Francis Ford Coppola rests in an elite company of American film directors who often write their own screenplays and at times produce their own movies. He has won five Academy Awards and was the first director ever to win the Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival twice. Best known for his Godfather trilogy of films about organized crime and his Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now, Coppola has forged a career from his fascination with the themes of family love, violence, the seductions of power, and the moral bankruptcy of modern life. Village Voice correspondent Andrew Sarris called Coppola "a major American director, whose work is mandatory viewing for every serious cineaste."

"Few film directors have left a greater mark than Coppola on the American motion picture industry" since 1970, wrote Robert Lindsey in New York Times Magazine. "The first in a generation of celebrity directors whose talents...