Francis Ford Coppola up with fellow Oscar-winning directors Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen for an anthology film called "New York Stories". Coppola directed the "Life Without Zoë" segment, starring his sister Talia Shire and also co-wrote the film with his daughter Sofia Coppola. "Life Without Zoë" was mostly panned by critics and was generally considered the segment that brought the film's overall quality down. Hal Hinson of The Washington Post wrote a particularly scathing review, stating that "It's impossible to know what Francis Coppola's "Life Without Zoë" is. Co-written with his daughter Sofia, the film is a mystifying embarrassment; it's by far the
Francis Ford Coppola the latter's first film, "THX 1138". Shortly after completion of production they brought the finished film to Warner Bros., along with several other scripts for potential projects at their newly founded company, American Zoetrope. However, studio executives strongly disliked all the scripts, including "THX" and demanded that Coppola repay the $300,000 they had loaned him for the Zoetrope studio, as well as insisting on cutting five minutes from the film. The debt nearly closed Zoetrope and forced Coppola to reluctantly focus on "The Godfather". His company American Zoetrope also administers the Zoetrope Virtual Studio, a complete motion picture production studio