Episode 13: the godfather
Mark Seal has written a book you can’t refuse
“I turned it down because of the horse. Do you believe that? And everybody said, ‘You are such an ass. What is the matter with you?’ I just couldn’t do it.”
GF1.
That’s what the New Jersey gangsters on The Sopranos called the film. To everyone else, it was The Godfather, a 1972 film that saved Paramount Pictures and catapulted the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall and Diane Keaton to the stratosphere. It also reintroduced a struggling Marlon Brando to the world.
In this episode, I interview Mark Seal, author of Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli: The Epic Story of the Making of the Godfather, recently published by Simon and Schuster. The book chronicles the unlikely rise of writer Mario Puzo (author of The Godfather novel), gambling habits, mob connections, Hollywood feuds, casting disputes, on-the-set backstabbing. The more one reads, the more one wonders how the damn thing turned out so well.
I love the book’s tenth chapter (“Tableau: Each Frame a Painting”), which details a six-hour production meeting. Led Coppola, the attendees included cinematographer Gordon Willis, production designer Dean Tavoularis, and costume designer Anna Hill “Johnnie” Johnstone.
“He wanted it to be operatic,” Tavoularis said.
— Todd Melby
More Good Stuff: An analysis of Francis Ford Coppola’s pre-production notebook is available on Jillian Hess’ Substack.
