WHAT WENT WRONG - The Godfather - Part 1 (Part 2)

Episode Date: February 3, 2025

This week it’s Francis Ford Coppola vs Bob Evans vs everyone. Join Chris and Lizzie for part 2 as they break down the truly insane rivalries behind 1972’s The Godfather. Find out why Coppola’s team briefly turned against him, how James Caan might have beaten up a costar on screen, and why this movie has one of the most dangerous stunts we’ve ever covered. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a great one, about organized crime in America. As always, I'm Chris Winterbauer, joined by our guide today. Lizzie Bassett, Lizzie, how are you doing tonight? I'm doing great. I've been steeped in the tea that is the Godfather, which is, yes, full of organized crime,

both on screen and off screen. Very exciting. And I'm excited to tell you how it wraps up today. I can't wait to hear about it. But before we get into this episode, guys, we have to say thank you. The outpouring of support following the fires here in Los Angeles has been really truly remarkable. Thank you to everybody who's reached out. Thank you to everybody who joined the Patreon and sent a nice note.

We really, really appreciate it. And we would like to give a special shout out to Meredith Farmer. Meredith works for a company called Taylor Stitch Clothes. They make men's clothing, of which I had none after the wildfire, and they very generously sent me a bunch of clothes. The clothes are absolutely fantastic. I truly feel like I could be a featured extra in a Taylor Sheridan show. You can tell that they are absolutely top-notch quality, that they're going to last. Honestly, they might even survive the next time my house burns down. So if you guys are looking for a wardrobe upgrade that's a little rugged and much hipper than what you're currently wearing,

at least in my case, check out Taylor Stitch clothing. And remember, they even made Chris look good. So imagine what they could do for you. Thanks again, Meredith. And that's Taylor Stitch Clothes. We want to give them a really special shout out for supporting folks after the wildfires. All right, Lizzie. Back to the Godfather. Last we heard, we had just witnessed our first whack, so to speak. of this production. That's right. Al Reddy, fearless producer of The Godfather

had just been swiftly fired by Charlie Blodorn, who's the head of Gulf and Western and the Paramount Board for the deal that he made with the Italian American Civil Rights League, aka, Chris? The mafia.

The actual mafia, that's correct. But here's the thing. This was late March of 1971, and Coppola had just started filming across town, and it turns out that the deal that got Al Reddy fired is what got him immediately rehired.

Okay. There we go. Yes. Joe Colombo is a loyal man. And if he's not working with Al Ready, he's just going to shut down all the locations all over again. That's amazing. He's like, why don't you bring back the guy I dealt with before? And we can continue this thing of ours. Exactly. He was like, I'm not doing this. If it's not the men I just made a good deal with. And what if we learned? Organized crime, more ethical and deeper integrity than Hollywood. That's right. Maybe the point of the movie, to be honest. honest. So Coppola begs Bluthorne to reinstate already and Bluthorne does it, but with a caveat. He says, quote, one more line to the press and I will personally choke you to death.

All right. So we're just going. Full mob. Full mom across the board. Well, remember, he also had connections to the mob. Seems like everyone in the 70s either did a bunch of cocaine and or had connections to the mob. The Colombo connection did continue to come in handy throughout filming. especially as they were trying to secure the Staten Island compound for shooting, where they were his houses. They had sign off from most of the people they needed in order to film, but there was one poor guy who was holding out. He didn't want to do it because he said he'd worked his whole life to afford the house, and he didn't want it portrayed as the house of a gangster. And Al Ruddy was like, oh, I'm so sorry. I'm calling Joe Colombo.

Yeah, exactly. So he calls Joe Colombo. Colombo holds a meeting with the three of them. And the guy says that about not wanting to have his house portrayed that way. And Columbus just goes, give me the pen, jams the pen in the guy's hand. And the guy's hand is just shaking as he's signing on the dotted line. Al already was like, I felt a little bad. Yes, Al.

Yeah. Not the best. And as always, the little guy does get squeezed eventually. Oh, well, also all of these filming locations that they were getting through Joe Colombo, they were just passing most of the money that they made off of the godfather back to the mob. Like, that's 100%. They were tithing. Yeah.

So with Reddy reinstated, they were off to the races, and the godfather would end up being shot at 120 New York locations over 67 days. How packed is that? That's insanely packed. I mean, it may just be because I was just knee-deep in Stanley Kubrick's eyes wide shut in which they shot seven locations for 400 days. Oh my God. But that's 120 and 67.

67 days for a three-hour movie. That seems very, very fast. Well, it's actually more because they shot more in Sicily. I think it's a total of 77-ish. That's not, but only 10 days in Sicily, that's not that much, considering everything they did in Sicily, including blowing up a car,

and he gets married, he spends half his life there. Yeah. It's only 10 days. Yeah, they pack it in. Yeah. So as with Ghostbusters closing down New York City streets caused a lot of confusion and pissed local residents off quite a bit. Angry New Yorkers would shout at the crew and the sounds of honking and screaming from the traffic messed up a ton of takes that they had to dub over in post. It was just people saying like, hey, Godfather, fuck you. So let's talk about the production, which Coppola said was, quote, the most miserable time of his life.

and he is including apocalypse now. Oh, because I was about to say, the most miserable pint of your life so far. No, he is including apocalypse now. Wow. The studio did not have a lot of faith in Coppola, and they definitely didn't have a lot of faith in Al Pacino. Right from the beginning, Chris,

there was a pretty bad omen for Al. So he was, like, scruffy looking at the time of the shoot. So the studio sent him to get a haircut and a shave before starting his part as young, a clean cut Michael. Yeah, fresh out of the military. Right. But when the barber heard he was cutting the hair of the guy who was going to play Michael Corleone,

he had an actual heart attack and had to be carried away on a stretcher to the hospital. Oh, my God. And this like 5-7 little guy walks in and he just clutches his chest. Pacino was not on steady footing at all early in the shoot. He was shown some footage of himself. and he felt certain that the studio was going to fire him. You know, he was right. Paramount was not impressed.

Surprisingly, Coppola also seemed nonplussed. What's weird is that the footage they were seeing was early scenes with him and Kay, where he is more subdued. And the way that he described this is he was like, I don't necessarily think, like, I'm not jumping off the screen, but I'm not supposed to. Like, he's supposed to kind of blend in. No, it's almost a misdirect. So he, I mean, that was. what he was going in with, and he's right, but I think they were all so nervous about him already that they were looking at this being like he's terrible. Yeah, it's interesting because, you know,

in a traditional, like, or let's say current Hollywood film, you would think he needs to start to change and show that he can be the boss at the turn at the end of Act 1, right? So 25, 30 minutes into the film. Right, but it takes a lot longer. It doesn't happen for an hour in this movie. In fact, he's hardly in the first hour of this movie. Yeah, that's true. It just goes that it. own rhythm. Yeah, it's like the first, it's really not until Vito is shot while Fredo's, you know, driving him that Michael steps back into the picture. Yeah, Sunny, honestly, isn't it more than Michael is early on? Absolutely. So it wasn't until the scene at Louis restaurant where he really lit up. But even

this scene was an absolute slog to film. It took hours to reset because they had to clean up all the blood, reset the squibs every time. Apparently it was taking so long that Sterling, Hayden, who plays the crooked cop. McCluskey. Yes. Went for a walk and then disappeared. And no one could find him for like hours. But it turns out he just fell asleep on a park bench and was woken up by children throwing

rocks at him. What children? Welcome to New York. Yeah. Awful New York 1970s children. I love it. Yeah. Just chucking rocks out of.

And he was like, I guess I got to get back to set. And a point on those squibs, too, is those squibs are, they have to be applied with makeup. It's not just resetting the outfit, right? where the squibs underneath the shirt. McCluskey, he's got a squib in his throat and then on his forehead as well. So you have to do effectively prosthetic makeup as well. Yeah, the makeup in this movie is insane.

We're going to get into it a little bit. A lot of squibs. And also they were using a very fine powder for the explosions, I think, behind his head. So again, just like tons of cleanup. Pacino definitely knew that his job was on the line and he took the scene very seriously. He got coaching from Al Latieri on how to handle the gun. Remember, Al has some personal family. experience with that. And Littieri also spoke fluent Italian and was trying to help Pacino with it in the

scene. Pacino was not fluent. But Al kept stumbling, couldn't get the lines right, which is why you see him switch from Italian to English in the scene. That was completely ad-libbed. That was Pacino just being fed up and switching. And it works so well. I love that moment. Yeah. I also think it's more accurate to, I guess, my understanding, second generation. Yeah. Italian-American would not. be fluent. And a lot of these guys were not fluent in Italian, you know, by the time they had been raised, those that have been raised entirely in the United States. Right. I mean, he understood enough, but it was at a point where he was like, I need to be able to clearly get my point across. This is not doing it. Yeah. They shot the scene so many times that at one point,

Pacino asked Coppola what his motivation was. And I think it was Coppola's AD said, your motivation is you've been working for 16 hours and the sun is coming up and everybody wants to get the hell out of it. That's great. Yeah. To George Lucas' answer. So now they really had to wrap, but there was one thing left to capture, which was Michael's getaway from the restaurant. Because they were short on time, they hadn't done an actual rehearsal of this sequence. They were just like, just go. So the car pulled up outside the restaurant, but apparently had not been told to fully stop. So Al Pacino just threw himself at the car to try to jump on, you know, how in 1940s cars they

have those little running boards. So he was trying to, like, land that and catch on it. But he missed completely, landed in the street, badly hurt his ankle, and was just laying there. And on Conan O'Brien brings a friend recently he said he was actually really relieved as he was lying on the ground because he was like, I think this might get me fired. And I'm so exhausted. I'm so done with this movie. I'm so done that he was like, thank God, great. This should take care of it.

But unfortunately, Paramount really loved the performance that he had just given. So they shot him in the ankle with some painkillers and had him finished. the day. We'll just numb it up. You're not going to feel this leg anymore, but let's just keep going. You don't need it. Puccino was not the only one who thought he was going to get fired the entire time. So did Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola had assembled an extremely experienced team for the film, including cinematographer Gordon Willis, who had just come off of Clute. Which looks, if you guys, sorry, if you guys haven't seen Clute. It's great. It looks amazing, too. Yes. All of his movies do. All of his movies do. He is a legend. He would go on to shoot the

Parallax View, Godfather Part 2, all the President's Men, Annie Hall, Manhattan, and one of my all-time favorite over-the-top 90s thrillers, Malice. I love Malice. I love Malice. Which you might notice about all those movies is that they're very dark, physically dark, and that is because he is known as the Prince of Darkness because of his propensity to play with shadows. The costume designer was Anna Hill Johnny Johnston, also a legend who had literally outfitted

Brando on the waterfront. and the production designer was Dean Tevalaris, who had previously worked on Little Big Man. So Coppola was by far the youngest and realistically the least experienced on set. Initially, it doesn't seem like this was an issue. He was very welcoming to ideas during the team's pre-production brainstorms, but it started to become clear that he maybe didn't understand sort of the, like, practical application of things in the way that the rest of the team did. I mean, he was coming from indie film, effectively, and these are studio veterans.

Exactly. He was a huge stickler for time period authenticity, but the rest of the team sometimes had to like give him a little help to understand that certain elements need to give a bit to make it a more cohesive picture. Sure. Like he was concerned about the color of the women's lipstick not being exactly accurate. And they were like, yeah, but like you don't actually see women that often in this movie and like, it's going to be okay. Right. Yeah. And like I said, he was absolutely miserable. He was stuck in a tiny apartment with his very, very pregnant wife and two kids, and he couldn't sleep. And before cameras even started rolling, especially Robert Evans, did not trust Coppola. They were immediately concerned that the script at over 170 pages was way too long. It's really long. It's a really long script.

You know, rough math for any folks out there who haven't heard it on this podcast, you assume on average one minute, per page. So that means they're staring down a two-hour and 50-minute film without credits, which would push it over three. It's almost exactly what the film ends up being. Yeah. So that's a very long movie post, you know, the musical road shows of Hollywood that had kind of dominated 15, 20 years prior. Well, he also kept hearing rumors that the studio had sent a spy to the set to keep eyes and ears on the production. And the rumors, Chris, were true. Oh, yeah. Jack Ballard was described by Walter Merch, the film's sound effects supervisor, as Bob Evans, Luca Bratsey. He's an enforcer.

And we killed it, like Luca. Well, he does have a dramatic exit that we'll get to later. He cared about the bottom line, and he was there to enforce it no matter what. Not a particularly creative guy, it doesn't sound like. Do we need women at all? Could we, who cares about the lipstick? Could we do without their lips? His reports back to Paramount and Evans got more and more negative every day,

and it didn't help that Coppola was almost immediately running behind. Yeah. So Ballard would send all the Daly's back with a specific list of every single time he felt that Coppola or one of the actors had messed up. I mean, this is horrible. Like, this is not... If your job exists to find problems, you will find problems. You will find problems, and that's his whole job.

It's so stupid. He has to justify his existence by sending everything that's wrong. That's exactly right. and Copla's insecurities were getting to the crew who were starting to think that maybe the godfather wasn't going to be so great after all. Apparently one time Copeland went to the bathroom and while he was in there in the stall,

two crew members came in and started calling him and the film a quote, load of shit, and he heard the whole thing and he just picked his feet up and listened. It's like high school and the mean girls come in. It's terrible. I'm sure he felt like everyone was out to get him and at a certain point in the production, they actually were.

So Coppola's editor, initially, was a guy named Aram Avakian, who he had worked with previously on You're a Big Boy Now, and Coppola trusted him. But Aram was also a director. At the beginning of the film, Aram had asked Coppola

to staff up the production team with a bunch of his buddies, including cinematographer Gordon Willis. Unbeknownst to Coppola, he had basically staffed Aram's team and not his. Oh. It started to become clear

that Aram wanted Coppola's job for himself. And as the editor, he has actually like a unique position to have a lot of influence, because he kind of sits between Coppola and the studio in an interesting way. Well, he's also in control of a lot of the footage that's going back to the studio. Exactly. I mean, the editor can make something terrible look great and something great look terrible. One night at dinner with Copla and his wife, Aram waited for Francis to leave the table

and then started talking to Eleanor Copla about how the movie wasn't coming together. She said she got the distinct impression that he was trying to use her to convince Francis to quit. Fortunately, this lady was absolutely not having it. No, she, God bless her, will follow Coppola into the sun. Yeah. If you watch her in Heart of Darkness, it's pretty incredible. Yeah, she's not the one to try that with. So Al Reddy had gotten wind of what Aram was up to, and he had warned Peter Bart,

but Bart was still shocked when Jack Ballard announced on a conference call that Copla was suck in big time and Aramovacian was to be the new director. So, sorry, Jack's making that call? He's saying this is what we should do. He doesn't actually have the authority to do that, yes. He's making the suggestion. Got it, got it, got it. So in mid-April, Robert Evans' red emergency phone.

Yes, he has a phone like the president has. Great. The nuclear football. Yes, rang in the middle of the night. And Jack Ballard told him the movie doesn't cut together. And so Bob Evans is like, put Aram on. And Aram told him that individually the shots looked great, but that referring to Coppola, quote,

the fucker doesn't understand continuity. Right. What's interesting to me is that Evans, despite all of the issues that he had had with Coppola, and as we will see, we'll continue to have, does not really seem to buy this. I do think, like, say what you will about Bob Evans, he is a nut, but, like, he has taste,

and I think he knows when he, he sees something special, even if he hates him. I also think he knows people and their machinations, and he can smell a snake a mile away. And the way that Aram has worded it is so specific to not put any blame at the feet of his friend, the cinematographer, Gordon Willis, right? Individual shots look great.

By the way, was lighting stuff way too dark at one point, and they did have to pull him back a little bit. I mean, he's amazing. Yeah. But yeah, that's a really good point. Since Evans didn't immediately fire Coppola, Francis made a wild decision. He picked six people, including Avakian, who he believed were part of the coup, and he fired them all. I mean, good for Coppola. Like, you got to do it. You got to pull the plug. Yeah. And he timed it right, too. He did it like midweek when there was a holiday on the Monday or something so that they couldn't get anything done. And yeah, he just said,

I'm the director and you don't have a job anymore. It sounds like there's a chance of A.K.N. wasn't leading the coup that may have actually been Copeland's first AD, but regardless, they all had to go because clearly they were up to something. Back in L.A., Bob Evans was furious to find out that the AD had made actual offers to other directors, including Ilya Kazan.

Yeah, and that's a huge, enormous overstep of the first AD because it's also an inter-gild over-send overstep. And unless first 80s were not part of the Director's Guild at this point in time, I'm not 100% sure, it would be the equivalent of your first mate attempting to subvert the captain, you know, on a ship. It's... It's a crazy move. Yeah, it's a crazy move. It's, it really is. That's bold. Well, it didn't work. And fortunately, Evans backed Coppola, and Coppola's little midnight murder spree among his own crew paid off. One of Aramovacian's friends that Coppola didn't fire, was cinematographer Gordon Willis.

Now, Willis was kind of a grouch in general, although an incredibly talented one, who would get extremely pissed off if actors even slightly missed their mark. Why is that, Chris? Because he has not enough light to cover them if they step anywhere besides their mark. Yeah.

Exactly. Because he's lighting it so tightly that even a little bit of a deviation from their mark would ruin the shot. Sorry, I will say, one of the reasons I think this movie looks as timeless as it does is it's not overlit.

It looks amazing. Great contrast, deep shadows. It doesn't have that kind of studio light feel or even kind of like the overlit action movie of the 80s, for example. It really feels natural in a way that I think a lot of films, especially a lot of earlier, you know, color films, let's say, like the late 50s and 60s did. Oh, it looked very different.

It looks incredible. Yeah. But also thinking about this as an actor, it's like you have, you're so constrained in terms of your movements, which would be really hard. He had a sign on his camera that said, actors think marks are German currency, which is like...

It's funny, but it's also... It's a little hostile. Yeah, exactly. Like, look at this while I record you do your job. Right, yeah. So this obviously requires a lot of careful preparation on Willis's part, but Coppola was very partial to changing things on a whim,

so they really did not get along at first. While shooting the family dinner scene after Don Corleone has been shot, Coppola decided to change everything. And Willis is like, that's fine, but I need to redo all of the lighting now. And Coppola's like, nah, it's fine. Let's just go. Let's go now.

They end up screaming at each other with Willis saying, you don't know how to do anything right and storming off of the set. And Coppola immediately calls for another one of the cameraman, Michael Chapman, to go ahead and shoot the scene. And this guy literally runs away and locks himself in the bathroom because he does not want to get involved. Yeah, because he's probably concerned that he's going to get fired by his boss, who is Gordon Willis. By either of them. Yes, totally.

Yeah, exactly. So Coppola just absolutely explodes, runs off to his office, and literally punches down his door. Like, breaks his door into tatters. It has to be replaced by Carpenter's the next day. Anyway, they were fine. They resolved it. They got back. They're best friends by the end of the week.

One person who did back Coppola majorly was Brando, and he said that he would walk if Coppola were fired. So that must have carried some weight. And I think it's probably a pretty big reason that Coppola kept his job through a lot of this. Now, to top everything off, as I said, Coppola's wife was super duper pregnant when this started. And immediately after filming the sex scene between Sunny and the random bridesmaid, Coppola was informed that Eleanor was in labor. So he ran and grabbed a camera and headed to the hospital. It turns out they were actually waiting to tell him until the scene had wrapped.

I would have been so mad. I'll jump in briefly, if I may, one story really quickly, even worse than this, that's related. I believe on the shoot of full metal jacket, I think it was Matthew Modin's wife went into labor, and it was going to be a C-section. And Kubrick told Moding he shouldn't go because he needed to finish the shoot. And he basically said, you'll just get in the way of the doctors, get queasy and throw up. You're more useful here. And Moding said, if you don't let me go, I will break my own hand.

so they have to take me to the hospital. And Kubrick said, fine, but you have to be back here tomorrow, 8 a.m., first thing, to finish your scene. Jesus. Because we need 100 more takes. That's terrible. Well, Chris, the baby was a girl. She was born on George Lucas's birthday, smack in the middle of making the godfather. Who was it?

Sophia? Yes, it was Sophia. And you can actually see her in the movie. She is the baby playing Connie and Carlo's son in the baptism scene at the end of the film. I was wondering, that's such a friend. fresh baby. They literally popped Sophia Coppola out, and they put her in the baptism. And she's like, shoot it.

Let's do it. Yes. Now, this wouldn't be an episode about the godfather without us talking about that horse's head. So, yes, it's a real horse's head. Let's get into it. Coppola was insistent from the beginning that the horse's head that the godfather has placed in film producer Jack Wolts' bed should be real. not only that, he actually wanted real blood, like, from a butcher.

He was like, why can't you just go to any butcher and ask for a bunch of buckets of pig's blood? And production designer Dean Tavilaris is like, you can't do that for a lot of reasons, but mainly because blood coagulates and you're going to be shooting for a long time. Yeah. So he created a mixture using caro syrup that does congeal after a while, but doesn't go up the same way that actual blood would. Now, Paramount, obviously not team. actual fresh horses head. So initially they sent a dried up, just ratchety, taxidermine horse's head that they

said weighed like two pounds was filled with straw. It was sea biscuit said. It was disgusting. It's just you could like kick it around like a pinata. Yeah. It was basically a hobby horse. It's like what they said. Yeah. So clearly not usable. No. And Copla also wants to take it one step further. He's like, it doesn't actually just have to be a dead horse. I need it to be a dead racehorse because racehorse's heads look different. Okay. And you got to put lipstick on it. Yeah. And it needs to be period appropriate lipstick on that racehorse's head. So Al Reddy's poor assistant, Betty McCart, was charged with finding an actual fresh racehorse's head. None of the men want to deal with it. No. They find this young woman assistant. And they say, all right, honey.

All right, tuts, what's up? All right, Tuts, you got one job. Well, she did it. She called a place that made dog food using horses, and they're like, ooh, lucky you. A racehorse was just put down, and you can come get the head. Unfortunately, for her, the Teamsters refused to go get it when they found out what they would be picking up. So she had to go out there in a limousine and pick up a stinking fresh race horses head and drive it back from, like, New Jersey.

to where they were shooting. Oh, my God. Other versions of the story have the art director selecting the exact horse whose head they wanted before it was put down. Right. Got it. What a job. Also, poor John Marley, the actor playing the film producer,

had to shoot with that thing in his bed for upwards of eight hours. And they kept all the windows closed. So it smelled horrible. We had a cat die under our house a little while ago and I had to go through the crawl space to get it and it was one of the more awful experiences of my life

which tells you two things. One, I'm a wuss and two, I've had a very nice life. But that, I cannot imagine having that dead animal in my bed for eight hours while filming a scene with the windows closed because it smelled ripe. And also they're telling him like,

hey, stretch your legs out like you're asleep and he's like, no thanks. You had a nice dream. Give it a little shake. Oh my God. At the end of the shoot, he was asked if he wanted to keep the pajamas as a keepsake, and he goes, I'll tell you where to put the pajamas. Wow.

So in addition to the horse's head, of course, we also have to talk about Marlon Brando. Brando's makeup in this movie is incredible because remember that he is only 47 years old. You can actually look up before and after pictures of him in the makeup chair. And the transformation is, it's insane. It looks like him and then his father or something. something. Yeah. Also, it's without applying a ton of prosthetics. Like, they're not doing that much on him, which I think is why it looks so good. Exactly. Because it's so restrained, you believe it more. I think part of the problem today is they'll do a ton of work, but then retain the youth of the

eyes. And this, I think, goes the opposite direction, which is, like, they age his eyes a lot with the crow's feet, and they add the darkness, the deep bags and whatnot. And I think that gets you 90% of the way there. Yeah. Well, the makeup is thanks to legendary makeup. artist Dick Smith, along with Brando's personal artist. Smith is incredible. He would go on to work on taxi driver, The Exorcist, Marathon Man, Death Becomes Her, many more. Oh, we got to cover, Death Becomes Her. I watched it. I'm embarrassed to say for the first time, somewhat recently, and I really enjoyed it. Yeah, it's a super fun one. So they developed a routine that would take about three hours with Marlon in the chair, which also, like, to your point, we've covered a lot of

other movies that involve, you know, tons of prosthetics in there in the chair for eight hours, and it's not what they did here. They applied layers of liquid latex to his skin that would stretch and dry in the wrinkles that you see. They also added age spots and yellow teeth, and he had a custom mouthpiece built that sagged his jaw

and made his jowl sort of jut forward. He had to keep a dry ice pack near his face for most of the shoot so the makeup wouldn't just melt off of him. He also put a 10-pound weight on each foot to slow down his movements, And apparently, he was heavily padded around the midsection because he had, quote, washboard abs. Get it, Marlon.

Don't doubt it. How, though? He'd just been lounging around on Valium for like seven years at this point. I'm convinced everyone had washboard abs, except for Coppola if you see photos. Yeah. I mean, Marlon Brando was, he was beautiful for a long time. Yeah, until Island Dr. Morrow. Yeah.

Well, really until apocalypse now, it starts to go awry. Yeah, that's true. He was also a notorious prankster. I don't know if you know this about Marlon Brando. One of his best in this movie was in the scene where he's being carried up the stairs on a stretcher. After having been in the hospital, he hid 300 pounds of sandbags on himself and the stretcher so that the poor people trying to lift him up the stairs were like, what is going on? And he just is laughing.

I'm sure he got like gripping electric to help him, right? Because they have these sandbags right to hold down their equipment. but I think the heaviest ones are 25 pounds. It's a lot. So that still means he had 12 very big sandbags somehow hidden in this thing. It's so funny. I think people really liked him. That's definitely the impression.

Yeah, I'm sure. Others on set also got in on the fun. Because James Con and Robert Duval knew that Marlin was a prankster, Duval convinced James Conn to pull his pants down and moon Marlon Brando when their cars pulled up next to each other one night. And Brando loved it so much that he made a bet with them about who could be named the mighty moon champion. This will come back, but just remember that

Marlon Brando won. Okay, got it. They're all like, you win, Marlon, we're good. Call it today. You'll see why. A few more fun facts. He insisted on eating squid and hot sauce every day. No context. I'll just leave that there. I'm sorry.

And we thought the horses head smelled bad? Brando's breath by the end of this thing. I love Kalamari, too. He frequently also couldn't hear anyone because he was wearing flesh colored earplugs to help drown out background noise and really focus in his performance. He also loved to talk about the script, maybe more than he loved to rehearse actual scenes. This definitely started to concern Coppola early on because an hours-long conversation between

Robert Duval and Marlon Brando about the nature of violence might sound cool. It is also not usable. Now, you may have heard that he needed cue cards because he didn't memorize his lines. This is true. He did need cue cards, but from what I've read, it might be. most likely wasn't out of laziness or not wanting to learn them. I think it's because the script was changing so much that he often didn't have time to learn them and had to read them on the fly. He also, I think, said himself that it helped him be more natural and less rehearsed in those scenes.

That's what I had heard is that he actually liked either the in-ear microphone earpiece that he would later use or the cue cards because he liked the spontaneity of just reacting in the moment. I think it's a combination of that and the fact that they were literally rewriting entire chunks of the screenplay on set. And Coppola wasn't just rewriting it himself. He also called in favors from friends, including someone we talked about a lot in our Chinatown episode, Robert Town. Town was tapped to come in and write the scene between Michael and his father, as the power is sort of transferring. It's right before Brando's character dies. Town pulled the scene together very quickly, and Francis and Brando both loved it. And when asked if he wanted a screenwriting credit,

Robert Town said no, it's just one scene. And he was like, he joked, just thank me if you win an Oscar, which, of course, Coppola did, and he did thank him. All right, Chris, do you remember who Gianni Russo was from our first episode? Yes, he plays Carlo. Carlo Rizzi, Connie's terrible, abusive husband. Yes. We're going to talk about him a little more because this guy is absolutely wild. So starting with their first cast rehearsal, which was just an improvised conversation, over dinner at a restaurant, it was pretty clear that Gianni was the odd man out. He was not trained as an actor, which Marlon Brando picked up on very quickly.

Brando asked him if he had a big movie coming out, or if he was on TV, or who did you study with? And Russo's like, what? So Brando calls over Coppola to be like, hey, who is this guy, who cast him? Like, why is this person playing my son-in-law? And Russo proceeds, to send Coppola away so we can have a private word with Brando. So Russo sent Coppola away, just to clarify. Correct. Okay, wow. Bold move, Russo.

Just to wait, because this is what he said to Marlon Brando. All due respect, I know who you are. Don't fuck this up for me. Do you hear me? If you screw this up for me and I get fired and I lose this part, I will suck on your heart and you will bleed out right here. I will suck on your heart. Yeah. That's the scariest thing I've ever heard somebody say.

This is my favorite part of this is that Marlon Brando just stands there, listens to it, and then goes, that was beautiful. You could do this part. Yes. I just love, I love it. Brilliant. This guy's not acting and Marlon Brando has no idea. No. He's like, this guy's great. He's method. It's amazing. Oh, my God. And remember, this guy is still on a moment. mostly wine diet. To be fair, the diet of my dreams. This is sort of a running thing for Brando of him not understanding that some of these guys are actual mobsters and not actors. Yes. Yeah, that's great.

He also told Lenny Montana, who plays Luca Bratsy, to forget about acting school and just be natural when he could tell that he was nervous. This man has never been to acting school. Great. He's basically Tim Allen and Galaxy Quest at this point. He just doesn't understand that any of this is real. So in Luca's scene at the wedding, James Con tried to get him to loosen up by saying he needed to prank Brando. And Lenny was terrified, but he let James Conn put a piece of surgical tape on his tongue that said, fuck you. And when it came time to approach Brando in the scene, he stuck his tongue out.

Brando loved it. And so I was laughing hysterically. And then he mooned him and then he put a whoopee cushion under his chair. Under the chair of this absolutely gigantic actual. And then it blew a hole up the side of the wall. Yeah. But Lenny struggled majorly with his admittedly very few lines. He could barely get through the actual scene where he thanks the godfather.

So instead of scrapping it, Coppola got very creative and filmed Lenny practicing his lines with index cards outside. And it totally works. Have you watched The Sopranos? I've seen like half of it. Oh, he reminds me so much of Bobby Bacola. So much of Bobby Bacola. Anyway. There's a lot, I think, from the Sopranos that borrows, obviously.

but also just like it infuses this character with so much sort of sweetness that I think is not in the book. Well, and then you do care when he's killed as a result, a character who you've hardly seen in this movie. Speaking of his death scene, he seemed pretty game to be actually strangled during this. He had been a professional wrestler for many years, so it seemed like he knew when to tap out. But he did apparently pass out a few times and also bleed from his ears and nose. I mean, his eyes are bugging in that scene. That's real. Yeah, it looks real.

It looks painful. And then my favorite Lenny Montana story is that at one point, Reddy's poor assistant, Betty McCart, broke her watch, and Montana asked her what kind of watch she'd like to replace it with, and she jokingly said a Rolex. So he shows up with an actual Rolex and says it's from the boys, but don't ever wear it in Florida. That's the only instruction.

She was like, They'll suck on your heart. Don't wear it in Florida. Not a problem. Now, the set wasn't just terrifying because of actual mobsters and studio henchmen lurking around every corner.

For the guy who played Polly Gatto, remember the driver who double-crossed Vito and who gets killed in the car while Clemenza is peeing outside on the side of the road, it was also terrifying because of how they shot this death,

shot being the operative word. Now, I have double-checked this straight from the mouth of the poor actor, Johnny Martino, who played Polygado. Yeah. He was told to pull a string and land on the steering wheel after he heard three shots. Uh-huh. The string would pull his hat off and release a squib that would launch blood down his face.

Coppola's like, get some on your mouth, you know, like spit it out a little bit and then fall on the steering wheel. He's like, okay, sure. Uh-huh. As they're about to call action, an old guy with a rifle slides into the backseat of the car behind him. And Martino is like, hello, what? are you doing here? And the guy's like, oh, don't worry, I'm just going to shoot three bullets past your head and out the windshield. Three real bullets? He also said not to worry because he just handled all the ballistics on Bonnie and Clyde. And also the bullets would miss his head by at least

four or five inches. Pass? The actor also wanted to know how they planned to not actually shoot Richard Castellano, who plays Clemenza since he was right in front of the car. And they're like, oh, yeah, don't worry about that. There's a guy hiding next to the car with like a really thick piece of a wood on a stick and he's going to pop up and hold that in front of the windshield. It's going to catch the bullets. Like, mar, don't worry about it. This is the worst Rue Goldberg device I've ever heard of. So naturally, Martino called Coppola over to express some concern. And Coppola goes, oh yeah, don't worry. The Marksman's really good. Okay, action. Oh, my God. And they did it. They shot an actual gun, like four inches away from this guy's head to blow the windshield out.

We joke because it's funny only because nobody. was hurt. That is one of the most insane things we've actually heard on this podcast, I would say. Truly. I literally was like, this can't be real. And I had to go and like find interviews with this poor man and it's real. Also, potentially the most famous line in the movie, which is leave the gun, take the canoli, was half improvised. As scripted, it was just leave the gun. But Richard Castellano remembered his on-screen and soon to be off-screen real life, wife's instructions to get canoli and dropped the iconic, Take the Canoli right after.

Interesting. Another completely improvised line was James Kahn's, Bada Bing! Which, of course, was the name of Tony's strip club and the Sopranos. Yeah, I think he's joked

that he should get some kind of compensation for how much that's shown up in mob films after this. He clearly felt comfortable improvising throughout the movie. That scene where he comes outside at the wedding and like roughs up the photographer and breaks the camera.

Not at all planned in any way That poor photographer just saw James Kahn come at him and didn't know what to do. So also Clemenza holding him back, not scripted. It was Richard Castellano trying to stop him from breaking more expensive old cameras. Great moment, though, really establishes his character in one beat. And then him pulling out the cash and throwing the money down. That was something he remembered from his own neighborhood is that you can get away with whatever as long as you pay for it. Right.

Now, one of the most difficult scenes in the whole movie was Sunny's death. at the toll booth. The amount of squibs and guns going off in that scene, and squibs are, they can be pneumatically released, right? Like a burst of air, but a lot of the times it's a gunpowder charge blasting glass or blood or both. And it looks like a thousand squibs in that scene.

It's crazy. Well, not a thousand, but Khan himself was rigged with 110 shell casings full of powder and blood to explode on cue. It's like having a hundred bullets strapped to your body. It's just ridiculous. That's exactly right. They were very dangerous because if he moved the wrong way

and got any part of his body like a hand or anything in front of one of them, they are literally filled with gunpowder. It could blow a hole in his hand. He also had specially designed blood packets hidden on his face that were attached with fishing line. So the crew members would pull those off as soon as the shooting began. And the car was rigged with two, hundred bullet holes that were also filled with those gunpowder squibs.

The whole two-minute scene cost $100,000, and that was for one take. I'm not surprised of just the sheer volume of destruction. And the visceral impact of it, it is shocking to watch in a way that, look, it's so much safer now to do digital blood bursts, which are what you see in 95% of the films, I would say, that are released today, even something, you know, like John Wick, et cetera. And they all look very convincing now. However, the squib, I still think, looks the most visceral of any bullet impact I've seen on screen. And this one, you can just feel Khan like actually reacting to all of these things exploding on his body.

And it's really horrifying. It really shows you the power of guns. And then obviously the tragedy of this character. it's a really amazing, terrifying scene. Totally. It looks really good, and James Con looks terrified, which I think he was. Fortunately, they got the whole thing in one take, and no one blew a hole in James Con.

That's also crazy that that's one take. That's it. Wow. I mean, they literally couldn't afford to do it more than once. I mean, it would be like a whole other day, too, on top of just the cost, you know, to get everything reset. Now, we're still not done with old Jimmy. One of the strangest rivalries on set was between number one crazy man, Gianni Russo and number two crazy man, James Kahn.

Of course. Like, Brando loves those guys, and then Khan is like the bullshit detector, I'm sure. You know what I'm saying? It's like in a different way. So, yeah. Well, according to Rousseau, which we can take all of this with a grain of salt, but it all started when he was out at a nightclub with two soldiers from the Gambino family. Just having a drink with Tommy Bellotti and boozy de chicho, as one does, Chris.

These are real people. What he didn't know was that James Kahn was allegedly in the backroom having a drink with an underboss from the Colombo family, a rival family. Some kind of conflict or scuffle, it seems, did happen due to them both being there with competing families, and Rousseau left convinced that James Kahn was out to get him from there on out. Worth noting, Khan denies this completely. But I might side with Rousseau on this one. So here's the thing. This scuffle happened just a few days before they were set to film the scene where Sunny beats the absolute

crap out of Carlo. Yep. Now, Con apparently rehearsed the scene quite a bit with the film Stunt Coordinator, but on the day, he added a little extra panache, Chris. He asked the prop master for a broom handle, and the prop master is like, why? And Con's like, yeah, just put it in my car. So he comes barreling out of the car and immediately throws it at Russo, which Coppola loves, and is like, oh, that was great, but you missed him.

Hit him next time. Yeah, of course. According to Russo, it hits him right in the back of the head. Then Khan threw him over the railing, which was rehearsed, but slamming the garbage lid on him was not. And Russo claims he chipped a bone. He also said that Khan did not fake the kicks to his ribs when he's clinging to the fire hydrant and was fully kicking him.

Interesting. Which, I'm not going to lie, if you watch it again, it looks like James Khan is beating the shit out of this man. Well, here's the thing. Now that I think about it, too, Khan's doing it on all of the things that he can kind of get away with from the way you describe it. The punches are clearly theater punches when he stands Rousseau up.

But when Rousseau's on the ground and Kahn's feet are hidden behind Rousseau, you have no idea what he's doing because the thing is filmed in one continuous long shot from the far side of the street. Also, Rousseau looks really scared and I don't think he's that good an actor. Oh, he does look really scared. Yeah. Rousseau firmly believed that Kahn did this on purpose as retaliation, but Kahn's story is very different. He was just improvising.

Nothing personal. Yeah. And again, we do not condone workplace violence. No. Which is what this is. Listen to your stunt coordinator. Do not actually beat the man. Exactly.

Improvisation is wonderful on set when both actors are consenting to what's being improvised. Yeah. It did take Rousseau a few days to recover from this, apparently. I believe it. It takes me a few days to recover from a run. I can't imagine being hit in the elbow with a garbage can lid by James Con. That's like... I've been punched once in my life by someone much smaller than James Con, and that was painful enough.

I'm good. Yeah, I don't need to do that. Now, Rousseau also made sure to pocket some extra cash from the wedding scene. He sold cases of soda to Paramount at a markup price. He's like one of these kids, like, do one of my chocolate bars to send my basketball team to the tournament? He also made himself a deal with a local baker where he got the massive wedding cake for free, but sold it to Paramount for like $1,500. You know what? Honestly, good for him.

Good for him. Yeah. Like, bilk the studio for a little bit of money. He does. Speaking of the wedding scene, Coppola captured some of the shots via a helicopter, but I guess they hadn't tied things down enough. So it started whipping up tents and prop walls, which was really scary. And most of the helicopter shots were not usable. But a lot of the cast and extras didn't really seem to care because they were extremely drunk.

They look drunk. Yeah. As the helicopter came around again and again, they started waving at it going, hello, Francis. I honestly assumed Gopold had just like invited his family to come have a great time or something. Well, it's funny you should mention that because a whole bunch of the 500 extras on set for this shoot were the families of actual mobsters. Yes. Great. It was the family.

And Brando's walking around going, where do these, find these guys? Literally, Marlon Brando was plastered during this, did not know that that's who was in the crowd and decided to moon them all as a big joke. The Mighty Moon Champion strikes again. And I'm sure all these mob guys think it's amazing, you know, like Brando. I don't think the wives loved it. And the theater mom's also not happy with Marlon Brando's ass just out. He did have washboard ebbs, so who knows? That's not what they were seeing.

About halfway through the filming, though, things took a very serious turn. On June 27, 1971, producer Al Ruddy received a call from the anonymous FBI agent who had been talking to him throughout production about his dealings with the Colombo family. I get the impression he wasn't, like, informing on the Colombo family. It's just this guy was, like, in contact with him because they were basically like, you are dealing with actual criminals, like, be careful. Yeah. The next day, Joe Columbo had a huge rally planned and Reddy was supposed to go and show his support.

The FBI agent told him, quote, under no circumstances are you to be standing next to Joe Colombo tomorrow at Columbus Circle? Do you understand? And he's like, gotcha, no problem. Our friend Gianni Russo received a similar call, but this one was from a Gambino family member. He told him not to go anywhere near the rally, even though Russo was supposed to literally be on-stage. with Colombo. Mm-hmm. At 11.45 a.m. the next day, as Joe Colombo approached the stage, a man dressed as a press

photographer suddenly crouched down, pulled out a gun, and shot Columbo three times in the head. The gunman was then swiftly killed by someone else, leaving no trace of who had ordered the hit. And Colombo would remain in a coma for the next seven years before finally dying in 1978. And by the way, this was like down the street from where the Godfather was filming. Mm-hmm. Which is pretty weird. I think Coppola was like watching the news later that day,

and they were showing like documentary footage of the godfather, basically on the news about this actual mob guy being killed. I knew Columbo died at some point, but I didn't think it was until the late 70s. And then obviously, as you just said, it's because he was in a coma for seven years. Yeah. Totally forgot that that overlapped with this production.

And I think Reddy had gotten like kind of close to him at this point. So this was upsetting. So throughout every. everything that's going on, Robert Evans and Francis Ford Coppola were growing farther and farther apart on pretty much everything. The ability to shoot in Sicily was yet another battle between Coppola and Evans, with Evans constantly trying to pressure Coppola to just shoot it in upstate New York, you know, the Sicily of America. The beautiful rolling hills of Poughkeepsie, as they say. Yeah, Coppola is like, they're not the same. thing. And Bob Evans and Jack Ballard are like, sure you can. It's fine. Take him to the cat skills.

Jack Billers like, you're lucky to shoot this movie outdoors, kid. Yes. So he did win the battle to shoot in Sicily. And he also won the battle to allow production to shut down for two weeks ahead of the Sicily shoot so he could do a rough assembly of the film out of his American zoetrope offices in San Francisco. So the town that you see on screen is actually not the town of Corleone. Apparently, Corleone was A, two full of actual mobsters, and B, two urban and dirty, so they couldn't use it. They shot in the little villages outside of the resort town of, I think it's Taormina. Teormina? I'm so sorry, Italians.

Well, you know, my enunciation's not going to be any better, so we'll stick with yours, Lizzie. Their time in Sicily was one of the few enjoyable portions of this shoot for Coppola. Even he and Gordon Willis got along great. It was short, but they had a really good time. kind of feel it. It feels so tranquil compared to the rest of the movie. You're just like, Apollonia, you're so beautiful. Don't get in that car, honey. You can't drive anyway. Yeah, I didn't even think it was a car bomb. I think she just couldn't drive. But Jack Ballard was still crouching over them to the point where he was literally shipping dailies back to L.A. across a complicated

set of international flights. And those dailies were being watched obsessively by Robert Evans. Now, by this point, Evans had a pretty massive cocaine and prescription drug problem, and he was relying on both heavily to get through the godfather, which had at this point become his entire life. Yeah. It sounds like it all got worse when he managed to hurt his back pretty badly. His wife said by playing tennis, who knows exactly, there are a lot of stories about how he got a hold of these pain pills. But at a certain point, he had to literally be wheeled into the screening room on a gurney to work on the edits. Doctors, again, prescribed in pain pills for whatever this injury was, which he took.

And then, of course, because pain pills make you sleepy, he took more cocaine to bring back the focus. Yeah. He was really obsessed with the edit, and this would ultimately be the breaking point between him and Coppola. Coppola had been working out of San Francisco to pull together a 175-minute edit, and this is after all the shooting is done. When he screened this cut, most people, including Robert Evans, loved it. But again, it's 175 minutes long. So the studio freaked out. We see this all the time.

Why, Chris? Because they can't fit as many screenings into a day in a given theater with a, I think it's over two hours and 20 minutes or something like that. There's a certain number that you need to hit and you get one extra screening per day. Which is a lot more money, potentially. I think it's like over 10 or 15%. You know what I mean? If you just look at the pure math of it. Well, your math on the time is very good because they tell Coppola he has to cut almost 40,

minutes, which would put you, I think, right at that two-hour and 20-minute mark. Yeah. Now, when Coppola does it, he cuts 40 minutes out. And when he screens this version, Bob Evans reportedly hated it so much that he threatened Paramount he would walk away if they stuck with the shorter version. He literally said, this feels longer than the 175-minute version. Exactly. Because if you cannot understand what you're watching, it will feel interminable as a result.

Also, you have to really pay attention. It clicks at a very fast pick. You are going across time and space very quickly. What could they even have cut out? You wouldn't be able to understand what was happening. They would have stripped all of the wedding down. I guarantee you it would have been, you know, Sunny's dead by like 35, 40 minutes into the movie. You know, Brando's dead by an hour and then all of the hits are happening.

I don't know. I can't even imagine. It would be so compressed. Yeah. It just wouldn't make any sense. So the studio said, fine. And this is where Coppola and Evan's stories go in completely different directions. Now, according to Evans, he went into, like, a fugue state working endlessly on the edit.

According to Coppola, he simply restored the footage that had been cut by the studio in the first place. So Coppola was like, my first cut was perfect. Evans didn't do anything else. It just literally put back what had been taken out. They stopped speaking completely and only communicated through Peter Bart. Evans was so obsessed that he didn't even notice anything was wrong when his wife, Ali McGraw, left to go film The Getaway with Steve McQueen in Texas for three months. And he didn't visit her on location once, which would prove to be a fatal mistake.

Remember, Evans is also working on Chinatown at this point. So he must have just not been sleeping, like really not well. he also had a habit of talking himself up quite a bit, which I think is what really pissed Coppola off. I don't think Coppola would have made anything out of this if Evans hadn't been out there touting his contributions to this movie. Which is kind of how Evans got his position to begin with a little bit. You know what I mean? A lot of bravado, you know, kind of led to his success. It's a continuation of what's worked in the past.

Yeah. Also, Al Reddy does uphold that Evans is. biggest contribution was that he fought his own studio to keep the edit long. There's really no arguing that. He did do that. And that's not nothing. Outside of that, it is very unclear how much he actually changed and how much Coppola had already done. Yeah. I am inclined to believe he did do some stuff. There's a couple of things I came across that make me think that his contributions were not nothing to this. One is that I think Coppola wanted to end on the baptism scene. And Evans insisted on ending through the doorway.

Yeah. So there's stuff like that where it's like, that is not insignificant. No, and it's a great character moment. And I don't doubt that he contributed. I think we all tend to overvalue our contributions to any endeavor and undervalue those of those around us. But I think it's particularly hard. He's never been on set, presumably. Right.

And so Coppola's, I'm sure, thinking, you're coming in here at the 11th hour. He's been breathing down his neck. the whole time. And from Copla's perspective, you make the most obvious decision ever, which is not to go with a cut that's so bad it makes everyone want to jump off a bridge. But from Evan's perspective, you know, he's effectively turning against his employer, like his source of status. He's going against the family, so to speak.

So it is a big leap for him, but there's no way for either to understand the other in the sense. That's the thing is I think Copla, to your point, he's pissed that he's coming in. He feels like he hasn't done anything. And Bob Evans on the other side is like, I have put my life on the line for this. You're giving me no credit for what I've done. This all segued into another enormous fight about the music. Evans and Paramount wanted Henry Mancini, who had just done Breakfast at Tiffany's, I think a decade earlier maybe, and he'd won the best original song Oscar for Moon River.

Evans wanted a happier, more American score to pep the movie up. Obviously, he is wrong on this one. Coppola was insistent that it needed to be Nino Rota, prolific compil. for mostly Italian films at that point. He wanted it dark, moody, distinctly Italian. It reached a point where Coppola threatened to take his name off the movie and take out ads in the Hollywood reporter about how terrible Paramount had been. Wow. So finally, he was like, you know what? I don't care.

Do a test screening with Rota's score. And if the audience doesn't like it, you can change it. And this was like six weeks before the film's release. So at this point, I think he had stalled enough that he knew. Obviously, the screening was a hit, and Evans caved. By the way, the only reason Rhoda didn't get an Oscar nomination for this, I think, is because the main theme is actually a variation on a previous theme he had done, and they deemed it that he wasn't able to...

Oh, interesting. So, I said Jack Ballard had a sort of dramatic exit. Here it is. He continued to plague the production all the way through the sound mix until one day they were screening the sound effects reel. he shows up, starts going off about how garbage the sound effects sound, how they would never work in this town again. Also, this is, I believe, Walter Merch is the supervising sound. Arguably the greatest supervising sound editor maybe of all time and an incredible editor.

Oh, no, I'm just saying he would eventually be, you know what I mean? Well, it's funny you should bring up merch because he had had it with Jack Ballard at this point. And he explained to him, he's like, you don't know. what you're talking about. We are listening to an effects reel. This is not the final. Like, you don't know what you're doing. And on top of everything else, sir, you're drunk.

And Ballard just paused and was like, you know what? I don't know what I'm talking about. And I am drunk. And then he just walked out and they never saw him again. Oh, no. Jack Ballard, they broke him. He was like. I love it.

He comes in. He's like, why don't you put the words in, you dummies? He's like stumbling around and then he's like, you're right. So initially the Godfather had been set for release in December of 1971, but thanks to the difficult shoot and even more difficult post-production, it had been pushed back to March at this point. Generally not considered a great time to release something like this, especially because this is an awards contender. Or even like a summer tent pole, you know what I mean? It's just kind of a dead zone. The dumpuary January, April sort of range.

But Paramount came up. with a groundbreaking release strategy for The Godfather to counteract this. The film premiered on March 14, 1972. That was the big New York premiere. The next day, it released in five theaters across New York. Then a few days later, it expanded to L.A. and Toronto. Now, within five days of the wide release on March 24th, it had expanded to 316 theaters across the country.

I think this Blitz was, like, more than anyone had ever really done at once, and they did it very quickly. So they platformed the release, you know, which is obviously like you kind of do concentric circles and you expand it. And then, but they really quickly got to saturation, it sounds like. Yes. In the first week at the five Manhattan theaters alone, the Godfather hauled in $465,000. Which is, that's a great per theater average, especially for that time. By a month past release, it was grossing $1 million a day.

Lines were wrapping around the block to get tickets to see it. It was an absolute blockbuster. It earned more than $250 million worldwide. But before it ever made it into any of those theaters, Al Reddy snuck out of print to screen it for the boys, aka the mob. Because they weren't allowed tickets to the actual premiere. And they absolutely loved it.

The projectionist said he was getting tipped thousands of dollars. The Godfather made millionaires out of Coppola, Reddy, and Puzzo. But one person that didn't make it. rich was Marlon Brando. And that's because right before filming was set to start, Brando's attorney had called up Charlie Bluedhorn and Evans saying Brando needs $100,000 to pay his taxes. Oh, no. So this lawyer struck a deal where he got that money right away, but he gave up all of Brando's points on the back end. Oh, no. At the end of the day, Brando lost something like

$11 million because of this. Kids, pay your tax. Pay your taxes and don't give up the investment in the actual profits. Yeah. He promptly fired his entire team when he found out what had happened. Yeah. Someone else who didn't make money off of it, Robert Evans. Yeah, unless he gets promoted off of it or, you know, the board gives him more stock or something. There's no participation for him.

Yeah, despite all the work he had put in, he wasn't technically accredited producer on it like Al Reddy was. He was the head of production at Paramount. And that's true of the executive. at any studio, you know what I mean, for the most part. And that's why you don't see The Godfather on his IMDB page. You do see Chinatown because it bothered him so much on this that he wanted his name on the poster for that. He had also absolutely destroyed his body during the production,

and it turns out also his marriage. He learned shortly after the All Out party he threw for the Godfather premiere that his wife, Allie McGraw, was leaving him for Steve McQueen. Arguably one of the most attractive men on the planet at that. Robert Evans was also not bad. I mean... He was strapped to a gurney. You've got a good point.

Four men strapped to a gurney, pretty handsome. I'm not comparing myself to him. I'm just saying it's Steve McQueen. It's Steve McQueen. And also I think I think I have Matthew Good as Robert Evans in my head. Because when I look up actual Robert Evans, I'm like, I mean, yeah. He's like, actual Robert Evans is tall Paul McCartney. Yes.

That's true. Steve McQueen, yeah. So she'd shown up to the premiere, but that was the last truly happy memory that he would have with her, with Henry Kissinger on one arm and Allie McGraw on the other. What a weird double date.

What a night. It does seem like Robert Evans, despite having, oh my God, so many more wives never really recovered from this. Yeah. At least Marlon Brando won a best actor Oscar, and that was enough of a calling card

to put him back on the map as an actor. Now, of course, I'm sure you all know this, but he famously did not show up to accept his award. And he sent a Native American woman, Sachi Little Feather, to accept it for him. Now, there's since been some controversy calling into question whether she had Native ancestry or not.

We're not going to get into that here. Marlon's intention was to bring awareness to the mistreatment of Native Americans across the country, as well as their misrepresentation specifically in film. Unfortunately, it is a really sad and uncomfortable moment because she is booed. John Wayne wasn't, like, it was ready to, like, get on the stage.

fighter or something like that, I vaguely remember. Yeah, there's something ridiculous. It was not the whole crowd at all. No, no, yeah. But it was a lot of the crowd. This was part of his many, many years-long pledge to bring awareness to the mistreatment of Native Americans across the country. In fact, he also did not attend the Godfather premiere.

He sent another Native American man in his stead to that. That was met with, I think, less frustration than this was just because of the platform of this moment. But you can see it. It's a bummer. She looks great. I think at those awards events, the gross truth of it is, like, I think actors really like to think like we're doing, and all of us creatives, like, we're doing such a good job for the world. Yes.

Like, this is so important what we're doing, this like play acting that we're all doing. I'm sure I would be as guilty as anyone, where I talented enough to win an Oscar, which I'm not. And then to be reminded of like, oh, yeah, no, this is actually a distraction at the end of the day. I'm sure makes people uncomfortable. I used to think before I, like, knew more about this that it was kind of shitty of Marlon Brando to like send her out there. But the more I've learned about him and this moment, I don't think he had any intention to hang her out to dry. And I think he had the best intentions involved in this. and everything that he had been trying to do.

Now, Coppola lost best director to Bob Fosse for Cabaret, which I would love to cover. I kind of, I might get some flack for this. I'm kind of on board with that. I think Bob Fossy's an incredible, just overall creative person, obviously, and very interesting and tragic person that we need to cover, and then we also need to cover all that jazz.

obviously at some point. I don't know. I'm torn. I just like the godfather more than Cabaret personally, so I can't really comment. I love Cabaret. I love the Godfather, too. But they're, I don't know. They're both amazing. They're both wonderfully directed. So I don't think you can choose wrong. I don't think there's a wrong choice. And Cabaret is also so tight. Yes. In a way that obviously the Godfather is not, but both amazing. Puccino, Khan, and Duval all lost out to Joel Gray, also for Cabaret. Again, I don't know, pretty good. Well, and I would argue...

They cancel each other out, probably. Exactly. The movie kind of scaffolds itself with equal parts of each of them, and so no one of them is big enough, you know what I mean, or dominates the screen enough. To be honest, I think Pacino should have taken that one. Even just for the Louis Diner scene alone, which is one of the greatest, like, watch a character make a decision without overacting moments in cinema history. That's the thing. It's the thing that they were on Pacino about early on that he wasn't doing enough. It's what is so good about this performance is that he's not going over the top or over-indicating anything. Exactly. However, Coppola and Puzzo did win for adapted screenplay, and of course, the godfather took home Best Picture. Al Reddy would take home another Best Picture Oscar in 2005 for Million Dollar Baby. And he just died at 94 in May of this year.

Good for Al Reddy. That is a great old age. Yes. 94. Wow. So Bob Evans' anger over what he felt was a lack of recognition for his work on the film continued to fester for many, many years. In The Kid Stays in the picture, his autobiography, he literally calls Coppola a fat fuck, which is quite a shock when you're listening to the audiobook. I was like, excuse me? And Evans was happy to tell anyone who listened what he thought of Francis. Now, in 1983, Evans and Copeland. sent each other telegrams that I would like to read you now, Chris. So more than 10 years after the release of the Godfather. And again, huge shout out to the main source for these episodes, which is Leave the Gun Take the Canoli by Mark Seal, which is where I am reading these from, from Francis. Dear Bob Evans, I've been a real gentleman regarding your claims of involvement on the Godfather.

I've never talked about your throwing out the Nino-Roda music. You're barring the casting of Pacino and Brando. But continually, you're stupid blabbing about cutting the Godfather comes back to me and angers me for its ridiculous pomposity. You did nothing on the Godfather other than annoy me and slow it down. That is why Charlie, meaning Bluthorne, put in the Godfather 2 contract that you could have nothing to do with the movie. You will never see the Cotton Club until it is an answer print. You have double-crossed me for the last time. If you want a PR war or any kind of war, no one is better at it than me, Francis Coppola. Wow. Let's hear

what Bobby had to say. His response is, Dear Francis, thank you for your charming cable. I cannot imagine what prompted this venomous diatribe. I am both annoyed and exasperated by your fallacious accusations, when all I do is praise your extraordinary talents as a filmmaker. Conversely, your behavior towards me glaringly lacks any iota of concern, honesty, or integrity. I am affronted by your gall in daring to send me this Machiavellian epistle, the content of which is not only ludicrous, but totally misrepresents the truth. I cannot conceive what motivated your malicious thoughts, but if they are a reflection of your hostility, I bear great sympathy and concern for your apparent paranoid schizophrenic behavior.

However, dear Francis, do not mistake my kindness for weakness, Robert Evans. I got to say, so much more dynamic, engaging, well-written, eloquent, than watching, for example, Elon Musk and some other idiot go at each other on Twitter. Like, this is a war of words. I love it. I love it. Now I'm going to hold off on going further into Evans' downfall because it is very much intertwined with another Coppola film

that Coppola referenced in that telegram, the Cotton Club, which I know we will be covering. Also, kind of Coppola's not total downfall, but financial downfall. Sure. I mean, it didn't involve a murder for Coppola, as it does, unfortunately, for Bob Evans. But suffice it to say, Evans was on his way down, but still quite far from rock bottom at this point. Now, they seem to have at least slightly reconciled prior to Evans' death in 2019. At the 25th anniversary of the godfather, Coppola hugged Evans and finally said, you must have

done something right. I like that. That wraps up our coverage of the godfather. That was incredibly bleak and entertaining and wonderful, just like the godfather. Wow. Wild times. the 70s. It's all I'll say. You could get away with really more than you should. Yeah. All right. Well, Lizzie, as always, we have to say what went right with this production.

And there's so much that we could choose from. But if you don't mind, I'd like to go first. Al Pacino. I forget how, and the same is true of De Niro to a certain degree. and I would argue Brando too, a lot of these actors kind of got pushed or pushed themselves

into perhaps caricatures of themselves in later years. You have the freak-out Pacino, you know, I'm thinking, and that ass! That gif of him. That meme from heat, yes. Exactly, yeah.

And you forget how remarkably understated they could be. And Pacino, despite being a diminutive, I mean, 5-7 on a good day and just a very slight man really commands the room and your attention when surrounded

by some heavy hitters, some incredibly charismatic big performers like James Kahn and obviously Marlon Brando. So, you know, we see, so we saw it, you know, recently in an interview where he fondly discusses his Shrek phone and he also basically says, like, the only reason he did a number of roles later in his career, even once he enjoyed doing like Jack and Jill with Adam Sandler, was because he'd gone broke. You know, he'd basically spent all this money that he'd made $50 million he'd made on his earlier films. And I don't think we should let that in any way

diminish our opinion of these actors. Like, at the end of the day, this is a job. And at a certain age, like, you kind of just need to do the job to get the money. And I just think Pacino remains one of our greatest actors that we've seen in the last 50 years. And this is one of his most incredible films, along with Heat, which I just rewatched and I want to cover, too.

And it's so good. So anyway, to Al Pacino, a very steadying performance and a very explosive film. Yeah, you need it. I think I will go with the obvious here and say that what went right is Francis Ford Coppola. I think that he, for any inexperience, he came into this with. He was really able to see what the heart of this movie was. Without that, it would not have worked. It would not be the film that we know and love.

and his attention to detail, while I'm sure it put things behind, I'm sure it pissed people off. Man does it pay off. I mean, this movie looks incredible. I think he was very supportive of his actors. He just, he has an eye, obviously. He knew what he was looking for. And he just nailed it. He did it.

Like, with people breathing down his neck the entire time, with a pregnant wife about to give birth, with Bob Evans, who to do you? be honest, is another what went right on this. I know he got a lot of flack over the course of this. I know that he, you know, was a pain in Francis Ford Coppola's butt, but there is something about the two of them together that really managed to pull this movie off. And to your point, Coppola made a movie that, yes, is very violent. Yes, is explosive, but that's not really what you remember about the Godfather. You remember the interpersonal connections. And that's due to him, not just as a director, but honestly, as a screenwriter, because he wrote so much of this.

So I will give it to Coppola. And at like, what, 32 years old, basically? Yeah, he's a baby. Crazy. All right, guys, thank you so much for sticking with us on this incredible journey into the history of the godfather. Not the last time we'll be talking about this franchise, I'm sure, and not the last time we'll be talking about any of its players, as we've discussed, but we can't continue this, and we wouldn't have even gotten this far if it weren't for the support of our family, the listeners of this podcast. And you guys have

become a little mafia, and you're clearly pounding the pavement and threatening people because we've seen some amazing growth over the last year, and we are so happy and proud to be able to make this for you. If you want to support this podcast, three easy ways to do it. One, grab a broken broomstick. No, you can just tell somebody about it. Tell a friend, tell a family member, somebody at the gym, wherever, your barista. If you are a barista, every customer, think smart. If you'd like to go a step further, you can leave us a rating and review on whatever podcast platform you use, Spotify, Apple, Amazon, music. Or if you really want to go the full canoli, you can join our Patreon, www. www. patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast. You can join

for free. For a dollar, you can vote on films that we cover in the future. We've had a lot of great polls, a lot of great films, including Die Hard and Gremlins, were the results of these polls. For $5, you can get an ad-free RSS feed. And of course, for $50, you've made me an offer, I can't refuse. Here it goes. Which is $50 a month for this terrible, terrible Godfather impression. The birthday boy, look how they massacred my birthday boy, the Provost family. Say it right. The O's sound like Oves. Jack Everton.

Galen. David Friskillante. Adam Moffat. Kate. Film it yourself. Do it yourself. Chris Zaka. Kate Elrington.

M. Exodia. C. Grace B. Jen Mastro Marino. She sounds like a real fine Italian woman. Christopher Elner. Blaise Ambrose. Jerome Wilkinson. Lauren F. Lance Stata.

Let's age it up a little bit. Nate the Knife. Lena. Andrea. Ramon Villanueva Jr. Half-Gray hound. Willa Dunn. Brittany Morris.

Darren and Dale Conkling. Ashley. Jake Killen. He's no killer, though. Andrew McFaggle-Bagel. Matthew Jacobson. Grace Potter. Ellen Singleton.

J.J. Rapido. Zio St. Sermot. Scott Gerwin. Sadie. Just Sadie. Brian Donahue. Adrian Pang Correa. Chris Leal. Kathleen Olson. Brooke. Leah Bowman. Steve Winterbauer. Dawn Sheibel. George. Rosemary Southwood. Tom Christen. Jason Frankel. Salman Chianney. Michael. Michael McGrath. Lonville and Lydia All right, guys. Pull the cotton balls out here.

Apologies for that. And with that, I officially retire my Brando impression for all time. Really, truly, thank you so much for your support. Thank you everybody who listens to this podcast. We couldn't be doing it without you. It brings us such joy and we hope to be able to do it for years and years to come.

We will see you in two weeks for Malcolm X. Yes, I'm very excited for that. See you then. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at what went wrongpod.com. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. Research for this episode was provided by Sarah Bown.