When it was released 50 years ago this week, The Godfather had broken all revenue records, won the Oscar for best feature film and familiarized the whole world with the mafia, its ruthless traditions and its turpitudes.
When director Francis Ford Coppola, 82 years old today, was offered to adapt this successful novel by Mario Puzo to the screen, he almost refused.
“I was deeply disappointed when I started reading it… It was really a commercial work that Mario Puzo had written to earn money for his children,” Coppola said Monday in Los Angeles, during a screening commemorating the 50th anniversary of his film.
“When they offered me the opportunity to do this, mainly because everyone else had already said no, I too declined,” said this figure in American cinema.
Luckily for him, one of his young associates named George Lucas explained to him that this was an offer he couldn’t refuse because they had to save their small independent production company, American Zoetrope, from bankruptcy.
“Francis, we need that money! The taxman will padlock the front door… You have to take a job like that, “said his friend the one who was going to create the phenomenon Star Wars a few years later, Coppola said.
The sequel is legend.
The Godfatherreleased on March 24, 1972 in a large number of cinemas, became six months later the film with the highest grossing in history, snatching this record from the emblematic Gone with the windproduced in 1939.
According to experts, The Godfather in a way ushered in the era of blockbusters, confirmed three years later by a new box office record set by Jaws by Steven Spielberg.
According to Peter Biskind in his book The New HollywoodFrancis Ford Coppola largely won his bet with Paramount studios, which had agreed to pay him an extension limousine if the receipts from the Godfather reached $50 million. They had exceeded 130 million at the time, a sum of the order of 880 million current dollars taking inflation into account.
Coppola had at the same time become one of the first star directors, with enough artistic credibility to have all his projects financed.
“It was the beginning of a new era for directors,” writes Peter Biskind.
“Not at all happy”
The Godfather however, a priori had few tricks up its sleeve to achieve such success.
By 1972 gangster movies were largely out of fashion. Four years earlier, Paramount had released The Sicilian Friars with Kirk Douglas, who flopped.
The studio owned the rights to Mario Puzo’s novel, which was growing in popularity, and decided to give it a shot anyway. He had had a hard time finding a candidate: Elia Kazan, Costa-Gavras and Peter Bogdanovich had in turn declined.
Francis Ford Coppola may well be the leader of the so-called “New Hollywood” movement, part of the counter-culture and wanting to modernize cinematographic codes, he was far from having the notoriety of the latter.
He had no big successes to his credit and it was mainly because of his Italian origins that Paramount had approached him.
After having said “yes”, Coppola had all the same set his conditions: Paramount wanted an adaptation quickly done well, and above all cheap, but the director had asked for a bigger budget. In particular, he wanted the film to take place in New York in the 1940s, which involved a significant cost in terms of sets and costumes.
This meant that the $2 or $2.5 million budget “was probably going to be at least double that.” “And they weren’t happy with that at all,” recalls the director.
Coppola had also taken the beak with the production concerning the casting.
The only star of the film, Marlon Brando, was on the return. Al Pacino, still relatively unknown, was not “the big, handsome guy” they wanted. “Al is very handsome, but in his very own way,” Coppola joked.
“All the women loved him very much. Al Pacino was very attractive to girls. I wondered why exactly, but it has always been the case, ”added the filmmaker.
Ultimately, The Godfather won the flagship Oscar for Best Feature, Brando won Best Actor that year, and Al Pacino was one of three film stars to be nominated for Best Supporting Actor.