Francis Ford Coppola Robbed

Way back in February, we told you about Francis Ford Coppola’s plans to make a movie in Argentina. Tetro is set to shoot next year with Matt Dillon. Now Coppola has told an Argentine television station that the script for Tetro and other writings and family pictures were stolen from his Argentine studio by armed men.

All of the data, including the script, were on a computer backup drive that was taken, along with other equipment, by four men armed with a knife. The men broke into Zoetrope Argentina and tied up the employees (Coppola was apparently not there), slightly hurting one man. The computer drive stolen was, according to Coppola, "a little thing ... but the information is (worth) much time. If I could get the backup back, it would save me years -- all the photographs of my family, all my writing." He went on television in hopes of getting the men to return the hard drive so he can have the writings and photos back. Good luck with that, Francis.

The good news, for anyone who hasn’t seen Coppola’s last three or four movies, is that other copies of the Tetro script exist so filming can roll forward. Coppola said the thieves took many years of work, so it is possible that future projects will be hampered by the theft, but he didn’t explicitly state that. Hopefully all copies of Jack were stolen and will be summarily destroyed.