Word: puzo
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DIED. MARIO PUZO, 78, Godfather author; in Bay Shore, N.Y. (See Eulogy, below...
...think of MARIO PUZO this way: When I was younger, struggling for a sense of place in the world of letters, this older, wiser author of indisputable talent and success not only offered me steady encouragement but took the time to read my adolescent jottings. But that was Mario: that smile, those mischievous eyes, that wry humor--one part paisano and one part prince. He treated everyone, from studio chiefs to busboys, exactly the same--well, maybe busboys a little better...
Just in case we haven't sussed out the metaphor from dozens of other movies and books devoted to romanticizing Cosa Nostra, Mario Puzo's The Last Don, a six-hour mini-series (beginning May 11, 9:00 p.m. E.T., CBS) based on the author's best-selling 1996 novel, is here to remind us that the Mob functions no more or less rapaciously than any corporation or government, and at least its employees know a good prosciutto when they see one. Hollywood studios are run by vicious souls, the movie tells us; politicians are a meretricious and evil-thinking...
...centuries before the advent of Christianity (and inspired by God, traditionalists believe, centuries earlier). Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer once told author David Rosenberg, "I am still learning the art of writing from the book of Genesis." The words could have been uttered by Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky or Mario Puzo. Dozens died in Israel last month over boundaries Genesis set forth; yet the same tales appear, in somewhat altered form, in Islam's holy text, the Koran...
Based on the book Gotti: Rise and Fall by Jerry Capeci and Gene Mustain, as well as on FBI surveillance-tape transcripts and press accounts, Gotti the movie gives us the former Gambino crime-family boss as a Puzo-esque romantic, a faux plumbing-supply salesman who longs for the days when the Cosa Nostra had real structure, when family loyalty meant something, when the Mafia wasn't so enthusiastically in the business of mergers and acquisitions. "You got a worldwide crime syndicate now," the imprisoned don, played by Armand Assante, bemoans at the end of the film. "There...