The Godfather’s genesis was a nightmare, according to director Coppola

Of all the anecdotes about the obstacles in the filming of The Godfather The meeting between mob boss Joe Colombo and film producer Al Ruddy is perhaps the most evocative. Colombo was supposed to come and read the script, was invited to the New York office of Gulf+Western, the then parent company of film studio Paramount Pictures, on a weekday in 1971. The gangster had enforced this unique privilege through the Italian-American Civil Rights League (IACRL), the civil rights movement he himself founded in 1970 that fought against the stereotyping of Italian Americans. De facto, this was a PR agency run by the Colombo criminal family, which served to deny the existence of ‘the mafia’.

Not everyone was happy with the impending film adaptation of Mario Puzo’s bestseller. Anonymous threatening calls came in at the studio. Someone had also shot out producer Ruddy’s car windows and left a note on the dashboard: no film! There was also the IACRL, which called on – or forced – the grassroots in the Little Italy district to put stickers on the windows in protest against The Godfather† All of a sudden, all kinds of already booked filming locations in New York were cancelled. An interview between the studio and the underworld seemed inevitable.

Complete book

Vanity Fair-journalist Mark Seal writes it down like you’re there in Leave the Gun, Take the Cannolithe new and very complete book about the creation of The Godfather (1972), the 50th anniversary film, in a copy restored under the supervision of Francis Ford Coppola.

How Joe Colombo – with fedora hat and reading glasses – got to the open Godfather-script peers, at the office, to ask after a minute or so: what does ‘fade in†

This man is never going to get through those 155 pages of the screenplay, Ruddy knew.

Colombo swore and threw the bundle of paper at Companion George ‘Butterass’ DeCicco, future capo of the Gambino family. But he turned out not to be a reader either.

Well, that reading wasn’t necessary at all, Colombo decided. As long as the producer assured that the terms ‘mafia’ and ‘cosa nostra’ would not appear in the film under any circumstances.

That’s okay, promised Ruddy, knowing that the reference to the Sicilian cosa nostra was missing anyway and the “mafia” designation would only be used once, if Jewish Hollywood boobs Jack Woltz (of the horse’s head in bed) offended the Corleone clan. : ‘dago, guinea, wop, greaseball, mafia, goombahs!‘ Even without that penultimate word, the message got across.

Colombo would never see the final film: he was shot in the head during the shooting period. A fellow mobster called producer Ruddy on the day of the gala premiere: why were none of them invited? If you were making a movie about the military, wouldn’t you invite a few generals too?

And so got The Godfather a special preview for the representatives of the main New York crime families. They turned out to be deeply impressed, no different from ordinary cinema-goers; one tipped the operator a $1,000.

Nightmare

Often Apocalypse Now dubbed as the film with the toughest shooting process ever. Because of the typhoon that blew away half the set of the war epic, actor Martin Sheen’s heart attack, star Marlon Brando’s whims, and a host of other obstacles. It’s all captured in Eleanor Coppola’s great documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse†

But according to her husband, filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, the genesis of The Godfather an even bigger nightmare. Not because of Brando, by the way. He showed up on set only one day later than agreed and patiently sat out the many hours of make-up required for the metamorphosis in that old Don Vito Corleone. And Coppola didn’t have much to fear from the mafia either, they left him alone. Coppola went to war with the studio. Or rather, the studio was at war with him.

“The battle for the casting of the Corleone family was more explosive than the battle the Corleone family fought in the film,” then Paramount studio boss Robert Evans once summed it up. Coppola was mocked by the studio when he listed his list of intended actors. Brando’s career was in shambles in the early 1970s. And Al Pacino, invariably called “the dwarf” or “that bantam chicken” by Evans, was a little-known stage actor. Only after Coppola shot a (now legendary) screen test clip of Brando shaping himself into Don with some shoe polish and some cotton wool stuffed into his cheeks, did the studio agree. Pacino held fears that they would fire him well into shooting time.

Coppola, in his early thirties, had only been appointed after all sorts of established names (including Coppola’s hero Elia Kazan and Bonnie and Clydedirector Arthur Penn) had thanked me. He enjoyed little confidence from his crew: to avoid an impending cut, Coppola fired only a handful of employees after a few weeks of shooting, including his assistant director and permanent editor. He also constantly clashed with his director of photography, the brilliant Gordon Willis. He wanted to highlight his dark ‘tableaux’ to the centimeter, where Coppola believed that his actors also needed some freedom of movement; a highly escalating creative conflict that, given the end result, turned out to be extremely fruitful.

Mutual hate

In Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli Mark Seal also records the two faxes Coppola and studio boss Evans sent each other in 1983, which radiate mutual hatred and contempt. Coppola warns Evans to stop pretending it was him, the studio boss, who… The Godfather saved. Evans, in turn, expresses concern about Coppola’s “paranoid schizophrenia.”

Seal visited the former studio boss a few years before his death in 2019, and is visibly doing his best to give him some credit as well. But those who read the book are mainly surprised by the ignorance of Evans: the man who insisted on Robert Redford for the role of Michael Corleone, and who tried to replace that moody waltz by Nino Rota with a stirring American soundtrack.

How little do the various makers initially feel like The Godfather had remains a remarkable fact, in what is now regarded as one of the greatest film classics. The gambling addict Mario Puzo, who before the publication of The Godfather had never met a single mobster in 1969, wrote his pulp novel out of sheer need for money. And Paramount, which bought the film rights for a small price before publication, was actually upset with it: their gangster film The Brotherhoodstarring Kirk Douglas, had just flopped in 1968.

Coppola explained The Godfather Gone after fifty pages: too lewd and filthy. But his friend and protégé George Lucas (then unknown) moved him to rethink Paramount’s proposal: Wasn’t there something in Puzo’s book after all? Money played a part: Coppola’s film company American Zoetrope had huge debts with the studios after the production of Lucas’ debut film THX 1138 and Coppola’s drama The Rain Peopletitles that did receive some appreciation, but did not attract an adequate audience.

family chronicle

Come on then, Coppola thought, ducking into the San Francisco library to read everything there was to read about the mafia. And so he became fascinated by Puzo’s novel: that combination of the family with the business, the human and monstrous of those criminals. A Shakespearean succession drama, in which each of the three Corleone sons—Sonny, Fredo and Michael—possess an element of their father’s greatness, Coppola saw: “The eldest are passion and aggression, the second are soft-hearted and playful, and the third are intelligence, cunning and coldness’. It was about patriarchal power. And on migration: the American dream. The Godfatherthe director decided, could best be filmed as a family chronicle, with crime as a metaphor for capitalism.

When he heard that, Paramount studio boss Evans responded: “Fuck him and the horse he rode in. Is that man insane?’

It became war. And Coppola won.