Citizen Coppola

The scene looks like something out of The Godfather. A bearded Neapolitan and four unsmiling associates alight from a private jet, pile into a black limousine, and head for the office of a prominent editor. They take him for a ride to a local Italian restaurant, where much intense talk and spirited gesticulating ensue. A few hours later, the visitors fly off again in their plane.

Variations on that episode have been playing in a number of American cities in recent weeks, but the only real affinity to The Godfather is the fact that the don is played by Francis Ford Coppola, the movie's director. His traveling companions are new editors of City magazine, a San Francisco weekly that appears next week for the first time in a thoroughly renovated format. Coppola bought a $15,000 piece of the fledgling magazine in 1973, picked up more last year, and had himself named publisher. "It was my Viet Nam," he recalls. "Every month I put more into it. The stakes were getting so high that I felt I either had to get in or get out."

New Recruits. He stayed in, but grew increasingly dissatisfied with City's predictable mixture of entertainment listings and windy anti-Establishment articles. He hired a succession of new editors, then grew dissatisfied with them too. Finally last month he suspended publication and fired the entire staff. Since then, he has taken some new recruits—including Editor Michael Parrish, former managing director of the monthly San Francisco, and Consulting Editor Rosalie Muller Wright, former editor of womenSports—across the country to talk publishing with some successful pros. Among them have been New York magazine Editor Clay Felker, New Times Publisher George Hirsch, Ms. Co-Founder Gloria Steinem and Sacramento Bee Managing Editor Frank McCulloch, a former TIME bureau chief who successfully launched the innovative monthly Learning. Coppola did not like what he heard. "Publishing is worse than the movie business—the egos, the feeling that you've stepped in somebody else's terrain," he says. "I sensed a real coldness in Felker, he was so unresponsive. George Hirsch was friendly but skeptical, as if he didn't believe it was going to work."

Guest Editors. Small wonder. Starting the kind of polished, expensively produced weekly that Coppola wants would be difficult even in a metropolis like New York or Los Angeles, let alone a second-tier city like San Francisco (pop. 675,000). In addition, Coppola has drawn up a list of "guest editors" he plans to invite to put out entire issues. Among them: San Francisco Symphony Orchestra Conductor Seiji Ozawa, Rock Singer Sly Stone, Patty Hearst's ex-fiancé Stephen Weed and "an Italian fisherman."

Another Coppola idea is to hold the magazine's weekly closing in a theater and open the event to the public. Editors would do their work onstage, with galley proofs flashing on a screen behind them, and the audience offering comments, which would be published as a special page of the magazine. Beyond all that, Coppola wants City home-delivered to its projected 100,000 subscribers on Sundays. He explains: "I think it would be nice to have something like the New York Times to settle down with every Sunday morning."