The Visionary And the Frog Prince

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Speaker 14 Yes.

Speaker 15 The day started like any other.

Speaker 18 It's a Sunday in 1969, and Francis Ford Coppola is sitting in his home in San Francisco.

Speaker 20 Three things happen all at once.

Speaker 23 First, he sees an ad in the Sunday New York Times for a new novel entitled The Godfather.

Speaker 28 Coppola thinks to himself that the author's name, Mario Puzzo, sounds like an Italian writer of classic literature.

Speaker 19 Second, a knock at the door.

Speaker 31 Two producers from Paramount, Al Ruddy and Gray Frederickson.

Speaker 20 They're in town to film Little Faust and Big Halsey and want to meet the up-and-coming director who fled Los Angeles for the artistic freedom of San Francisco.

Speaker 24 Third, a phone call from Marlon Brando.

Speaker 28 It comes in before the Paramount producers are even gone.

Speaker 18 He's calling to turn down Coppola's offer to star in his passion project, The Conversation.

Speaker 38 Coppola would later remember all of these things as a celestial alignment of forces, the first ripple of foreshadowing of the project that would come to define his career.

Speaker 16 I'm Mark Seale.

Speaker 43 And I'm Nathan King.

Speaker 16 And this is Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli.

Speaker 43 Today's episode puts Francis Ford Coppola, the Godfather's enigmatic and intellectual director, front and center.

Speaker 17 We'll investigate Coppola's creative process, explore his relationship with Mario Puso, and maybe even get to the bottom of the Coppola-Coppola debate.

Speaker 43 Okay, before we start, we have to address this discrepancy. I say Coppola, you say Coppola.
Who's right?

Speaker 41 I don't know. I've heard it both ways.

Speaker 43 I've only ever heard it pronounced Coppola, but I think there's

Speaker 43 a nice southern charm to your pronunciation.

Speaker 17 I don't know. It just rolls out of my mouth, Koppala.
I could be wrong.

Speaker 46 I stand corrected.

Speaker 43 That's all right. I think you should keep saying Coppola.
I'll say Coppola. We're not going to go back and re-record the podcast.
Let's get into it.

Speaker 43 Mark, over the course of reporting the Vanity Fair story and and writing your book, you were able to put together quite the portrait of Coppola. What was your process like for getting to know him?

Speaker 17 Yeah, well, I did what I always do.

Speaker 48 I talked to as many people as I could find.

Speaker 30 I read every article I could find about him, every interview. He had done so many interviews over the years about the making of the Godfather that he at times said he was tired of speaking about it.

Speaker 30 But he was kind enough to send me a lot of answers, I think answers to 40 questions or so via email.

Speaker 40 And I spoke to, of course, his sister, Talya Scheier, his assistant back then, Mona Skager, and all of the executives at Paramount at the time, of course, had a lot to say about him.

Speaker 27 And we even have some new audio that he was kind enough to send us, especially for this podcast.

Speaker 43 Did you feel intimidated? researching him and finding out that he had talked about the Godfather so much?

Speaker 43 And did you worry at all that maybe it was a fool's errand to try and dig up any new information?

Speaker 30 Well, no, not really because, you know, all of the answers that he had given in the past just added to the texture of what I was trying to do.

Speaker 54 You know, it was a blessing that he had given so many interviews.

Speaker 44 He gave an exhaustive long

Speaker 31 he interviewed a cigar aficionado that he pointed out to me.

Speaker 34 when I was writing the book.

Speaker 22 He said, take a look at that and it answers a lot of questions.

Speaker 52 And then I plunged forward and I sent him a list of, I think, 40 questions.

Speaker 27 And he said in the email that he would answer the ones that interested him.

Speaker 37 And I think he answered every one.

Speaker 43 So when Coppola got the offer to direct The Godfather, he was in pretty dire straits, right?

Speaker 28 Yes, indeed. He was 29 years old.

Speaker 56 He was deeply in debt.

Speaker 44 He was living in San Francisco.

Speaker 15 trying to get his production company, American Zoatrope, off the ground, but it wasn't working out very well.

Speaker 43 You wrote in your book that it seemed like Coppola was heading toward the godfather his entire life. Can you tell us a little bit about his upbringing and his background?

Speaker 43 Because he was Italian, but he wasn't Italian in a godfather way necessarily.

Speaker 20 Well, he was an Italian-American.

Speaker 47 He grew up in Queens, but he was born in Detroit, and the family moved around a lot, but obviously they were pretty far from Italy.

Speaker 43 And it was a pretty creative family.

Speaker 59 Exactly.

Speaker 41 His father was a flautist, a composer, a teacher, and most of all, a long-suffering artist who felt he was always looking for his big break.

Speaker 16 And Francis and his siblings got moved around a lot as his father moved between jobs and orchestras.

Speaker 43 And then in 1949, he was nine years old and something really dramatic happened and his life changed drastically.

Speaker 16 Exactly.

Speaker 30 The family was living in Queens, and suddenly Francis was stricken with polio.

Speaker 54 He was bedridden for nine months and these nine months were really the birth of Francis Coppola, the artist.

Speaker 48 While the other kids played outside, he became a director of sorts.

Speaker 27 He would stage puppet shows, he would devour comic books, and his mom said that every time she came into his room, he would hold out his little hands like he was lining up a shot.

Speaker 43 It's really interesting that so many creative people were afflicted with with sicknesses that left them bedridden as children.

Speaker 40 Yeah, I think it's the isolation of being alone.

Speaker 42 It's not easy to be alone, but when you're forced to be alone, a lot of things come from that.

Speaker 58 And I think those nine months were instrumental for him because he was forced to play with his own imagination.

Speaker 43 Is that when he knew he would be a filmmaker?

Speaker 59 I think so.

Speaker 55 He was really young, but as soon as he was healthy again, he started making movies.

Speaker 20 I was able to speak with his sister Talya who told me a wonderful story about raising money for his first film.

Speaker 59 She went around the neighborhood and says, my brother's going to be a director, you know, and everybody, oh yeah, right.

Speaker 18 But she really believed in him and saw something.

Speaker 17 She just said he was an artist from the word go and she just felt like he could do anything.

Speaker 16 And so she went around trying to help him raise money for an early film.

Speaker 43 How old was he at this point?

Speaker 29 I think he was still in his teenage years and she was obviously younger, so I think she really could see the future and that he was going to be a great director one day.

Speaker 43 So it was already clear that he had a sort of idealistic streak running through him.

Speaker 50 Yes, idealistic and talented and even in his bedroom when he was all alone he would do these very creative like little films and impressions and all of that.

Speaker 53 So it became clear early on that he was going to be an artist of some sort.

Speaker 43 So Talya was really, she was right by his side from the beginning.

Speaker 30 Oh yeah, they always supported each other. And of course she goes on to play Connie Corleone in The Godfather.

Speaker 43 So what's next for Francis?

Speaker 34 Well in 1955 he enrolled in the theater arts department at Hofstra University and then he went to UCLA Graduate Film School where he rose through the ranks and became a top screenwriter in his class.

Speaker 43 And that's when Peter Bart discovered him, right?

Speaker 28 That's right. Peter Bart was a New York Times reporter based in Los Angeles and and here he is.

Speaker 63 Young wannami filmmakers at UCLA and USC were finding unique ways of staying alive and feeding themselves while they were making student films, going to film school, and trying to get some film to show, you know, studios to get a job.

Speaker 63 And that one of the ways that Francis had pursued was to make films that were called nudies, N-U-D-I-E-S,

Speaker 68 which were by today's standards totally asexual but had sort of sex scenes but you know fully closed sex scenes and he directed or edited a couple of those a decade ago i was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught the answers were there hidden in plain sight So why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 68 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now.

Speaker 68 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 43 All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie.

Speaker 65 For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

Speaker 62 I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her. We know.

Speaker 65 A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV.

Speaker 69 Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

Speaker 65 My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

Speaker 9 I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said.

Speaker 71 They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her.

Speaker 65 From Lava for Good, this is Graves County. A show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

Speaker 12 America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happen

Speaker 12 to good people in small towns.

Speaker 65 Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 65 And to binge the entire season at free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

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Speaker 74 It's okay not to be okay sometimes and be able to build strength and love within each other.

Speaker 75 Thanksgiving isn't just about food. It's a day for us to show up for one another.

Speaker 75 I'm Elliot Connie, host of the podcast Family Therapy, a series where real families come together to heal and find hope.

Speaker 7 What would be a clue that we'd be like, I've gotten lots of text messages from him.

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Speaker 75 This is Family Therapy. Real families, real stories on a journey to heal together.

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Speaker 57 When did Roger Corman come into the mix?

Speaker 43 And for people who don't know, the late, great Roger Corman was sort of a godfather in his own right, but the godfather of the new Hollywood.

Speaker 43 And he was a great director of B-movies and pop cinema, but also handled distribution on a lot of foreign films by incredible directors like Kirasawa and Fellini. And of course, he...

Speaker 43 fostered a lot of young talents and was a mentor to people like Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda and Peter Bogdanovich.

Speaker 44 Yeah, you know, especially Francis Ford Coppola, who even featured Roger in Godfather 2. He was one of the senators in the hearings.

Speaker 61 But they met when Coppola was finishing up at UCLA in the 60s, and Corman was looking for an editor to cut the anti-American propaganda out of a Russian sci-fi film.

Speaker 48 And here's Roger Corman.

Speaker 67 So I called UCLA and I said, Who is your best graduating senior in editing? So they sent over several people and I felt Francis was the

Speaker 67 brightest and most creative.

Speaker 43 Corman hired Coppola as his assistant. And what sort of work did he do for Corman other than editing Russian sci-fi films?

Speaker 21 Well, pretty much everything, positioning the camera, holding the boom mic, script revisions.

Speaker 34 He even brought Francis to Europe as part of a film crew where he decided to give him even more responsibility.

Speaker 67 And so I then got the idea that I had this little crew, I had everything in the micro bus. We'd paid for everybody to come to Europe.

Speaker 67 And we could make another picture and amortize the cost of taking everybody to Europe. I'll write it off over the first picture and make a second picture for almost nothing.

Speaker 67 So I offered the chance to Francis. I said, I've got $30,000 in cash.

Speaker 67 I can give you the $30,000 if you can write a little horror script and shoot it in Ireland with a skeleton crew.

Speaker 49 Coppola jumped at the chance and assembled a ragtag group of fellow UCLA grads and Irish locals to work around the clock on the top floor of an old house outside of Dublin.

Speaker 61 And the movie was called Dementia 13.

Speaker 43 What came of that movie?

Speaker 20 Well, probably the most significant thing for Francis was his wife and firstborn child.

Speaker 43 That's right, they met on set, right?

Speaker 21 Exactly.

Speaker 61 Eleanor Jesse Neal.

Speaker 18 She was a fellow UCLA grad recruited by Corman and the two started a relationship in Ireland and soon she became pregnant.

Speaker 43 How did Coppola take that?

Speaker 46 Really great.

Speaker 52 He told Eleanor that he always wanted a family and the two got married in Las Vegas and moved to LA to start their lives as filmmakers.

Speaker 43 Tell me about Coppola's early career. Did he see a lot of success?

Speaker 41 Well, pretty much like Mario Puzzo, Coppola struggled early on.

Speaker 20 Early films that weren't exactly A-list movies, a bad investment, and real feelings of despair about his prospects as an artist.

Speaker 76 But things turned around when 20th Century Fox hired him to co-write the screenplay for Patton, which won him an Academy Award.

Speaker 43 Mark, let's talk about Patton for a second. Patton comes out in 1970, and it's about one of the most famous generals in American history, if not all of history.

Speaker 43 To what extent do you think that prepared Coppola for not only writing a blockbuster, but writing a movie that's about a strong figurehead or a charismatic leader?

Speaker 58 Yeah, I think Patton prepared him for a lot because Patton was about, you know, a general that was a strong, charismatic leader, much like Don Corleone, but in a very different way.

Speaker 76 They were in a very different war.

Speaker 61 Patton was World War II, and the Godfather was a war between the two rival families going to the mattresses where Colmenza says, you know, we have to do this every few years to weed out the bad blood.

Speaker 35 But I think that Francis learned a lot by co-writing the script for Patton, for which he won an Academy Award, as did George C.

Speaker 30 Scott for Best Actor that year.

Speaker 20 And I think that prepared him for the War of the Godfather, which was soon to come.

Speaker 43 And that was also the first time that Coppola had gone from making an indie film to making an epic.

Speaker 17 Yeah, and this is a mainstream Hollywood film for which he won an Oscar as a co-writer of the script.

Speaker 60 So it was a pretty big step.

Speaker 43 And then he wrote a movie for Charlie Bluedorn, right?

Speaker 55 Famously, yes.

Speaker 38 It was one of Charlie's early flops, is Paris Burning.

Speaker 14 And Coppola knew it was a bomb.

Speaker 58 So while he was working on it, he wrote an adaptation of the novel You're a Big Boy Now, which he then directed and screened at Cannes.

Speaker 16 That's what really put him on the map.

Speaker 43 I want to just read a few of the headlines from that time. From the LA Times, we have Coppola Breaks the Age Barrier, which marveled at his success as a 26-year-old.

Speaker 43 From the New York Times, Offering the Moon to a Guy in Jeans by film critic Rex Reed, who called him Orson Welles of the handheld camera. That's some pretty staggering praise.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I was amazed when I saw all those clippings with all of those amazing reviews of his work and who he was.

Speaker 23 And it wasn't long after that when he signs a deal with Warner Brothers to direct Finney's Rainbow, starring no less than Fred Astair.

Speaker 43 But with all his success, he's growing pretty disillusioned, right?

Speaker 18 Yeah, he's fighting to make the kind of movies he wants to make from inside the Hollywood machine.

Speaker 24 He makes the Rain people without Warner Brothers' full sign-off on certain aspects of the film, which end up costing him in the end.

Speaker 45 He's just sick and tired of Hollywood.

Speaker 43 And he decides to head north.

Speaker 34 Yeah, he packs up his family into a VW bus in a very 60s scene and leaves L.A.

Speaker 80 for the greener pastures of San Francisco.

Speaker 23 He's trailed in a caravan by his assistant Mona Skager and his sister Talya and of course his collaborator, young George Lucas.

Speaker 43 So they get to San Francisco. What then?

Speaker 28 Well, they set up shop for a new kind of production company, American Zoatrope, which was modeled in a way after studios that Coppola had seen and experienced in Europe.

Speaker 30 Mona Skager told me it was in the wine country because the neighborhood was filled with winos.

Speaker 43 It's interesting what you say about the foreign production companies. In what way was it modeled on them?

Speaker 20 Well, they were more independent.

Speaker 15 They were more artistically driven rather than commercially driven. driven.

Speaker 34 I think it's best summed up in an interview he gave to the San Francisco Chronicle when he gave a tour of their new offices.

Speaker 35 And he said, the difference is that in L.A.

Speaker 28 you talk about deals, and here you talk about film.

Speaker 43 Sounds like a dream for a director.

Speaker 44 Yes, but the dream didn't last.

Speaker 23 By the time Peter Bark approached him about the godfather, American Zootrope was in a dire position.

Speaker 45 The sheriff was literally at the door, about to shut down the company for unpaid taxes.

Speaker 34 And they were $600,000 in hoc to Warner Brothers for overhead and development cost.

Speaker 43 It seems like a no-brainer that he'd accept the job.

Speaker 50 You would think, but he really didn't want to make the movie.

Speaker 36 He thought the book, upon first hearing about it, sounded like the carpetbackers.

Speaker 53 But Peter Bart was persistent.

Speaker 36 He mailed him a copy of the book, and apparently Coppola only got 60 pages into it.

Speaker 79 You know, I did bully him. He didn't want to do the picture, and I would call him and remind him how much money he owed.

Speaker 79 One time I called him and I found out what the tuition of his oldest kids, the private school tuition was, I said, Rancid's show broke. I'd like to remind you,

Speaker 79 but I was rather unpleasant about pushing him in this because he didn't want to do it up.

Speaker 43 What convinced him to do it in the end?

Speaker 60 Well, I think it was really debt.

Speaker 30 American Zoatrope was struggling and Coppola was at his friend George Lucas' house one night in Mill Valley.

Speaker 41 And somehow Peter Bart got the phone number and called him there.

Speaker 8 And Lucas apparently told him what would soon become a famous, quote, we are broke, Francis.

Speaker 41 We're out of business. We're closed.

Speaker 40 You have to accept this job.

Speaker 30 We have no money, and the sheriff is coming to chain up the front door.

Speaker 43 And legend has it that Coppola quit trying to read the book and headed to the Mill Valley Public Library and read books on the mob instead. What did he find in those books?

Speaker 47 Well, he found a lot.

Speaker 41 Beneath all the blood and gore, he found stories of families and American entrepreneurs, all in the mob.

Speaker 8 His interest was revived, and he went back to the book with an open mind.

Speaker 30 He realized that there was a profound story to tell in Mario Puzzo's novel.

Speaker 53 He said it was the classic story of succession about a great king with three sons, each of whom had a single element of what made the king great.

Speaker 53 Like a scene out of the movie, he calls Peter Bart and says, I'll make the picture under one condition.

Speaker 56 And here's how Robert Evans later described it in his memoir.

Speaker 82 Peter comes into my office. Coppola will make the picture on one condition, that it's not a film about organized gangsters.
It's not about organized gangsters. It ain't a musical, Peter.

Speaker 82 He wants to make it as a family chronicle, a metaphor for capitalism in America. Fuck him and the horse he rode in on.

Speaker 43 So now Coppola is convinced and he wants to do the film, but perversely it seems like he needs to turn around around and convince Paramount that he's the man for the job.

Speaker 33 Yes, even though he's accepted the job himself, he has to convince Paramount.

Speaker 42 He flies to LA, Al Ruddy picks him up at the airport, and immediately starts giving him advice on how to land the gig.

Speaker 42 I said, but remember one thing, Francis.

Speaker 62 There's a low-budget movie.

Speaker 63 So when you meet the guys,

Speaker 63 start figuring out how to downgrade what you've planned.

Speaker 29 He takes him to the Paramount studios, and and according to Ruddy, Coppola gives the performance of a lifetime.

Speaker 62 Oh, God, he ran that on, but philosophically, the value of film and the beauty of film and the messages of this book.

Speaker 63 He's throwing up so many diets and so much flash in their face.

Speaker 81 They don't know what he's talking about. They loved him.
So now Francis is on. They loved him.
Yeah, I know. They loved him.

Speaker 43 For a guy who doesn't want the job, he's really selling himself.

Speaker 39 According to Ruddy, yes, but I asked Coppola about that meeting 25 years later and had no recollection.

Speaker 39 He wrote to me in an email, I'm sorry, I have no idea of how Ruddy described what I may have said.

Speaker 31 Sorry, I cannot remember that day at all.

Speaker 43 It sounds like he might be repressing that memory a little bit.

Speaker 16 I'm not sure because for Ruddy, it was crystal clear.

Speaker 32 He says Francis jumps up on the table and starts giving the performance of a lifetime.

Speaker 55 He sounded like Al Ruddy as Al Ruddy gave the performance of Hogan's Heroes.

Speaker 45 Remember that?

Speaker 48 So this is like Coppola giving his vision of the Godfather.

Speaker 43 So he kills it in L.A., but then his agent, Freddie Fields, says he needs to go to New York and convince Charlie Bluedorn.

Speaker 42 Yes, Coppola's assistant, Mona Skager, told me Francis took the red eye to New York and kept Charlie up until 3 in the morning, pitching him on his vision of the movie.

Speaker 27 How do you know he's kept him up until 3 in the morning, Francis told you? Because he told us. He had a meeting with him and then

Speaker 68 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the Most Notorious Killer in New York since the son of Sam. Available now.

Speaker 68 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 43 All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie.

Speaker 65 For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

Speaker 62 I'm telling you, we know Quincy Hilda.

Speaker 66 We know.

Speaker 65 A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV.

Speaker 69 Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

Speaker 65 My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

Speaker 9 I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said.

Speaker 71 They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her.

Speaker 65 From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

Speaker 12 America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happen

Speaker 12 to good people in small towns.

Speaker 65 Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 65 And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 72 Welcome, fellow seekers seekers of the dark.

Speaker 12 I'm Danny Drejo.

Speaker 72 Won't you join me in Nocturnal, Tales from the Shadows?

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Speaker 83 Listen to Hungry for History as part of the My Pultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 43 So he sold Hurricane Charlie on his vision.

Speaker 54 He sure did.

Speaker 53 And then he called his assistant, Mona, and tells her to tell his wife to pack up the kids and get on the Red Eye to New York.

Speaker 55 The family would be sailing on the SS Michelangelo for Italy the next day.

Speaker 43 It's so funny that he and Puzzo chose to do the same exact thing once their ship came in, metaphorically speaking.

Speaker 41 These guys haven't even met yet, but they're already kindred spirits.

Speaker 43 And he worked on the screenplay on the ship, right?

Speaker 33 Yes, Mona told me that he tore pages out of Puzo's novel and taped them to the windows of the ship and was just typing away like a mad dog.

Speaker 43 Do you think that Coppola chose to go to Italy because he thought that it would inspire him in some way or was this just a simple family trip?

Speaker 17 Well, I think he was going there because there was a film festival he wanted to attend in Italy.

Speaker 52 That's where he met or that's where he met up with Martin Scorsese.

Speaker 48 And so there was a reason for him going there.

Speaker 60 It was about film, but at the same time, it was like Mario Puzzo, you know, a getaway, a vacation, a celebration of sorts.

Speaker 43 Okay, let's fast forward to September 29th in 1970.

Speaker 43 There's an amazing photo, which you have in the book, of Puzzo, Coppola, Evans, and Ruddy at a press conference announcing Coppola as the director of the film.

Speaker 56 Yes, it was extraordinary because I was able to access Robert Evans' date book because there was an auction of his possessions.

Speaker 52 And I was able to track down the man who purchased the date book at the auction.

Speaker 17 And he kindly sent me photographs from these pages.

Speaker 56 And on the one that marked September 29th, 1970, you can see in Robert Evans's own green handwriting, 10 a.m.

Speaker 41 press conference, the Godfather.

Speaker 17 So, in the famous picture that resulted from that press conference, you can see these four men, Puzo, Coppola, Evans, and Ruddy, at this famous press conference.

Speaker 48 And they're all smiles, but they're about to engage in this epic battle to get this picture made.

Speaker 43 Eerily, it doesn't portray any of the misery that's about to come.

Speaker 21 No, everybody's all smiles at this point, but those smiles would not last for long.

Speaker 43 Well, let's start with a relationship that did have some smiles, Coppola and Puzo. We know Coppola extensively rewrites Puzo's script.
Did Puzo know this going in?

Speaker 21 Yeah, he knew, and honestly, he was very relieved.

Speaker 16 According to everyone I spoke with, Puzo and Coppola became fast friends and had great respect for one another.

Speaker 80 Here's what Talya Shire said about them.

Speaker 86 They loved each other. I mean, they were very, very good friends.
And Francis had tremendous respect for him as a writer.

Speaker 86 You know, he's he's an awfully good writer and they were together and I think that was the the cincher for Francis that he was so loved Mario and

Speaker 86 their collaboration was very creative and exciting Mario really was in Francis's corner and Francis was seeing it

Speaker 53 and did they work on the screenplay together yes and no Puzzo really wanted to collaborate sit side by side and rewrite the script and what he envisioned was a traditional way but apparently when he asked, Coppola looked him straight in the eye and said no.

Speaker 48 And Puzo would later say he liked that.

Speaker 56 That's how he knew that Coppola was a real director.

Speaker 43 I guess at this point he's looking for someone to take over from him.

Speaker 40 Exactly.

Speaker 18 So the two agree that they'll collaborate long distance with Coppola in San Francisco and Puzzo in L.A.

Speaker 58 or New York back home.

Speaker 16 And Coppola sets to work in a cafe in San Francisco where he arrived each morning with the novel in a satchel and his first step is to create what he calls a prompt book, which is a tradition from the theater.

Speaker 25 And here's an interview from 2001 where he describes creating this tome of a book.

Speaker 87 When I realized that I was actually going to make a movie out of the novel The Godfather,

Speaker 87 I sat down and began to read the book very, very carefully.

Speaker 87 And I think it's important to put your impressions down down on the first reading because those are the initial instincts about what you thought was good or what you didn't understand or what you thought was bad.

Speaker 87 And having gotten through the book, I pulled my book apart that I had made those comments on and I myself pasted every page of the novel onto sheets of paper like this.

Speaker 87 And I called it the Godfather Notebook and put a big warning, if found, return to this address for reward, because I recognized that it would have every

Speaker 28 opinion that I had on the book.

Speaker 87 And

Speaker 87 interestingly, I decided to break down each section with these

Speaker 87 key criteria.

Speaker 43 He's clearly such a craftsman, and you can start to see some of the moments that he pulls from the book as essential or pivotal.

Speaker 87 On page 79 of the book, we have the actual shooting of the dawn. Whenever I felt there was a really important

Speaker 87 part of the book that was going to be in the movie, I would sit there with my ruler and really underline. So this details the shooting.
My margin notes are the shooting, great detail.

Speaker 87 The Don is the main character of the movie. So as in Psycho, we are totally thrown when he is shot.

Speaker 43 Okay, I'm afraid to ask. Coppola is hard at work on the script.
What's Puzo doing with his newfound free time?

Speaker 37 Well, he's having the time of his life at Hollywood.

Speaker 46 He's living on Paramount's dime, but the pressure to write the script is off.

Speaker 47 So he gets to really enjoy being a successful author and screenwriter of a much anticipated Hollywood film.

Speaker 30 At this time, he has a new assistant, Linetta Walgren.

Speaker 31 Linetta calls him the frog prince because he dressed very poorly.

Speaker 30 His pants would drag on the ground.

Speaker 40 He had these shirts that were too tight.

Speaker 17 And of course, he had a prodigious belly. So one day, Linetta takes him to the Gucci store in Beverly Hills.

Speaker 20 Well, of course, nobody knows who he is.

Speaker 17 So they pretty much ignored him.

Speaker 37 And soon Linetta says, don't you know who this is?

Speaker 47 This is the writer, the author of The Godfather.

Speaker 46 And they went, oh my God. And pretty much, like in the movie Pretty Woman, they're all over him.

Speaker 40 And he buys all these new clothes, velour track suits, all in his favorite color, pink.

Speaker 21 And he's just transformed.

Speaker 41 The frog prince had turned into a real prince of Hollywood, and everyone wanted him at their parties and for dinner.

Speaker 43 He must have fit right in at the Beverly Hills Hotel in his pink track suits.

Speaker 41 I think he stood out at the Beverly Hills Hotel in his pink track suit.

Speaker 29 But, you know, everybody loved Mario Puzo.

Speaker 43 He's also a man of deeply entrenched habits. He's still gambling during this time, right?

Speaker 21 Of course he's gambling.

Speaker 39 Linetta Walgren said she would pick him up for work every day, and some days he would just say, get on the freeway, which meant they were going to the airport to fly to Las Vegas for the day.

Speaker 5 Well, what about work?

Speaker 43 Isn't he helping Coppola with the script?

Speaker 31 Yes, but according to Coppola, Puzo had done his part by writing the book, and now it was Coppola's turn to do the heavy lifting on the script.

Speaker 37 He would send drafts for Puzzo to comment on, and Coppola really respected his notes.

Speaker 30 There's a great line in the scene where Clemenza is teaching Michael how to make spaghetti sauce, and Coppola had written, First you brown some garlic, and then you throw in the tomatoes.

Speaker 46 And Puzzo scribbled a note, Gangsters don't brown, they fry.

Speaker 43 And this is also when they're working out of casinos, right?

Speaker 38 Yes, Francis told me that a casino is the absolute best place for writers to collaborate.

Speaker 12 One thing about Mario is he loved to gamble. So I got the

Speaker 12 that we could both go to a gambling casino in nearby Reno, Nevada. The reason why it's good to work in a gambling casino is because they're up for twenty-four hours uh service.

Speaker 12 So people are gambling all through the night so that at any time if you order breakfast or you order some refreshments or wha whatever you want, basically there it's available.

Speaker 12 And we were up all night writing the script and then when we get tired we would go downstairs and Mario would gamble. And of course, he was a terrible gambler.

Speaker 12 And he would just lose all this money on the roulette wheel. And

Speaker 12 once someone said, oh, Mr. Puzo, you're losing so much money.

Speaker 12 He says, yeah, well, we're losing thousands here on the roulette table, but we'll go upstairs and work on the script and we'll make millions.

Speaker 43 So Coppola's version of the script was... vastly different than Puzzo's.

Speaker 45 I think it was quite different.

Speaker 17 Peter Bart and Bob Evans were pretty happy with Puzo's Puzzo's script, mostly because it seemed like he did everything he was told to do.

Speaker 58 He changed the setting to modern day to cut costs, and was even opening with a love scene, because Al Reddy told him to.

Speaker 43 But Copla was up for a fight.

Speaker 41 Always up for a fight.

Speaker 53 He insisted on keeping the film set in the 40s, and he had his own thoughts on an opening scene.

Speaker 43 I believe in America.

Speaker 81 America has made my fortune.

Speaker 43 Which is, of course, one of the greatest openings in movie history.

Speaker 58 Absolutely, because that line, I in America, appears about halfway into the first chapter of Puzzo's book.

Speaker 76 It could have been easily overlooked, but Copler realized what it represented.

Speaker 16 He said, the real appeal of the Godfather is that you could go to someone if you weren't being treated fairly and the Godfather would make it right.

Speaker 43 You know, one of the things about The Godfather is that it's an immigration story. It's a story about a family that comes from this part of Italy that's very remote from America.

Speaker 43 So do you think that that sets it up as being a film about the American dream?

Speaker 40 Yes, of course.

Speaker 31 I mean, you see this face coming out of the darkness, and the first line he says is, I believe in America.

Speaker 54 I mean, you just think, wow.

Speaker 19 And then the way it pulls back from the darkness, you see the hand of Bido Corleone scratching his chin, and then you see the cat, and then you see the family there gathered around the table on the day of his daughter's wedding.

Speaker 19 So it's telescopic in a way because it starts with this amazing image of this immigrant coming to the Godfather for help.

Speaker 35 And then the story that he tells about his daughter, I mean, gosh, you can't get any more dramatic than that.

Speaker 43 And Bonasera is pleading and desperate. And in contrast, Don Vito is incredibly composed and stoic.

Speaker 44 It's this opening scene so dramatic.

Speaker 61 That was the scene that hooked me in from the get-go.

Speaker 19 You know, you see the moon face of this Undertaker rising up out of the darkness and he says, I believe in America.

Speaker 35 And then it cuts to Don Corleone and you wonder what the hell's going on.

Speaker 51 And then Bonacera asked the godfather to commit murder.

Speaker 33 He wants the young men who have harmed his daughter dead.

Speaker 44 He doesn't say it just like that because he whispers it in the Don's ear while Brando is petting that cat.

Speaker 37 And then Don Corleone says, you know,

Speaker 44 You come to my house on the day of my daughter's wedding and you ask me to commit murder.

Speaker 30 That's not a legitimate tit for tat or whatever, you know,

Speaker 80 because your daughter is still alive.

Speaker 44 You know, he says, you found success in America and never needed a friend like me, but now he needs him pretty badly because the system of America has denied him justice.

Speaker 21 That opening scene just grabs you by the throat, sets up everything to follow, and really doesn't let you go into the final credits.

Speaker 43 And Coppola is already thinking about casting.

Speaker 44 Yes, and unfortunately, so are the executives at Paramount.

Speaker 35 Ruddy was so besieged with actors seeking roles that he put out a statement to the Hollywood Reporter, and here's what it said: The book is the star, not the actors.

Speaker 17 I want the audience to see real people almost as if they're looking through a window. I just don't feel I can achieve this if I hire well-known actors.

Speaker 44 I mean, this is the producer, not the director, saying this.

Speaker 20 So you can see the panemonium that has ensued.

Speaker 43 Thus begins the casting frenzy of The Godfather.

Speaker 44 Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli is a production of Air Mail and iHeart Media.

Speaker 43 The podcast is based on the book of the same name written by our very own Mark Seal.

Speaker 44 Our producer is Tina Mullen.

Speaker 43 Research assistants by Jack Sullivan.

Speaker 35 Jonathan Dressler was our development producer.

Speaker 43 Our music supervisor is Randall Poster. Our executive producers are me, Nathan King, Mark Seale, Dylan Fagan, and Graydon Carter.

Speaker 44 Special thanks to Bridget Arseneau and everyone at CDM Studios.

Speaker 43 A comprehensive list of sources and acknowledgments can be found in Mark Seale's book, Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli, published by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon ⁇ Schuster.

Speaker 68 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

Speaker 68 So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the Most Notorious Killer in New York since the son of Sam.

Speaker 68 Available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 84 I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it rip through me.

Speaker 88 In season two of Rip Current, we ask, who tried to kill Judy Berry and why?

Speaker 51 They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods.

Speaker 85 She received death threats before the bombing. She received more threats threats after the bombing.

Speaker 1 I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement.

Speaker 88 Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 12 Malcolm Glaudwell here.

Speaker 89 This season on Revisionist History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control.

Speaker 12 And he said, I've been in prison 24, 25 years. That's probably not long enough.
I didn't kill him.

Speaker 89 From Revisionist History, this is the Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionist History, the Alabama Murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 43 Hey, I'm Kyle McLaughlin.

Speaker 10 You might know me as that guy from Twin Peaks, Sex in the City, or just the internet stand.

Speaker 90 I have a new podcast called What Are We Even Doing?

Speaker 91 where I embark on a noble quest to understand the brilliant chaos of youth culture.

Speaker 10 Each week, I invite someone fascinating to join me to talk about navigating this high-speed roller coaster we call reality.

Speaker 91 Join me and my delightful guests every Thursday, and let's get weird together in a good way. Listen to what are we even doing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.