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The 50th AFI Life Achievement Award Dinner For Francis Ford Coppola Is One Of The Starriest And Most Heartfelt Tributes Of Them All
Francis Ford Coppola received the AFI Life Achievement Award before a starry crowd that celebrated this master maverick filmmaker with highest honor
Robert De Niro, Pacino, Morgan Freeman, Dustin Hoffman, Harrison Ford, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg(the latter pair bookending Coppola at his long table in the middle of the room) were all there to pass the torch, but you have to wonder why it took until the 50th to give this man his due, arguably the Godfather himself of his generation of filmmakers (and many of those who received this years ago). Throughout the night there were not just film clips, but portions of an interview his daughter Sofia Coppola conducted with her father that took us through each step of his life and career from directing Fred Astaire in Finian’s Rainbow in 1967 (where a young college intern named George Lucas would come by the set to learn) all the way to 2024’s Megalopolis). “This is a principled life, and for a year in our culture where the importance of the arts is minimized and our industry is seemingly out in the open that the only measure to judge a film’s success is simply by how much money it makes, I hang on to individuals like Francis for inspiration who live though their convictions, through big moves, all in service of pushing the medium forward.
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