The Godfather
16:45 Share

In 1972, one of the greatest movies ever made was released, The Godfather. The Godfather is not only one of the most critically acclaimed movies in history, but was also one of the most successful at the box office. Despite its overwhelming success, however, it almost didn't get made and could have wound up a very, very different film. Learn more about The Godfather and the fascinating story of its production, casting, and filming on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

This episode is sponsored by NerdWallet. When it comes to general knowledge and history, you know I've got you covered. But who do you turn to when you need smart financial decisions? If your answer is NerdWallet, then you're absolutely right. And if it's not, let me change your mind.

The nerds at NerdWallet have spent thousands of hours researching and reviewing over 1,300 financial products. And they have the tools you need to make smarter financial decisions. Looking for a credit card? Go beyond the basic comparisons, filter for features that matter to you, and read in-depth reviews. Ready to choose a high-yield savings account? Get access to exclusive deals and compare rates, bonuses, and more. House hunting? View today's top mortgage rates for your home sweet home.

Make the Nerds your go-to resource for smart financial decisions. Head to nerdwallet.com forward slash learn more. NerdWallet, finance smarter. Disclosure, NerdWallet Compare Incorporated NMLS 1617539. This episode is sponsored by ButcherBox. We're now in the thick of football season and that means inviting friends over to watch the big games. If you're going to have people over, then you're going to have to feed them. And no matter what your game day food selection is, ButcherBox can help you out.

Butcher Box is currently offering new members a great deal that will help in your game day preparations. New members can get their choice of ground beef, chicken wings, or bacon for free in every order for the lifetime of your subscription. Want to serve burgers or sliders? Then go with the ground beef. If you love chicken wings, then you can go for that. And of course, bacon goes with everything. No matter what you select, Butcher Box only offers the highest quality meats and seafoods.

So sign up to ButcherBox today by going to butcherbox.com slash daily to receive your choice of ground beef, chicken wings, or bacon for free in every order for the lifetime of your subscription. Plus, you get $20 off your first order. Once again, that's butcherbox.com slash daily and enter code daily at checkout.

For the purposes of this episode, I am going to assume that you have seen The Godfather. And if you haven't, then you have a homework assignment. The Godfather is one of the few films that's considered one of the greatest films of all time, and it is also one of the best performing box office films of all time if you adjust for inflation. It's one of the most quoted films in history, and that alone is good enough reason to watch it, just so you know what someone is referencing when they say that you'll make them an offer they can't refuse.

However, as acclaimed as the movie is, it almost didn't get made. Many first-rate actors and directors passed up the opportunity to work on the movie because they thought it would bomb. The story of The Godfather begins with the novel of the same name written by Mario Puzo. Puzo had been a rather unsuccessful writer through most of the 50s and 1960s. His first novel, The Dark Arena, was published in 1955.

It had good reviews, but it wasn't commercially successful. He worked as an assistant editor for a Pulp Fiction magazine and came up with the idea of a book about the Mafia simply because it had broad appeal. Despite being an Italian-American who grew up in New York City, he had no first-hand experience with the mob. He never knew any mobsters. He just did a lot of research on the subject. In 1967, he was working on The Godfather when his publisher reached out to Paramount Films Vice President of Production, Peter Barton.

They felt his unfinished book would make a good screenplay and they wanted to give Paramount a chance to make a bid on the rights to the book before it was published. Bart liked what he read because he felt it was more than just a mafia movie. So he offered Puzo $12,500 to option the book and another $80,000 if the book should actually be made into a movie. Puzo took the deal because he had gambling debts and he had no clue if the book would actually be successful.

It turned out the novel was successful. Very successful. The Godfather was released in 1969. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for 67 weeks and sold 9 million copies in the first two years after its release. Paramount's gamble paid off handsomely. In 1970, Paramount decided to proceed with the film and appointed Albert Ruddy as its producer. Ruddy had previously produced two films, both of which were on time and under budget.

His biggest claim to fame was producing the TV show Hogan's Heroes. If you ever wanted to know whose idea it was to make a sitcom situated in a German prisoner of war camp, it was him. Ruddy's vision was to hire as many Italian-Americans as possible to make the film authentic. The first decision was to hire a director. The first choice was the Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone, who was responsible for the entire spaghetti western genre. Leone turned it down so he could work on his own mafia film, Once Upon a Time in America.

Then they offered the movie to a series of directors, Peter Bogdanovich, Peter Yates, Richard Brooks, Arthur Penn, Franklin Schaeffer, Costa Gavras, and Otto Preminger. All of them turned The Godfather down. Paramount then decided to go with a young Italian-American director by the name of Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola directed a few low-budget films that received good reviews. However, he had just won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay for the movie Patton.

Coppola also initially turned down The Godfather, but he needed money. He changed his mind after reading the book and realized it wasn't just a mafia movie, but a movie about a family. Paramount's idea for the film was to change the setting from the novel. Instead of post-war New York City, they wanted to make it a contemporary film set in St. Louis and shot in a film studio.

Coppola fought to have the setting of the film true to the novel and shot on location in New York. With the success of the novel, Paramount agreed, even though it meant a larger budget. There were several points early in the production where Coppola thought that he for sure was going to be fired. The studio thought that the project was too big for him and were ready to bring on Elia Kazan.

Paramount hired Puzo for $100,000 and a percentage of the box office to write the screenplay along with Coppola. The two actually wrote separate screenplays and then just merged them together. One of the first problems the film had was with the Italian-American Civil Rights League. This was actually a public relations front organization which was led by Joe Colombo, the head of the Colombo crime family, one of the five families in New York.

They claim that the film portrayed Italian-Americans in a bad light and threatened to boycott the film and get several unions to go along with the boycott. Ruddy met with Joe Colombo and agreed to remove the words mafia and costa nostra, which actually wasn't much of a concession as the words only appeared twice in the screenplay. They also promised to give the proceeds from the movie's premiere to help build a children's hospital.

The Italian-American Civil Rights League approved the script and eventually became a supporter of the film, providing many of the extras for it. The next challenge was casting. The biggest role was that of Vito Corleone. Puzo wanted Marlon Brando for the role. In fact, he sent a personal letter to Brando to get him interested. Coppola wanted either Brando or Laurence Olivier. The studio, however, didn't want Brando at all. He was in his mid-40s and at this point was considered to be washed up.

His last several films performed poorly, and he was notoriously difficult to work with. Other actors considered for the role included Charles Bronson, George C. Scott, Richard Conte, Anthony Quinn, Ernest Borgnine, and Orson Welles. Richard Conte actually appears in the film as Don Barzini. After months of pressure, Puzo and Coppola eventually got Paramount to relent on Brando, but there were conditions.

Brando had to do a screen test, he would receive no money up front, and had to put up a bond to ensure that he wouldn't delay production. Coppola didn't want to offend Brando, so he tricked him into thinking that he needed to perform a makeup test rather than having him do an actual screen test. Brando put Kleenex in his cheeks, shoe polish in his hair, and recorded a scene. The studio was impressed and hired him, and he ended up making $1.6 million from the film.

Robert Duvall was Coppola's choice to play Tom Hagen right from the start. The role of Michael Corleone was the last major one to be cast. Paramount wanted Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, or Ryan O'Neill for the part. Coppola wanted Al Pacino for the role. Paramount's primarily concern was that Al Pacino was too short. The studio actually offered the role of Michael Corleone to Burt Reynolds. Brando threatened to quit if Reynolds got the part, and Reynolds declined.

They then offered it to Jack Nicholson, but he declined because he felt it should go to someone who was Italian. They ended up giving the role to James Caan. However, Coppola still really wanted Pacino, who was scheduled to be in the movie The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight for MGM Studios. The two studios reached an agreement so Pacino could be in The Godfather. Now, with Pacino as Michael, they moved Caan to the role of Sonny, the eldest son. The role of Connie went to Coppola's sister, Talia Shire.

Robert De Niro was originally cast as Pauly Gatto, the guy who was shot with the cannoli. When the role in The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight opened up, he left to take Pacino's former role, and that made him available for a major role in Godfather Part II, for which he won an Oscar. Veteran stage actor John Cazale played Fredo, the middle son.

Cazal's movie career was really interesting. The Godfather was his first movie, and he only appeared in five movies in his short career before dying of cancer at the age of 42. All five of the films that he appeared in, The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter, were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Ruddy originally cast the role of the singer Johnny Fontaine to the real-life singer Al Martino. However, Coppola then fired Martino and hired the real-life singer Vic Damone. Martino went to a real mob boss, Russell Bufalino, to complain. They leaked some stories to the press about how Martino was originally cast, but it all became moot when Vic Damone quit.

And the reason Victimone quit was because if he took the role, he would have been blacklisted in Las Vegas by Frank Sinatra. Sinatra hated the book and the film because he believed that Johnny Fontaine was based on him. Mario Puzo once introduced himself to Sinatra at a Hollywood restaurant and Sinatra blew up at him and threatened to beat him up. Oddly enough, Sinatra supposedly put out feelers to see if he could buy the rights to the film and produce it himself.

He planned to cast himself as Don Corleone, and one can only imagine completely eliminating the role of Johnny Fontaine. The last interesting casting decision was that of Luca Brasi. The role was given to a non-actor named Lenny Montana. Montana was a former professional wrestler and actually worked as an enforcer for the Columbo crime family. He was the only real mobster in the film. A few notes on the production of the film. The scene with the horse head in the bed?

was an actual severed horse head. The head was procured from a slaughterhouse, and it wasn't killed for the purpose of the film, they just had a horse head. Nino Roda wrote the legendary score for the film. The Godfather theme is one of the most recognizable in cinema history. However, after being nominated for an Academy Award, it was ruled ineligible because it was considered too similar to a score that he wrote for the 1958 film, Fortunella.

I actually had to go hunt down the theme to Fortunella to see how similar it was, and yeah, it's basically the same theme, just with a more upbeat tempo. That being said, the score to The Godfather did win a Grammy. The Godfather premiered in New York on March 14, 1972, and was rolled out nationwide on March 24th.

It was a huge hit. It was the biggest box office draw in 1972. It made more than twice as much as the next most popular film, The Poseidon Adventure, and it was very briefly the highest grossing film in history. It had a domestic box office of $86 million in 1972, and its worldwide box office since its release is somewhere between $250 and $300 million.

Adjusted for inflation, it is one of the top 25 highest-grossing films of all time. The film single-handedly reversed the fortunes of Paramount Pictures, which had previously financed a string of failures. The film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, but it only won three. Best Actor for Marlon Brando, Best Adapted Screenplay for Coppola and Puzo, and Best Motion Picture.

Brando famously did not accept the award, and supposedly Al Pacino was miffed that he had been nominated for Best Supporting Actor when he had more screen time than Brando did. The success of the film resulted in a sequel being approved by Paramount, with Coppola again directing. The Godfather Part II also won the Oscar for Best Pitcher, becoming the first sequel to do so. And Coppola this time won the award for Best Director. In 1990, Godfather III was released, completing the story of Michael Corleone.

The biggest testament to the success of The Godfather isn't the box office receipts or the awards. It's the fact that the film has stood the test of time. Over 50 years after its release, it's widely recognized as one of the greatest films ever. The Internet Movie Database, IMDb, has The Godfather ranked number two for all films. Metacritic, which measures reviews across all critics, has given it a perfect 100%.

Rotten Tomatoes has a critic score of 97% and an audience score of 98%. The American Film Institute ranked it the second best American movie ever, with the fifth best score and the second most popular movie quote. Sight & Sound Magazine's Decadal Survey ranked it the second best film of all time in their director's poll. In 2014, The Hollywood Reporter polled over 2,100 people in the motion picture industry, and it was ranked number one.

Moreover, even mobsters liked the film. The former underboss of the Gambino crime family, Sammy the Bull Gravano, said, "...I left the movie stunned. I mean, I floated out of the theater. Maybe it was fiction, but for me, then, that was our life. It was incredible. I remember talking to a multitude of guys, made guys who felt exactly the same way." The great film critic Pauline Kael wrote in her review when the film was released, "...it

If there ever was a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art, The Godfather is it. Amazingly, instead of one of the greatest films of all time, we very easily could have had a Godfather starring Ernest Borgnine and Burt Reynolds that took place in St. Louis. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiefer.

I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.