In 1972, a thirty-two-year-old Italian-American director, Francis Ford Coppola, made his name with a gangster movie called “The Godfather.” It grossed more money more quickly than any previous film and helped to sweep away the moral cant of its era. But even before he had directed a single film that attracted a large audience or substantial acclaim Coppola made the movie business seem wide open in a way few directors had since the early silents. In the sixties, moviemakers coming out of film programs at places like U.S.C. and U.C.L.A. hoped to revitalize American movies as an art form and overturn the Hollywood status quo. Coppola, as the writer-director John Milius recently told me, was “the rebel envoy, the guy who had gotten into the walled city.” Coppola had worked as a writer (notably on “Patton”), as a director (on the musical comedy “Finian’s Rainbow”), and as a writer-director (on the horror quickie “Dementia 13,” the frenetic coming-of-age film “You’re a Big Boy Now,” and the offbeat woman-on-the-road movie “The Rain People”). He’d cowed his peers and impressed the press as the one member of the “movie generation” who both broke into the studio system and kept one foot outside it. And his initiative backed up his high standing: in the case of “The Rain People,” he shot first and asked questions later, roaming cross-country with a caravan of fledgling filmmakers (including his friend George Lucas).
In 1969, Coppola had institutionalized his outsiderdom. He settled in San Francisco, keeping his distance from the studios and sinking whatever funds he could find—including seed money from Warner Bros.-Seven Arts—into a production company called American Zoetrope. The company swiftly became a magnet for known movie-industry mavericks like John Korty (“The Crazy Quilt”) and Haskell Wexler (“Medium Cool”) as well as a cinematic frat house for tyros like Milius, Lucas, and Carroll Ballard (a U.C.L.A. film-school classmate of Coppola’s, who later made “The Black Stallion” under his aegis). Coppola’s dream was that American Zoetrope would allow artists to share ideas and equipment, and eventually to transform their native cinema. He infected dozens of other film postgraduates with his spirit of conquest. Lucas, just five years younger than Coppola, has said, “Francis was the great white knight. . . . He was the one who made us hope.” Milius, who wrote the first draft of “Apocalypse Now” for Zoetrope before establishing himself as an action filmmaker (“Dillinger,” “Conan the Barbarian”), recalls, “He always said we were the Trojan horse, but that wasn’t quite true, because he was inside opening the gate. None of those other guys—Lucas, Spielberg, all of them—could have existed without Francis’s help. And his was a much more interesting influence than theirs. Francis was going to become the emperor of the new order, but it wasn’t going to be like the old order. It was going to be the rule of the artist.”
Actually, American Zoetrope had relatively little to do with “The Godfather,” which celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary on March 15th. “The Godfather” was a Paramount picture. And it was just the sort of project that Zoetrope’s would-be mavericks were supposed to shun: Mario Puzo’s gigantic best-seller about the Sicilian Mob in America blended juicy research and the remarkable central character of Don Vito Corleone (inspired, Puzo now says, by his mother) with cheesy roman-à-clef material about Hollywood and Las Vegas. Coppola agreed to adapt and direct it largely to pay Zoetrope’s bills, and then (by his own admission) risked compromising the movie’s final form in an attempt to keep its postproduction centered at Zoetrope. In interviews conducted on the eve of its re-release, to be marked by a gala on March 20th at the Castro, San Francisco’s old-style movie palace, Coppola’s co-workers continually circled back to his embattled commitment to Zoetrope. Walter Murch, who was a postproduction consultant on “The Godfather” and is responsible for improving the sound for the movie’s reissue, says, “We knew if Zoetrope was going to survive it was because this film was going to be made and be good. We had tied our rowboats to a speedboat; we had each intended to take our little rowboats into the lake and make our seven-hundred-thousand-dollar films, like ‘The Rain People’ and ‘American Graffiti.’ ‘The Godfather’ was this huge and early exception. It had such a giant engine attached to it because the book and the head of the studio were involved. It was energizing, in a way. And it was also a little disorienting.”
No one was more disoriented than Coppola. His sister, Talia Shire, who appeared in “The Godfather” and its two sequels, was taken aback at his transformation, comparing him to a performer who lands in a defining part: “When you play a role of force, a king or queen, and you have not been by casting or nature that size yet, it suffuses you. You saw Francis emerge . . . not just from people applauding, but from something of the epic size of the project and of the central character—a dark character, a Machiavellian character, but a man also appealing.”
Yet to this day Coppola hasn’t satisfactorily reckoned with the success of “The Godfather.” Its filming, he told me, was, “right up to the end, one of the stories of the thing you think is going to ruin you.” He added, “And in some ways it did ruin me. It just made my whole career go this way instead of the way I really wanted it to go, which was into doing original work as a writer-director. It just inflamed so many other desires. After ‘The Godfather,’ there was the possibility of having a company that could one day evolve into a real major company and change the way we approach filmmaking. Suddenly, a lot of things that I didn’t have a shot at I did. ‘The Conversation,’ which I did write and direct as an original, was a film nobody wanted me to do, but I got to make it out of the deal to do ‘Godfather II.’ The great frustration of my career is that nobody really wants me to do my own work. Basically, ‘The Godfather’ made me violate a lot of the hopes I had for myself at that age.”
Critics tend to date Coppola’s descent into creative chaos from the manic-depressive overreaching of “Apocalypse Now” (released five years after “The Godfather, Part II”). In the last few years, he has directed the bombastic “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” and the flaccid, commercial “Jack,” and he is currently at work on an adaptation of a John Grisham novel. But from the beginning of his career Coppola almost recklessly mixed aestheticism and cunning and showmanship. What’s significant is that a filmmaker so divided against himself and so disdainful of outside authority managed to pull all his impulses together for “The Godfather” and “Godfather II.” He achieved the combination of groundbreaking expression and public acceptance that is a popular artist’s holy grail—a relic that, for all its glory, exacts misery from those who seek it, and even from those who find it.
When I talked to Coppola recently in his penthouse office on the eighth floor of the triangular green Sentinel Building, a 1906 San Francisco edifice that serves as American Zoetrope’s headquarters, he mused that the stance he took toward the studios in the company’s early years was founded on his exploits as a theatre major at Hofstra: “We would launch these ambitious productions, and the faculty would say, ‘Oh, that’s too much for students,’ and we’d do it anyway.” But on a day now known in Coppola’s circle as Black Thursday (November 19, 1970), Coppola had to report that Warner Bros. was taking over the editing of Zoetrope’s first full-fledged production, Lucas’s “THX 1138,” and had rejected Zoetrope’s future slate. The studio also demanded repayment of the development money for the projects it had spurned. In the meantime, Coppola says, “there was talk that if we didn’t pay certain bills the sheriff was going to lock our doors.” It was Lucas who persuaded him to consider Paramount Pictures’ offer of directing a movie version of Puzo’s semi-tawdry best-seller. “Of course George was the key person,” Coppola admits. “He is very practical, and he said, ‘You gotta do it, you gotta do “The Godfather,” it’s going to be good, you’ll see.’ ”
At first, Coppola didn’t see how it could be good. Puzo, a respected novelist, set out to write a blockbuster—he initially called it, bluntly, “Mafia.” As Puzo told me on the phone from his Long Island home, the manuscript generated interest at both Universal and Paramount when he had written only “about a hundred and fifty pages.” Robert Evans championed it at Paramount, where he was then chief of production. Indeed, in his 1994 memoir, “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” Evans says he met with Puzo, liked him, and agreed to pay him enough money for the book to clear his gambling debts. Puzo says that the session never took place. (He also refutes widely circulated rumors that Paramount set him up in an office on the lot to finish the book.) In any event, Evans controlled the movie rights, giving Puzo option payments totalling twelve thousand five hundred dollars (“All the money in the world!” Puzo says), which would escalate to eighty thousand if the film was made. When the novel generated huge sales in 1969, a movie version seemed inevitable. But in 1968 Paramount had released a Mafia film called “The Brotherhood,” starring Kirk Douglas as an old-style don fighting the corporate tides of the postwar Mob. It ignominiously flopped.
Evans and his production vice-president, Peter Bart, approached one director after another, including Costa-Gavras, Peter Yates (“Bullitt”), and Franklin J. Schaffner (who’d just directed “Patton”). They all turned down Puzo’s novel. Some had moral qualms about the risk of romanticizing the Mafia; one who didn’t, Sam Peckinpah, had two meetings with Bart, but was concerned less with Puzo’s material than with a vision resembling (in Bart’s phrase) “The Wild Bunch in the Mafia.” Evans and Bart thus had to come up with a ploy to sell Paramount’s president, Stanley Jaffe, a Sicilian Mob film without a name filmmaker attached. They insisted that “The Brotherhood” tanked because it had a Jewish creative team. (The director, the star, and some members of the supporting cast were Jewish, but the screenwriter was Lewis John Carlino.) “The Godfather,” they vowed, would be Italian-American all the way. This pitch worked; it also led to what Bart, now the editor of Variety, calls a major misunderstanding. “The legend became that Francis Coppola was being considered because he was the only Italian-American director I knew,” he told me. “The thing was that Francis was not the only Italian-American director I knew but the brightest young director I knew.” Bart believed that there was an underlying integrity to Puzo’s storytelling. Through conversations with Coppola, he came to see that the novel was a family chronicle as well as a crime story, with the Mob as a metaphor for capitalism. He trusted that Coppola would “present the movie brilliantly to my colleagues.”
Coppola demurred. “I had always approached my career thinking that I was going to be a writer-director—that I was one of the few guys that could write an original screenplay,” he explains. “I had taken a left turn against my planned direction with ‘Finian’s Rainbow,’ because musical comedy was something that I had been raised with in my family, and I thought, frankly, that my father would be impressed. And now here was a big best-selling book, which upon my first look seemed to have a lot of commercial sleazy elements.” It was only after he scraped away subplots, like the ones about a Dean Martin-like performer’s dipsomania and a woman with an oversized vagina, that he realized he could extract a “classical” story about an aging Mob king, Don Vito Corleone, and his potential heirs—the hotheaded Sonny, the emotionally fragile Fredo, and the thoughtful, rebellious Michael.
Coppola’s next problem was the script: “It was contemporary, set in the seventies—there were hippies in it. By then, I felt there was a good core jewel in ‘The Godfather,’ but it should be set in the forties. And of course the studio felt to do it in period would cost more money.” Paramount wanted the film to be made cheaply. Coppola says, “No doubt that’s why I got the job—because I was considered kind of a younger filmmaker using what were thought of as more modest techniques, such as handheld cameras.”
Evans and Bart had brought in Al Ruddy to produce; he’d acquired a reputation for speed and efficiency with youth movies, like the Robert Redford biker flick “Little Fauss and Big Halsey.” Ruddy arranged for Coppola to meet Evans and Jaffe at Paramount’s executive offices, and Coppola, as Bart had predicted, was a spellbinder. Ruddy is still dumbfounded that this young man who’d made nothing but flops operated as if he had the clout of a Mike Nichols or a Stanley Kubrick. Ruddy told me that Coppola was “like Starbuck in ‘The Rainmaker’ ”: he dragged everything into his spiel, “how films should be made, the history of the world, the domino theory, everything. It should have been taped.” Coppola persuaded Evans and Jaffe to do a period film despite the rise in budget, from two and a half million dollars to a final cost of more than six million—still a bargain in an era when Paramount turkeys like “Paint Your Wagon” cost more than twenty million. And when it came to rewriting the script, Puzo, who had been treating his chores as a lark, proved a game collaborator. “To this day,” he says, “I can’t even remember what’s mine and what’s Francis’s. I feel it’s Francis’s picture.”
Coppola’s ideas for the cast—Brando, Pacino, Duvall, Diane Keaton—now look classic to us. But the studio considered them wildly unorthodox, and Coppola took this resistance personally. Shire told me that when she asked her brother if she could audition for the role of Connie Corleone Rizzi, “Francis said ‘No!,’ a very loud ‘No!’ ” Even after a contingent led by Evans offered her the part, and she took it, “Francis said I should have asked him first.” Once she realized, however, that his unconventional choices were going to “give everybody terror,” she began to think that it might have been “wrong” for her to give him “something else to worry about”—a sibling in front of the camera.
In fact, Shire fit the criteria set by her brother and Fred Roos, his casting director. Roos recalls, “Francis and I tried to make a pact to cast Italian for every role that was Italian, to keep a certain purity to it. And we stuck pretty damn close to it.” That’s one reason that James Caan, a Coppola favorite, wasn’t cast, at first, as Sonny; Coppola and Roos had selected an actor named Carmine Caridi, who, Roos says, “looked exactly the way Sonny was described in the book.” For the Don, he explains, ‘We couldn’t find a real Italian actor with the charisma he needed to have. There’s a lot of talk about the Don in this movie; he permeates the movie even when he’s not onscreen, and you had to have someone who could deliver on all this talk. So we started to bring up great actors who could do it as a display of great acting—learn the accent, turn it into a tour de force. We thought of three: Marlon Brando, George C. Scott, and Laurence Olivier, who’d recently played a Russian in ‘The Shoes of the Fisherman.’ But I remember on the day we tried to decide which one should play the Don I said Marlon, and Francis said, ‘Of course, Marlon.’ ”
The first to envision Brando as Don Vito Corleone was Puzo: he had already sent the superstar a letter and talked to him about the role on the phone. But Brando was dubious. “I had never played an Italian before, and I didn’t think I could do it successfully,” he says in his autobiography. And he warned Puzo that no studio would go for him. Erratic behavior and abysmal box-office returns had turned him into a Hollywood pariah. At a meeting that has been reported with varying degrees of comedy and melodrama for the last quarter century, Coppola pressed the case for Brando. “You have to remember that they were very seriously considering if they had the right director, and I brought up Marlon Brando,” Coppola says. “I was told by one of the executives—I shouldn’t say which one—‘Francis, Marlon Brando will never appear in this picture, and I instruct you never to bring him up again.’ At which point, I fainted onto the floor, as if to say, ‘How can I deal with that type of statement?’ My ‘epileptic fit’ was obviously a gag, and they got the point. Finally, they recanted and told me that I could consider Brando if I could meet three criteria: one was that he would do the film for ‘nothing,’ one was that he would personally post a bond to insure them against any of his shenanigans causing overage, and the third was that he would agree to a screen test. And I agreed, even though I didn’t even know Brando.” In an incident that has since entered Hollywood lore, Coppola shot Brando on video metamorphosing into Don Corleone with shoe polish in his hair and Kleenex in his mouth, and the deal was done.
For the Don’s favorite son, Michael, Coppola favored a shrimpy New York actor named Al Pacino. “When I read ‘The Godfather,’ I saw Al in the part of Michael,” Coppola recalls. “I remember when the shepherds are walking across Sicily I saw his face, and when that happens it’s very hard to get out of your head. So right at the front I said ‘Al Pacino’—and of course that was not viewed as a possibility.” Pacino was primarily a New York stage actor, with only one major movie in the chute, the antidrug film “Panic in Needle Park.” “So they had me do lots and lots of screen tests,” Coppola says. “And I tested every talented American actor—Jimmy Caan tested for Michael, Dean Stockwell tested for Michael, Frederic Forrest, everybody.” Coppola kept coming back to Pacino, and kept hearing the response that he was a “runt.” Coppola now reasons, “I think Bob Evans was a handsome guy, a tall guy, so he tended to see Michael as someone more like himself. He was suggesting Ryan O’Neal or Bob Redford and I was suggesting Pacino. I wanted someone more like me.” Pacino’s then girlfriend, Jill Clayburgh, had taken to berating Coppola for stringing Al along: “I’d call up and ask ‘Please, could Al come back one more time?’ and she’d get on the phone crying, ‘What are you doing to him? You’re torturing him, you’re never going to give him the part!’ ” According to Coppola, the matter was resolved when he was out of the country. He went to England to meet Brando, who was finishing “The Nightcomers”; upon his return, he learned that Pacino would play Michael, and James Caan, who was being pushed to play Michael, would play Sonny. “Apparently,” Coppola says, “they’d seen a little footage of ‘Panic in Needle Park.’ And I think they also decided that if they weren’t going to fire me, they at least would go along with some of my recommendations.”
In the meantime, Pacino, assuming he would be rejected, had signed on with M-G-M for a role in “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.” Evans had to call on his close friend, the late lawyer Sidney Korshak, a high-level fixer with a notorious Chicago past and connections to the unions and big business, to wrest Pacino away from M-G-M. Korshak, in an ironic twist on the movie’s subject, solved another critical problem when Coppola’s demand that the film be shot in New York caused mobsters to shut the movie out of locations throughout the boroughs and Long Island. The production designer, Dean Tavoularis, recalls, “We looked high and low; somebody would follow us; we’d strike a deal for a location and suddenly it would unravel.” Evans says that what finally opened up New York “like a World’s Fair,” complete with the help of “the garbagemen, the longshoremen, the teamsters” and security for the locations, was a call or two from Korshak. Evans says, “I was getting calls at the Sherry-Netherland like ‘To kill the snake you cut off its head,’ or ‘If you want your son to live longer than two weeks, get out of town.’ ” Evans now states flatly, “ ‘The Godfather’ would not have been made without Korshak. He saved Pacino, the locations, and, possibly, my son.”
Coppola, Tavoularis, and the cinematographer Gordon Willis devised a shadowy look for the film which would profoundly influence period films for three decades to come, and would confound screening-room kibbitzers accustomed to ultra-bright Doris Day lighting. Coppola was searching for a classical style to fit his classical story. Tavoularis testifies, ‘We went scene by scene, and determined that we’d have tableau shots, five or six men in a dark room or in front of Jack Dempsey’s restaurant or in front of the hospital, straight-on shots where the actions unfold without the camera doing anything.” Willis says that he intuited “something about a dirty yellow feel—it seemed organic for me,” and he adds that much of his lighting scheme emerged “from wondering how the audience would first see Brando—how they’d respond to him made up in this fashion.” He continues, “We used overhead lighting a lot to form the person behind that desk theatrically. The idea was that this was a character who didn’t always let you see what he was thinking, so sometimes you’d see his eyes, sometimes not. As the rushes went back to the studio, the legend became ‘You never see Brando’s eyes, your camera is always focussed on the dark.’ But if you look at the movie it’s very well structured visually. You have to remember that when the first ‘Godfather’ was done, screens were generally so blitzed with light that you could see into every corner of every toilet and closet on the set. When the studio people saw what we were doing, their reaction was ‘What happened?’ I got a lot of criticism because of the juxtaposition of bright, Kodachromey stuff for the wedding with the dark office where sinister things were happening. But in my mind and Francis’s the contrast between the happiness in the background and this thing inside was quite clear. We had two rhythms going all the time, and it was not a mistake. But nobody got it in Hollywood. Whatever the studio people tell you now, they weren’t coöperative.”
For the first three weeks of shooting, Coppola was actively concerned about being replaced. Not only were the images too murky to please the executives; they also thought Brando was incomprehensible. Even Peter Bart, Coppola’s biggest supporter in the executive suite, admits that he felt as if he’d worn sunglasses to dailies.
Bart divulged to me that he descended to subterfuge to help save Coppola. “There was a movement to substitute Elia Kazan,” he explains. “At a pivotal meeting in Bob Evans’ office, I brought in a prominent Hollywood figure; he asserted that he had talked to Kazan and found him to be senile, and was sufficiently persuasive that the idea of hiring him was thrown out. I’m not proud of this—I knew Gadge was not senile—but at every studio there comes a crunch time when you have to be devious.” (Coppola says that when he and Kazan met, Kazan told him he’d never wanted to do the film.)
Coppola’s first editor, Aram Avakian, is said to have put out the word that the footage was garbage. Gray Frederickson, the line producer, told me that Avakian, who had only one solo directing credit (“End of the Road”), was trying to stage a putsch. Frederickson says that Ruddy and Jack Ballard, the production man whom Paramount had sent to New York, even screened Avakian’s movie to see if he was a capable director who could possibly take over. Coppola had Avakian fired, but his queasiness never went away. Frederickson recalls Coppola’s quipping that the two of them should form W.U. Productions, for “Washed Up.”
As for Willis, he and Coppola found it hard to reconcile their temperaments. “I like to lay a thing out and make it work, with discipline,” Willis says. “Francis’s attitude is more like, ‘I’ll set my clothes on fire—if I can make it to the other side of the room it’ll be spectacular.’ ” Willis’s camera operator, Michael Chapman, soon to become a renowned cinematographer (“Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull”), attests to “marvellous operatic fights” between Coppola and Willis. At one point, Willis walked off the set, and Coppola called for “Chappie” to shoot for him, but Chapman, rather than get between his two higher-ups, ran into a stall in the ratty old bathroom at the Filmways studio and lowered his pants, so that any emissary of Coppola’s would have to be really motivated to get him. (Coppola, blowing off steam, reportedly pulverized his own office door.)
If the director was tense, the cast was often loose. Stories of Caan, Duvall, and Brando’s competitive jokes abounded during and after shooting; Caan admits to having been shocked when Duvall and Brando mooned the assembled extras for the wedding scene. Caan says that Coppola cemented his working relationship with Brando by being straightforward: “With Brando, all Francis did was talk to him. Everyone wants to conquer Brando—Francis just talked to him.”
Coppola does take credit for instilling family feeling in the cast, “through a lot of early rehearsals and improvisations over meals and stuff.” But Caan says that this kind of gentle manipulation extended throughout the movie. For example, to nudge Caan into brotherly feeling for Connie, Coppola would make him feel protective toward Shire: “Francis would tell me, ‘Someone’s bothering Talia,’ and it wouldn’t have anything to do with the movie, but I’d take care of it. The s.o.b. must have done it on purpose.”
Still, Coppola says, “I don’t take a lot of pleasure in anything to do with ‘The Godfather.’ I love the cast, and I think the film definitely brought out something, but it was a terrible period in my life. I had two little kids and a third on the way, I was living in this borrowed apartment, and at one point my editor told me that nothing was any good. It was a total collapse of self-confidence on my part; it was just an awful experience. I’m nauseated to think about it.”
Didn’t Coppola expect that his unconventionality would upset the studio, that it would take the executives time to see what he was doing? “No, because I was just following my nose. I really saw it as an Italian family, and I knew that if I had one asset it was to do things—textures, what have you—that would be like my own family and not like so-called movie Italians. But I thought the movie was a disaster, because everyone was saying it was.” Did Coppola realize that lines like “It’s not personal . . . it’s strictly business” would seep into the culture? “No. I was so frightened and depressed that I just wanted to get through the night and day. I was in so much trouble the first week—they were seeing dailies and didn’t like them. To this day, even Peter Bart says, ‘Well, the first stuff. . .’ But the first stuff was probably the best stuff in the picture. The scene in the restaurant where Michael kills Sollozzo—that was the Tuesday and Wednesday of the first week. So they didn’t see it. Really, almost nothing in the picture was reshot, if the truth be known, but they weren’t saying, ‘Gee, good work.’ I was being told I was going to be fired up until the end of the third week.” Didn’t he know that in adapting the book he had transformed it? Consider, for example, how much more nuanced he made the character of Fredo. “Well, a lot of that came from the actor, John Cazale, who was a very magical person. Where the process gets at its best, where it’s relaxed and fun, where every single moment becomes an opportunity, you don’t even remember who thought of anything.”
Coppola says that the first person to offer him any encouragement was the screenwriter (later to become writer-director) Robert Towne. Towne had known Coppola from their days of making quickies for Roger Corman, and had since become Hollywood’s premier script doctor. (He received a “special consultant” credit on “Bonnie and Clyde.”) He remembers that he flew to New York to write a crucial summation scene for Don Vito and Michael, and that Coppola screened roughly an hour’s worth of material for him beforehand. “I told him it was amazing,” Towne says, “and he looked deeply distressed, as if he’d hired someone to help him write a scene and instead he’d got someone on an acid trip. I had already heard from people at Paramount that the picture was not going well; only Fred Roos said, in his quiet, understated way, that ‘it’s going to be good.’ It always is a surprise when footage is so beautiful. I’d never seen footage with that kind of texture related to any so-called gangster movie; Francis had brought so much of himself and of life to it. The wedding! I thought, Jesus, what are people complaining about? But wasn’t it Mark Twain who said, ‘Thank God for fools, without them none of us would succeed’?”
Towne stayed up all night to write the father-and-son scene. He recalls, “Francis picked me up around six-thirty in the morning, so nervous—he had a little baby with him—and we drove out to Staten Island in a station wagon. We drove for forty-five minutes without saying a word. Then Francis said, without turning around, ‘Any luck?’ I told him I thought so: I had a clipboard with the scene on it, and showed it to him. ‘Yeah, that’s good,’ he said. ‘Let’s show it to the actors.’ We showed it to Al; he liked it a lot. Then Francis said, ‘You show it to Marlon.’ Marlon was in makeup, having his cheeks put in. And Marlon made me read him the scene, both parts. It was extremely intimidating and infuriating. Read Marlon’s dialogue to him? I made up my mind immediately to read it as badly as possible, as flatly, to not try to act it. There was a long pause, and Marlon said, ‘Read it again.’ And afterward he said, ‘That’s not bad. I want you to tell me something. Why doesn’t he say anything about Fredo?’ ‘Because he can’t figure out what to say about him at that moment.’ ‘O.K.’ He went through every phrase and comma in the speech. Then he said, ‘Would you mind coming on the set?’ Francis was naturally relieved. He had no idea what we had been doing.”
Besides Towne, Coppola’s biggest non-Zoetrope supporters were probably the film editors who replaced the fired Avakian—William Reynolds and Peter Zinner. Respected Hollywood veterans, they went to New York and cut film as it came in. After shooting stopped, they flew to San Francisco, where each would polish half of the movie. Zinner says, “Reynolds and I flipped a coin, and he won—he got to do the first part.” Why did that make him the winner? “Because the wedding was stupendous.” Indeed, Reynolds considered the opening sequence, which intercuts Connie Corleone Rizzi’s marriage party with the Don granting favors in his office, one of the sublime challenges of his career. “Francis knew he had to stage a real Italian wedding,” Reynolds explains, “and he did it superbly, but there wasn’t any plan as far as the script was concerned about going back and forth. We did it; I did it.”
Zinner, too, made a signal contribution. In a climactic sequence, Coppola had the stroke of genius (confirmed by Puzo) to intercut Michael’s serving as godfather at the christening of Connie’s baby with his minions’ savagely executing the Corleone family’s enemies. But, Zinner says, Coppola left him with thousands of feet of the baptism, shot from four or five angles as the priest delivered his litany, and relatively few shots of the assassins doing their dirty work. Zinner’s solution was to run the litany in its entirety on the soundtrack along with escalating organ music, allowing different angles of the service to dominate the first minutes, and then to build to an audiovisual crescendo with the wave of killings, the blaring organ, the priest asking Michael if he renounces Satan and all his works—and Michael’s response that he does renounce them. The effect sealed the movie’s inspired depiction of the Corleones’ simultaneous, duelling rituals—the sacraments of church and family, and the murders in the street.
The happiest moments for Coppola came during the untroubled location shoot in Sicily and the postproduction time he spent in San Francisco. He applied an S.F. trademark to this L.A.-studio production: the inventive use of music and sound, and sometimes sound as music—for example, when the roar of an elevated train mirrors the turmoil in Michael’s heart and mind as he’s about to commit a double murder. (Coppola regards San Francisco’s preëminence in movie sound as a Zoetrope legacy; the company had its own state-of-the-art sound equipment.) But this tranquillity didn’t last. Coppola and his collaborators found that the picture ran comfortably at roughly three hours. (The final movie runs two hours and fifty-one minutes.) What came next is the “Rashomon” of postproduction stories. Both Coppola and Evans say they fought for a long version of the film—but they often fought at cross-purposes. Reynolds states the nearest thing to a consensus version of what happened: “Francis didn’t have all the muscle that he has now. He said Paramount would never accept it at that length. We did some drastic editing. So we took it down and showed it to Bob Evans when it was probably a little over two hours. Once the screening was over, Bob said, ‘Yeah, it’s good, but I remember a lot of wonderful material that wasn’t in the film.’ And Francis said, ‘I thought you and Paramount would never accept a film of excessive length,’ and Bob said, ‘I don’t care how long this picture is, put that material back in.’ I’ve often told this story as a bold stroke on Bob’s part. And I was there. Bob was Paramount at that point, and he said, ‘Put it back.’ He had a sense of the scope of the picture and how good it was.” Zinner, Bart, and Ruddy by and large concur. Bart says, “This was a unique case where the studio production chief said, one, make it longer, and, two, the studio will give up a prime Christmas opening date—and he told the distribution arm as much. Today, marketing and distribution control the process. And Bob was a young studio head. For him to go up against the president of the company took serious testosterone.”
The way Coppola sees it, Evans simply wanted to bring the film back to L.A. In his view, the issue behind the editing of “The Godfather” wasn’t length but location: “I don’t think they wanted me to be cutting the film in San Francisco, but I had my own little facility. And Bob Evans had told me that if the film was any longer than two hours and fifteen minutes he was going to yank it and we’d cut it in L.A.” Coppola’s solution, he says, was to lift “a lot of non-plot-plot-plot parts,” pulling out twenty-five minutes “of stuff I loved” in order to keep it in San Francisco: “I figured, ‘I’ll show it to them, and little by little I’ll get it back in.’ But Bob Evans said, ‘Well, you pulled out the best parts of the film. We’ll bring it to L.A.’ They brought it to L.A., Evans ordered me to put it all back, which I happily did, and then he said ‘See!’ ” To Coppola, this meant that Evans wanted the movie back in L.A. at any length. No one I spoke to, including Bart, believes that Coppola resisted the idea of a longer cut—no one except Evans, who says he fired Coppola four times during postproduction, and insists that only his threats brought Coppola back to the editing table. (In his memoir, Evans treats Coppola’s takeover of their nightmarish production, “The Cotton Club,” as revenge for Evans’s hands-on association with “The Godfather”—a historical interpretation that can cut both ways.)
From Coppola’s perspective, “at the bottom of things, there were two creative people who had a different point of view.” There were fights over the kind of music and the amount; Coppola and his supporters at Zoetrope believe that Evans wanted to remove Nino Rota’s lyrical Italianate score, while Evans says he simply wanted recognizably American music to dominate the sequences in Hollywood and Las Vegas. When Charles Bluhdorn, the chairman of Paramount’s parent company, Gulf & Western, asked Coppola to do the sequel, Coppola was so sick of the jousting that he suggested Martin Scorsese instead, relenting only after Bluhdorn guaranteed that he wouldn’t have to work with Evans. Yet Bob Towne, who wrote “Chinatown” for Evans before falling out with him in 1985 (over its sequel, “The Two Jakes”), witnessed some of the back-and-forth between Coppola and Evans, and found Evans “more sensitive editorially than I would ever have suspected.” In the end, Towne says, “you can’t gainsay what happened in the work process,” and the finished movie had clearly laid the groundwork for an even braver sequel: “In the seventies, when we felt families were disintegrating, and our national family, led by the family in the White House, was full of backstabbing, here was this role model of a family who stuck together, who’d die for one another. The real appeal of the movie was showing family ties in a setting of power. It was really kind of reactionary in that sense—a perverse expression of a desirable and lost cultural tradition, filling people with longing for a family like that, a father who not only knew what was best but, if a guy was giving you a hard time, could have someone kill him.” Towne continues, “I think Francis sensed that in some way the movie elicited this reaction, and I think ‘Godfather II’ was a self-conscious attempt to show the devolution, the tearing apart of the family, by the very things people thought in the first film held it together. One of the most chilling, heartrending sequences in movies is Bobby De Niro as the young Vito Corleone killing the local Mafia guy, committing this horrifying slaughter, and then holding his son in his arms and saying, ‘Michael, your father loves you very much’; at the very instant in his life when he moves to save the lives of his children, he damns himself and, as we’ll see, them.”
Coppola says he didn’t get a chance to savor his achievement. When he went to an exhibitors’ screening, he heard “Red Somebody, the ‘dean’ of exhibitors” say, “Well, it’s no ‘Love Story.’ ” (“Love Story,” of course, had been a victory for Evans as a production head.) And by the time the film was out he was once again chained to his typewriter for a cursed adaptation—this time Evans had wooed him into scripting “The Great Gatsby.”
But Coppola’s peers saw that “The Godfather” was what Fitzgerald would have called his “golden moment.” Milius says, “I cannot extoll the virtues of Francis in those days enough. A lot of the American Zoetrope people, people who are happy to sell out to George”—Lucas—“felt that in choosing to do ‘The Godfather’ Francis had sold them out, when he did it to keep people afloat, and he did keep people afloat. And when it all gets said and done, he is the best director of our generation.”
Working on someone else’s epic story had given Coppola new lucidity as a writer; working on a big studio project had given him new expressiveness as a director. Against his better instincts, he had become a better artist.
Coppola isn’t able to see it that way. By all accounts (not just his own), he was miserable during the shooting of the film. His way of acknowledging its success is to credit the cast, along with his luck at getting handed a story “that a lot of people obviously responded to as a book,” to which he could apply “some family stuff in my own life that was the glue, that was unusual, that hadn’t been done so much in a believable way in the past.” Coppola remembers visiting Las Vegas with Puzo when “some thuglike guy came over and said to me, ‘Just remember, he made you, you didn’t make him!’ I said, ‘Fine.’ ” ♦
