Across the feast of Edwardian-era buildings that help define San Francisco’s architectural style, few command reverence like the patina green Sentinel Building in North Beach.
Even Francis Ford Coppola, one of cinema’s great appreciators of beauty, couldn’t help himself. The director bought the seven-story structure, modeled after Manhattan’s Flat Iron Building, for $500,000 in 1973, one year after he secured artistic renown with the release of “The Godfather.”
Now, one year after the release of arguably his most epic theatrical flop, “Megalopolis,” Coppola is using the building as collateral on a private loan.
According to documents filed with the San Francisco assessor-recorder earlier this month, Francis Ford Coppola Presents, one of the director’s companies, has taken out a loan with Capital Holdings VI LLC, and has offered the Sentinel Building as a guarantee. The Sentinel Building, owned by another of Coppola’s companies, Sofia Properties LP, hosts the historic Café Zoetrope on the ground floor, and the offices for Coppola’s production company, American Zoetrope above.
The loan amount is undisclosed, as is the assessed value of the building. In any case, a default would make Capital Holdings VI LLC the landlord of the property, which the city designated as historic in 1970. Neither Gordon Wang, an executive at multiple Coppola companies who signed the documents, nor Natalie Talbott, listed as the agent for Capital Holdings VI in state records, returned The Real Deal‘s calls for comment.
This isn’t the first time Coppola has used the building to guarantee a loan. In the 1980s, Coppola nearly lost the building in a debtor’s auction, but allegedly paid off a $1.7 million loan from Security Pacific Bank just in time to keep the property. In 1998, Coppola used the address again to secure a $1.5 million loan from First Republic Bank.
Coppola’s financial straits in recent years have been well reported. To fund “Megalopolis” — released in 2024 but conceived decades earlier — the director merged his Sonoma County wineries with a Napa-based brand. He then borrowed $200 million against his ownership stake to finance the project. Despite costing $120 million, “Megalopolis” grossed just $14.4 million at the box office.
Coppola used the rest of that $200 million loan to fund improvements at both his high-end Inglenook Winery in the Napa Valley and the Sentinel Building. According to the Wall Street Journal, part of those improvements to the San Francisco flat-iron tower included converting the offices formerly occupied by his production company into hotel rooms.
The director recently said he was broke, telling music producer Rick Rubin in a podcast that “I don’t have any money because I invested all the money that I borrowed to make ‘Megalopolis.'” Coppola recently made headlines when he announced that, in December, he planned to auction off seven of his watches — one of which is expected to fetch north of $1 million.
“I need to get some money to keep the ship afloat,” he told the New York Times last month.
Earlier this month, he closed on the sale of his Belize island for $1.8 million, a move the Hollywood Reporter tied to his financial losses from “Megalopolis.”
Coppola is no stranger to financial stress driven by creative risks — his 1979 Vietnam War epic, “Apocalypse Now,” famously drove him into debt. He has reportedly spent much of the last year in Europe, working on his next project, a musical adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel, “Glimpses of the Moon.”