In Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker s Life, Michael Schumacher aims to provide a wealth of details about all aspects of the creation of most of Coppola's films. In detail, Schumacher works on Dementia 13 through John Grisham's The Rainmaker, charting Coppola's techniques with actors and crew, the integration of his family into the work, and his well-publicized battles with Hollywood executives.

Francis Ford Coppola was an important part of American film history. According to the author:

Francis Ford Coppola is one of the seminal filmmakers of the generation that changed the way movies are made. Five of the films he s worked on are listed among the American Film Institute s top 100 films ever made. He is a man who s spent his life seeking to realize his own artistic vision even as he acknowledges the force that truly drives Hollywood-box office receipts.

Michael Schumacher did a wonderful job at describing the works of Francis Ford Coppola. Michael Schumacher s writing style is extremely detailed and researched exhaustively. Michael Schumacher gained extraordinary access to Coppola s peers, critics, friends, casts, and crews. For example Schumacher has an interview with Joel Oliansky and he says:

My take on him then, Oliansky said of Coppola in a 1999 interview, was exactly what my take on him is today: He s incredibly talented and incredibly pretentious; he doesn t know what he s doing half the time, and the other half of the time he s brilliant.

Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker s Life has a few footnotes. These are mainly used to inform the reader if the statement is the author s interpretation or if there has been discrepancies in the facts. Included in the book is a lengthy bibliography of almost seventy-five different sources and also a filmography that gives details about some of the movies Francis Ford Coppola has directed or had a part in.