Financial distress: Why Francis Ford Coppola flogs his watches | Francis Ford Coppola

TThe bad news for Francis Ford Coppola is that he made Megalopolis at exactly the wrong time. It could have been a pretentious, semi-coherent feature film about progress through architecture, starring Jon Voight as a man who can stop time for no apparent reason, always struggling to make money.

But getting the film to gross more than $100 million of its own money and releasing it in 2024, in an era when the bulk of the public has largely given up on visiting the cinema, was disastrous. In the end, the box office total was only $14.4 million. By comparison, this puts it roughly in line with the totals of the French-language biopic about Charles Aznavour released the same year. But this film cost four times less, was not released in any English-speaking country, and was not about the proposed construction of a glowing golden city.

In other words, Francis Ford Coppola is broke. But the good news is that this is a good time to be a wealthy watch collector. To supplement his funds a little, Coppola is holding what amounts to a huge auction, where he will sell one of his watches worth a million dollars.

According to the New York Times, in December Coppola will auction off a self-designed watch made by FP Journe. The watch, called the FFC, has no hands to represent the hours and minutes. Instead, time is told via an armored human hand in the middle of the face, its fingers moving in different configurations depending on the time of day. This means that the watch is literally trying to reinvent the way we tell time, even though no one had a problem with the way we already did it, which seems like a somewhat copulaesque thing we’d want to do.

Fortunately for Coppola, the watch is quite expensive. A prototype will sell at auction in 2021 for nearly $3 million, more than 10 times its estimate. And while this doesn’t have the same cachet — unlike the prototype, it took eight years to make — it’s still expected to reach seven figures.

Adding to the value is the fact that buyers will not only be purchasing an insanely complex watch, but they will also be purchasing Francis Ford Coppola’s state of mind. When David Lynch’s estate auctioned off his property earlier this year, his espresso machine was one of the main attractions, since his love of coffee was legendary. Likewise, what kind of millionaire Coppola fan would be able to turn down the opportunity to own a device that does very simple things in an extremely complex way? In this respect, it’s less a watch than a physical manifestation of Coppola’s entire raison d’être.

But let’s keep some perspective here. FFC may be an hour in a lifetime and is completely outside the financial limits of the majority of people. It is likely to become the most valuable possession of the person who buys it. However, it’s important to remember that Megalopolis was such a great work of art that the watch — this million-dollar, over-the-top work of art that painstakingly took eight years to make — would only pay for about 82 seconds of its running time.

Of course, Francis Ford Coppola has other ways to make some money back. He is selling some of his other watches, worth between $3,000 and $240,000. He has been touring major cities, accompanied by a lecture titled “How to Change Our Future,” with tickets priced at $200 per person. There’s also Megadoc, the StudioCanal-distributed documentary about the making of Megalopolis, which has actually been much better reviewed than the film itself.

But, really, none of that matters. Francis Ford Coppola will never make all his money back in the big cities, but we’re talking about a man who spent his entire life making fortunes and losing fortunes over and over again. He was never afraid to invest his money in a crazy artistic trend that never paid off, and he always ended up doing well. The man is now 86 years old. If Megalopolis proves to be his last film, at least he wasted his money doing something only he could have done. And if a billionaire ends up getting unfathomable surveillance, so much the better.