One theme running through the text of The Godfather: The Official Motion Picture Archives (published by Insight Editions) is that nothing panned out as originally planned—and how may have been for the best. The Godfather's producers tapped over half a dozen directors for the project, including Arthur Penn, Peter Yates, Costa-Gavras, Otto Preminger and Elia Kazan. All of them declined. Francis Ford Coppola wasn’t interested at first in adapting what he regarded as pulp fiction, but the little-known filmmaker relented after his father told him he needed the money. He also got on well with author Mario Puzo, and soon enough relished the opportunity to develop an Italian-American story for the screen.
But finding a director was only one aspect that might have gone differently. Paramount resisted Coppola’s suggestion to cast newcomer Al Pacino, preferring the bankable Robert Redford, Martin Sheen or Ryan O’Neal. Coppola insisted on an Italian American and Pacino passed the screen test. The studio wanted to shoot the film in Kansas City or St. Louis before bowing to Coppola’s demands for location settings in the more expensive environs of Manhattan. Henry Mancini was almost commissioned for the score but Coppola held out again—in favor of the ecstatic melancholy provided by Nino Rota.
Author Peter Cowie (whose previous work including biographies of Orson Welles and Francis Ford Coppola) is an astute critic as he identifies the sources of The Godfather’s enduring power over the imagination. Unlike its sequels, including the much admired second chapter, The Godfather’s characters were sympathetic as well as seriously flawed. In adapting the screenplay from the novel, Puzo and Coppola humanized them and transformed the story into a Shakespearean tragedy. “Marlon Brando’s Don invites us to empathize with him, to recognize the burden that power imposes on every leader,” Cowie writes.
The Godfather set the bar for most every gangster story to come and even influenced the style of real criminals, not only the Italian-American Mafia but throughout the world. No one imagined that this movie, intended as a modestly budgeted midline picture, would become a classic.
A coffee table book full of production stills and other memorabilia, The Official Motion Picture Archives is in published to mark the 40th anniversary of the film’s release.
