Nicolas Cage nearly derailed his aunt Eleanor Coppola’s feature-film directorial debut.
The actor pulled out of Eleanor’s “Paris Can Wait” two weeks into shooting. Fortuitously, at the same time, Alec Baldwin called to ask her husband, Francis Ford Coppola, for a favor, and Francis obliged . . . but with a caveat. Soon thereafter, a plane was whisking Baldwin from the Hamptons to France to replace Cage.
The film got the Cinema Society treatment with a chic fête in the garden of Ladurée Soho, which drew Diane Lane, Paul Haggis, Cuba Gooding Jr., Sandra Ripert and Sony Pictures Classics’ Michael Barker and Tom Bernard.