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The Godfather – Classic Scene
The Godfather is a 1972 American crime film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who co-wrote the screenplay with Mario Puzo, based on Puzo’s best-selling 1969 novel of the same name.
The film stars Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Richard Castellano, Robert Duvall, Sterling Hayden, John Marley, Richard Conte, Diane Keaton and Talia Shire.
It is the first installment in The Godfather trilogy. The story, spanning from 1945 to 1955, chronicles the Corleone family under patriarch Vito Corleone (Brando), focusing on the transformation of his youngest son, Michael Corleone (Pacino), from reluctant family outsider to ruthless mafia boss.
Paramount Pictures obtained the rights to the novel for the price of $80,000, before it gained popularity. The studio executives had trouble finding a director; the first few candidates turned down the position before Coppola signed on to direct the film but disagreement followed over casting several characters, in particular, Vito and Michael. Filming took place primarily on location around New York City and in Sicily.
The Godfather premiered at the Loew’s State Theatre on March 14, 1972, and was widely released in the United States on March 24, 1972. It was the highest-grossing film of 1972, and was for a time the highest-grossing film ever made.
The film received universal acclaim from critics and audiences, with praise for the performances, particularly those of Brando and Pacino, the directing, screenplay, cinematography, editing, score, and portrayal of the mafia. The Godfather acted as a catalyst for the successful careers of Coppola, Pacino, and other relative newcomers in the cast and crew. The film also revitalized Brando’s career, which had declined in the 1960s, and he went on to star in films such as Last Tango in Paris, Superman, and Apocalypse Now.
The Transition of Power
In Mario Puzo’s novel, there is no resolution between Vito Corleone and his son Michael. Coppola wanted to convey that they loved each other. So Coppola called on his friend Robert Towne, (a renowned screenwriter who later wrote Chinatown), as a script doctor. Towne arrived in New York the day before the scene between Vito and Michael was scheduled to be filmed. Towne faced a tremendous challenge: to add outside material that captured complex and powerful emotions but remain consistent with what had already been filmed. After conferring with Brando and Pacino for ideas, and taking notes from the original script he worked through the night, finishing the scene at 4 am.
It’s a simple scene in Don Corleone’s garden that focuses as much on regret about the past as it does anxiety over the future. “I never wanted this for you,” Vito says to Michael, explaining he wished to see a Senator or Governor Corleone. Brando’s speech about his dreams for his son runs nearly two minutes. When Coppola accepted the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, he thanked Towne: “That was Bob Towne’s scene,” he said.
Robert Towne, one of the more gifted scriptwriters and “doctors” (and directors) Hollywood has known. That Towne was able to take so many threads -“strings,” if you will – of this sprawling scenario and distill them into this rich, overarching short scene is something of a miracle of screen-writing craft. Towne gives us this transitional moment between father and son – ultimately, their last moments – and neatly buttons up plot-points while advancing the storyline, provides information that the audience will need, gives us a deeper insight to the special bond between father and son and how their roles are reversing, and makes it so full of trivial conversational details that it feels so real.
The Set-Up
Michael Corleone, youngest and most promising of Don Vito’s male children is now ‘mixed up in the family business’ of organised crime. He’s now head of the Corleone family empire. The Don, suffering from advanced age and an earlier assassination attempt that changed everyone’s lives, is now acting as advisor to his son in a time of explosive transition.
SCENE: THE DON’S GARDEN – DAY EXTERIOR
The Don, older looking now, sits with Michael.
VITO CORLEONE: So Barzini will move against you first. He’ll set up a meeting with someone you absolutely trust, guaranteeing your safety. And at that meeting you’ll be assassinated.
The DON pauses for a sip of wine, giving MICHAEL a chance to ponder the calm delivery of news about his own impending murder.
VITO CORLEONE: I like to drink wine more than I used to. Anyway I’m drinking more.
MICHAEL: It’s good for you pop.
The DON looks at the glass.
VITO CORLEONE: I don’t know… your wife and children – are you happy with them.
MICHAEL (nods): Very happy.
VITO CORLEONE: That’s good. I hope you don’t mind how I keep going over the Barzini business.
MICHAEL: No, not at all.
VITO CORLEONE: It’s an old habit. I spend my life trying not to be careless. Women and children can be careless but not men.
The DON pauses.
VITO CORLEONE: How’s your boy?
MICHAEL: He’s good.
VITO CORLEONE: You know, he looks more like you every day.
MICHAEL: He’s smarter than I am. Three years old and he can read the funny papers.
VITO CORLEONE: (Laughs) Read the funny pages.
The DON drifts away for a moment, looks up and remembers something.
VITO CORLEONE: Uh, I want to arrange to have a telephone man check all the calls that go in and out of here.
MICHAEL: I did it already pop.
VITO CORLEONE: You know, it could be anyone…
MICHAEL: Pop. I took care of that.
VITO CORLEONE: Oh. That’s right I forgot.
The DON frowns, hesitates and rubs his chin.
MICHAEL leans closer and pats his father’s knee.
MICHAEL: What’s the matter? What’s bothering you? I’ll handle it, I told you I can handle it – I’ll handle it.
The DON pauses, thinks for a moment, stands and walks slowly to the other side of MICHAEL’S lounge, looking away from his son.
VITO CORLEONE: (as he stands) I knew that Santino was going to have to go through all this. And Fredo…well…
(after. He sits beside MICHAEL)
VITO CORLEONE: But I never…I never wanted this for you. I work my whole life, I don’t apologise, to take care of my family. And I refused to be a fool……dancing on the string, held by all those…big shots. I don’t apologize, that’s my life but I thought that…that when it was your time that…that you would be the one to hold the strings. Senator Corleone. Governor Corleone, or something…
MICHAEL: Another pezzonovante.
The DON turns to his son.
VITO CORLEONE: Well there wasn’t enough time Michael… Wasn’t enough time…
MICHAEL: We’ll get there, Pop. We’ll get there.
The DON holds MICHAEL’S head in his hand, kisses him and pats his cheek.
VITO CORLEONE: Hm. Now listen. Whoever comes to you with this Barzini meeting – he’s the traitor. Don’t forget that.
The DON stands, sighs and MICHAEL leans back in the seat deep in thought.
Fade…
Words by Robert Towne (and Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola)
Coppola says that the first person to offer him any encouragement was the screenwriter (later to become writer-director) Robert Towne. Towne had known Coppola from their days of making films for Roger Corman (film director and producer), and had since become Hollywood’s premier script doctor. (He received a “special consultant” credit on Bonnie and Clyde.)
He remembers that he flew to New York to write a crucial summation scene for Don Vito and Michael, and that Coppola screened roughly an hour’s worth of material for him beforehand. “I told him it was amazing,” Towne says, “and he looked deeply distressed, as if he’d hired someone to help him write a scene and instead he’d got someone on an acid trip. I had already heard from people at Paramount that the picture was not going well; only Fred Roos (producer) said, in his quiet, understated way, that ‘it’s going to be good.’ It always is a surprise when footage is so beautiful. I’d never seen footage with that kind of texture related to any so-called gangster movie; Francis had brought so much of himself and of life to it. The wedding! I thought, Jesus, what are people complaining about?
Towne stayed up all night to write the father-and-son scene. He recalls, “Francis picked me up around six-thirty in the morning, so nervous – he had a little baby with him – and we drove out to Staten Island in a station wagon. We drove for forty-five minutes without saying a word. Then Francis said, without turning around, ‘Any luck?’ I told him I thought so: I had a clipboard with the scene on it, and showed it to him. ‘Yeah, that’s good,’ he said. ‘Let’s show it to the actors.’ We showed it to Al; he liked it a lot. Then Francis said, ‘You show it to Marlon.’ Marlon was in makeup, having his cheeks put in. And Marlon made me read him the scene, both parts. It was extremely intimidating and infuriating. Read Marlon’s dialogue to him? I made up my mind immediately to read it as badly as possible, as flatly, to not try to act it. There was a long pause, and Marlon said, ‘Read it again.’ And afterward he said, ‘That’s not bad. I want you to tell me something. Why doesn’t he say anything about Fredo?’ ‘Because he can’t figure out what to say about him at that moment.’ ‘OK’ He went through every phrase and comma in the speech. Then he said, ‘Would you mind coming on the set?’ Francis was naturally relieved. He had no idea what we had been doing.
The first to envision Brando as Don Vito Corleone was Puzo: he had already sent the superstar a letter and talked to him about the role on the phone. But Brando was dubious. “I had never played an Italian before, and I didn’t’t think I could do it successfully,” he says in his autobiography. And he warned Puzo that no studio would go for him. Erratic behaviour and abysmal box-office returns had turned him into a Hollywood pariah. At a meeting that has been reported with varying degrees of comedy and melodrama for the last quarter century, Coppola pressed the case for Brando. “You have to remember that they were very seriously considering if they had the right director, and I brought up Marlon Brando,” Coppola says. “I was told by one of the executives – I shouldn’t’t say which one – ‘Francis, Marlon Brando will never appear in this picture, and I instruct you never to bring him up again.’ At which point, I fainted onto the floor, as if to say, ‘How can I deal with that type of statement?’ My ‘epileptic fit’ was obviously a gag, and they got the point. Finally, they recanted and told me that I could consider Brando if I could meet three criteria: one was that he would do the film for ‘nothing,’ one was that he would personally post a bond to insure them against any of his shenanigans causing delays, and the third was that he would agree to a screen test. And I agreed, even though I didn’t’t even know Brando.” In an incident that has since entered Hollywood lore, Coppola shot Brando on video metamorphosing into Don Corleone with shoe polish in his hair and Kleenex in his mouth, and the deal was done.
For the Don’s favorite son, Michael, Coppola favoured a shrimpy New York actor named Al Pacino. “When I read The Godfather,” I saw Al in the part of Michael,” Coppola recalls. “I remember when the shepherds are walking across Sicily I saw his face, and when that happens it’s very hard to get out of your head. So right at the front I said, ‘Al Pacino’ – and of course that was not viewed as a possibility.” Pacino was primarily a New York stage actor, with only one major movie in the chute, the antidrug fill Panic in Needle Park. “So they had me do lots and lots of screen tests,” Coppola says. “And I tested every talented American actor – Jimmy Caan tested for Michael, Dean Stockwell tested for Michael, Frederic Forrest, everybody.” Coppola kept coming back to Pacino, and kept hearing the response that he was a “runt.” Coppola now reasons, “I think Bob Evans (Head of Paramount Pictures) was a handsome guy, a tall guy, so he tended to see Michael as someone more like himself. He was suggesting Ryan O’Neal or Bob Redford and I was suggesting Pacino. I wanted someone more like me.” Pacino’s then girlfriend, Jill Clayburgh, had taken to berating Coppola for stringing Al along: “I’d call up and ask ‘Please, could Al come back one more time?’ and she’d get on the phone crying, ‘What are you doing to him? You’re torturing him, you’re never going to give him the part!’ ” According to Coppola, the matter was resolved when he was out of the country. He went to England to meet Brando, who was finishing The Nightcomers; upon his return, he learned that Pacino would play Michael, and James Caan, who was being pushed to play Michael, would play Sonny. “Apparently,” Coppola says, “they’d seen a little footage of Panic in Needle Park. And I think they also decided that if they weren’t’t going to fire me, they at least would go along with some of my recommendations.”
Robert Towne (born Robert Bertram Schwartz; November 23, 1934) is an American screenwriter, producer, director and actor. He was part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmaking. He is best known for his Academy Award – winning original screenplay for Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), which is widely considered one of the greatest screenplays ever written. He later said it was inspired by a chapter in Carey McWilliams’s Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946) and a West magazine article on Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles. Towne also wrote the sequel, The Two Jakes (1990); the Hal Ashby comedy – dramas The Last Detail (1973) and Shampoo (1975); and the first two Mission: Impossible films.
Towne directed the sports dramas Personal Best (1982) and Without Limits (1998), the crime thriller Tequila Sunrise (1988), and the romantic crime drama Ask the Dust (2006).
Source: Paramount.com, en.wikipedia.com and The Annotated Godfather by Jenny M Jones
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