Production company | |
Industry |
Motion pictures Television |
Founded | December 12, 1969 |
Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
Key people
|
Francis Ford Coppola George Lucas |
Owner |
Roman Coppola Sofia Coppola |
Website | zoetrope |
American Zoetrope (also known as Zoetrope Studios from 1979 until 1990) is a privately run American film studio, centred in San Francisco and founded by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas.
Opened on December 12, 1969, American Zoetrope was an early adopter of digital filmmaking, including some of the earliest uses of HDTV. The studio has produced not only the films of Coppola (including Apocalypse Now, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Tetro), but also George Lucas's pre-Star Wars films (THX 1138), as well as many others by avant-garde directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, Wim Wenders and Godfrey Reggio.
Four films produced by American Zoetrope are included in the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films. American Zoetrope-produced films have received 15 Academy Awards and 68 nominations.
Initially located in a warehouse on Folsom Street, the company's headquarters have since 1972 been in the historic Sentinel Building, at 916 Kearny Street in San Francisco's North Beach neighbourhood.
Coppola named the studio after a zoetrope he was given in the late 1960s by the filmmaker and collector of early film devices, Mogens Skot-Hansen. "Zoetrope" is also the name by which Coppola's quarterly fiction magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, is often known.