You are a human animal. You are a very special breed, or you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and this is Bookworm.

Today on Bookworm, we're discussing Hollywood biographies.

Our first is the book On the Edge, The Life and Times of Francis Coppola, by Michael Goodwin and Naomi Wise.

Naomi Wise is in the studio with us.

Our second biography will be a book about Aldous

Huxley, Aldous Huxley in Hollywood. Naomi, how did it get started that you were doing a project

on Francis Coppola? Well, we began actually shortly after the failure of one from the heart, the $24 million

musical that earned back almost zero.

We knew Coppola slightly.

Michael had worked with him on City Magazine, and I had also done some work on City Magazine just as a writer rather than an editor.

The time seemed right to address the issue of a man who had plummeted from such heights to such deaths.

And that was the moment that we started on this.

So was the decline that interested you?

It was the rise and the decline and the mercurial personality of Coppola.

We are both film nuts, and so it was very much off our alley,

and we were ready to start doing a serious book. It's an interesting question to me. I had

problems with this book. For one thing, it seemed to me that the question being raised by Coppola

again and again is, am I an artist?

And yet this book doesn't attempt to suggest any criterion by which one would determine that.

If we were to look at this book, we would really not know why the Godfather films

or the conversation are called by this film, book, Art,

...