Francis Ford Coppola

The authors, French journalists, document filmmaker Coppola's iconoclastic career in a flat, perfunctory style with sentences that occasionally trail off incompletely. The anarchistic Rumble Fish is called ""indescribable, impossible to explain'' and left at that. In other sections, Chaillet and Vincent offer plodding production notes and plot synopses. While the book describes the ``reciprocal misunderstanding'' between Coppola and his critics along with his radical experiments and financial woes, the authors fail to convey the innovator's creative fire. Photos. December