many people vet a trailer in a marketing department? For a $120 million picture self-financed by Coppola himself? Certainly more than one or two executives or interns (according to an unnamed producer quoted in THR)? Probably Coppola himself - who's paying for the whole thing?
I find it hard to imagine when these fake quotes were internally tested NO ONE said at one point are we sure these are real?
It was a bit!
But Lionsgate didn't admit it was a joke. Lionsgate isn't exactly Paramount or some other white-shoe lot worried about EBITA and has shareholders more concerned about next summer's blockbuster than revenues from a huge library and can play fast and...
...hold on this just in. Lionsgate spun off Starz streaming earlier this year to increase stock value as a studio and made a couple acquisitions to strengthen its "core value." There may be a play to make themselves more attractive to a potential merger or buy-out although that's a difficult road. Maybe they're more like Paramount than we thought. When they pissed off the industry, they could have gone all Blair Witch with "It's only real if you believe it's real."(1) but instead they kneeled and took it like good gimps.
And because shit flows downhill they fired that Egan guy. I don't think it's likely Egan was the guy who googled "bad quotes from previous Coppola movies," typed them in and presented it on his personal laptop. If they asked him if those quotes were real he probably said "This is a film about a Roman emperor who stops time in a future apocalypse and is based on The Fountainhead. None of this is real."
Now maybe I'm giving too much credit to the studios. To marketing departments. To the guys with 6-figure paychecks and polo club memberships and two mistresses. Maybe after the covid years and a couple strikes a company that's been around since the '60s got sloppy. If they just made one of those AI mistakes well I guess they won't be making that particular one again for a while.
So the quotes are now gone. We're sorry we offended the film critics of a previous generation - when writing about film critically mattered a little bit more. Please acquire us.
And enjoy our fucked-up epic movie.
(1) Another real quote.
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