COPPOLA'S VISION BEYOND FILM.

Byline: Joshua Mooney Entertainment News Wire

Francis Ford Coppola's biggest production of the '90s - even bigger than his last hit film ``Bram Stoker's Dracula'' - isn't a movie at all. The restless, visionary American filmmaker is hard at work on an ambitious slate of projects, including a literary magazine, a film museum and a line of cheese.

Francis Ford Coppola presents ... mozzarella? Not necessarily what we'd expect from the creator of ``The Godfather'' and ``Apocalypse Now,'' but then Coppola's never been predictable. Most of his current activities are centered far from Hollywood at his 1,500-acre winery in California's Napa Valley, which he bought 20 years ago.

With additional purchases of property last year, the stage has been set for construction of a movie memorabilia museum and other additions aimed at making the Niebaum-Coppola vineyard a profitable tourist destination. A corresponding expansion of the vineyard's wine production has made the Coppola name as highly rated on wine bottles as it is on screen. Now, this man of legendarily large appetites will put his name on a line of gourmet foods, including olive oils and vinegar produced at the vineyard.

Coppola, 57, recently spent more than $9 million expanding the winery - which brings back memories of his spendthrift ways in the '70s and '80s. Back then, rampant spending led him to the brink of bankruptcy and threatened his film career.

In decades past, not content just to sink his money into ambitious film projects like ``Apocalypse Now'' and ``One From the Heart,'' Coppola bought a magazine, a theater and a restaurant. He poured millions into his American Zoetrope Productions, the studio he originally planned to be both independent from the Hollywood machine and on the cutting edge of electronic technology.

``I came close to pulling it all off. We certainly had the right ideas,'' he says.

There does seem to be a practical side to many of Coppola's current ventures. Movies, after all, take money, and Coppola certainly plans to keep making them. His latest, ``Jack,'' is a comedy-drama starring Robin Williams as a 10-year-old in a 40-year-old's body.

In the past, Coppola admits, he would pour much of his director's fees into his studio instead of his family's bank account. ``Steven Spielberg puts his money in a bank,'' he says. ``So I think I'm developing these other interests I have - particularly in wine and food - to create a business that would support my family.''

Coppola picked up another business-savvy strategy in the '80s when debts from his expensive money-loser ``One From the Heart'' scuttled plans for American Zoetrope. Out of necessity, he became a director-for-hire, taking on films that had nothing to do with his personal visions. ``Jack'' is such a project. Coppola came on board the Disney production after Williams already had signed on and the script had been written. Of projects like this, he says, ``I'm very grateful that I can work as a professional director for Disney or whomever brings me a script and says, `Can you direct that?' '' The income, Coppola says, allows him the ``possibility to perhaps make at least one totally original film from an original script before I'm over the hill.''

American Zoetrope, which is now holding its own financially, is producing a large slate of projects for film and television in the near future. The director himself hasn't announced his next film, but it's clear what his ideal would be. ``I would very much like to make a personal film on the scale of an `Apocalypse Now,' but with an original script based on an original story of mine.'' He also knows how difficult such a vision would be to realize. ``Certainly to do a mature film with real ideas about life in our time is very difficult to finance in Hollywood today, particularly if it would be a size that would cost a lot of money.''