All eyes are on Coppola in Cannes. Sound familiar?

By springtime 1979, Coppola had assembled an edit he screened in Los Angeles — much as he recently did “Megalopolis.” When Jacob got wind of the screening, he threw himself into securing it for that year’s Cannes.

“Already considered an event even before it had been shown, ‘Apocalypse Now’ would be the festival’s crowning glory,” Jacob wrote. He added: “Ultimately I knew it was Cannes’ setting — more than a match for his own megalomania — that would convince him to come.”

But Coppola wasn’t so sure. The film was unfinished, didn’t have credits yet and he still was unsure about the ending. But after some back-and-forth and debate about whether “Apocalypse Now” would screen in or out of competition, it was decided: It would screen as a “work in progress” — in competition.

At the premiere in Cannes, Coppola carried his daughter, Sofia, then 8, on his shoulders. The response to the film wasn’t immediately overwhelming.

“‘Apocalypse Now,’ one of the most ballyhooed movies of the decade, got only a polite response at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday,” wrote the Herald Tribune.

At the press conference, Coppola was defensive about the bad press the film received and the attention given to its budget.

“Why is it that I, the first one to make a film about Vietnam, a film about morality, am so criticized when you can spend that much about a gorilla or a little jerk who flies around in the sky?” asked Coppola.

But “Apocalypse Now” would ultimately go down as one of Cannes’ most mythologized premieres. The president of the jury that year, French author Francoise Sagan, preferred another entry about war: “The Tin Drum,” Volker Schlondorff’s adaptation of the Günter Grass novel. The jury, split between the two, gave the Palme d’Or to both.

“Megalopolis,” too, will be premiering in competition on Thursday.

The day after the 1978 Cannes closing ceremony, Jacob recalled running into Coppola at the Carlton Hotel, just as he was leaving.

“A big, black limousine was about to drive off. The back door opened and Francis got out,” Jacob wrote. “He came up to me, held out his hand and, as he removed a big cigar from between his teeth, said, ‘I only received half a Palme d’Or.’”