When Coppola first learn Mario Puzo‘s The Godfather, the filmmaker was upset to search out that the story was extra of a “potboiler” and never the mental treatise on energy that he envisioned.
However simply as he felt Puzo—whose earlier books he admired—had churned out some bestseller fodder to earn money on this case, he admitted that he wanted the paycheck, too, so he took the job.
Reservations apart, the movie’s story hews intently to the novel, minus the subplot involving—as Coppola put it on NPR’s Recent Air in 2016—the character Lucy Mancini’s “non-public anatomy issues.” Slicing that out, he stated, “did not hurt the remaining half, which everyone knows.”
However signing on to make the film was solely the start of a seemingly infinite array of disagreements with the studio, over the whole lot from the time interval (“the script had hippies in it,” he recalled to NPR) to the placement (“they took me on a visit to go searching at Italian neighborhoods in Kansas Metropolis”) to each actor he wished for the principle roles.
When all was stated and sparred over, although, The Godfather made greater than $250 million on the worldwide field workplace (making it the highest-grossing launch ever till Jaws got here out in 1975) and is extensively thought-about one of many best motion pictures of all time. However although it was named Greatest Image on the 1973 Academy Awards and Coppola and Puzo shared the Tailored Screenplay Oscar, Coppola misplaced Greatest Director to Cabaret helmer Bob Fosse (you’ll be able to watch all that jazz unfold within the FX miniseries Fosse/Verdon). He’d win for The Godfather: Half II in 1975.
