My Vulture colleagues at Cannes have now seen Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, and their opinions—like the movie, apparently—are all over the place. The film isn’t screening in New York yet, but even the trailer has me revved up to see it, whatever it is and whenever it gets here, because I have been paying attention to Coppola’s revelations, rueful sighs, and intense commentary about this project for decades. Megalopolis has been his passion project, his mad dream, and even if it’s headed off the rails, I am eager for the ride. It has, at times, sounded a little like Chinatown shot through with The Power Broker, a film about the ways in which power and money and real estate all influence the fate of millions. But maybe that’s not the movie that got made, because 40 years’ gestation will change a script, and so will (per Coppola) 300 rewrites. As a city-watcher, I’m fascinated by what I see in the preview reel, because even that’s a lot. Even at this distance, I see a visual representation of an alt-future, or maybe alt-present, New York laid over the real thing. The title telegraphs that this movie is, at least in part, a biography of a half-imaginary, half-real place.
Coppola’s city is called New Rome, with all that implies: empire, bleak future, oligarchs, nascent and maybe imminent fascism, blood thirst. It seems to be the present day in this film, but it’s also perhaps 1960 or 1980. Gory Ben-Hur–style chariot races are being staged in Madison Square Garden—and it’s not the early arenas that were actually on Madison Square, nor is it today’s version above Penn Station. Instead it’s the current one’s immediate predecessor, at Eighth Avenue and 49th Street, the one that was torn down in 1968. (Onscreen there is a Nedick’s hot-dog place on the ground floor, much as there was in the 1950s; see photo.) If you let your eye linger on that marquee, you’ll see that, compared with the real-life one, it’s been augmented with big LED wraparound displays above and below. The implication is that somehow, the dumpy old Garden No. 3 survived into our era, its signage having received a high-tech upgrade. (Which further hints that the original Penn Station perhaps escaped the wreckers. If only our own neo-Roman homage, its architecture based on the Baths of Caracalla, had made it.) The reference to “Crassus National Bank” on the Garden’s marquee presumably refers to John Voight’s character, Hamilton Crassus III, who is pretty obviously named for Julius Caesar’s financial patron as well as a certain secretary of the Treasury we’ve all learned about via Broadway.
In another scene, we see shadowplay on a skyscraper. There’s some CGI work muddying the waters here, but I am pretty sure this is one of the postwar towers of Rockefeller Center, on the west side of Sixth Avenue. It appears to be a flipped image of 1211 Avenue of the Americas—which is the headquarters of News Corporation and home of the Fox News Channel. More crumbling-empire resonances, clearly, plus some tacit media criticism.
There are also a couple of straightforwardly familiar sights: the Helmsley Building behind Grand Central Terminal, and a lightly resculpted version of the Chrysler Building. (This vista will perhaps be altered once a supertall rises next door.) The shot over the eagle-shaped gargoyle and the pose atop the building’s crown in another shot both give off vibes of Margaret Bourke-White.
Just when you think you’re in the present, a maybe-anachronism shows up: a Citroën DS sedan, one of the great forward-looking automobile designs of all time. The French automaker produced this futuristic, technologically extraordinary model from 1955 to 1975, and you still see one on the road now and then. (The other cars on the road are of recent manufacture, so maybe Laurence Fishburne, who’s driving, is just an enthusiast?)
This all makes sense (as much as anything about this movie seems to make sense) given its backstory. Presumably the script and design, over those decades of development, picked up bits and pieces from a variety of utopian and antiutopian and dystopian visions of urban life. New York in that stretch has gone from a seemingly obsolete, crumbling mess to glittery base for the global rich that still contains plenty of grinding poverty (and is also still crumbling). Along the way the city became the site of terrorist attacks, major blackouts, and a financial meltdown, as well as the locus of a global pandemic. Its cinematic representations in this era, too, are all over the map, from bleak to buoyant, from The Warriors to Sex and the City and everywhere in between. Is it any wonder that Coppola picked and chose from this menu at will? Megalopolis is a maximalist’s smorgasbord of city imagery, and he seems to have said “yes, and …” to it all.
And that’s just from 91 seconds of the trailer. There’s another two hours and 16 minutes on its way to town.