00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American stories. Up next, the story of The Godfather and its unlikely journey to the screen. The director of Francis Ford Coppola was a renegade filmmaker who never made a profitable picture. The producer already was hired because he could stay below budget. The star, Marlon Brando, had a reputation for being difficult: a formula for disaster. Nope, not quite. It was the makings of one of the greatest films of all time. Here to tell the story is Harlan Liebow, author of The Godfather Legacy.

00:00:43
Speaker 2: The Godfather really is very much a family story. It’s certainly not a family picture by any means in the traditional sense of a rated G film, but it is a movie about a family. There, of course, there are many things about the mafia and violence in the film, but at the heart of the story are the struggles within a family: a very powerful man, his three sons, and his daughter, and in particular the struggles of Michael, his youngest son, who wanted to stay out of the family business, as they call it, but winds up, of course, at the end of The Godfather—of the film and the book—both as powerful and as ruthless as his father could have ever imagined. So it’s very much a family picture. I mean, it’s the same way as looking at Gone at the Wind. It’s Gone at the Wind isn’t a movie about the Civil War. It just has the Civil War as a backdrop. It’s about the struggles of a woman during the Civil War. But The Godfather is the same way. The whole issue of family and trust and love is very much a part of The Godfather. In fact, they are integral to The Godfather. Michael, the youngest son played by Al Pacino, never would have done what he did, which has become part of the family business, if it was not for his love of his father. And that’s a real torment for him, but it doesn’t stop him from becoming the ruthless killer that he does become.

00:02:03
Speaker 3: Spent time with his family, sure I do. But that’s a man who doesn’t spend time with his family, because that would be a real man.

00:02:14
Speaker 2: If you look at Hell’s Kitchen or other parts of New York, for example, where they filmed The Godfather Part Two, they were not good parts of New York then. But the city has changed and continues to change, and it’s much nicer now, but Hell’s Kitchen was the classic tenement section of New York City for many decades, and that’s where Mario Puzo was from. He was young, he was poor. He eventually became a civil servant working in New York and at the same time was a struggling fiction author through the 1960s. He wrote good books, but they didn’t sell very well at all until he decided to pick up an idea that he thought about all along the way and was mentioned just a bit in one of his other books, which is the experiences of a family involved in the underworld of New York, and that’s when the idea for The Godfather came along. The book itself was one of the great page-turning books. One summer that it came out, Puzo had decided to give writing one last shot. He maxed out all the credit cards. He also got a little money from Paramount Pictures, but this really was his last shot at writing. He sent off the manuscript. He came back from a vacation, and he came back to discover that not only had the books sold, but the paperback rights that sold for about four hundred thousand dollars. And in 1970 money, that’s a lot of money. So the book was a gigantic hit, number one on the best-seller list for months and months, and it was a natural fit, you would think, to be made into a film. But that’s where other problems started.

00:03:56
Speaker 1: The process of.

00:03:56
Speaker 2: Giving writers advances wasn’t done very often, but it was done most frequently by an executive named Peter Bart, who is still very active in the film business right now. He is a columnist and has been for years writing some of the most intelligent work about the film business and entertainment in general. But Peter believed very strongly that some writers needed a little help from now and then to keep going, as all struggling writers do. He had already supported other books that had done very well, like Love Story, which did very well for Paramount Pictures. So Peter Bart supported Puzo with a few bucks now and then, and they held on to the rights to make The Godfather—of the book—into a film if it turned out to be a success. Well, of course, it turned out to be a huge success, which naturally led it into becoming a film project in 1971. No one did want to direct the film. Even though The Godfather, the book, was a huge best-seller, it was thought at the time that a movie about the mafia would not be very successful, and primarily that’s because what Paramount wanted to do with it. They had supported Puzo as a writer, but they didn’t want to support the film any more than any other relatively low-budget, shoot-’em-up picture about crime, and as a result, there were no takers on directors for the film and very little interest in the project. That problem was compounded by the fact that a film called The Brotherhood had come out at about the same time, which had huge, a huge budget, big stars, and it flopped because again it was just not well thought of as a topic to make movies about the mafia.

00:05:40
Speaker 1: Well.

00:05:41
Speaker 2: Eventually the movie was offered to Francis Coppola to direct, and Coppola was a young, just getting started director. He’d only had, I think, three films at that point and had written another one.

00:05:57
Speaker 4: Much of the original book was a potboiler, so it was not a film I particularly wanted to do, but I had no money, and my then young assistant, George Lucas, said, “Francis, you got to get a job because the Sheriff’s going to come and put a chain on the door of American Zoetrope because we haven’t paid our bills. Do this movie.” And so I ultimately took the job and wrote the screenplay. I just took the novel and went through it and underlined everything that I thought that I could use.

00:06:28
Speaker 2: But part of the reason they went to Coppola was he seemed solid enough as a director, but he was also Italian-American, and that was crucial to the project at the time. And we could certainly talk about the problems within the Italian-American community in the 1960s and early 1970s with Hollywood, but the short version is that it was viewed within many Italian-American families that anytime an Italian-American person appeared in the film, it was in a crime role, and there were no non-crime roles, legitimate characters, who were Italian-American in films or on television. Well, Paramount came around to the idea that one of the ways to solve that problem is to have an Italian-American director. They went to Coppola, they offered the project to him, and he turned it down. He came around because of the same things we were talking about a few minutes ago. He finally did read the book all the way through. He only read sort of the smutty parts up front before he declined. But then he realized the same thing that we did, which is that the movie is not about the Mafia at its core. What it’s about is a family and the problems of a particular family and the struggles of that family. That’s the story at its core. And if you focus on Michael, the problems of the youngest son, then it becomes even more interesting. So Coppola agreed to do the film with many conditions, and he was able to convince Paramount to buy in. Coppola did grow up in Detroit and a few other places as well. His father, Carmine, was a very talented musician-composer, but he always felt like he was waiting for his break to come, like he was waiting for that knock to come on the door. And it never did, or at least it never did until his son helped him later, and Coppola realized that you just can’t wait around for these things. You need to go out and make your own breaks. And he did make his own breaks, and of course, here was a break that had been handed to him because of the talent he had developed, and he turned it down and then finally did accept it, but he made very strong demands about how the film needed to be made. The primary demand, of course, was that it’d be filmed entirely on location in New York, which is a very expensive proposition. At that point, the studio wanted to make it either in-studio or on the streets in Los Angeles, which would have been much cheaper. They had a very small budget in mind for the film, and of course, by today’s standards, the budget was very small, but by the standards then and the struggles within the motion picture industry in the early nineteen-seven, it was a very small budget. Coppola got more. Keep in mind, The Godfather is a huge book and has many subplots, and he made the case that he was going to focus as much as he could on the trials and tribulations of the family. And he stood his ground, and that’s. There were many times where he had to stand his ground over the next few months.

00:09:24
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Harlan Liebow, author of The Godfather Legacy, tell the story about how The Godfather came to be. Heck, even as a best-selling piece of fiction, it barely happened. I mean, it was Mario Puzo’s last shot, and what do you know, it becomes a hit. Coppola doesn’t even want to do the film. The only reason he’s been picked is because he’s Italian, and he’s probably cheap. And he says no the first time, but he needs the money. When we come back, more of the story of how The Godfather came to be with Harlan Liebow here on our American stories, and we continue with our American stories and with Harlan Liebow, author of The Godfather Legacy: The Untold Story of the Making of the Classic Godfather Trilogy. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

00:10:24
Speaker 2: The Godfather is a movie about violence and about, in some ways, about love and about family. But it’s one of the best American films ever made, or one of the best films ever made about power, how power can be used, and how power can corrupt. And those are the elements that Coppola went for. And in all fairness, the movie was very, of course, very popular at the time, but even more important, it is a lasting treasure of American cinema. If you ask practically anyone the kinds of films they like, or the films of their favorite films, The Godfather is almost always and of the films that everybody, everybody really loves. It really was quite universal. The issues of love and family and conflict are so clear in the film. I mean, let’s face it, there’s a lot of violence in The Godfather. Of course there is. That is part of the story, it’s part of the culture. It tells the story in many ways of the family itself. But the problems within the family, in particular, of course, Al Pacino playing Michael, and his struggles to stay away from the family business all fall apart, and that’s the intriguing part of the story, right up to the very end. What you do with the headstrong, violent oldest son. That sort of takes care of itself about halfway through the movie when he’s killed. But then always, that the story of Fredo, the middle son, and what happened to him or what didn’t happen to him, how he was sort of left by the side of the road in many respects. That gets picked up again in much more detail in Godfather Part Two.

00:12:01
Speaker 3: Mike, you don’t come to Las Vegas and talk to a man like Moe Greene like that.

00:12:08
Speaker 5: Fredo, you’re my older brother and I love you.

00:12:14
Speaker 3: But don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family again.

00:12:20
Speaker 2: Ever. But it was a real problem filming The Godfather. The film was shot primarily in the spring and summer of 1971, and they were filming in nineteen, what was supposed to be, in 1946, 1947, and 1948. Well, it doesn’t seem all that long before. It was only twenty-three years earlier. But it was a long time in the history of New York, and the city really looked nothing like it did in 1946. And constant attention to detail and fixing the streets and putting up posters or big trucks to block things that were would otherwise be seen on screen. That was a constant challenge when making the film. One of the great pleasures of watching The Godfather is watching the detail of the film, just adding extra details. Dean Tavalaris, the production designer. There’s one scene on the streets of a tenement area where James Caan’s character, Sonny, the oldest son, beats up his brother-in-law because his brother-in-law has attacked Sonny’s sister, the youngest in the family. Look around at what’s going on in that scene, just at the decor and the posters of political campaigns and posters that are falling down and tattered away that have posters underneath them, or the cars, or the shepherd’s-crook light poles. All that detail was a constant challenge, but well worth it because The Godfather looks incredibly good and incredibly realistic. Actually, when you look at it now, I believe Brando’s character is only in the three-hour Godfather about forty-three minutes, something like that, but his aura is over every frame of the film, and he had exactly what it took to make that character of Don Vito Corleone come alive.

00:14:13
Speaker 1: Godfather.

00:14:14
Speaker 5: I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.

00:14:17
Speaker 4: You cannot like him on what’s wrong to.

00:14:22
Speaker 3: That’s how you turn out a Hollywood phenocure, Christ, like a woman.

00:14:27
Speaker 5: What could I do?

00:14:29
Speaker 4: What can I do?

00:14:30
Speaker 3: What is that look? I went to the rest well in a month from Novice, Hollywood. Big shot’s gonna give you what you want?

00:14:42
Speaker 5: Too late?

00:14:43
Speaker 1: They started shooting in a week.

00:14:45
Speaker 3: I’m gonna make him an awful game refuse.

00:14:51
Speaker 2: Well, now we’re looking at it in retrospect a lot of years later. Then, Brando was viewed by some as not bankable, so most of his films just before The Godfather had not done very well at all. He was also viewed as impossible to work with by some people, who probably unfairly said that he was really very tough on the set and was it difficult for directors for many things, many reasons. He was not anyone’s choice to be the Don except for Coppola, who went for him, who met with Marlon Brando, and Brando certainly wanted the part and created his own character right in front of Coppola’s eyes as he envisioned the Don.

00:15:33
Speaker 4: Being the president of Paramount told me in these words: he says, “Francis, as president of Paramount Pictures, I am telling you that Marlon Brando will not be in this movie.” I said, “We have to be like ninjas. We have to go to Mr. Brando’s house to make any noise, and we’ll just sort of photograph him experimenting to be in Italian.” So we went. We arrived very early in the morning, and no one said a word, and he came out. He had long blonde hair. He was only forty-seven. He was quite a handsome young man. And as he came out in a beautiful Japanese robe. I remember he came out, and he took his long hair and he kind of put it up behind his head, pinned it in. He got some shoe polish and he started to make it black and kind of do that, and then he put a white shirt on. And I remember he took the white shirt and he was taking his collar. Interesting about little seeds of a character. And he started to bend the end of the collar, and he said, “Those Italian guys collar is always bent.” And he even said, “Oh, maybe his voice should be very hoarse, because he shot in the story in the throat.” He was talking like this like that, not saying anything, and meanwhile we were photographing this. So he even took some Kleenex and he put it into his mouth, you know, and he said, “Those guys looked like bulldogs.” And it was a miracle because the character was growing out of this. I took this tape. I decided to go to New York and show it to the chairman and the owner of Paramount, who was named Charles Bluhdorn, who was an interesting person, and he had a company called Gulf + Western. It was the first conglomerate, and one of the companies he owned was Paramount.

00:17:31
Speaker 3: I’m gonna make him an offer. Can a few.

00:17:35
Speaker 4: Charles Bluhdorn comes out and he recognized Mel Francis. “What can I do?” I said, “Well, look at this,” and I turned on the tape recorder and there is Marlon Brando with this long blonde hair rolling it up. And Charles Bluhdorn said, “No, no, absolutely not Marlon Brando. Ah.” And as, at that moment, I knew that I had Brando in the part. And of course Brando to this day is thought of for that role.

00:18:09
Speaker 2: And Coppola was right. And Coppola had to fight for practically every character, but the key characters he had to fight, fight for, were first Marlon Brando and then later Al Pacino.

00:18:19
Speaker 1: And we’ve been listening to author Harlan Liebow tell one heck of a story about the greatest film ever made in American history—that is, The Godfather—and a lot of film critics, but The Godfather, too, right there with it, and that never happens with sequels. And so much of it had to do with Francis Ford Coppola’s artistic nature, him seeing and understanding the core of the story, which was that it was not a mob film. It was a film about power, violence, love and family at the center. And my goodness, having to create a film in the streets of New York in 1971 and make it look like it was 1947 or 1948. It was pulled off by a master. And then there’s that talk of the scene with Marlon Brando and him showing it to this titan, this head of gol