“Because in the end, none of us live very long on this earth…life is fleeting.” — Robin Williams‘ Jack Powell, a kindly fellow afflicted with Werner Syndrome, which causes sufferers to age four times faster than normal. Oh, my God…there’s Bill Cosby!
Murdered by critics for its treacly mawkishness, Jack (released by Disney on 8.9.96) was probably the worst film and surely the most perplexing career move by esteemed director Francis Coppola, who only four years earlier had directed the mostly respected Bram Stoker‘s Dracula. Coppola followed Jack with another weird film for someone with his exalted reputation — The Rainmaker, an adaptation of a Jon Grisham airport novel with Matt Damon and Danny DeVito.
And that was it for Coppola and mainstream commercial filmmaking. With Youth Without Youth (’07) he began a second career as a self-funded indie filmmaker.
