Godfather (18 page)

Evans's high hopes for the project were not shared by others at Paramount. “Sicilian mobster films don't play,” the head of distribution told him. He pointed to
The Brotherhood
(1968), a Kirk Douglas vehicle that fizzled.
²
Evans figured that
The Brotherhood
failed because almost none of the creative personnel connected with the picture were of Italian descent. The director, Martin Ritt, and the star, Douglas, were both Jewish. Bernard Dick writes that, like Douglas, most of the cast were Sicilian “in make-up only.” It was an ordinary crime movie “with a few Italian touches thrown in for good measure.”
³

Despite the misfire with
The Brotherhood
, Evans thought that interest in the Mafia was growing in the United States. To begin with, Senator Estes Kefauver's Committee on Organized Crime was convened in 1950. The hearings were televised and acquainted the nation with mafiosi like Frank Costello, who testified before the Committee. In addition, in the fall of 1963 Senator John McClellan's committee investigating organized crime likewise received nationwide attention. The country was ready for a Mafia movie, Evans reasoned.

The Godfather
, as the book was finally titled, appeared in April 1969. After briefly considering non-Italian directors like Elia Kazan (
A Streetcar Named Desire
) to direct the picture, Evans became increasingly convinced that only an Italian American director could supply the creative tissue to make a Mafia movie work. “It must be ethnic to the core,” he said. “[Y]ou must smell the spaghetti. That's what brought the magic to the novel—it was written by an Italian.”
⁴

Peter Bart, a Paramount vice president and Evans's chief assistant, suggested Francis Coppola as a director of Italian ancestry who could fill the bill. Evans recalled the flashbacks in
Rain People
to the heroine's Italian wedding and decided to go for Coppola. “He knew the way these men ate their food, kissed each other, talked. He knew the grit.”
⁵
Coppola could, for example, get across to the mass audience the Mafia's unswerving allegiance to the Sicilian code of silence (
omertà
) about the inner workings of the
organization, which dictates that a member pay with his life for violating it. That is why most members prefer to call the organization
La Cosa Nostra
(our affair), signifying that the family business is not to be shared with outsiders.

Furthermore, Evans deplored earlier attempts to portray Italian gangsters on the American screen, which had merely resulted in stereotypical portrayals of Italian immigrant-criminals. In this regard filmmaker Martin Scorsese (
Mean Streets
) singled out Howard Hawks's
Scarface
(1932), in which Paul Muni plays a mobster modeled on Al Capone. Muni's mugging for the camera and his phony Italian accent were embarrassing, says Scorsese. His performance exemplified the “Mama Mia” school of acting. “No one talks that way.”
⁶
(As a matter of fact, Coppola affirms that mafiosi born in New York and not in the old country have New York accents, not Italian accents.) It would be up to Coppola, Evans concluded, to show the Italian American community in an authentic manner—how they treated their families and celebrated their rituals.

But Coppola was not hired just because he was Italian American, he points out, but because he had recently made a flop for Warners,
The Rain People
. Coppola guessed that Paramount thought that he was young enough and chastened enough by his recent box-office failure to be pushed around by the studio officials. On the credit side of the ledger, Bart was impressed that Coppola made
Rain People
on a meager budget and that he had the reputation of a director who could make a film economically. And, more important, he knew that Coppola had coauthored the Academy Award–winning screenplay for
Patton
(1970) (see
chapter 1
).

When Coppola was invited to make
The Godfather
, he got around to reading the book for the first time, but he never got past page 50. He dismissed it as “pretty cheap stuff.” He was offended by some sensational subplots, which Puzo admittedly concocted to boost sales (e.g., Sonny Corleone's tempestuous affair with Lucy Mancini). Moreover, Coppola thought the book read like a lurid potboiler by the likes of Irving Wallace (
The Chapman Report
)—books that he considered below the belt and beneath discussion. Besides, Coppola wanted to avoid doing formula pictures. He believed that he had taken a left turn when he had agreed to make a commercial picture like
Finian's Rainbow
(see
chapter 2
). He did not want to make another big studio project, this time a gangster movie.

A few weeks later Bart decided to phone Coppola again and tracked him down at George Lucas's home in Mill Valley, where Lucas was editing the final cut of
THX 1138
. Lucas remembers that Coppola covered the receiver with his hand and asked, “George, should I make this gangster movie?”
Lucas reminded Coppola that American Zoetrope was foundering (see
chapter 3
). “Francis, we're in debt,” he said; “you need a job. I think you should do it. Survival is the key thing here.”
⁷
So Coppola took Paramount up on its offer and went back to reading
The Godfather
through to the end.

When he got further into the book, Coppola saw that it was “the story of a family, this father and his sons; and I thought it was a terrific story, if you could cut out all the other stuff.” So, once he had scraped away the dispensable subplots, he concluded that “it wasn't a piece of trash.”
⁸
His father, Carmine, confirmed his decision to make the movie, pointing out that making a successful commercial film would enable him to finance his more personal projects. Coppola accordingly informed Bart that he would make the movie so long as it was not merely a film about an organization of gangsters but a family chronicle.

When the film's producer, Albert Ruddy, gave Puzo the news about Coppola, Puzo was working on a draft of the screenplay. Ruddy advised him that Coppola would be collaborating on the script as well as directing, and Puzo suggested to Coppola that they work together. “Francis looked me right in the eye and said no. That's when I knew he was really a director.”
⁹

Coppola spent his mornings working on the screenplay at a secluded table in the Café Trieste in San Francisco, while Puzo toiled in an office in Los Angeles. Coppola says in the documentary that accompanies the DVD of the
Godfather Trilogy
(released 2001), “I did my own version of the screenplay, then I contacted Mario and we collaborated.” Puzo adds in the same documentary, “We wrote separately. I sent my stuff to him, and he sent his stuff to me. Then he made the final decision as to what would be in the shooting script.”
¹⁰
Coppola was able to whittle Puzo's gargantuan novel down to a screenplay of 163 pages for a film of about three hours.

Before getting down to work on the screenplay, Coppola went through a preliminary procedure that would ensure that all of the key events of the novel would find their way into the script. He began by tearing the pages from a copy of Puzo's novel and pasting each page into a large stage director's notebook. He then summarized the action with handwritten notes in the margin of each page. Coppola explains in the documentary, “I would indicate what the core of each scene was. This became the master document that I would work from while directing the film. I would refer to it in addition to the script while filming. This was for me a multi-layered road map to direct the picture.”

Coppola never backed off from indicating in the script that the mobsters were of Italian descent. He wished to show the Italian American community with understanding and candor, to indicate that Don Corleone, the godfather of the title, was convinced that organized crime was the passport to the American dream for downtrodden immigrants. In order to give some historical perspective on the way organized crime developed in the United States, the movie would suggest that the lack of career opportunities open to unskilled immigrants from Italy, Ireland, and other European countries made racketeering, in their view, one of the few lucrative avenues of opportunity open to immigrants. The mobs gained power through patronage of corrupt politicians and thereby made more inroads on legitimacy. In short, the Mafia grew out of the anarchy in the inner city itself, in the face of social injustice.

In apportioning credit for the shooting script, Coppola explains that, on the one hand, Puzo created the characters and the plot and, on the other hand, Coppola himself chose which episodes from the book would be in the film and which incidents would be bypassed. He also added some elements to the film that moviegoers assumed were in the book but that were not. “The art of adaptation,” he told me, “is when you can do something that wasn't in the literary source but is so much like the source that it should have been.”

Coppola added a minor but telling incident early in the film, when one of Don Corleone's capos, Peter Clemenza (Richard Castellano), is leaving home to arrange the murder of Paulie Gatto, the don's treacherous bodyguard who is in the pay of another mob. Coppola had Clemenza's wife say to him, “Don't forget to bring home some cannoli.” Then in the scene where Clemenza has a hit man liquidate Paulie in a car on a remote country road, Clemenza says to him, “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.” Clemenza's thinking about the dessert his wife told him to bring home—immediately after a killing—provides a chilling moment in the film. Edward Rothstein comments that this scene brings into relief that “at the heart of the movie is a forthright assertion of ethnic identity as a source of strength. That is where we find the human side of the mob; the warmth, the loyalty, the love of cannoli. Aside from the nature of the family business, the plot could be about an immigrant family trying to preserve its ethnic traditions.”
¹¹

It is evident that Puzo provided Coppola with a roaring good plot, Pauline Kael writes. He gave Coppola “a storyteller's outpouring of incidents and details to choose from.” She also observes that Coppola refined the crudities of the novel: “The movie starts with a trash novel,” Kael states, but one that is “gripping and compulsively readable.” From this raw material Coppola
“salvaged Puzo's energy and lent the narrative dignity,” performing a job of alchemy in turning Puzo's novel into art on the screen. The abundance is from the book, “the quality is from Coppola.”
¹²

When the screenplay was finished, Ruddy met with Coppola to inform him that Paramount had sustained heavy losses on some recent flops like the Julie Andrews vehicle
Darling Lili
(1970). The studio was therefore not willing to gamble on a big budget gangster picture. It was generally known that Ruddy had a reputation for bringing B pictures in on budget. Since he was more adept at saving money than making it, Coppola was not surprised that Ruddy had been selected to produce
The Godfather
on a modest budget.

More specifically, Evans had declared that
The Godfather
was to be a low-budget movie, shot at the studio and using the back lot. Moreover, it was to be set in the present, rather than after World War II (which is the time frame of the book) in order to avoid the extra expense of making a period picture. The movie, in brief, was designed to be made on the double and on the cheap for $1 million.

Coppola balked at these restrictions. To begin with he maintained that the story simply would not work if set in the present. For example, mob members no longer shot each other in the streets like rabbits the way they did during the gang wars in the old days. “I made a big point of saying to the studio that the story was immersed in the postwar period and had to take place there,” he says in his DVD documentary. He insisted that the film be set after World War II like the book, with the feeling of the 1940s. Evans responded that that would add another $1 million to the budget and was out of the question.

Undaunted, Coppola also lobbied to have the picture shot on authentic locations rather than on the studio back lot, whose “New York” street was familiar to moviegoers from countless Paramount pictures. That petition was likewise rejected as too costly.

It was while Coppola was negotiating with the studio about the production values of the film that, much to everyone's surprise, the novel began its steady climb to the top of the bestseller charts. When the book became a runaway hit with the public, Coppola, who was turning out to be a good deal less tractable than the front office had anticipated, strongly urged the studio to upgrade the production to an A picture, as benefitted the movie adaptation of a bestseller.

He ultimately succeeded in getting the studio to change its tune: The picture was to be set in period and he would be allowed to film the bulk of the picture on location in New York, and even to shoot the scenes set in
Sicily on location in Sicily. When the budget was finally increased to $6.5 million, it was evident that Coppola had begun to dominate the decisions made about the production. Recalling the pitched battle he had with Evans and the studio brass, Coppola says that a great deal of the energy that went into the making of the movie was expended on just convincing the people who held the power, whom he referred to as “the suits,” to let him do the film his way. Puzo reflected, “Francis is heavy-set, jolly, and is usually happy-go-lucky. What I didn't know was that he could be tough about his work.”
¹³

Once the word got out that Paramount was making a movie about the Mafia, to be shot largely in New York City, the studio was plagued with protests from the New York-based Italian American Civil Rights League, which claimed a movie about the Mafia would be disparaging to all Americans of Italian descent. Ironically, the league was spearheaded by New York Mafia chieftain Joseph Columbo. For all practical purposes the league was a smoke screen to keep the law from prying into Columbo's underworld activities. Albert Ruddy told me, during a brief conversation after a screening of one of his subsequent movies, that Evans got an anonymous phone call from a mobster who warned him not to make a movie about “the family” in New York City. Otherwise, they would disfigure his “pretty face.” Evans, never one to mince words, responded, “Fuck you, buddy. If you have a problem, you should take it up with Al Ruddy, the producer.”