Daily Loaf

For the Godfatherophiles among us, and I count myself as a big one (in more ways than one), the latest issue of Vanity Fair does not disappoint.

In a long story, author Mark Seal details the Hollywood and real Mob fights behind the making of the Oscar-winning Godfather. The story’s tease pitches it this way:

In many ways, the men who made The Godfather-director Francis Ford Coppola, producer Al Ruddy, Paramount executives Robert Evans and Peter Bart, and Gulf & Western boss Charles Bluhdorn-were as ruthless as the gangsters in Mario Puzo’s blockbuster. After violent disputes over the casting of Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, they tangled with the real-life Mob, which didn’t want the movie made at all. The author recalls how the clash of Hollywood sharks, Mafia kingpins, and cinematic geniuses shaped a Hollywood masterpiece.

Seal details how producers didn’t want the short Al Pacino as Michael Corleone, among other colorful anecdotes. The piece begins:

It all began in the spring of 1968, when a largely unknown writer named Mario Puzo walked into the office of Robert Evans, the head of production at Paramount Pictures. He had a big cigar and a belly to match, and the all-powerful Evans had consented to take a meeting with this nobody from New York only as a favor to a friend. Under the writer’s arm was a rumpled envelope containing 50 or 60 pages of typescript, which he desperately needed to use as collateral for cash.

“In trouble?,” Evans asked.

And how. Puzo was a gambler, into the bookies for ten grand, and perhaps his only hope of not getting his legs broken was in the envelope-a treatment for a novel about organized crime, bearing as its title the very word the underworld guys wanted to stamp out: Mafia. Though the word had been in use in its current meaning in Italy since the 19th century, it gained recognition in America in a 1951 report by the Kefauver Committee, a congressional group headed by Democratic senator Estes Kefauver, of Tennessee, created to investigate organized crime. The good news, Puzo claimed, was that the word had never before been used in a book or film title.

“I’ll give you ten G’s for it as an option against $75,000 if it becomes a book,” Evans remembers telling the writer, more out of pity than excitement. “And he looked at me and said, ‘Could you make it fifteen?’ And I said, ‘How about twelve-five?’”

Without even glancing at the pages, Evans sent them to Paramount’s business department, along with a pay order, and never expected to see Puzo, much less his cockamamy novel, again. A few months later, when Puzo called and asked, “Would I be in breach of contract if I change the name of the book?,” Evans almost laughed out loud. “I had forgotten he was even writing one.” Puzo said, “I want to call it The Godfather.”

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