Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola

5. Decline and Fall: The Godfather Part II and The Godfather Part III

5 Decline and Fall The Godfather PartII and The Godfather PartIII I grew up in a neighborhood where organized crime was a way of life. I never knew these people as criminals. To me they were fathers and sons, childhood friends that I went to school with and sat next to in church. —Bo Dietal, a policeman in the film One Tough Cop I no doubt deserve my enemies. —Walt Whitman When The Godfather became a runaway hit, Coppola's earnings from the film's profits amounted to a small fortune. So he could now afford to move the offices of American Zoetrope, his independent film production unit, from the old Folsom Street warehouse in San Francisco to more ample quarters. He took over the eight-story Sentinel Building at 910 Kearney Street, which had survived the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The edifice , which was painted sea green, was topped by a blue and gold dome that he christened "Coppola's cupola." He remodeled the new home of American Zoetrope to encompass a penthouse office-studio, from which he could look out on the Golden Gate Bridge, and a high-tech postproduction facility , not to mention an espresso machine (no more instant coffee as in his austere, pre-Godfather days). Decline and Fall 113 It was from the new office complex of Zoetrope that Coppola continued to develop film projects, which he arranged to finance and release through the distribution setups of various major studios in Hollywood. Thus The Conversation was a Zoetrope production, financed and distributed by Paramount (see chapter 3), At the outset, Coppola was not enthusiastic about making the sequel to The Godfather. It seemed to him too much like reheating last week's stew. He joked that he would only direct the sequel if he could make it along the lines of a farce called Abbott and Costello Meet the Godfather (a reference to the series of Abbott and Costello comedies like Abbot and Costello MeetFrankenstein ). He was inclined to return to making small personal films like The Conversation, even if he was reduced "to making them on Super 8."1 Charles Bludhorn would not hear of any other director but Coppola taking on the sequel, Coppola says in his DVD commentary on Godfather II. Bludhorn told him, "Francis, you've got the recipe for Coca-Cola, and you don't want to manufacture any more bottles of Coke!" Paramount offered Coppola a handsome salary and a generous slice of the profits, but Coppola was especially interested in artistic control of the production. In negotiating with the studio he demanded that Robert Evans, with whom he feuded constantly on The Godfather, was to have "zero to do with the film" at any phase of the production. This stipulation was not a problem, since, as Biskind states frankly, Evans "was getting deeper into drugs" and eventually "stopped coming to the office."2 An early scenario proposed to Coppola dealt with the death of Michael Corleone, and he declined to consider it. "I did not want to see him assassinated by his rivals or go to jail," he explains. "I wanted to take Michael toward what was in fact his destiny. . . . After winning all the battles and overcoming all of his enemies, I wanted him to be a broken man, a condemned man."3 What finally convinced him to take on the project was his conviction that the public had not morally condemned Michael at the end of The Godfather . He got to hear that some filmgoers actually applauded when the door of Michael's office was slammed in Kay's face at the film's final fadeout . Showing Michael Corleone to be the ruthless, cold-blooded criminal that he has become would provide Coppola with the lead-in to the sequel. He decided to call the film The Godfather Part II, a title that occurred to him when he remembered Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible Part II (1945). "Godfather II was the first American film that did not have a special title for the sequel," Coppola says in his DVD commentary . For example, a sequel to In the Heat of the Night (1967) was called The 114 Part Two: The Mature Moviemaker Organization (1971). "Calling the sequel to a Hollywood film Part //began with The Godfather." TAe aodlathor Fart MM Once Coppola had finally agreed to do the film, Paramount gave...