ALBERT S. RUDDY,
PRODUCER, ALFRAN PRODUCTIONS
Affable Albert Ruddy rose through the ranks in the entertainment business with few qualifications but his moxie. After a chance meeting with a Warner Bros. executive, he co-created the successful television show Hogan’s Heroes, and three movies: Little Fauss and Big Halsy, Wild Seed, and Making It. Although all were unsuccessful at the box office, they were made on the cheap and came in under budget, just what Paramount wanted for The Godfather. Rather than go through a lengthy pitch of how he was going to adapt the book into a movie, he convinced Bluhdorn to hire him by announcing, “Charlie, I want to make an ice-blue terrifying movie about people you love.” Bluhdorn said, “That’s brilliant!” banged on the desk, and ran out of the room. Ruddy succeeded, but as he said shortly after the film was released: “It was the most miserable film I can think of to make. Nobody enjoyed one day of it.” Today, while he admits the shoot was rough, he calls it “a great experience that started everyone’s career. It was magic.”
MARIO PUZO, FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA, ROBERT EVANS AND ALBERT S. RUDDY AT THE PARAMOUNT PICTURES PRESS CONFERENCE ANNOUNCING THE GODFATHER (PHOTO COURTESY OF RUDDY MORGAN ORGANIZATION).
III
THE ARCHITECT: FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
“It was my intention to make this an authentic piece of film about gangsters who were Italian, how they lived, how they behaved, the way they treated their families, celebrated their rituals.”
—Francis Ford Coppola, in Time magazine
When Paramount gave The Godfather the green light, finding a director turned out to be a difficult task. Twelve directors turned down the job—many, including Peter Yates (Bullitt) and Richard Brooks (In Cold Blood), because they didn’t want to romanticize the Mafia. Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, Little Big Man) was too busy. Costa-Gavras (Z) thought it was too American.
Robert Evans, Paramount’s head of production, sat down with Peter Bart, his creative second in command, to determine why previous organized crime films hadn’t worked, and decided it was because Jews made them, not Italians. So, they sought an Italian-American director, a commodity in short supply. Bart thought of a twenty-nine-year-old he had met when he had written a little piece for The New York Times on a young wannabe director who paid his way through college by making “nudies,” otherwise known as skin flicks.
COPPOLA AND CREW WATCHING FOOTAGE ON LOCATION AT THE SCENE OF PAULIE GATTO’S MURDER.
Francis Ford Coppola was born in Detroit in 1939. His father, Carmine, was the conductor and arranger for the Ford Sunday Evening Hour radio program (hence Francis’s middle name). Because the ambitious musician worked traveling shows, the Coppola family was often uprooted. Francis was grounded by an upbringing steeped in his Italian heritage.
At age nine Francis contracted polio and spent a year in virtual isolation. During this time, he developed an interest in mechanical things. He got an 8mm camera and started making movies, and by a young age knew that he wanted to be a director. He was a theater arts major at Hofstra University, and then enrolled at UCLA for a master’s in fine arts. While he was attending UCLA, prolific B-movie filmmaker Roger Corman recruited him, as he did so many young filmmakers of great potential, to work on several schlock films. Coppola married fellow UCLA graduate Eleanor Neil in 1963 while working on his directorial debut, the Corman-financed Dementia 13.
COPPOLA AND PACINO DISCUSS THE SOLLOZZO/MCCLUSKEY MURDER SCENE.
After winning a screenwriting competition, Coppola got a job as a screenwriter and wrote the script for Patton, among other projects. He directed You’re a Big Boy Now, a precursor of sorts to The Graduate, which garnered him a Golden Palm nomination at the Cannes Film Festival. Warner Bros. offered Coppola the musical Finian’s Rainbow. Young George Lucas was a production assistant there and became a protégé who was also interested in working outside the studio system.
Coppola went on to write and direct his own film, The Rain People, about a young pregnant wife (Shirley Knight) and her search for personal fulfillment. In 1969, Coppola set his dreams in motion: he sold his house, moved to San Francisco, obtained a loan from Warner Bros., and started an independent film studio with Lucas and other young idealistic filmmakers. American Zoetrope was founded with the utopian vision of creating personal, artistic films.
The first project the company produced was Lucas’s futuristic sci-fi drama THX 1138. The unsuccessful film was ruinous for American Zoetrope. Warner Bros. recut the film, eventually releasing it with little marketing backing. The studio went through a major restructuring, and the new brass weren’t impressed by American Zoetrope’s proposed projects. They asked for their $600,000 back. Coppola tried to raise money doing commercials and educational films, but soon he was desperate enough to listen to the pitch to direct The Godfather.
Peter Bart first approached Coppola to direct The Godfather in the spring of 1970. Coppola tried to read the book but found it sleazy. His father advised him that commercial work could fund the artistic pictures he wanted to make. His business partner, George Lucas, begged him to find something in the book he liked. He went to the library to research the Mafia, and became fascinated by the families that had divided New York and run it like a business. Coppola reread the novel and came to see a central theme of a family—a father and his three sons—that was in its own way a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy. He viewed the growth of the 1940s Corleone Family as a metaphor for capitalism in America. He took the job.
Coppola was announced as director on September 28, “by default,” according to Bob Evans. With the inexperienced Coppola, Paramount thought they were hiring an Italian-American director who would also come in on budget and be pliable. Although indeed Italian American, Francis Ford Coppola would not be the director the studio had envisioned.
The first battle was over the picture being a period piece. Coppola was adamant that the film be set in the 1940s. In a recent interview he explained, “One of the reasons it was so important to me to get Paramount to agree to set the movie in the forties instead of the seventies is that so much of the story connects with what was going on in America during that period: the birth of America after World War II; Michael’s service in the Marines; the imagery of America; what was going on in America; the rise of corporate America. All of that was very much part of the story, and I couldn’t imagine how you would tell the story in the way they were planning to do it.” Paramount had asked Puzo to set the screenplay in the seventies because contemporary films were cheaper to make: no 1940s cars to find, sets to create, costumes to make. Eventually, Coppola’s desire to preserve the book’s period quality won out.
The second battle was over location. Coppola wanted to shoot in New York, an expensive proposition because of the unions. Producer Albert Ruddy had suggested Cleveland, Kansas City, and Cincinnati as possible sites—or perhaps a studio backlot. (In an interview with the author, he indicates it was also because “some of ‘the boys’ [read: Mafia] told us we couldn’t come to New York.”) In an October 1970 Variety piece, Coppola stated: “I very much want to do it in New York. The atmosphere is strictly New York, and since I want to do the film as a period piece, if possible—say the 1940s—any other locale is going to make it more difficult to capture the special flavor of New York.” Ruddy countered: “We’re watching the pennies and we think we can make the picture for much less on other locations and not sacrifice any quality.” In the end, the studio gave in, and the film was shot on location in New York.
In September 1970, Robert Evans announced on behalf of Paramount: “The Godfather will be our big picture of 1971.” At this point, the book had sold more than one million copies in hardcover and six million in paperback, forcing Paramount to reconsider a modest film. The $2 million budget was increased to $3 million, and then to $4 million, and eventually to $6 million. Coupled with the book’s runaway success, Coppola’s sheer force of will overcame the objections of the studio brass.
The third battle, and it was a long
and bloody one, was over casting. Coppola recalls Charles Bluhdorn wondering, after the multitude of screen tests (and all the money that was spent on them), how fifty-odd actors could all be terrible. He suggested that with just one director, it must actually be the director who was terrible. When it was all over, Coppola had the principals he wanted all along. However, the arguments had left the combative Coppola exhausted and the studio wary. Paramount kept a close eye on Coppola throughout the filming, making for a very pressurized situation.
The Godfather production was rough going. Coppola was disorganized, indecisive, and scattered. (His struggles with the studio would have understandably left little time for planning.) He didn’t film in the conventional way of adhering to the shooting script—much of the movie was in his head. Production fell behind schedule, and each day cost $40,000. Many members of the crew were not supportive; they thought Coppola was in over his head. While in a bathroom stall, he overheard some of the crew griping, “Where did they find this kid? Did you ever see such a bad director in your life?” To make matters worse, from the start he battled with the stubborn cinematographer, Gordon Willis, who during production once exclaimed that Coppola “couldn’t do anything right.”
COPPOLA’S FAMILY
On March 17, 1971 Coppola arranged for the full cast of Corleones to have an informal, improvisational “rehearsal” meal at Patsy’s Restaurant in New York. He arranged for a home-style table with home-style dishes. The cast stood around, anxious and uncertain. Coppola recalls, “It was the first big time that the actors were to meet Brando, and although Brando was sort of washed up in the eyes of the Paramount executives, to people like Al Pacino and the rest of the cast, he was more than a god—he was God.”
“We were all new to each other,” said John Cazale in an interview. “We stood there not knowing what to do. Brando broke the ice. He just went over, opened a bottle of wine, and started the festivities. I think we all realized then that he was acting with us the way the Don would have acted with his own family.” Coppola had hoped that a sensual activity such as eating would give the cast a chance to relate to one another as a family—and it did. Brando, wordlessly going into character, sat at the head of the table; Talia Shire (the female family member) served the food; and the “sons,” Robert Duvall, James Caan, and Al Pacino, each in his own way tried to impress the “father,” Brando. “Jimmy Caan was cracking jokes and trying to impress him, Al was trying to outbrood him, and whenever Brando would turn away, Duvall would imitate him, although he was clearly not really part of the group,” Coppola reminisces. Throughout the process of that first improvisation, the actors all found their characters.
When the first rushes (the first positive prints made on the night of shooting and used to gauge progress) came in, Paramount was underwhelmed. Although Coppola and Willis had deliberately planned the interplay between dark and light scenes, as Peter Bart reports, some of the early dailies were so dark that Paramount had trouble seeing what was going on. This, in Bart’s words, exacerbated Coppola’s “difficult relationship with the studio.” Brando mumbled in the Sollozzo meeting scene. (According to Coppola, the actor said that just because he was Marlon Brando, that didn’t mean he didn’t get nervous on his first day.) Evans had trouble understanding him in the scene and haughtily suggested subtitles.
The Paramount executives were concerned. They sent the script to Elia Kazan—another director—but Bart coaxed an art director friend of Kazan’s into reporting the director’s senility to Evans. This put the kibosh on plans for Kazan to take over, but Coppola had nightmares of the great Kazan awkwardly informing him of his firing.
Paramount assigned Vice President Jack Ballard to keep an eye on costs. Coppola calls him “a grotesque guy with a bald head who was sent to make me miserable.” Another issue: editor Aram Avakian and assistant director Steve Kesten, both of whom Coppola had hired, had designs on the director and producer jobs. Rumors of footage sabotage were even floated. Regardless, at this point, very little was necessary to fuel both Coppola and the studio’s paranoia and antipathy toward each other. As Bart suggests, “Francis did feed into that skepticism.”
PAGES FROM “THE GODFATHER NOTEBOOK”, WITH COPPOLA’S NOTES ON THE WEDDING SCENE.
Evans’s and Coppola’s stories diverge here. Evans said he found Coppola’s footage brilliant, so he fired the interlopers. According to Coppola, associate producer Gray Frederickson told him that Avakian was bad-mouthing the footage to the higher-ups at Paramount. In addition, the studio refused to allow him to reshoot the Sollozzo scene—indicating to Coppola that they intended to sack him. Coppola didn’t believe a studio would fire a director in the middle of the week, because they would need the weekend to get a new one on board, so he took matters into his own hands. He fired Kesten, Avakian, and a host of others midweek and quickly reshot the Sollozzo scene, in order to make the cost of hiring another director to reshoot it more prohibitive.
Undoubtedly, Paramount was taken aback by Coppola’s counter-coup. They watched the new scene and concluded it was much better (although Coppola believes the original scene might actually be the one that ended up in the film). Paramount’s concern about the PR implications of firing the Godfather director also worked in Coppola’s favor. In addition, according to Marlon Brando’s autobiography, he returned Coppola’s favor of casting him by threatening to walk off the picture if Coppola was fired. While Brando had said that Coppola didn’t give the actors much direction, in general Brando supported Coppola’s artistic vision. Coppola stayed. Peter Bart has said that, after years of purposely avoiding thinking about it, he’s come to the realization that, as he said at the South by Southwest Film Festival, “there really was a plot afoot during the third week of shooting The Godfather to fire Francis Coppola.” In a recent interview, he states: “I honestly did feel from the second week that this was a remarkable movie being made, but the number of people seeing the dailies began to shrink.” He explains, “You can always tell when a studio is giving up on a picture—you look around the room and there’s nobody there.” The tally of Coppola’s near-firings: five—over casting Brando; when Paramount saw the first rushes; when Coppola insisted on shooting scenes on location in Sicily; when he went over budget; and during the editing process.
THE BIBLE: COPPOLA’S NOTEBOOK
When Coppola embarked on adapting The Godfather novel into a feature film, he created a document analogous to a theater prompt book (Coppola had a background in theater). He took the novel and sliced out all the pages, pasting each one into the middle of a blank notebook page, and leaving a wide margin for his own notes. He used this massive document, which he called The Godfather Notebook, to analyze the novel and determine what would be included in the film.
In the notebook, he dissected the entire novel by diagramming the story—breaking down each of fifty scenes according to the following categories: Synopsis, The Times (how to preserve the 1940s period quality), Imagery and Tone, The Core (the essence of the scene), and Pitfalls (issues to watch out for, such as pacing or clichés). This approach to breaking down dramatic work was inspired by an Elia Kazan piece in Directors on Directing: A Source Book of the Modern Theatre, a collection of essays edited by Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy.
Coppola peppered the notebook with his own ideas and concerns about how the scenes should play out, and how to make the film authentic to Italian and Mafia culture while remaining true to Puzo’s novel. He also jotted down little pep talks to himself, such as this note on the characters’ reactions to death: “This is tough. Think about it AND BE PREPARED, FRANCIS.” Coppola now recalls, “I actually schlepped this with me every day of The Godfather.”
When it came time to direct The Godfather, Coppola relied on the notebook rather than the shooting script for inspiration. It’s an amazing testament to his rigorous adaptation of the novel.
In August 1971, Coppola went home to San Francisco to edit a first cut of the film. It came in at two hours and forty-five minutes, but
he knew that Paramount was unwilling to market a long epic to the moviegoing public, and had been told directly by Evans that if it were longer than two hours and fifteen minutes, Paramount would take the film and edit it themselves in Los Angeles. Coppola didn’t want to go to L.A., because he would have less control and preferred to work from his home base. So he edited his first cut down to a two-hour, twenty-minute version of the film.
When Evans saw the shorter version, he went ballistic, as all of the texture had been left on the cutting-room floor. According to Albert Ruddy, Evans got on the phone with the president of the studio, Frank Yablans, and told him the film seemed longer at two hours twenty minutes than at three hours. In his self-aggrandizing but very entertaining memoir, The Kid Stays in the Picture, he reported his admonishment to Coppola: “You shot a saga, and you turned in a trailer. Now give me a movie.” So Paramount took the film to L.A. after all (as Coppola surmises they intended to do all along). During the editing process Evans had sciatica and was wheeled around on a hospital bed.
Debates rage as to who was ultimately responsible for the completed film. Shortly after the release, Coppola acknowledged in a Time interview: “Bob forces you to come up with alternatives. He pushes you until you please him. Ultimately, a mysterious kind of taste comes out; he backs away from bad ideas and accepts good ones.” Evans even blamed the long hours he put in editing The Godfather for the disintegration of his marriage to Ali MacGraw.
But Coppola took umbrage at Evans’s claims, even sending Evans a now-famous telegram (which Evans reportedly framed and displayed in his bathroom), that was reprinted in part by The New York Times: “Your stupid blabbing about cutting The Godfather comes back to me and angers me for its ridiculous pomposity. I’ve been a real gentleman regarding your claims of involvement … You did nothing on The Godfather other than annoy me and slow it down.” As he recently said, “After fighting me on Brando, fighting me on Pacino, fighting me on the music, and on whether or not it would be period, and on whether it would be in New York—now you say you made the movie because you put back in the half hour!”
The Annotated Godfather: The Complete Screenplay with Commentary on Every Scene, Interviews, and Little-Known Facts Page 2