Inspiration in unlikely places
Oh, hi friends!
“So it was stupid of me to do, but nonetheless I was depressed and I had lost everything and I was facing a bankruptcy.”
That’s Francis Ford Coppola, explaining how he felt after his film One From the Heart flopped at the box office in 1982. (This was *after* he directed The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather: Part II, and Apocalypse Now.)
But then something happened.
“That’s when a large envelope arrived in the mail for him from the library class of Lone Star Elementary School in Fresno, Calif.
‘These children had voted that I should take their favorite book and make it into a film,’ Coppola recalls of the package, which came with about 10-15 pages of signatures from seventh and eighth graders, courtesy of their librarian Jo Ellen Misakian. ‘And the fact that these kids had voted for me to do their film meant for sure I was going to [at least] read the book… And I read it, and I was very touched by the book because it showed how young people really have such strong feelings. I was very moved by it.’”
He directed The Outsiders a year later, to much success.
“I listened to the advice and the opinion of the young people,” Coppola says. “Which is what we should be doing in the world today, in my opinion.”
I love this story not only because I grew up near Fresno (!), but because it shows the ebbs and flows of a career most people see on paper as incredibly successful.
Everyone makes mistakes and experiences low moments — even the most accomplished people in the world.
And I especially love that instead of wallowing in the wake of one bad mistake, he found inspiration in an improbable place.
It’s often too easy to ignore the signs that come to us saying, “Go here, this way, keep moving forward.”
He didn’t.
Will you?
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Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara