Trivia / One from the Heart

• Box Office Bomb: Big time! Budget, $26 million. Gross, $636,796.
• Creator Killer: The film is often compared to Heaven's Gate as a great financial disaster. A small art film that went seriously overbudget, it led to the demise of Coppola's revolutionary and state-of-the-art Zoetrope Studios, which he put up for auction not long after the film lost money. Coppola's career didn't take a major hit as Cimino did, but he ended up spending the next two decades directing more commercial fare and less artistic ones to pay off the massive debt this film had caused.
• Real-Life Relative: Francis Ford Coppola's parents Carmine and Italia appear as the couple in the elevator.
• Romance on the Set:
  • Harry Dean Stanton (Moe) and Rebecca De Mornay (Understudy) became a real-life couple after meeting on the set of this film. They lived together for about two years until De Mornay began an affair with Tom Cruise while filming Risky Business in 1982.
  • Composer Tom Waits and script analyst Kathleen Brennan fell in love during the production of this film and married in 1980. They're still together over 40 years later, and Brennan became a major creative partner in Waits' music starting with 1983's Swordfishtrombones.
• Troubled Production: While not nearly as turbulent as Apocalypse Now, the film had such dire consequences for Francis Ford Coppola that it earned the nickname "One Through the Heart".
  • Initially meant as a small $2 million musical for Coppola to recover and raise money after the sheer hell of Apocalypse Now, he quickly grew more ambitious. MGM was initially tapped to finance the film (and offered Coppola $2 million to direct, a record at the time), but Coppola chose to buy the rights himself for his production company American Zoetrope, wanting full creative control and a chance to experiment with new techniques dubbed "electronic cinema", which would serve as a precursor to the digital era of filmmaking that took off in the 2000s.
  • The budget ballooned due to Coppola exclusively filming on lavish, stylized sound stages (reportedly 10 miles of set was built to recreate the various Las Vegas locations of the film). The ever rising costs put Zoetrope on thin ice in terms of finances, and Coppola was in a constant scramble for funds. MGM pulled out as a result of the financial issues. Coppola managed to strike a deal with Paramount to distribute the film, but the film had ended up wildly over budget at $26 million.
  • Paramount screened an unfinished workprint to would-be theater exhibitors in August 1981, reportedly due to recently passed laws regarding "blind bidding" by theaters. The response from exhibitors was viciously negative, with those who viewed it giving quotes such as "one of the 10 worst movies I've ever seen". Coppola went on the defensive, claiming they were judging the film from an unfinished workprint missing key music and effects, though others would later claim the workprint was only missing a few effect shots.
  • The film proceeded to miss its planned Christmas release date, and Paramount refused to put it up for Oscar screenings. This strained the relationship between Coppola and Paramount to a breaking point. When Coppola made preview screenings in January 1982 without Paramount's permission, they pulled away despite the film already being booked in theaters. Columbia Pictures picked it up at the last second, but it only made it to 44 theaters in 8 cities in the US, making a grand total of $636,796 during its box office run.
  • The staggering financial failure of the film left Coppola bankrupt and buried under bank interest; between 1982 and 1992 he would declare bankruptcy three times, and spend the rest of The '80s and The '90s as a cinematic gun-for-hire to recover debts. American Zoetrope only survived in name and was reduced to a "virtual studio" without production facilities, with set elements and props from this film auctioned off to try and make a return on production costs.

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