Word: puzo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sooner had Paramount announced plans to film Mario Puzo's novel about the powerful leader of a Mafia family than the protests began. The Italian-American Civil Rights League, a group headed by Joseph Colombo, the reputed don of one of New York City's five Mafia families, held a rally in Madison Square Garden, raising a $600,000 war chest to stop the production as a slur on Italian-Americans. Close to 100 letters of protest came in from Senators, Congressmen and New York State legislators. The Manhattan offices of Paramount's parent company, Gulf & Western...
...Coppola fought to get his budget doubled, shift the style to the period in which the book is set (late 1940s and early 1950s), and alter the whole conception of the film. "I saw important ideas in this book that had to do with dynasty and power," he says. "Puzo's screenplay had turned into a slick, contemporary gangster picture of no importance. It wasn't Puzo's fault. He just did what they told him to do." With Puzo's collaboration, Coppola rewrote the script along the broader lines he envisioned. "It was my intention...
...Puzo seemed to be bemused by the already dizzying changes. He had welcomed a Hollywood writing stint as a vacation from the hermit existence of the novelist. His office at Paramount had a refrigerator containing "an unlimited supply of soda pop free," he recounts in an upcoming nonbook entitled, naturally, The Godfather Papers and Other Confessions. "I had an adjoining office for my secretary and a telephone with a buzzer and four lines. This was living." However, between the soda pop and the tennis and the gambling, which Puzo plunged into with relish, he soon found that being the father...
More troubles were to come for Puzo. He be came disgruntled because he had no final say on the picture. He was not allowed to view the finished cut when he wished to, and it was rumored that he had sworn - humorously, no doubt - a Sicilian vendetta against Paramount's Robert Evans...
Flamboyant San Francisco Lawyer Melvin Belli let it be known that he was available. Coppola and Puzo agreed that the actor they saw in the role was Brando (see CINEMA). Once again the Paramount bosses howled. They saw Brando in his more familiar role as the star of money-losing pictures and a moody troublemaker on the set. Brando's shenanigans during the filming of Mutiny on the Bounty had become legend, and the star, who is currently divorced from his second wife, was famous for his sometimes tumultuous off-screen romances...