KingsOfKings
♟️ GRANDMASTERS ♟️
Keep it down, I’m writing a bestseller!” cash-strapped Italian-American author Mario Puzo used to yell at his five children as he sat in the basement of his New York home. Day after day in 1966, he was pounding away on his Olympic Manual typewriter on the first draft of The Godfather. He had no idea then that, just a few years later, his book would be adapted into the classic 1972 film directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
The description of Puzo trying to write his crime novel is contained in Mark Seal’s recently published book, Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli: The Epic Story of the Making of The Godfather. The novelist had been inspired by reading The Honoured Society, British travel writer Norman Lewis’s 1964 book about the Sicilian mafia. He had also watched the TV broadcast of real-life mobster Joseph Valachi’s testimony to Congress 1963 in which Valachi had committed the cardinal sin of breaking his vow of silence. An editor had told Puzo that if one of his previous novels had had “a little more of the mafia stuff in it, maybe the book would have made money”.
has long since grown up around the film and its sequels. They’ve been re-released multiple times. They’re in cinemas again this month in restored 4K versions. Memoirs, critical studies, magazine articles and documentaries have celebrated the Godfather legacy. Next month sees the launch of The Offer, a dramatised TV series about the making of the movie in which Dan Fogler (Jacob Kowalski from Fantastic Beasts) plays director Coppola and sleek British actor Matthew Goode is cast as his patron, the charismatic, cocaine-binging Paramount Studios boss Robert Evans.
Familiarity generally breeds first contempt and then indifference. And yet The Godfather – which was released in US cinemas 50 years ago on 5 March – continues to exercise a strange and enduring fascination on all film lovers. Its combination of artistry and brute violence has rarely, if ever, been matched. Winning Best Picture at the 1973 Academy Awards, it is a true epic, “the Gone with the Wind of gangster movies”, as Newsweek called it.
This was the film that brought its star, Marlon Brando, in from the cold. Hollywood had just about given up on the 47-year-old as erratic, irascible and an all-round box-office liability before Coppola insisted on casting him. Paramount got him cheap, a $50,000 upfront deal with add-ons. Even so, as Seal reports, the trade press mocked him. “No Stars for Godfather Cast – Just Someone Named Brando” was the headline in one industry paper. The bet paid off when Brando went on to win the Best Actor Oscar (and then provoked uproar by sending Native American Sacheen Littlefeather on stage to decline the award on his behalf
The Godfather at 50: Producer chaos, erratic stars and the making of a classic
The description of Puzo trying to write his crime novel is contained in Mark Seal’s recently published book, Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli: The Epic Story of the Making of The Godfather. The novelist had been inspired by reading The Honoured Society, British travel writer Norman Lewis’s 1964 book about the Sicilian mafia. He had also watched the TV broadcast of real-life mobster Joseph Valachi’s testimony to Congress 1963 in which Valachi had committed the cardinal sin of breaking his vow of silence. An editor had told Puzo that if one of his previous novels had had “a little more of the mafia stuff in it, maybe the book would have made money”.
has long since grown up around the film and its sequels. They’ve been re-released multiple times. They’re in cinemas again this month in restored 4K versions. Memoirs, critical studies, magazine articles and documentaries have celebrated the Godfather legacy. Next month sees the launch of The Offer, a dramatised TV series about the making of the movie in which Dan Fogler (Jacob Kowalski from Fantastic Beasts) plays director Coppola and sleek British actor Matthew Goode is cast as his patron, the charismatic, cocaine-binging Paramount Studios boss Robert Evans.
Familiarity generally breeds first contempt and then indifference. And yet The Godfather – which was released in US cinemas 50 years ago on 5 March – continues to exercise a strange and enduring fascination on all film lovers. Its combination of artistry and brute violence has rarely, if ever, been matched. Winning Best Picture at the 1973 Academy Awards, it is a true epic, “the Gone with the Wind of gangster movies”, as Newsweek called it.
This was the film that brought its star, Marlon Brando, in from the cold. Hollywood had just about given up on the 47-year-old as erratic, irascible and an all-round box-office liability before Coppola insisted on casting him. Paramount got him cheap, a $50,000 upfront deal with add-ons. Even so, as Seal reports, the trade press mocked him. “No Stars for Godfather Cast – Just Someone Named Brando” was the headline in one industry paper. The bet paid off when Brando went on to win the Best Actor Oscar (and then provoked uproar by sending Native American Sacheen Littlefeather on stage to decline the award on his behalf
The Godfather at 50: Producer chaos, erratic stars and the making of a classic
