The Big Screen (67 page)

That's one explanation for how Altman was making the most innovative American films in the moment of
The Godfather
. By reputation, Coppola's picture is violent. But Brando's Vito Corleone is as adorable as he is magnificent. Think of Joe Pesci in
Casino
(1995), and you realize how much hideous pathology is left out of Vito. He has a kitten in his lap in that opening scene; the enchantment goes all the way to the moment he is playing with a grandson in the garden and has his heart attack. He is gracious, kind, and sad.

If you want to confront real psychotic danger try Mark Rydell's Marty Augustine in
The Long Goodbye
, a sort of stand-up comic gangster until he smashes a Coke bottle in his girlfriend's face. That unexpected moment is something rare in violent movies: it truly conveys the hideous damage of broken life. And that was what Altman was always searching for. Show audiences today the killings in
The Godfather
and they follow the ritual with reverence and satisfaction. (Those final executions are intercut with a baptism service.) But show them the Coke bottle sequence in
The Long Goodbye
and they turn away in distress. “Why did you show me that? Because such things happen?”

“Why should I do it?” Francis Coppola asked his father, Carmine. By chance, they had crossed paths at Burbank airport. Francis had been at the Paramount building all day. “They want me to direct this hunk of trash,” he told his father. He may have heard through the grapevine that the Mario Puzo novel
The Godfather
had already been turned down by Arthur Penn, Peter Yates, Costa-Gavras, Otto Preminger, Elia Kazan, Fred Zinnemann, and Franklin Schaffner. But those guys weren't thirty-one and in debt, like Francis. He told his father he preferred to make art pictures, not lousy anti-Italian mobster stuff. But Dad said take the money and then do your own things. The money turned out to be $125,000 against 6 percent of the rentals.

The Puzo novel had been published by Putnam in 1969 on a $5,000 advance. It sold a million copies in hardback and had a paperback advance of $410,000. With the best will in the world, critics admitted it was a piece of trash, but one the public enjoyed. Paramount, in the person of its production chief, Robert Evans, bought the book on a $12,000 option against $85,000. They hired Al Ruddy to produce it, gave him a copy of the book, and asked what sort of movie he could foresee. Ruddy replied, “An ice-blue terrifying movie about people you love.” These are the first words close to sense on the project.

Ruddy and Paramount chose Coppola for several reasons: the kid had won an Oscar writing the screenplay for
Patton
; he had had his training with the UCLA film school and Roger Corman; he had directed a few films—
You're a Big Boy Now
(1966),
Finian's Rainbow
(1968), and
The Rain People
(1969), none of which had made money—plus, everyone else they asked turned them down; Francis was of Italian descent; and they still couldn't reckon how enormous or prestigious this venture would be. If they had known, they might have got Luchino Visconti, which shows it's best not to know. I realize this sounds irreverent. We take it for granted
The Godfather
is a masterpiece, but that came later.

Puzo had done a script no one liked, but then Coppola sat down with him on a second draft. Meanwhile, the great gamble of casting set in. Paramount had its own ideas: Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra, and Burt Lancaster had all been mentioned as Vito, but Coppola had his mind set on Marlon Brando. This outraged the studio: Brando had done a lot of bad work in the 1960s, and the legend was that he had destroyed
Mutiny on the Bounty
with his salary, his demands, and his delays. Puzo himself had approached Brando, and the actor had warned him that no one would make it with him. Dino de Laurentiis told Paramount that if they used Brando, the film was dead in Italy.

But Coppola had his own casting director, Fred Roos, who had first worked on
Five Easy Pieces
and who was in the habit of going to small plays off Broadway and asking the advice of other actors. That's how Roos saw John Cazale and knew immediately that he was Fredo. No one at first quite grasped the significance of the role of Michael, though the actors under consideration included Robert Redford, Ryan O'Neal, James Caan, Tommy Lee Jones, and even Robert De Niro. But Roos knew Al Pacino and believed he had the eyes for the part, even if his two films so far,
Me, Natalie
(1969) and
The Panic in Needle Park
(1971), suggested nothing like the necessary strength. Robert Duvall would be Tom Hagen, but a Roos pal, Jack Nicholson, had been a contender, too. Francis's sister, Talia Shire, would be Connie. Diane Keaton was cast as Kay, but there were others on the possibles list, including Jill Clayburgh, Blythe Danner, Michelle Phillips, and Geneviève Bujold.

The issue of Vito was still unsettled. A casting list existed, crazy with speculation: George C. Scott was sensible; John Huston was intriguing; but Paul Scofield, Victor Mature, and Laurence Olivier? You have to realize how lucky you have been.

When Coppola insisted on Brando, Paramount turned ugly: they would only take him if he signed a bond guaranteeing no delays, if he agreed to a per diem salary, and if he did a screen test. Those obstacles were meant to provoke anger and refusal. You can understand how Brando had become so “difficult” over the years, and you may appreciate his generosity here. He consented to the screen test. Francis flew down from his home in San Francisco. He hired Hiro Narita as cameraman. And they arrived at Brando's mansion on Mulholland Drive.

The actor put black boot polish in his blond hair. He stuffed a few tissues in his mouth to change the shape of his face. He experimented with a husky voice and a thin mustache. This took half an hour and then they shot some footage on video. When Charles Bluhdorn, the head of Paramount, looked at the test he didn't know who it was, but he said, “Hire him!” So the deal went down whereby Marlon Brando played Vito Corleone for $50,000, with $10,000 a week as expenses and a profit percentage on a rising scale from 1 to 5. Then, when he saw the cut of the film and reckoned it would flop, Brando went to Robert Evans and traded back his points for $100,000. No one ever knows, not even the geniuses.

They shot the film, despite early hints that Coppola might be fired. The cameraman was Gordon Willis and the production designer was Dean Tavoularis. Willis was an East Coast cameraman, masterly but testy. He had just shot
Klute
for Alan Pakula, a study in colored gloom. Coppola encouraged a similar look for
The Godfather,
on the principle that Italian interiors were usually brown and black. Still, the two men argued a lot as Tavoularis (he had been on
Bonnie and Clyde
) delivered sets of such warmth, texture, and shadowy intimacy that we feel at home. But
The Godfather
was never bright or energetic—and those attributes usually attended big American pictures. It was still the industry's idea that the audience deserved and expected a lot of light—for therapy or sizzle. You can say
The Godfather
feels authentically Italian and of the 1940s—Coppola had insisted on doing it in period—but the subdued look is more profoundly emotional. It is a darkness, not too far from wickedness, maybe, yet just as close to comfort, security, and home.

They shot most of it in New York and Sicily, and the costs climbed. When Coppola had trouble with the final conversation between Michael and his father, he asked an old friend, Robert Towne, to come to the location and provide some rewrites. In the end, a film always gets shot, even if everyone there thinks it's a disaster and they can't wait to go home.

It was filmed in the summer of 1971, with Paramount pledging itself to a December opening. But as the editing set in, at the offices of Francis's American Zoetrope, in San Francisco, the picture seemed closer to three hours than two, and not ready until 1972. There were bitter arguments, most of them lied about later in the glow of success. Two editors were at work, William Reynolds and Peter Zinner, with another longtime Coppola friend, Walter Murch, as postproduction consultant. The length of the movie edged back and forth between two hours fifteen minutes and nearly three hours. With the final cost at $6.2 million, it became clear that a Christmas opening was impossible.

There had to be a score, too, and Coppola upset Paramount when he proposed Nino Rota, who had done
La Dolce Vita
(1960) and
The Leopard
(1963). Al Ruddy admitted he had never heard of Rota. The studio had had Henry Mancini lined up. But today, Rota's elegaic score is not simply as familiar as the Tara theme from
Gone With the Wind
. It is another keystone to the emotion of the picture that gives access to a level of feeling not heard in Mancini's music (including the syrup of “Moon River” for
Breakfast at Tiffany's
). Of course, Coppola's father, the dad encountered at Burbank airport, had once played the flute in Arturo Toscanini's NBC Orchestra, and he wrote extra music for the picture.

In the end, Paramount respected the work: they let it play without an intermission, when most theaters wanted that to make their money on refreshments. The film opened in New York on March 14, 1972, and the audience was appreciative, without standing to applaud. Many were taken aback by the violence and the endorsement of this Mafia family. There were some who wrote it off: William F. Buckley said, “it will be as quickly forgotten as it deserves to be.” Arthur Schlesinger found it “overblown, pretentious, slow and tedious.” But in the
Los Angeles Times
, Charles Champlin thought it the fastest three hours in movie history. In the
New York Times
, Vincent Canby called it “one of the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life ever designed within the limits of popular entertainment.” Pauline Kael remarked on “the spaciousness and strength that popular novels such as Dickens's used to have.”

Those instincts about popular appeal proved prescient. For the biggest American shows, movie or otherwise, the reviews rarely matter. Paramount had planned to charge $3.50 for a ticket (more than twice the going rate). But they put it up to $4.00 when they felt the interest in the picture. In its first week, the movie grossed over $7 million. By April 12, it was at $26 million. The eventual gross would exceed $130 million; the rental income to the studio was over $80 million. For a few years,
The Godfather
could claim to be the biggest box office winner in history—it took over from
The Sound of Music
(1965) and would yield to
Jaws
(1975).

Theaters were packed and audiences thrilled in ways that reclaimed the past, especially the mid-1940s, when most of the action takes place. Once again, a three-hour film felt normal, if it worked. The whole value of young filmmakers out of film school seemed like wisdom. If there was a silver age, then
The Godfather
is its crown. So many people were vindicated (if their furious disagreements could be forgotten): Puzo, Robert Evans, Al Ruddy, and Coppola. An ensemble of actors passed into steady careers, and Marlon Brando was back to his old glory for a moment. The gangster film was made respectable, though soon people who knew enough about the Mafia said it was pipe dream. Martin Scorsese delivered
Goodfellas
(1990) to show what the real thing was like, and David Chase's TV saga
The Sopranos
would be slice upon ugly slice, the cold cuts of a dysfunctional family. The Corleones are not dysfunctional. Try heroic.

There's the dream we have always cherished. Willis and Tavoularis had made it plausible. The cast had poured their truth over the screen. Who could dispute the toughness of it all? Still, it was a superb, arranged show, from the moment when a humbled supplicant seeks the Don's grace to the calculated affront to conventional morality that links drastic business slaughter and religious ritual. Coppola had said at the outset, and would reiterate, that it was a study of American capitalism, of crime getting so organized and so American it no longer seemed like crime.

The film is as dark as Michael's having Fredo killed in
Part II
. But we do love these sinister people. On-screen, it became clear Michael was its center, and his dramatic arc is one we have followed so often: the ordinary, decent guy who gets into the light or the limelight and rises to its opportunity. Michael's hitherto secret dream of himself becomes ours.

Audiences had often gone with gangsters before. But Cagney's outlaws paid with their lives, in payment for our fun. Michael is revealed as lethal, cold, a liar to his wife, a man who hires killers and arranges massacres, but he is not repudiated. His authority works on us as much as on his henchmen. Once, he was the white hope of the family—he went to Dartmouth and served with honor in the war. But honor never convinced him. Something else was weighing. “That's my family, Kay,” he says. “It's not me.” But in the film, we realize that becoming his wife does not qualify Kay as family. Michael may be more impressed by his Sicilian bride, Apollonia. He has sex with her, not with Kay (just heirs). Yet he doesn't seem to mourn Apollonia when she is murdered, because death and vengeance have become his trade. It is his code to let business bury personal things. He might kill anyone—he says as much in
Part II
. Forty years ago, nearly, those messages slipped by. But now they seem like a premonition of America.