Francis Ford Coppola has made anumber of attempts to play impresario over the years, but one of his most successful acts of patronage over the years may have one that was partly incidental: he's given Eleanor Coppola, his wife of more than forty-five years, plenty to write about. Eleanor Coppola kept a diary of the making of Apocalypse Now from the period when her husband was assembling his cast and crew to the movie's completion and published her observations in a book called Notes that was published when the movie was in 1979. (That book, and footage she had shot, subsequently served as the core of the classic making-of documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse.) Now Coppola has published her second book, a follow-up volume called Notes on a Life. Coppola told interviewer Margaret Wapper that the new book, which covers events in her family's life from the 1980s to the near-present day, ""doesn't have a specific projection or underpinning, but it's reflective of the way we think. In the present time, we are aware of something, but maybe it reminds us of something else and then we're in the past and then we're back to the present again. . . . As I looked back on the notes, I could see strong themes emerging, repeating themselves, certain images or ideas."
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