The Godfather - Mario Puzo [237]
Copies of the novel were dispatched with million-dollar offers to these top talents, only to generate a surprising response. The superstars were fascinated by the book, but also scared of it for the very reason Puzo had anticipated. How can this movie be made, they asked, without glorifying a criminal organization? And wouldn’t the movie be widely condemned by self-appointed censors if not by ordinary filmgoers? One after another, the top film directors in the U.S. turned down the project, including Franklin Schaffner, who directed Patton, and Arthur Penn, who did Bonnie and Clyde. Top actors also shied away from the roles, with the exception of Brando, but some of the Paramount brass were opposed to casting Brando in this plum role because his most recent films had performed badly at the box office.
In the end, the corporate “mavens” backed off, and my original proposed director—Coppola—reemerged as the obvious choice. The problems encountered by Coppola during the production have by now been well documented—a tight budget, insufficient time for preproduction planning, arguments over casting, etc.—but oddly, all this strife seemed to work in his favor. Coppola somehow managed to galvanize the tensions on the set into a sort of creative frenzy. Al Pacino’s performance had an edge because the young actor thought he might be fired at any moment. Coppola was determined to throw everything into his scenes day by day because he, too, felt that every shooting day might be his last. At one point early in the schedule the studio actually started interviewing other directors, fearing that the production was out of control. Coppola’s problems were exacerbated by a couple of rebellious members of his crew, who mistakenly concluded that his seemingly disorganized approach to filmmaking signaled a lack of discipline. In fact, Coppola was feeling his way, but doing so with utter brilliance.
The studio eventually rallied to his support, much to Puzo’s gratification. Puzo had liked Coppola from the outset and, indeed, had been delighted by the way Coppola and others had treated him in Hollywood. Once Coppola started rewriting his script, however, and the production moved forward, Puzo, like most writers, began to feel a sense of ostracism. “The truth is that, if a novelist goes out to Hollywood to work on his book, he has to accept the fact that it is not his movie,” he said. “That’s simply the way it is. And the truth is that, if I had been the boss in the making of this movie, I would have wrecked it.”
Overall, Puzo was not only satisfied but delighted with the final product, and at the same time he got himself a quick education in the ways of Hollywood. He was mortified when his icon, Frank Sinatra, screamed abuse at him in a crowded restaurant. Angered by the depiction of Johnny Fontane in Puzo’s book, Sinatra called Puzo a pimp and threatened to impair his health and that of his family. Suddenly, Puzo realized, his fictional cast of characters was coming to life around him.
Puzo was hurt, too, when, upon accepting accolades for the film, Coppola told reporters that the success of The Godfather would now permit him to make films he “really wanted to make.” Having said for years that he wrote his novel only to make money, Puzo had to confront a director who basically was singing the same tune.
I visited with Puzo shortly after all this happened, and his attitude was typically crusty. “This thirty-two-year-old kid suddenly realizes what I knew at age forty-five,” Puzo told me. “Namely, that both of us had to get The Godfather under our belt in order to win the freedom to do whatever we wanted.” At the same time, even Puzo had to acknowledge that what he had created—indeed what they had created—had taken on a life of its own. Not only had the novel become a legend, but many would consider the film to be among the five greatest movies of all time. The two men had achieved, however inadvertently, a sort of immortality through the