Francis Ford Coppola Predicts YouTube in 1991

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

What a fat girl in Ohio has to do with Mozart and one of our era’s most radical shifts in the culture of creativity.

 

We’ve previously explored 5 fascinating vintage visions for modern social media, including Thomas Edison’s early experimentation with what became one of YouTube’s message staples — the cat meme as a currency of entertainment.

From legendary director Francis Ford Coppola comes a vision for YouTube as a medium — 40 seconds of remarkably prescient insight into one of the greatest creative revolutions of our time, two decades before our time.

Suddenly, one day some little fat girl in Ohio is gonna be the new Mozart…and make a beautiful film with her father’s little camera-corder, and for once this whole professionalism about movies will be destroyed, forever, and it will really become an art form.” ~ Francis Ford Coppola

This excerpt from Hearts of Darkness, a fascinating documentary about Coppola’s 1979 cult-classic Apocalypse Now.