Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola

4. In a Savage Land: The Godfather

4 In a Savage Land The Godfather You can get a lot more done with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone. —Al Capone I've never made a movie as good as The Godfather, and I don't have the ambition to try. —Steven Spielberg When Francis Coppola first considered filming Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather, he perused the book and found it a rather sensational, sleazy crime novel. But, then, Puzo was not aspiring to create a work of literature. When he conceived it, as he confesses in The Godfather Papers, he had already published two novels that did have literary pretensions, but they went largely unread. He decided to write a novel about the Mafia because this time around he was determined to turn out a bestseller. And that accounts for the liberal doses of sex and violence in the book, which are precisely what turned Coppola off. Deeply in debt, Puzo decided that "it was time to grow up and sell out, as Lenny Bruce advised."1 Progress was slow because Puzo had no direct links with the underworld ; therefore, his knowledge of the Mafia was derived totally from research . In the spring of 1968 he met with Robert Evans, production chief at 88 Part Two: The Mature Moviemaker Paramount, and offered him the screen rights for his as yet unfinished opus. "From a rumpled envelope he took out fifty or sixty even more rumpled pages," Evans remembers. Puzo explained that his novel, tentatively titled Mafia, was going to give the inside story on organized crime. An inveterate gambler, Puzo confided to Evans that he had a $10,000 gambling debt that he had to pay off pronto, and hence he would consider any reasonable advance that Evans proposed. "I've just optioned Mafia for $12,500," Evans immediately replied. He did not know it then, Evans adds, but for that paltry sum, he now owned the rights "to the Hope diamond of literature." Evans's high hopes for the project were not shared by others at Paramount . "Sicilian mobster films don't play," the head of distribution told him. He pointed to The Brotherhood (1968), a Kirk Douglas vehicle that fizzled.2 Evans figured that The Brotherhood failed because almost none of the creative personnel connected with the picture were of Italian descent. The director, Martin Ritt, and the star, Douglas, were both Jewish. Bernard Dick writes that, like Douglas, most of the cast were Sicilian "in make-up only." It was an ordinary crime movie "with a few Italian touches thrown in for good measure."3 Despite the misfire with The Brotherhood, Evans thought that interest in the Mafia was growing in the United States. To begin with, Senator Estes Kefauver's Committee on Organized Crime was convened in 1950. The hearings were televised and acquainted the nation with mafiosi like Frank Costello, who testified before the Committee. In addition, in the fall of 1963 Senator John McClellan's committee investigating organized crime likewise received nationwide attention. The country was ready for a Mafia movie, Evans reasoned. The Godfather, as the book was finally titled, appeared in April 1969. After briefly considering non-Italian directors like Elia Kazan (A Streetcar Named Desire) to direct the picture, Evans became increasingly convinced that only an Italian American director could supply the creative tissue to make a Mafia movie work. "It must be ethnic to the core," he said. "[Y]ou must smell the spaghetti. That's what brought the magic to the novel—it was written by an Italian."4 Peter Bart, a Paramount vice president and Evans's chief assistant, suggested Francis Coppola as a director of Italian ancestry who could fill the bill. Evans recalled the flashbacks in Rain People to the heroine's Italian wedding and decided to go for Coppola. "He knew the way these men ate their food, kissed each other, talked. He knew the grit."5 Coppola could, for example, get across to the mass audience the Mafia's unswerving allegiance to the Sicilian code of silence (omerta) about the inner workings of the In a Savage Land 89 organization, which dictates that a member pay with his life for violating it. That is why most members prefer to call the organization La Cosa Nostra (our affair), signifying that the family business is not to be shared with outsiders. Furthermore, Evans deplored...