REMEMBRANCE | ELEANOR COPPOLA (1936-2024)
By ALISON OWINGS
The sad news spread fast among her friends: Ellie Coppola died.
She was 87, and died at home in Napa Valley on April 12.
For years she and her creative family lived near Fillmore Street, first on Webster Street and later up on Broadway.
Late in life, Eleanor Coppola – often known as the wife of moviemaker Francis Ford Coppola – returned to shoot one of her own films, “Love Is Love Is Love,” at the handsome Victorian house at 2561 Washington Street, just steps from Alta Plaza Park. The home of her good friends Carol and John Field, it was empty after their deaths, while the Field children determined what to do with it. The film was inspired in part by a memorial lunch her writing group held after Carol Field’s death in 2017.
“Love is Love is Love,” a trilogy distributed by Blue Fox Entertainment, never gained the acclaim of her documentary, “Hearts of Darkness,” about her husband’s fraught in-the-making war epic, “Apocalypse Now.”
The Fillmore segment of “Love” contained a much smaller scale drama: that of a table of women talking with intimate honesty about a cherished friend who had died. It echoes in ways a lively bunch of Bay Area writers and artists who jokingly call themselves “the Ladies Lunch Group.” They still occasionally have lunch, if not as frequently as in years past. The group included Ellie — and cherished her, too. Many lunchers responded with shock to the news of her death, and with appreciation. The consensus: Ellie was kind, inclusive, considerate, generous, caring and unassuming. Only weeks before she died, she contributed to a fund to help one of the other ladies. Typical.
At her death, she was editing a documentary about her daughter Sophia Coppola’s film, “Marie Antoinette.” Eleanor Coppola was not finished.
FROM 2020: The backstory about Eleanor Coppola’s newest film
Alison Owings’ latest nonfiction book, “Mayor of the Tenderloin: Del Seymour’s Journey from Living on the Streets to Fighting Homelessness in San Francisco,” will be published in September by Beacon Press.
