Skip to main content
Search Results for “Coppola”

Mario Puzo (source, screenplay), Francis Ford Coppola (screenplay, director) THE GODFATHER (Mar 29, 1971) Third Draft film script

New York: Paramount Pictures, 1971. Vintage original film script, 11 x 8 1/2″ (28 x 22 cm.), red leatherette Studio Duplicating Service wrappers, 158 pp. Many pages have vertical creases where they were once folded for set use by hair stylist Phil Leto; there are a number of pages with underlinings and a few notes in his hand. Brad bound, considerable wear to back wrapper (with part of leatherette surface worn off). Overall very good in very good- wrappers.

This film about a powerful Mafia family in New York is now acknowledged as one of the great classics of cinema. The film received ten Oscar nominations and won three (Best Picture, Best Actor for Marlon Brando and Best Adapted Screenplay for Puzo and Coppola).

The Godfather is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made, as well as a landmark of the gangster genre. It was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1990, being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and is ranked the second-greatest film in American cinema (behind Citizen Kane) by the American Film Institute. It was followed by sequels The Godfather Part II (1974) and The Godfather Part III (1990).

GREAT GATSBY, THE (1974) Screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola / Rev Version by J.C.

GREAT GATSBY, THE (1974) Screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola / Revised Version by J.C. [Jack Clayton] F. Scott FItzgerald (source) New York: [Paramount Pictures, 1974]. Vintage original film script, 11 ½ x 9:” (29 x 23 cm.), leatherette Studio Duplicating Service covers with stenciled title, brad bound, mimeograph, light wear to extreme edges of yapped covers, signed on title page by crew member Jack Stager, with a few MS notations in his hand. Just about fine in near fine wrappers, 131 pp.

Jack Clayton directed this, the third screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, with a cast which included Robert Redford as Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan, Bruce Dern as Tom Buchanan, Karen Black as Myrtle Wilson, and Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway.

GODFATHER: PART II, THE (1974) First Draft screenplay prepared Jul 4th 1973 [by] F.F. [Francis Ford] Coppola

Mario Puzo (source) Francis Ford Coppola (screenwriter, director) Vintage original film script, USA. Beverly Hills: Paramount Pictures, 1973. Plain wrappers, brad bound, 165 pp., Xerographic duplication. Light stains to wrappers, overall NEAR FINE, in a quarter morocco clamshell case.

This first draft screenplay of Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece – arguably, one of the greatest of American films – is unfinished. As Coppola himself explains in his preface to the screenplay:

 

“NORMALLY, I’D LIKE THE OPPORTUNITY TO FINISH THE ENTIRE DRAFT, AND THEN MAKE REVISIONS BEFORE LETTING ANYONE READ PAGES. SINCE IT’S MORE IMPORTANT THAT I PUSH ON TO COMPLETE THE DRAFT, I’VE NOT GONE BACK [TO] FINESSE ANY OF THESE PAGES: THEY ARE ENCLOSED PURELY AS AN ACCOMMODATION TO PARAMOUNT TO SEE THE SCOPE OF THE PROJECTED FILM, AND FOR SCHEDULING AND BUDGET PURPOSES. SO PLEASE READ THIS AS A WORK IN PROGRESS…”

 

Remarkably, given the complex and innovative structure of the narrative, this detailed first draft is fairly close to the completed film, as if Coppola had the entire movie in his mind – knew exactly where it was going and how it would end – but hadn’t yet put it all on paper.

GODFATHER: PART II, THE (1974) Second Draft screenplay by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola dated Sep 24, 1973

From the Richard Manney collection of film scripts, with his name on a 1990 bill of sale, which is laid in.

One of the great American films, and one of the cornerstone classics of the New American Cinema movement of the 1970s. Winner of six Oscars, including for Best Picture and Best Screenplay.
Brad-bound, pictorial wrappers, 200 pp., studio mimeograph, this script belonged to an uncredited member of the crew, and has various notations in holograph ink, including a few on front wrapper, NEAR FINE in VERY GOOD+ wrappers.

ROCCO E I SUOI FRATELLI [ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS] (1960) Set of 16 Italian photos

[Rome: Titanus, 1960]. Set of sixteen (16) vintage original 7 x 9 1/2″ (18 x 24 cm.) borderless Italian black-and-white photos, most of them have stamps on verso of Italian paparazzo G. B. Poletto. With stamps on verso of a photo agency, just about fine.

Luchino Visconti’s epic about a migrant family from southern Italy who come to a prosperous Milan, then an industrial center, and whose family gradually disintegrates under the weight of the new and unfamiliar world in which they find themselves. The film is now accepted as a masterpiece of post-war cinema, and it has been acknowledged by such directors as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola as a major influence on their works, with Coppola specifically citing it as an important inspiration for The Godfather. Such future stars as Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale were in a cast, along with Annie Girardot and Renato Salvatori.

Arthur Penn (director) NIGHT MOVES [working title: THE DARK TOWER] (Sep 17, 1973) Final revised film script

[Burbank, CA]: Warner Brothers, 1973. Vintage original film screenplay, brad bound, printed wrappers, mimeograph, with many pages of revisions on colored paper, 11 x 8 1/2″ (28 x 22 cm.), 126 pp. Script (under working title The Dark Tower, 1973. Script internally near fine, with some toning to a few initial leaves. Wrappers very good+, with the lower brad coming loose, and a few short closed tears and a light vertical crease to front wrapper.

Bram Stoker’s DRACULA (1991-92) Revised film script with storyboards

San Francisco: American Zoetrope, 1991-1992. Vintage original film script, quarto, bound in a binder with three holes punched, 437 page script,1991, with storyboards bound behind each page of script in three hole punched binder, and with 12 pages of revisions (storyboards on versos) dated 11-18-91 laid-in. Also a 33 pp.SCENES REMAINING TO BE SHOT, dated 1-7-92. Near fine or better. 

A massive script, with an utterly complete set of storyboards printed on the verso of each page, for Coppola’s visually compelling treatment of the story of Dracula. 

According to director Francis Ford Coppola, James V. Hart’s DRACULA screenplay had already been written before he agreed to direct it. The screenplay was brought to Coppola by actress Winona Ryder while Coppola was completing GODFATHER III. Ryder was originally supposed to star in GODFATHER III, but had to drop out for health reasons, and she offered the DRACULA screenplay to Coppola as a way of making amends. As it happened, Coppola had always loved Bram Stoker’s novel and the movies made from it, so he was more than willing to tackle the project. 

James V. Hart was a Texas-born novelist who had previously written the screenplay for Stephen Spielberg’s HOOK. His subsequent screenplays included BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA, MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN (produced by Coppola, but directed by Kenneth Branagh), and the Robert Zemeckis sci-fi epic, CONTACT. 

Just as Coppola insisted on titling his Godfather films, MARIO PUZO’S THE GODFATHER, he decided to call his Dracula movie BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA out of respect for the source material. Though in many ways the movie is extraordinarily faithful to the novel, in some ways the most faithful film adaptation of Stoker’s book, Hart and Coppola added elements, including a prologue based on the real-life history of Vlad Tepes aka Vlad the Impaler, the Romanian warrior king who inspired Stoker’s vampire, and they also chose to elaborate the romantic/erotic aspects of the story, i.e., the relationship of Dracula and Mina who, in the Hart/Coppola retelling, is presented as the reincarnated version of Vlad’s original great love. (The reincarnation concept derives not from Stoker’s novel, but from the 1932 Universal film, THE MUMMY, directed by Karl Freund who had photographed the Tod Browning/Bela Lugosi DRACULA one year earlier.) 

Due in part to the complexity of the special effects, almost all of which were done in-camera (the same way filmmakers created special effects in the 1920-30s), BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA was perhaps the most meticulously pre-planned of all of Coppola’s movies; and this pre-planning is reflected in the 437-page screenplay which includes printed storyboard illustrations of every shot in the film, facing the pages containing the scene descriptions and dialogue. 

Notwithstanding the shot-by-shot pre-planning that we see in this illustrated screenplay, there are a number of noteworthy differences between the script and the completed film. For example, Winona Ryder’s part was built up in the prologue, so that the film has a shot of her 15th Century alter ego getting married (with Gary Oldman as Prince Vlad, and Anthony Hopkins, who also plays Dr. Van Helsing, as the Priest who marries them), and the movie adds a shot of her character in puppet form leaping from a tower to her doom after she hears the falsely reported news that her Prince is dead. 

There is also some significant reordering of scenes. For example, in the screenplay the first scene taking place in the London present is that of Mina (Ryder) and her best friend Lucy (Sadie Frost) in a parlor discussing their respective boyfriends, whereas the film’s first scene after the prologue is mad Renfield (Tom Waits) in the insane asylum of Dr. Seward (Richard E. Grant). The movie has more Coppola-style cross-cutting than the screenplay, and some of the screenplay’s visual ideas were omitted from the film, for example, during the scene where Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) is being seduced by Dracula’s vampire brides, a shot of the shadow of a woman “being decapitated on the silks, repeated over and over.” A sequence in which Jonathan is stalked outside by the three vampire brides during daylight is omitted. A scene in which Dracula and Mina make love in a coach prior to her marriage to Jonathan is also omitted from the film. 

Shadows that move independently from the characters who cast them are a recurring visual motif. Anti-gravity and superimposition effects abound. Coppola self-consciously references the expressionistic horror of F.W. Murnau (NOSFERATU) and Carl Dreyer (VAMPYR) along with the surrealist poetry of Jean Cocteau (BEAUTY AND THE BEAST). The film’s references to the early days of cinema even include a visit by Mina and Dracula to a turn-of-the-century kinematograph (an early form of movie theater). The scene at the kinematograph is expanded in the movie to include interaction between Mina, Dracula, and a wild wolf loose in the theater – the beast likes her. 

This is a film in which the costume designer, Eiko Ishioka, can be credited as one of its principal auteurs. (She received an Academy Award for her contribution). Screenwriter James V. Hart should be commended for creating the most complex of screen Draculas, a character who is noble and tragic as well as a monster. 

Can Coppola be considered a true horror director? In light of his work on Roger Corman’s THE TERROR, DEMENTIA 13, DRACULA, and, more recently, 2011’s TWIXT, the answer is a definite yes. The horror genre frees a director like Coppola to be more experimental and romantically expressionistic than would be popularly acceptable in more “serious,” less dream-like genres. 

BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA is one of Coppola’s finest and most underrated achievements. The director has often spoken of his admiration for British filmmaker Michael Powell, in particular his 1940 THIEF OF BAGDAD and 1951 THE TALES OF HOFFMANN. The combination of magic, eroticism, and visual lushness in BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA makes it the most Powell-like of Coppola’s features. 

 

Revised Scenes – November 4, 1991. 8 pp. (light yellow) 

  • A slightly revised version of the scene with Quincey, Van Helsing, and Lucy lying in bed after she has been vampirised. 
  • A slightly revised version of the scene with Jonathan, Mina, and Van Helsing at supper as Van Helsing describes how he cut off Lucy’s head and drove a stake through her heart. 

 

Revised Scenes – November 18, 1991. 12 pp. (orange) including storyboard illustrations facing dialogue and description 

  • A revised version of the scene where Dracula consummates his love with Mina by having her drink is blood. In this version, he hesitates before letting her drink, but she encourages him. 
  • A scene where Van Helsing trepinates (drills a hole in) Renfield’s head – not in the movie. 
  • A slightly revised version of the scene where Jonathan and Van Helsing confront Dracula as he is vampirising Mina. 

 

SCENES REMAINING TO BE SHOT – January 7, 1992. 33 pp. plus title page (white, bound) 

  • Slightly revised version of the Prologue, Dracula’s victory over the Turks, Elizabeth’s suicide.
  • Shots pertaining to Jonathan’s visit to Castle Dracula and his interactions with the Count. His seduction by the Brides.
  • Dracula’s journey to London by sea. A wolf escapes from London zoo. 
  • Shots and inserts remaining to be photographed involving Lucy and Mina in London, and the final pursuit of Dracula by Van Helsing et al. as the vampire returns to his Romanian homeland, now including Van Helsing’s final movie line, “We have all become God’s madmen.”