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Francis Ford Coppola, '57
INTRODUCTION
By Francis Ford Coppola
I grew up in so many neighborhoods and went to so many schools that each place created a kind of temporal slice of life for me, like the striations in rock formations. East School in Long Beach, Long Island, PS 109 and PS 78 in Jamaica, Queens, and many junior high schools in both Los Angeles and Long Island. I went to Long Beach High School, Jamaica High School, New York Military Academy, and finally graduated from Great Neck High School. All this change has enabled me to remember the past very well, the houses I lived in and the people I knew at different ages.
I remember I was always telling stories and building things. Kindergarten was probably the high point in my life. There were huge building blocks out of which I could make structures or shelters or hideaways, a whole world, which my friends could pass into. I remember I made the best structures, and the other kids all wanted to come into them. And I was one of the best storytellers. I could read at five (due to comic books), and I knew all the fairy tales from beginning to end: Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm tales. I knew “Rose Red” and “Snow White.” I loved “The Tinder Box,” the story of a young soldier who is given a tinderbox and when he lights it a magical dog appears and grants him any wish.
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My favorite story was “The Little Mermaid,” probably because I didn’t quite understand the ending and had great difficulty in telling it. I see now that’s because the story is tragic. Back then, I was overwhelmed that the Mermaid had to go through so much for the love of the prince, and even danced for him, though it felt like dancing on broken glass and knives, until she became only a voice and foam on the sea.
One thing motivated my desire to build structures and tell stories: to be near the little girls. I wanted to please them and talk to them and braid their hair and have them find me interesting. I wanted a princess and to be the prince. I’m not sure which came first, telling the stories to please the girls, or loving the stories and wanting to share them with the girls I admired. Nonetheless, that is what I remember.
The first piece of fiction I read that really moved me was a paperback my family had of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. I thought the play was an incredible combination of the magical and the tragic. It was so lyrical and poetic and human and heartbreaking and memorable and funny. Because of this experience I began to prefer reading plays; they swept me up in their flow and carried me along in an exciting continuum, ending usually in an emotional conclusion. Williams’s play made me want to become a playwright. The one commodity held most precious in my family was “talent,” and so I wanted it more than anything. I tried and tried at playwriting—longer plays and one-act plays and musicals, and some of them were all right, I guess. But basically I failed, and I can remember one night at age sixteen at New York Military Academy when I wept myself to sleep because I had no talent.
(Read the rest of this autobiography from Zoetrope, Volume 7, Number 4, here.)
(The above was excerpted from the website: "Zoetrope: All Story: Back Issues." on 3/4/04 at http://www.all-story.com/issues.cgi?action=show_story&story_id=212)
