Charles Bludhorn would not hear of any other director but Coppola taking on the sequel, Coppola says in his DVD commentary on Godfather II. Bludhorn told him, “Francis, you’ve got the recipe for Coca-Cola, and you don’t want to manufacture any more bottles of Coke!” Paramount offered Coppola a handsome salary and a generous slice of the profits, but Coppola was especially interested in artistic control of the production. In negotiating with the studio he demanded that Robert Evans, with whom he feuded constantly on The Godfather, was to have “zero to do with the film” at any phase of the production. This stipulation was not a problem, since, as Biskind states frankly, Evans “was getting deeper into drugs” and eventually “stopped coming to the office.”2
An early scenario proposed to Coppola dealt with the death of Michael Corleone, and he declined to consider it. “I did not want to see him assassinated by his rivals or go to jail,” he explains. “I wanted to take Michael toward what was in fact his destiny… . After winning all the battles and overcoming all of his enemies, I wanted him to be a broken man, a condemned man.”3
What finally convinced him to take on the project was his conviction that the public had not morally condemned Michael at the end of The Godfather. He got to hear that some filmgoers actually applauded when the door of Michael’s office was slammed in Kay’s face at the film’s final fadeout. Showing Michael Corleone to be the ruthless, cold-blooded criminal that he has become would provide Coppola with the lead-in to the sequel. He decided to call the film The Godfather Part II, a title that occurred to him when he remembered Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Part II (1945). “Godfather II was the first American film that did not have a special title for the sequel,” Coppola says in his DVD commentary. For example, a sequel to In the Heat of the Night (1967) was called The Organization (1971). “Calling the sequel to a Hollywood film Part II began with The Godfather.”
The Godfather Part II
Once Coppola had finally agreed to do the film, Paramount gave him a fairly tight schedule to work on because the studio wanted this movie to open during the lucrative Christmas season in 1974. A novelist takes two years to finish an ambitious novel, Coppola says. “I looked at the calendar and realized that I had three months to write a two-hundred-page screenplay for Godfather II, and then go right into pre-production.”4 He was making a $13 million movie as if it were a quickie for his former boss Roger Corman (see chapter 1).
In approaching the screenplay, Coppola explains, “I believed that the family would be morally destroyed, and it would be a kind of Götterdämmerung. Moreover, I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose the ascension of the family under Vito Corleone with the decline of the family under his son Michael,” to show in flashback how the young Vito Corleone was building this crime family in America, while his son in the present is presiding over its disintegration.5
In the documentary that accompanies the Godfather Trilogy on DVD, Coppola notes, “I had always wanted to write a screenplay that told the story of a father and a son at the same age. They were both in their thirties, and I would integrate the two stories.” Young Vito Corleone’s early life as an Italian immigrant would be set during World War I, while the later life of the Corleone family presided over by his son Michael would be updated to the 1950s. The modern story would depict the family as “beset by Byzantine intrigues, marital discord, fraternal rivalry, and internal decay.”6 Consequently, Godfather II covers nearly sixty years of American history, from the immigrants coming to America in the early 1900s all the way up to the post-World War II period. It is evident that he definitely did not want Godfather II to be a rehash of The Godfather: “In order not to merely make Godfather I over again, I gave Godfather II this double structure by extending the story in both the past and in the present “He was fascinated by the concept of a movie that would move freely back and forth in time. In short, he was interested in making a sequel that was “more ambitious, more advanced than the first.”
Paramount had commissioned Mario Puzo to prepare a preliminary draft of the screenplay before Coppola came on board, and Coppola incorporated some incidents from it in his version of the screenplay. Puzo also contributed some additional material to the shooting script along the way, but the bulk of the screenplay was composed by Coppola. By burning a lot of midnight oil, he finished the script on time.
Most of the events in the modern story were invented by Coppola. Some of them were suggested by contemporary newspaper accounts. There is, for example, the incident in which Michael frames Nevada Senator Pat Geary by having a dead prostitute found in his bed in a sleazy bordello run by the Corleones in order to ensure the Senator’s continued patronage of the Corleone enterprises. This episode was inspired by a sensational newspaper exposé of Nevada brothels.
The flashbacks to young Vito’s life in New York’s “Little Italy” were drawn from material left over from Puzo’s novel—historical background for which there had been no room in the first film. In fact, Book III of the novel is a thirty-page description of the roots of the Mafia in Sicily and Vito Corleone’s subsequent rise to power as a Mafia leader when he immigrates to the United States.7 Puzo chronicles how Vito becomes a Mafia godfather who is a sort of Italian-immigrant entrepreneur in Little Italy. Coppola simply plucked historical incidents from Book III of the novel and wrote them into the script.
These flashbacks in essence depict the experiences of immigrants like Vito Corleone coming to this country and trying to realize the American dream of success in their lives. But they were reduced to laboring in sweat shops and dwelling in slums, so they found self-esteem and cash by joining street gangs, which they saw as brotherhoods.
The immigrants had a tradition of violence born of their resistance to the rural landlords who had exploited them back in Sicily. When they came over to America they formed gangs and secret societies, just as they had done in the old country. As historian Luc Sante states in the ABC-TV documentary The Real Gangs of New York (2003), “Crime became a necessary means of survival in the lawless slums,” which were therefore a fertile ground for the growth of gangs in the United States.
“My heart was really in the Little Italy sequences,” Coppola remembers, “in the old streets of New York, the music, all that turn-of-the century atmosphere.”8 To that extent, Coppola the auteur sees Godfather II as a personal film in which he addressed his own ancestry and ethnic heritage. In one flashback Vito and his friend Genco attend an Italian musical drama in a neighborhood music hall. The operetta, Sensa Mamma, was actually composed by Coppola’s grandfather Francesco Pennino, after whom he was named. It is about an immigrant who left his mother behind in Italy when he came to New York, and was quite popular in its day.
As the characters took shape in the script, Coppola’s thoughts turned to considering who would play the various parts. Many of the actors from The Godfather reprised their roles in Godfather II: Al Pacino, Talia Shire, Diane Keaton, John Cazale, and Robert Duvall all returned. As for new members of the cast, Coppola was at pains to find the right actor to play Vito Corleone as a young man. He tested Robert De Niro (Mean Streets). “I thought De Niro could be the young Brando,” Coppola says in his DVD commentary. “De Niro had a sort of stately bearing, as if he really was the young Vito who would grow into that older man who was Marlon Brando in Godfather I. He had grace.” As a matter of fact, De Niro had spent some time in his apprenticeship days as a young actor studying Brando’s acting style and was able to recreate in Godfather II Brando’s measured gestures and calm, convincing voice.
“Al Pacino suggested Lee Strasberg to play crime syndicate treasurer Hyman Roth,” an aging Jewish racketeer. Strasberg was the head of the renowned Actor’s Studio in New York, where he had been Pacino’s mentor. Coppola admits, “I was intimidated by Strasberg. Here was this great teacher of acting, and I would be in the position of having to direct him. But he was very responsive to direction and would easily put himself into whatever mood the scene called for.” Stras
berg made Roth a wily financial wizard who was a worthy opponent for Michael. Roth ostensibly treats Michael as an ally, but covertly plots to overthrow him. He was modeled on the notorious Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky. Like Lansky, Roth lives in a modest bungalow in Florida, which belies his stature as a wealthy, powerful kingpin of organized crime. When the septuagenarian Strasberg became ill during the shoot, Coppola modified the script in order to make Roth an ailing man. Playwright Michael V. Gasso (A Hatful of Rain) was likewise an important casting choice in the role of small-time Mafia crook Frankie Pantangeli. Both Strasberg and Gasso received Academy Award nominations for this film. Other interesting additions to the cast were G. D. Spradling, a former politician, to play Senator Pat Geary; and Troy Donahue, a former teen idol, to play Merle Johnson, Connie’s fiancé. Coppola had gone to military school with Donahue, whose real name was in fact Merle Johnson. Coppola’s brilliant strokes of casting demonstrated why there is more first-rate acting in even the smallest roles in this film than in most other American movies.
Coppola brought back some of the creative personnel that had worked on The Godfather or other Coppola films: cinematographer Gordon Willis (The Godfather), film editor Barry Malkin (Rain People), film editor Peter Zinner (The Godfather), production designer Dean Tavoularis (The Godfather), sound engineer Walter Murch (Rain People, The Godfather), and composers Nino Rota and Carmine Coppola (The Godfather). As for Willis, Coppola’s nemesis on The Godfather, “I got along with Gordy Willis on this film,” Coppola says in his DVD commentary. “I didn’t feel I was up against this crotchety school marm who wanted things done his own way. Of course, I was producer as well as director, so I really had no one to answer to but myself.”
Working with Willis, Coppola conceived a visual scheme to keep the two plotlines in the picture distinct: The flashbacks to Vito’s youth would be photographed in what Willis terms nostalgic “golden amber” tints, to give these scenes a period flavor as they portray Vito as a “Lower-East-Side Robin Hood” who steals from the rich and gives to the poor (in cahoots with Peter Clemenza [Bruno Kirby], a young hood who was an order man in The Godfather and was played there by Richard Castellano). In the flashbacks, says Willis, “the imagery is softer and not as sharply defined.” The scenes about Michael set in modern times would be filmed in a spare realistic color scheme featuring cool blues and grays in order to suggest how Michael becomes colder and more ruthless as time goes on.9
Principal photography for Godfather II began on location at Lake Tahoe, high in the Sierras, on October 23, 1973. Coppola commandeered the elaborate Fleur de Lac estate, constructed in 1934 by Henry Kaiser, to serve as the Corleone compound at Lake Tahoe. By mid-November the production unit moved on to Paramount studios in Hollywood for five weeks of filming interiors. On January 2, 1974, Coppola and company were on their way to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, where Gulf and Western owned a good deal of property that they put at Coppola’s disposal. Santo Domingo was the site chosen for the scenes set in Cuba, where Michael attends a high-level conference with other leaders of organized crime. During the Batista regime in Cuba the Mafia was involved in the gambling casinos and other rackets there. But their holdings would soon be lost in the wake of the overthrow of Batista’s dictatorship by Fidel Castro, which is portrayed in this sequence.
Pacino, who was already suffering from exhaustion brought on by playing the demanding role of Michael Corleone, came down with pneumonia in Santo Domingo and was ordered by his physician to take a month’s sick leave. Due to Pacino’s illness, Coppola transplanted the film unit to New York City to shoot the flashbacks with De Niro. When Coppola was asked if he was overwhelmed by the shifts in period during the production from the modern story to the flashbacks, he replied, “No, because basically you still do one day at a time, one shot at a time.”10
The film unit moved on to New York City in late January, where Dean Tavoularis cordoned off East Sixth Street in Lower Manhattan, between Avenues A and B, and systematically transformed it into Little Italy in 1918, with old-fashioned store fronts and a dirt road replacing the pavement of later times. Tavoularis would deservedly win an Academy Award for his production design on Godfather II.
Since the studio kept its promise to leave him alone during filming, Coppola confesses in his DVD commentary that the only problems he had were personal ones. “I was in the middle of a vulnerable time in my marriage” during the New York shoot, he says. He had taken on Melissa Mathison as his production assistant and protégée. She was young, intelligent, and, by all accounts, devoted to the director. Indeed, they were seen together off the set often enough to become an item in the gossip columns, much to the displeasure of Coppola’s parents, who visited the New York location. Coppola had the Little Italy set on Sixth Street wired for sound so that he could easily communicate with Willis and the camera crew. On one occasion Coppola got into a quarrel with his mother, Italia Coppola, over his relationship with his assistant, and their argument was amplified over the production unit’s public address system all along Sixth Street. Coppola, who had made a film about wiretapping (The Conversation), had inadvertently bugged himself. “You’re a good Catholic boy,” his mother remonstrated. “What do you mean carrying on with that girl?” Furious that a private family argument had gone public, he shot back, “It’s none of your business; I’m a grown man.”11 Eleanor Coppola remembers crying a lot during that period, but the marriage survived.
The film unit then journeyed overseas to shoot on European locations. As in The Godfather, the village of Taormina again served as the town of Corleone, the home of the Corleone family (it would be used again in Godfather III). An enormous fish market in the Italian seaport of Trieste was chosen by Tavoularis to stand in for the Immigration Arrival Center on Ellis Island, where Vito, while still a child, waits for admission into the United States. Coppola opted to film this scene in Italy because he wanted the eight-hundred extras to look like European immigrants entering the United States. The extras in New York City would have looked too American. Once again Coppola favored shooting on location over filming in the studio. Shooting outside the insulated atmosphere of a film studio gives a scene a sense of actuality, Coppola comments: “it is rewarding for the director because there is a sense of reality that he and his actors can dig into.”
By May 1974, Godfather II had completed more than eight months of principal photography on a budget of $13 million. “The film was shot in 104 days, as opposed to 62 days for Godfather I,” Coppola says in his DVD commentary. But the shooting schedule involved extensive location work in both Europe and the Dominican Republic as well as in New York, “so it was an efficient shoot.” By the end of filming Coppola was worn out by the grueling shooting schedule at far-flung locations. Asked by a journalist what he was looking forward to after finishing Godfather II, Coppola quipped, “retirement.”
But surcease from labor was nowhere in sight since he had to pare down the huge accumulation of footage into a feature film of reasonable proportions in time for the premiere on December 12. So supervising the editing of the film became a race against the clock for Coppola, but by November the rough cut had been shaved down to three hours and twenty minutes.
The studio was worried that audiences would get lost in the complicated plot, which glided back and forth between past and present. “As I view the film now, I realize how audacious it was,” Coppola comments on the DVD. Some studio officials thought “the modern story was enough, and that we didn’t need the old world story.”
By this time George Lucas and Coppola had gone their separate ways, but they still continued to consult with each other about their work. Lucas, who viewed an early assembly of the footage, expressed strong doubts about Coppola’s concept of a dual plotline for Godfather II. “Francis, you have two movies,” said Lucas ruefully. “Throw one away; it doesn’t work.”12
Not to be deterred, Coppola soldiered on. “I knew I could never top Godfather I in terms of financial success,” he says, “but
I did want to make a film that topped it as a really moving human document.” He believed that in moving back and forth in time at significant moments in the lives of father and son he had linked their lives together and showed how each dealt with problems that faced the family.13 In switching back and forth from a scene in Michael’s time to Vito’s young manhood, Coppola was at pains to provide smooth transitions between present and past that would suggest the affinities between Michael and his father. Thus Michael gazes down on his sleeping son in his Tahoe mansion, and the scene slowly dissolves to Vito gazing at his first-born son in the same ancient fashion in a New York tenement.
With the film’s premiere in mid-December fast approaching, Coppola had a sneak preview in San Francisco, which turned out to be a total disaster. “We made a lot of changes after that preview,” he recalls, “because it was hard for the audience to follow the two story lines. They wrote preview cards saying the picture was cold and confused,” especially in the last hour.14
Coppola previewed the picture again in San Diego, where it played much better, but still the audience began to fidget noticeably as the movie unspooled. Walter Murch, who worked closely with Coppola during postproduction, explains in the DVD documentary, “In the version shown in San Diego the two stories were intercut very often, i.e., each story interrupted the other very often: there were twenty cuts back and forth” between the modern story and the flashbacks. During the San Diego screening Coppola muttered notes to himself into a pocket tape recorder. At a roundtable discussion with his postproduction team, held after the preview, he ironed out the difficulties, as he notes in his DVD commentary: “I found that the audience had trouble staying with the film if the segments were too short. When we went back and forth between the modern era and the past era too quickly, we were leaving each segment too soon.” Hence he concluded that “the audience would feel more comfortable if they could watch a section of the movie for a longer duration. Each segment would then come to a resolution before it was interrupted to go to the other level of the story.” Consequently, in the final cut he shifted back and forth between the present and the past only eleven times—instead of the twenty shifts in the previous cut.
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