In June of 2022, Luvia Martinez-Luna received a phone call from Francis Ford Coppola. For years, Martinez-Luna had helped manage two of the director’s Family Coppola Hideaways hotels, in Belize, where she grew up. Mr. F., as Martinez-Luna calls Coppola, owned five hotels in total, and was looking into buying a sixth, south of Atlanta. He wanted her to run it. Two weeks later, Martinez-Luna pulled up to an old Days Inn, between a cold-storage facility and a McDonald’s, in Peachtree City. Coppola met her there. “It didn’t look like our other properties,” Martinez-Luna recalled. “But Mr. F. had a vision.”
A few weeks before the première of Coppola’s latest film, “Megalopolis,” a guest and a companion visited the property, which opened in July as the All-Movie Hotel. The footprint of the Days Inn remained, but the exterior now had Coppolanian flare: succulent-filled flowerpots imported from Italy, golden columns. Foam-core statues of the characters played by Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman in “Megalopolis” were perched by the parking lot—a storm had recently detached Hoffman’s hand. A golden eagle with a twenty-foot wingspan guarded a pool. The guests wiped their feet on an “Apocalypse Now” rug, which led into a spacious entry room. There were two “Godfather”-themed pinball machines against a wall, a mural from “The Godfather, Part II” above a plush couch, a communal dining table, and an eight-thousand-dollar Nuova Simonelli espresso machine anchoring a breakfast nook. “Mr. F. loves his espresso,” Martinez-Luna said, after checking in the guests. The hotel also has working film equipment. Martinez-Luna led the guests to a vaulted-ceilinged suite featuring a projector screen and photos of Old Hollywood stars. It occupied roughly two Days Inn rooms’ worth of space, not counting new his-and-hers bathrooms.
The guests were hungry, so Martinez-Luna suggested a strip mall a few miles away, which Mr. F. liked to visit via Peachtree City’s golf-cart paths. “Mr. F. loves riding around and waving to the locals,” Martinez-Luna said.
It happened to be the forty-fifth anniversary of the “Apocalypse Now” opening. The guests blasted the film’s harrowing soundtrack as they golf-carted through woodsy neighborhoods where deer grazed in the fading light. They arrived at a pizza place. Their waiter couldn’t recall meeting Mr. F., but said that he’d once served a gin-and-tonic to Danny DeVito. “Classy guy,” he said.
The next morning, after espresso, the guests met Akshay Bhatia and Jordan Holifield, a pair of Georgia Film Academy grads in their twenties, in the lobby, for a tour. Both work on the hotel’s film-operations team; Bhatia had previously worked as one of Coppola’s assistants. Each wore black. “Francis comes from the lineage of film as a dream factory,” Bhatia began. “You’ll notice little things that are very unique.” He pointed to an antique Moviola editing machine in a corner: “Francis had it painted hot-rod red.” He went on, “The taste of this place is his taste. The chairs in the garden. The potted plants. The movie-ticket doormats.”
“The pinball machines,” Holifield added. “Francis loves pinball.”
On to the guest rooms, inside of which Coppola and his crew had finished shooting and editing “Megalopolis,” before the hotel opened. (Movie-making guests can rent the technical facilities, too.) Room 104: two fancy speakers, a close-throw projector, and a couch. “We did a lot of visual effects in here,” Bhatia said. “We also watched the Super Bowl.” Room 106: bunk beds. “Jordan and I crashed here a few times.” Room 107: junior suite. “We did some time-lapse photography in there,” he said, pointing. “Before it became a closet.”
Where had the Days Inn furniture gone? “Parking-lot sale,” Holifield said. “People loved the framed pictures of docks. The ones we didn’t sell, we converted to sound panels. They’re the perfect size.”
Outdoors again, Bhatia pointed to a poolside grill. “One time, Francis made Martin Scorsese’s mother’s lemon chicken,” he said.
“He also does a zucchini soup,” Holifield said. “It’s actually fricking amazing.”
“I spent a lot of time buying him zucchinis,” Bhatia added.
Past the giant golden eagle (“You’ll see it in ‘Megalopolis’ ”), a tiny gym, and a kids’ playroom with a repurposed Days Inn entertainment center, they arrived at Mr. F.’s personal suite (about five hundred dollars a night). There were Coppola family photos; books by Wharton, Bellow, Rumi; a small table for meetings and rewrites; an espresso bar; and another projector screen. “Every single night, for two years, he’d watch ‘Megalopolis’ here,” Bhatia said. “You’d get notes from him at two in the morning.” Bhatia recalled a memorable moment with Spike Lee in this room. “Francis said, ‘Spike, ask Akshay anything.’ So Spike asked me this very elaborate question about ‘On the Waterfront’ that I completely whiffed. But I got the second question right.”
Finally, the group came to Room 202: a mini theatre with a ticket window salvaged from the Days Inn registration area. “We do movie club here,” Bhatia said. “I actually introduced Francis to ‘Ali: Fear Eats the Soul’ here. New German Cinema. But I think we’ll just show Francis’s films to guests.” ♦
