Introduction
We hope that you enjoyed the first part of Cinema Scholars’ 50th-anniversary celebration of Francis Ford Coppola’s groundbreaking 1972 film, The Godfather. In case you missed it, you can read it here. We invite you to read the second and final installment in this tribute to one of the great films in cinema history.
Below we’ll explore filming and the growing tensions between Paramount, Robert Evans, and Coppola. We also get into the film’s post-production as well as its iconic score. Finally, we’ll document the release of The Godfather and its incredible accomplishments. As well as the film’s enduring legacy and the impact that it’s had on us for the last 50 years.
Pre-Production
If getting to the point of starting production on The Godfather was a nightmare, filming would take this nightmare to another level. Producer Albert Ruddy and his assistant Bettye McCartt would navigate this nightmare on an almost daily basis. This was in order to allow Coppola’s vision to be seen on the screen.
The pair fended off meddling Gulf+Western executives (the Owners of Paramount), seedy figures in the Cosa Nostra, and Frank Sinatra, who hated Puzo’s book and was livid. It was pretty clear that the pathetic character of popular crooner Johnny Fontaine was based on Sinatra. It got so bad, that Sinatra berated Puzo publicly at Chasen’s Restaurant outside of Beverly Hills in 1969. Puzo later recalled the encounter:
“Sinatra started to shout abuse…I remember that, contrary to his reputation, he did not use foul language at all. The worst thing he called me was a pimp, which rather flattered me…What hurt was that here he was, a northern Italian, threatening me, a southern Italian, with physical violence…This was roughly equivalent to Einstein pulling a knife on Al Capone. It just wasn’t done. Northern Italians never mess with Southern Italians except to get them put in jail or get them deported to some desert island.”
One of Coppola’s first arguments with the film’s producers was the director’s insistence that The Godfather is set in the 1940s. Paramount’s intention was to make this a contemporary film. Hence, you don’t need vintage cars. You also don’t need to have expensive vintage wardrobes that you need in a period piece.
On top of everything else, Evans and the rest of the suits at Paramount were systematically trying to get rid of Al Pacino, right as filming was commencing. Evans felt that Pacino was too short for the role and would affect the scenes he had with the other actors. Ruddy and Coppola were waging an uphill battle against Paramount that was only just beginning.
Filming
Principal photography on The Godfather commenced in New York City on or about March 29, 1971. It didn’t help things that Coppola and his producer, Al Ruddy, were also getting into spats over the production of the film. Subsequently, Coppola was in constant danger of getting fired by Paramount head Robert Evans.
Filming on location, The Godfather would be shot primarily in New York City and the surrounding areas, as well as in California and Sicily. As a result of budgetary constraints, the scenes set in Las Vegas were not shot on location. The Corleone compound is located at 110 Longfellow Avenue in Staten Island, NY. The wall around the compound was made of styrofoam.
The costs to make The Godfather was rapidly starting to spiral upwards. As a result of this, Robert Evans and Paramount Pictures were starting to become more involved and trying to keep costs down. At one point early on in the film’s production, Coppola receives a phone call from his Agent, who loudly states:
“Don’t Quit! Whatever you do don’t quit, just let them fire you!”
One of the earliest sources of contention between Paramount and Coppola was with regards to Academy-Award-winning cinematographer Gordon Willis. Nicknamed the “King Of Darkness,” Evans was furious that he could barely see what was being filmed. It took a lot of arguing and convincing by Ruddy and Coppola to make the studio understand.
Heavy amounts of facial makeup were being hidden by Willis’ dark lighting. In addition, Willis used shadows and dark lighting to reflect the darkness within his characters. This was a sharp contrast to the happy Kodachrome brightness of the wedding that takes place at the Corleone compound at the beginning of the film. Willis reflected back in 1997:
“In the opening of ‘Godfather,’ I thought juxtaposing an underbelly of evil in Don Corleone’s darkened room with this bright, festive wedding that was taking place outside was a wonderful way of doing it…You cut back and forth between those two things, offering a visual subtext to the wedding, and the audience is immediately aware that not everything is always what it seems here”
Moons, Pranks and the Mafia
As the tensions on set grew more serious, the cast of The Godfather looked for ways to blow off steam. This inevitably turned towards pranks and practical jokes. James Caan and Robert Duvall would soon begin dropping their pants and mooning Oscar-winning legend Marlon Brando at various times during the production.
Caan, who portrayed Brando’s onscreen son Santino ‘Sonny’ Corleone, stated that Brando was the champion prankster during filming. In addition to the constant mooning, Brando stuck bars of lead in the bed that he was in as it had to be carried up a flight of stairs over and over again as Vito returns from the hospital. Caan later stated:
“They’re standing at the wedding ceremony when they posed for that picture, and there are 500 extras, old ladies, old men, kids, everybody…Bobby Duvall sees the ultimate moon. He and Brando had a race to drop their pants and Bobby’s got hitched, and Brando beat him, bent over and spread his cheeks, and mooned everybody. We had this belt made ‘Moon Champion’ hand-tooled leather. Brando got it”
Filming of The Godfather came up against strong backlash and protest from the Italian-American Civil Rights League. These protests were spearheaded by Joseph Colombo, boss of the Colombo crime family. These protests put the entire production in jeopardy. Al Ruddy eventually was able to secure a deal with Colombo and the IACRL on the condition that the word ‘Mafia’ would be excised from the script.
Francis Ford Coppola spotted one of their bodyguards, Lenny Montana, and cast him on the spot to portray Luca Brasi, henchman, and killer for Vito Corleone. Montana, a former wrestler, was by no means a trained actor. As a result, Montana was extremely nervous when filming his scenes with his idol, Marlon Brando.
Montana was missing his marks and messing up his lines. Coppola asked James Caan to help Montana relax so he could get thru the scene. Subsequently, Caan convinced Montana to play a practical joke on Brando in order to loosen up the hulking bodyguard. Caan wrote the words ‘fuck you’ on a piece of tape, attaching it to Montana’s tongue. When filming starts, Montana sticks out his tongue and Brando falls to the floor in hysterics.
Art Imitates Life
Throughout the production of The Godfather, Coppola kept a ‘notebook’ that contained his thoughts and ideas about each scene. This notebook was later published as “The Godfather Notebook” in 2016. It documented his thoughts, fears, and the cliches that he was trying to avoid. Further, it also contained pages from Puzo’s novel, with Coppola’s annotated notes in the margins. In a 2016 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Coppola reflected:
“Having been raised in the family of Italian Americans who – all of them were accomplished musicians. They weren’t gangsters, certainly. But so much of the detail of life – what the bottle of anisette looked like, the fact that they would sometimes send out for Chinese food…I used those details in the film…I knew that the Italian American didn’t speak with an Italian accent. One of my big arguments with the studio was saying…he would speak more with a Brooklyn accent that’d be more like Eddie Carbone in “A View From The Bridge,” you know?”
Coppola had written in his ‘notes’ that the characters in The Godfather had to be believable. Peter “Pete” Clemenza, the mentor to Don Vito, was a perfect example of this believability. Clemenza, one of the two original capos in the Corleone family, ruled over the family’s territory throughout The Bronx.
Coppola wrote in his notebook that Clemenza had to be believable as the type that would be everybody’s favorite uncle, but also a killer. In reality, Coppola had twin uncles that the character was loosely based on. Both of them, a little on the heavy side, and not as accomplished as the other members of the director’s family.
A Horse’s Head
One of the most iconic and infamous scenes in The Godfather is the horse head turning up in the bed of a successful film producer Jack Woltz. This scene has become one of the most iconic scenes in cinema history. While a fake head was used in rehearsals, Coppola used a real one for filming. The screams from actor John Marley were legitimate.
This was also a very famous scene in Mario Puzo’s novel. The audience who had read the book was expecting it. Coppola needed to figure out a way to trick the viewers so that what they knew was going to happen, might not happen. That’s why Coppola changed it slightly from Puzo’s novel. In the film, Coppola hides the head deep within Woltz’s blood-soaked silk sheets. Coppola later reflected:
“Well, when I had to direct that, I thought, maybe it would be interesting…you know, to trick them, to make them think something else…that maybe he had been mortally wounded. He wakes up and he feels something weird, and he uncovers the sheet and there’s some blood…Maybe his leg has been shot off or he’s been castrated…let the audience think something else has happened…Then as he panics and flings the bloody sheets away, it then reveals the severed head of the horse”
Post-Production and Editing
After principal photography on The Godfather had concluded on August 7, 1971, Coppola now had to shift his focus towards editing the film to a manageable length. A length that both Robert Evans and Paramount Pictures would be agreeable to. Coppola’s film was essentially re-written in the editing suite by six different people. Two of them, William Reynolds and Peter Zinner, would receive credit.
Coppola shot approximately 500,000 feet of footage. More than ninety hours of material. the director removed and replaced scenes to “appease the studio.” The end result was the editing process becoming a maze. Numerous scenes were sliced off and left on the cutting room floor. In making The Godfather a balanced coherent film, Reynolds, and Zinner received a 1973 Academy Award nomination for Editing.
The editing team employs the use of parallel editing. This allows for sharp contrasts in theme and tone throughout. There is no better-orchestrated example of this than Michael Corleone becoming a godfather, both to his niece and to his Cosa Nostra family. The baptism scene used parallel editing, cross-cutting, and the use of montage to brilliantly display this. Walter Murch, an editing consultant on The Godfather, elaborated:
“The audience, without knowing it, is hungry for metaphor…this separation is telling the audience, ‘We need you to complete it. We’re presenting you with a bifurcation here, these things don’t quite add up, so we need you, the audience to, in your own individual ways, put these things together’”
Music
Coppola hired Italian composer Nino Rota to compose the film’s iconic soundtrack and theme music. The director strongly felt that Rota’s music gave The Godfather an ethnic Italian flavor. Feeling that the soundtrack was too “highbrow,” Evans was against it. Coppola eventually convinced the producer to change his mind, letting him use it.
The Godfather soundtrack went on to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score. However, after being determined that a section of the ‘love theme’ portion of the soundtrack had been used in Rota’s score for the Italian film Fortunatella (1958), the nomination was revoked. Rota went on to win the Oscar two years later for his musical contributions to The Godfather: Part II (1974).
Al Martino performs the song “I Have but One Heart” as the character ‘Johnny Fontane’ during the film’s wedding scene. Coppola’s father, Carmine Coppola, an accomplished musician who studied at Julliard, created some additional music for The Godfather as well as its subsequent two sequels.
Release and Reception
The Godfather had its world premiere at the Loews’s State Theatre in New York City on Tuesday, March 14, 1972. Paramount had been pushing for a Xmas 1971 rollout, but Coppola and his team needed more time. To put the anticipation for The Godfather in perspective, the film had already earned $15 million in advance ticket sales nationwide. The film had its national release on March 24, 1972.
To say that The Godfather was successful is an understatement. It was a global sensation, launching all those involved into the stratosphere. The film would remain #1 at the domestic box office for an astonishing 23 straight weeks. Something unheard of today. In the ensuing years, The Godfather has grossed between $246 and $287 million worldwide. Adjusted for inflation, it’s one of the top-25 highest-grossing films of all time.
At the 45th Academy Awards on March 27, 1973, The Godfather won the Oscar for Best Picture, Best Actor (Brando), and Best Adapted Screenplay (for Puzo and Coppola). The film was nominated for an astonishing eleven Academy awards. Since its release 50 years ago, The Godfather has been widely considered to be a genre-defining classic, and one of the most influential films of all time.
Legacy and Rerelease
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of The Godfather, Paramount Pictures has announced that the film will have a limited theatrical run in theaters beginning on February 25, 2022. Further, all three films in Coppola’s Godfather trilogy have been meticulously restored under the watchful eye of its director. These films will be made available on 4K Ultra HD on March 22, 2022. Coppola issued a press release stating:
“I am very proud of The Godfather, which certainly defined the first third of my creative life…It’s also gratifying to celebrate this milestone with Paramount alongside the wonderful fans who’ve loved it for decades, younger generations who still find it relevant today, and those who will discover it for the first time”
In his 2012 essay The Godfather Effect, writer Tom Santopietro stated:
“The film changed Hollywood because it finally changed the way Italians were depicted on film. It made Italians seem like more fully realized people and not stereotypes…it helped Italianise American culture.”
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather changed filmmaking forever. The film revolutionized the sub-genre of the “gangster film” and transcended what we thought this type of film could look and sound like. With its stellar cast of actors, incredible score and soundtrack, lush cinematography, and brilliant screenplay, The Godfather, 50 years later, remains of the true classics of American cinema.
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