Godfather (23 page)

“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.” Strasberg 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.

One of the assistant editors working on the final cut said at the time, “I was amazed at Francis's total lack of proprietary ideas.” If people on the postproduction staff said they did not like the way a scene was cut, he would say, “Okay, try something else.” “He wants the movie to be good, and he doesn't care whose ideas make it good; and that's what gets people excited about working with him.”
¹⁵
Barry Malkin, Peter Zinner, and Richard Marks were the principal film editors. Malkin recalls: “We were working day and night to get the final mix finished. I remember sleeping on the floor of the editing room, just getting catnaps.” Malkin says that Coppola made no substantial alterations in the film at this juncture: “it was mostly a lot of tightening up.”
¹⁶
Coppola's office complex in San Francisco contains state-of-the-art editing equipment, and the end credits of
Godfather II
state that the film was made “with the production facilities of American Zoetrope.”