- The personal F.P. Journe FFC prototype watch owned by Francis Ford Coppola has sold at Phillips for US$10,755,000 (~AU$16,228,000).
- This auction result is the highest price ever achieved for a timepiece from an independent watchmaker, and the highest price since the sale of Paul Newmanโs Rolex โPaul Newmanโ Daytona in 2017.
- The watch was sold, in part, to cover losses from the Coppola-produced and directed 2024 film Megalopolis.
Itโs been a little while since weโve seen a watch achieve more than $15 million at auction, but thatโs exactly what a timepiece belonging to legendary Hollywood director Francis Ford Coppola just did at a recent Phillips auction.
The watch in question? None other than a Coppolaโs personal F.P. Journe FFC prototype, which sold for US$10,755,000 (~AU$16,228,000) including fees after a bidding war that lasted 11 minutes. This staggering figure is not only the highest price ever paid for an F.P. Journe watch, but itโs also the highest price paid for a timepiece from an independent watchmaker, and the highest price paid for a watch since the US$17,752,500 (~AU$26,307,021) sale of Paul Newmanโs Rolex โPaul Newmanโ Daytona in 2017.
What makes this watch special, beyond the world-class provenance of Coppola himself, is the extraordinarily unusual way the dial tells the time โ an idea that both Journe and Coppola collaborated on. Featuring a central hand wearing a medieval knightโs gauntlet, the fingers of the hand will instantaneously disappear from view to communicate the hours, while an arrow that rotates around the dial tells the minutes.
Beyond his close work with Coppola in the creation of this watch, Journe was also inspired by Ambroise Parรฉ, a French barber-surgeon from the 1500s who is remembered as an early innovator of prosthetic limbs. Parรฉ became famous for his development of a prosthetic hand nicknamed โLe Petit Lorrainโ, which was capable of gripping objects thanks to a mechanism of gears and springs inside the hand, which is clearly referenced in Journeโs design.
This wasnโt the only Coppola-owned watch that Phillips sold in this auction, with the sale also featuring the directorโs F.P. Journe Chronomรจtre ร Rรฉsonance โFFCโ, which was given to him by his late wife, Eleanor Coppola, in 2009 and led to the first meeting between Journe and Coppola. The Chronomรจtre ร Rรฉsonance โFFCโ also achieved an impressive result, selling for US$584,200 (~AU$)880,900.
While itโs an exciting moment for the collecting world when significant watches with world-class provenance come to the market, the reason for Coppola selling these watches isnโt as joyful.
In 2024, the film Megalopolis was released, which Coppola not only directed but also poured about $120 million (~AU$180 million) of his own money into creating. Starring big names like Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Laurence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman, it was a commercial failure and only grossed $14.3 million (~AU$21.5 million), leading to a significant hit to Coppolaโs net worth.
During a March appearance on Rick Rubinโs Tetragrammaton podcast, Coppola revealed he was very tight on cash, explaining, โI donโt have any money because I invested all the money that I borrowed to make Megalopolis. Itโs basically gone. I think itโll come back over 15 or 20 years, but I donโt have it now.โ
While Megalopolis was eventually a disappointing result for Coppola, it did represent a decades-long creative project for him, having started work on the film all the way back in 1983 and being knocked back by studios in both 1989 and 2001 when he sought to fund it. At a minimum, he finally created a project heโd long dreamed of, gave a watch collector a chance to buy a very special timepiece, and set a record for F.P. Journe watches in the process.
