Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (80 page)

But Coppola would not back down, not even when Pacino grew discouraged filming test after test after test for a part that he knew the studio would never give him. Ironically, it may have been that very frustration that got Pacino the part—in some of the screen tests he appears calm but also seems to be hiding anger just below the surface. This moody intensity was an accurate reflection of his state of mind, and it was just the quality he needed to convey to be successful in the role.

Did the screen tests convince Paramount that Pacino was right for the part, or did Coppola finally just wear them down? Whatever it was, Pacino got the job. “Francis was the most effective fighter against the studio hierarchy I’ve ever seen,” casting director Fred Roos told one interviewer.
“
He did not do it by yelling or screaming, but by sheer force of will.”

YOU LOSE SOME, YOU WIN SOME

By the time Paramount finally got around to approving Pacino for the role, he’d signed up to do another film called
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight
. To get him out of that commitment, Coppola made a trade: He released another young actor from appearing in
The Godfather
so that he could take Pacino’s place in
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight
. The actor: Robert De Niro—he’d been cast as Paulie Gatto, the driver and bodyguard who betrays Don Corleone. Losing the part may have been disappointing to De Niro at the time, but it also cleared the way for him to play the young Vito Corleone in
The Godfather: Part II
, the role that won him his first Oscar, for Best Supporting Actor, and made him an international star.

The famous “horse’s head” seen in
The Godfather
…

FAMILY PROBLEMS

As if fighting Paramount wasn’t bad enough, Coppola also had to contend with the real-life Mafia, which wasn’t too pleased with the idea of a big-budget Italian gangster movie coming to the screen. Joe Colombo, head of one of the
real
“five families” that made up the New York mob, was also the founder of a group called the Italian-American Civil Rights League, an organization that lobbied against negative Italian stereotypes in the media.

The League had won some impressive victories in recent years, successfully lobbying newspapers, broadcast networks, and even the Nixon Justice Department to replace terms like “the Mafia” and “La Cosa Nostra” with more ethnically neutral terms like “the Mob,” “the syndicate,” and “the underworld.” The League was at the height of its powers in the early 1970s, and now it set its sights on
The Godfather.

I’M-A GONNA DIE!

How would you deal with the Maf…er, um…the “syndicate
”
if they were trying to stop the project you were working on? Albert Ruddy, the producer, decided to face the problem head on: He met with Colombo in the League’s offices to discuss mutual concerns, and he even let Colombo have a peek at the script. Colombo’s demands actually turned out to be fairly reasonable: He didn’t want the film to contain any patronizing Italian stereotypes or accents—“I’m-a gonna shoot-a you now”—and he didn’t want the Mafia identified by that name in the film. Ruddy assured Colombo that Coppola had no plans to use that kind of speech, and he even promised to remove all references to “the Mafia” from the script.

Colombo didn’t know it at the time, but removing the word “Mafia” from the script was an easy promise to keep because it wasn’t in there to begin with—guys who are in the Mafia don’t sit around discussing it by name.

…was a real horsehead the producers got from a dog-food company.

In effect, Colombo had agreed to end the Mob’s opposition to the film and even to make some of his “boys” available for crowd control and other odd jobs, and had gotten next to nothing in return. (In 1971, during filming of
The Godfather
, Colombo was gunned down in a Mob hit and lingered in a coma until 1978, when he finally died from his wounds.)

LASHED TO THE MAST

One of the nice things about winning so many battles with studio executives is getting to make the film you want to make; the bad thing is that once it becomes your baby, if things start to go wrong it’s easy for the studio to figure out who they need to fire—
you.

Filming of
The Godfather
got off to a rough start—Brando’s performances in his first scenes were so dull and uninspired that Coppola had to set aside time to film them again. Al Pacino’s earliest scenes didn’t look all that promising, either. His first scenes were the ones at the beginning of the film, when he’s a boyish war hero determined to stay out of the family “business.” Pacino played the scenes true to character—so true, in fact, that when the Paramount executives saw the early footage, they doubted he’d be able to pass as a Mafia don.

For a time the set was awash with rumors that Coppola and Pacino were both about to be fired. How true were the rumors? Both men were convinced their days were numbered—that was one of the reasons Coppola cast his sister, Talia Shire, as Don Corleone’s daughter, Connie: He figured that if he was going to lose his job, at least
she’d
get something out of the film.

FAIR-WEATHER FRIENDS

More than 30 years later, it’s difficult to say how true the rumors were, especially now that the film is considered a classic—the executives who would have wanted to fire the pair back then are now more likely to take credit for discovering them. But the threat was real, and Marlon Brando saved Coppola by counter-threatening to walk off the job if Coppola was removed from the film.

Al Pacino saved his own skin when he filmed the scene where he murders Virgil Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey (Al Lettieri and Sterling Hayden) in an Italian restaurant. That was the first scene in which he got the chance to appear as a cold-blooded killer, and he pulled it off with ease. Finally, Paramount could see that he could indeed play a Mafia don.

You gotta start somewhere: Jack Nicholson once had a job answering Tom and Jerry’s fan mail.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Once these early problems were resolved, the production made steady progress and remained more or less on schedule and on budget. Marlon Brando behaved himself on the set and delivered one of the greatest performances of his career; the other actors gave excellent performances as well. As Paramount executives reviewed the footage after each day of shooting, it soon became clear to everyone involved that
The Godfather
was going to be a remarkable film.

In 62 days of shooting, Coppola filmed more than 90 hours of footage, which he and six editors whittled down to a film that was just under three hours long. (Paramount made Coppola edit it down to two and a half hours, but that version left out so many good scenes that the studio decided to use Coppola’s original cut.) By the time they finished—and before the film even made it into the theaters—
The Godfather
had already turned a profit: So many theaters rushed to book it in advance that it had already taken in twice as much money as it had cost to make.

LARGER THAN LIFE

The advance bookings were the first sign that
The Godfather
was going to do really big business; another sign came on March 15, 1972, the day the film premiered in the United States. That morning when Albert Ruddy drove into work, he saw people waiting in front of a theater that was showing
The Godfather
. It was only 8:15 a.m., and the first showing was hours away, but the fans were already lining up around the block—not just at that theater, but everywhere else in America, too.

The long lines continued for weeks. As
The Godfather
showed to one sold-out audience after another, it smashed just about every box-office record there was: In April it became the first movie to earn more than $1 million in a day; in September it became the most profitable Hollywood film ever made, earning more money in six months than the previous record holder,
Gone With the Wind
, had earned in 33 years. In all, it made more than $85 million during its initial release. (How long did it hold the record as Hollywood’s most profitable film? Only one year—
The Exorcist
made even more money in 1973.)

Barry White’s music has been used by marine biologists to encourage sharks to mate.

Nominated for 10 Academy Awards,
The Godfather
won for Best Actor (Brando), Best Adapted Screenplay (Coppola and Puzo), and Best Picture.

The Godfather
revived Marlon Brando’s career and launched those of Francis Ford Coppola, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, James Caan, Talia Shire, and even Abe Vigoda (who later starred in TV’s
Barney Miller
and
Fish
), whom Coppola discovered during an open casting call. “The thing that I like most about the film’s success is that everyone that busted their hump on this movie came out with something very special—and good careers,” Albert Ruddy said years later. “All of these people came together in one magic moment, and it was the turn in everybody’s careers. It was just a fantastic thing.”

SERENDIPITY

Two memorable scenes in
The Godfather
came about only by chance:

• Luca Brasi Memorizes his Speech

It wasn’t unusual for real-life wiseguys to hang out around the set during location shoots; one day during filming in the Little Italy neighborhood of New York, a mobster visited the set with an enormous bodyguard in tow. The bodyguard, a onetime professional wrestler named Lenny Montana, was 6'6" and must have weighed over 300 pounds. Albert Ruddy spotted him and pointed him out to Coppola, who cast him on the spot as Luca Brasi, the hit man who is garroted early in the film and ends up “sleeping with the fishes.”

Montana had no acting experience, and in his scene with Marlon Brando he was so nervous that he kept stumbling over his lines. Rather than replace him with someone who could act, Coppola made Montana’s fumbling a part of the story by creating the scene where Luca Brasi rehearses and repeatedly flubs the few words he wants to say in his meeting with Don Corleone at Connie and Carlo’s wedding. For the meeting with the Don, Coppola used one of Montana’s actual blown takes.

• The Don’s Death Scene

On the day that Coppola was supposed to film the scene in which Don Corleone dies while playing with his grandson, they were having trouble getting the young boy playing the grandson to perform his part. Brando mentioned a trick that he liked to use with his own small children: He would cut up the peel of a slice of orange into teeth, stuff it into his mouth, and play “monster” with his kids. Coppola liked the sound of it, so he tossed the script aside and filmed Brando playing monster with the boy. That was the scene that ended up in the movie.

Bolivia & Paraguay are the only South American countries with no coast.

THREE BITS OF
GODFATHER
TRIVIA

• Foreboding fruit:
One of the best-known uses of foreshadowing in all three
Godfather
films is the use of oranges to hint at upcoming scenes of violence and death. The Godfather buys a bag of oranges just before he is gunned down; later in the film, he dies while playing “monster” with his grandson with an orange peel stuffed in his mouth. The character Sal Tessio (Abe Vigoda), who betrays Michael and is murdered at the end of the film, is introduced at the beginning of the movie playing with an orange. According to production designer Dean Tavoularis, oranges didn’t start out as symbolic of anything. Cinematographer Gordon Willis, who worked on all three
Godfather
films, is known as “the Prince of Darkness” because he likes to film in low light, so Tavoularis put oranges in some sets for contrast—just to brighten scenes that would otherwise have been extremely dark and devoid of color.

•
Hits:
The scene where Sonny Corleone beats up his brother-in-law, Carlo Rizzi, contains a famous blooper that has become known as “The Miss”: Sonny takes a swing at Carlo and obviously misses, but there’s a sound effect, and Rizzi still reacts as if he’s been punched. (Ever notice that Rizzi is wearing an
orange
leisure suit?) The entire fight sequence, including The Miss, was reenacted in a 2003 episode of
The Simpsons
titled “Strong Arms of the Ma.”

•
Name game:
Francis Ford Coppola was named after his grandfather, Francesco Pennino. Where’d the “Ford” come from? The Ford Motor Company. They sponsored a radio show that employed his father, Carmine Coppola, as a conductor and musical arranger.