A striking, flatiron-shaped building in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, owned since 1973 by filmmaker, hotelier, and winery owner Francis Ford Coppola, has been put up for collateral on a loan as Coppola continues weathering the financial fallout from his flop passion project Megalopolis.

It’s not the first time that the oxidized copper-trimmed Sentinel Building has been used as collateral by Francis Ford Coppola, and it’s not the first time that Coppola has had to weather the fallout from a film that tanked at the box office. But the late-in-life would-be epic Megalopolis, which Coppola had been working on for 40 years, was more expensive than his other disappointments, and he already sold his two Sonoma County winery properties in order to fund its $120 million cost.

It should be noted that Coppola, 86, must still be doing pretty well, financially, and he isn’t actually selling the seven-story building at the intersection of Columbus, Kearny and Jackson streets — which alone could net him a tidy sum. (As the Chronicle notes, he bought it in 1973 for $500,000.) Coppola sold the Francis Ford Coppola Winery and Archimedes Vineyard properties, along with Virginia Dare Winery, both in Geyserville, in a deal valued at $650 million in 2021. And he still owns the very valuable Inglenook winery estate in Napa Valley, and an entire hotel group, which includes properties in Belize, Atlanta, and southern Italy.

The Sentinel Building was reportedly put up as collateral for a new private loan, the amount of which was not disclosed.

The building is home to the Coppola-owned Cafe Zoetrope, and the literary magazine Coppola founded in 1997, Zoetrope: All Story. It was formerly home to the offices of American Zoetrope, the film studio Coppola founded in the 1970s, and still (we think) has film-editing facilities inside where The Godfather and other films were edited.

Per the Chronicle, Coppola previously put the Sentinel Building up for collateral in 1998, and he reportedly nearly lost it in a debtor’s auction in 1980 — when he was reeling from the financial losses of Apocalypse Now.

Coppola has made a number of public comments suggesting that he believes Megalopolis will still catch on with audiences or critics over time — much like Apocalypse Now did.

“It takes people a while to like new things,” Coppola said in a new interview with the UK Telegraph, published Sunday. He noted that with Apocalypse Now, he suffered initially but he’s still making money from it 40 years later. “In the industry, they call it ‘a long tail,'” Coppola said.

This seems to ignore that there was some broad critical consensus that Megalopolis is “an overstuffed opus,” as Rotten Tomatoes puts it, and “More of a creative manifesto than a cogent narrative feature.”

A year after the film’s release, Coppola is still planning to release a documentary about the film to drum up interest, titled Megadoc, as well as a director’s cut of the film that he told the Telegraph is “real wild,” containing previously cut scenes.

Coppola lost his wife of 61 years, Eleanor, last year. And as he tells the Telegraph, “My favorite time with her was always in the mornings. All my life, there was someone to check in with, emotionally — so now, I… don’t know where I am.”

Eleanor Coppola was a documentary filmmaker who in 1991 made the Emmy-winning, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, about the disastrous production of her husband’s film.

The couple’s filmmaker daughter, Sofia Coppola, will be discussing her mother’s work, as well as her own, and her mother’s end-of-life memoir, at an event at SF’s Sydney Goldstein theater later this week.

Photo by Jairo Gonzalez