PAH in the Press
FIVE : Issue ten, 10/28/2006
The DigiVangelist
by Bill Nevins
Christopher Coppola spreads the gospel of digital filmmakingChristopher Coppola grew up with celebrity. Nicholas Cage is his kid brother and his uncle is Francis Ford Coppola. As a teen, he worked on Apocalypse Now. An established filmmaker and businessman in his fifties, Coppola – that’s Christopher – has his main office on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles where he rubs elbows with the famous as a matter of course.
Yet Coppola sees fame as a sometimes useful asset which, ironically, can be artistically limiting. “It’s that whole exclusive Hollywood concept which I’m totally against. I have to be in Hollywood because I need to know what’s going on. It’s painful but it’s true that the average person is still rocked by celebrity, but my point is: let’s bring celebrity to the people! Some of us have charisma, some of us don’t. But that does not mean the true creative spark is not present in most people.”
Coppola’s personal charismatic “rebel” image – stylized biker togs, headscarves and a fleet of ultra chic motorcycles – can draw jibes, including his own self-directed humorous digs, although it certainly gains him attention. He was often on the front pages of local newspapers during the past two years when he worked with Albuquerque’s Duke City Shoot Out – a festival that invites writers of selected scripts to come to Albuquerque to make and screen their movie in seven days – and filmed a tongue-in-cheek narrative tour of New Mexico kitchens, Biker Chef. The mayor of Roswell, New Mexico, declared a Christopher Coppola Day and swung in on a bike with Coppola’s entourage.
The image, though, is there to reach out to everyday people, to let them know there’s access to real tools of creative expression. Coppola explains that he hopes many more unfamous people gain knowledge and skills to tell their stories in movies – via digital filmmaking. This is the mission of his Project Accessible Hollywood (PAH), which was showcased this past July at the first annual PAH Fest in Grants, New Mexico. “At PAH Fest this year, I met a group of plumbers who came to me and said they had a story to tell. They want to make a movie, and I hope to help them do that, but they were not talking about giving up their jobs to become movie makers. They just wanted to tell their story and keep on with their lives,” he says.
PAH Fest also encourages youth just starting out in filmmaking, such as Leah Leija, an Albuquerque high school senior who took first prize with her documentary about family memories, loss and emotional reconciliation. “People are learning that they can make movies even on their cell phones,” says Coppola, pointing out that Leija had also won a prize in the 2005 Duke City Shoot Out with a 60-second cell phone film. He adds, “People can use digital technology and stay true to their own vision and voice. That’s what I love about rural America – the stories are still fresh!”
Coppola had a long history of acting, directing and producing films on movie stock before he decided to switch permanently to digital at the end of the 20th century. In an August phone interview, he told how in 1998 the negatives of a multimillion dollar apocalyptic road movie he had filmed on Super 16 were almost destroyed by film cutters’
negligence. “I was devastated. It felt like getting shot in the head,” he sighs. “But then a good friend showed me how the movie could be saved by transferring it to digital. I got into digital big time after that.”
Coppola’s conversion to digital started with “digi-flicks” (budgets under $100,000). Coppola notes his own digital innovations have paralleled the rapid 21st century growth of digital filmmaking. At first, many filmmakers scoffed at the low resolution of digital compared to traditional film. Resolution is no longer a problem. “The Hollywood big boys at first put us down for this interest. But now look what’s happened. You really can’t tell the difference between film and digital anymore, and everybody’s using it. They call me the Digi-vangelist! We do a lot of digital work for the big boys here now, and we are doing quite nicely,” he says.
The success of his LA business and the joy he found exploring New Mexico and the Southwest led Coppola to visit often and last year to buy a house in Albuquerque so he can bring his energies to bear here as well as in Tinsel Town. “I saw a lot of potential there,” he says. In Biker Chef, Coppola shares sake and hot chiles beside a campfire with members of the Los Bandidos motorcycle club, and during his Duke City Shoot Out involvement, Coppola hosted elegant New Mexico soirees visited by the likes of Tom Waits and other celebs, as well as many regular working folks.
“We’re working with people on the native pueblos now, and in the small towns and villages and we’re getting strong interest and response,” Coppola says of his ventures across the state. “They get really excited about this once they understand what we are offering them,” Coppola declares. PAH will continue to have its hub in Grants, New Mexico, but plans are underway to expand PAH to other parts of the U.S. and Coppola will be visiting Germany next month in response to a request from there to bring PAH to Europe.
The career of an innovator in the big biz of filmmaking is not without its contradictions. Christopher Coppola the rebel has had to accept assistance from some decidedly establishment sources – WalMart among them – in order to achieve his dreams of democratizing filmmaking. Yet, although aware of such apparent compromises, Coppola sees his role as bringing idealistic changes into reality via pragmatic negotiation. “If the evil empire itself comes to the table, you gotta sit down with them and try to make a deal if it is going to help people,” he says wistfully. Coppola may be a rebel, but he’s a rebel with a cause.