Saving the Studio

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Speaker 3 From Airmail and iHeartMedia, this is Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli, the epic story of the making of the Godfather.

Speaker 11 Based on the book by the same name, this show will attempt to tell the story of the men and women responsible for the greatest film of all time and those who tried to stand in its way.

Speaker 15 The five families did not want us to shoot that picture in New York.

Speaker 13 He said, as long as I'm president of Paramount, there's no way that Marlon Brenda will play this role.

Speaker 16 So this is going on and on and on.

Speaker 16 Francis just got so sick of everything. He goes, I'm going to Sicily.
Just

Speaker 16 cast my fucking movie. Excuse my language.

Speaker 13 My kids came in all

Speaker 13 hysterical. They'd heard gunshots and they went outside and all the windows had been shot out of the Faso Vega.

Speaker 3 It was consumed with taking us down and getting Francis out of there and saving the picture.

Speaker 3 I'm Mark Seale, author of Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli, published by Simon ⁇ Schuster in 2021.

Speaker 11 And And I'm Nathan King, deputy editor at AirMail.

Speaker 3 I came to this story in 2008. I was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

Speaker 3 What started out as a magazine assignment about the making of The Godfather turned into an all-consuming hunt for the truth behind this film that took over my life for almost 20 years.

Speaker 11 And resulted in Mark's hip book that would become known as the definitive truth behind a story filled with so many lies.

Speaker 3 But the truth is fickle, and to this day, the principles of this story have different versions of how it all unfolded.

Speaker 11 Over the next 10 episodes, we'll hear from all of them with never-before-heard interview tapes of the men and women Mark spoke with when writing his book, as well as some brand new interviews and rarely heard archival tape.

Speaker 11 The stories they tell are sometimes hard to believe, and we'll let you be the judge of what's fact and what's not.

Speaker 11 But what we can promise is that this show will take you through everything we know about the film, from the origins of organized crime in America and the writing of Mario Puzzo's novel to casting, filming, and the Godfather's rapturous premiere.

Speaker 3 In this episode, we're starting at what might seem like an unusual place, a Hollywood producer's bedroom. This is really the first interview I've done in bed.

Speaker 15 That's very funny.

Speaker 11 Robert Evans was one of the most legendary producers in Hollywood history.

Speaker 11 He helped rescue Paramount from a shameful demise with pictures like Rosemary's Baby, Love Story, and of course, The Godfather.

Speaker 15 It's called Lily Godfather's Godfather.

Speaker 3 As the head of production, Evans was involved in every aspect of the movie.

Speaker 15 I devoted my entire four years to this. There was a lot of fights and everything.

Speaker 3 He financed the struggling author of the novel on which the movie is based.

Speaker 15 A very good writer named Marian Pusso is real short and green.

Speaker 3 He greenlit greenlit the film's development.

Speaker 15 Nobody wanted to make it. As a matter of fact, Paramount refused to make it for a while.

Speaker 3 He hired its producer and its director.

Speaker 15 It was operatic. Francis made it operatic.

Speaker 3 And he fostered the film's legend before and after its release.

Speaker 15 It's my most important legacy in life.

Speaker 11 Like so many others involved in the movie, Robert Evans died while we were making this podcast, and we're honored to tell his story here.

Speaker 3 Picture this. I'm in a rent car coming from Los Angeles International Airport and I drive to Robert Evans' home called Woodland.

Speaker 3 And as I pull up to Woodland, I have no idea what I'm getting into.

Speaker 3 I'm reminded of how Robert Evans described this place in his memoir, The Kid Stays in the Picture.

Speaker 17 The grounds, the trees, the acreage, the towering eucalyptus. Thousands of roses, and everything is quiet and secret behind walls.

Speaker 3 I get out of of the car. I knock on the door.
It swings open, and there's this butler, Alan Selka, to welcome me. Come in, Mr.
Seal. Mr.
Evans is awaiting you.

Speaker 3 Memorabilia from the movie is laid across the dining room table. There's pictures, there's clippings, there's plaques, maybe an award or two.

Speaker 3 And as I'm looking at all these things, suddenly the room turns silent. And Robert Evans walks in.
And it's a typically grand entrance. He's 78, but I'm reminded of the actor he once was.

Speaker 3 He's wearing his trademark black sweater and bolo tie. His black hair is slick back.
His face is deeply tanned. He flashes a wide, dazzling grin and stares at me through rose-colored glasses.

Speaker 3 And then he speaks in his gravelly voice. It's stranger than fiction.

Speaker 3 He shakes my hand and prepares to tell me the saga of the movie that he considered both his legacy and his loss. The movie that made him and destroyed him.

Speaker 3 And then Evans, a legendary Lothario, looks me in the eye and says, let's go to bed. I'll admit, I was a little taken aback.
I don't think I got out much except a what?

Speaker 3 Evans explains that a fire had consumed his screening room and now he and his friends watch movies from his bed.

Speaker 3 So he leads me into the bedroom, and I stare for a moment at his bed, which was large and covered in fur. And he says, would you rather watch the movie in bed or would you rather use the chair?

Speaker 3 And I say, frankly, I think I'd rather be in the chair. And he goes, take those shoes off.

Speaker 3 And pretty soon, we're lying side by side on top of this fur coverlet. He calls in the butler, Alan, who arrives with food, drinks, and a huge TV is queued up with scenes from the Godfather.

Speaker 3 It's clear there's a big story to tell, and it may take a while.

Speaker 3 It should be the Godfather has made a mistake.

Speaker 11 Mark, you've been researching and reporting on the myth behind this film for almost 20 years, but your obsession with the movie started much earlier than that.

Speaker 3 That's true. It really started in March of 1972 when I first saw the movie.
I was 19 years old, and one afternoon, some friends and I decided to go see a movie.

Speaker 3 And I knew absolutely nothing about this movie, except on the marquee it said two words, the Godfather.

Speaker 3 I walk into the theater. The lights go down and the music comes up.

Speaker 3 The Godfather logo comes on the screen and the moon face of the Undertaker, Bonacera, comes out of the darkness and he says, I believe in America.

Speaker 3 This is a movie I soon realized about family and expectations and legacy. And I started thinking about my own family and my own future, which was sort of unsettled then.

Speaker 3 I didn't know really what I wanted to do. But by the time the movie was over, I felt suddenly a sense of purpose of wanting to do something in the arts.

Speaker 11 Which is how you ended up in Robert Evans' bet 35 years later.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 11 How did you land the Vanity Fair story? It seems like it would be a dream come true for you.

Speaker 3 It was because at the time I was new to the magazine and the stories that I did were crime, scandal, stories that would get me into the pages because they were kind of a must-read story of the moment.

Speaker 3 And you couldn't hold these kinds of stories because the crime had just happened or the scandal had just occurred.

Speaker 3 The film stories, on the other hand, were for film writers, and I wasn't really a film writer at that point, certainly not for Vanity Fair magazine.

Speaker 3 So when I had the idea to do the story about the making of the movie of the Godfather, I thought I would be the most unlikely writer to get the job.

Speaker 3 I thought that the editor of the magazine, Graydon Carter, who is now the editor of Airmail, he could give it to any of his seasoned film writers, of which Vanity Fair had an abundance.

Speaker 3 But I dutifully wrote a pitch and gave it to my editor, the great Wayne Lawson. And Wayne said, we'll see what Graydon says.
So he took it to Graydon and suddenly they said, you're on.

Speaker 11 And when you started reporting the story, you started with Robert Evans.

Speaker 3 Exactly. I started with Robert Evans, but soon all roads led to a man equally as mythic as Evans, Charlie Bludorn.

Speaker 3 He bought Paramount in 1966, and he was known as Hurricane Charlie, an Austrian-born business titan with an insatiable appetite for acquiring companies. His story begins at age 19 in 1942.

Speaker 3 Charlie was the son of a Jewish mother, and he was enrolled in the Carleton School for Boys in Yorkshire, England, and his parents, who had already left war-torn Europe for America, gave him a two-word directive, leave immediately.

Speaker 3 So he boards the HMS Hillary bound for America, and it was trailed by Nazi submarines intent on seeking it. But thankfully, Charlie made it to America.

Speaker 11 And so he gets to America, Mark. And what does he do?

Speaker 3 Well, he immediately starts working. His daughter told me that there was never a day in Charlie Bludorin's life when he wasn't thinking about business or working in business.

Speaker 3 And there's a story when he was a very, very young man. He got a job as a broker in a commodities house in New York City.

Speaker 3 And he was soon bringing in a million dollars dollars a year into this small company.

Speaker 3 And Charlie had the ability to sell anything and everything, even spaghetti, which he was selling to of all places Italy, as if Italy didn't already have enough spaghetti.

Speaker 3 Then he got into the coffee business and then he got into the auto parts business.

Speaker 3 And really, he had his hands in everything, which is how he started his company, which became a conglomerate he called Gulf and Western, which signaled his ambitions to stretch from the Gulf of Mexico to the western Canadian border.

Speaker 11 Bluedorn had a huge appetite for what most people would consider ill-advised business ventures. He loved what he called wreck jobs, which are businesses that are almost beyond repair.

Speaker 11 And in 1966, he bought what he thought was the biggest wreck job of them all, Paramount Pictures.

Speaker 3 That's right. Paramount was once the fabled studio that produced so many classics.
Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Breakfast at Tiffany's, the list goes on and on and on.

Speaker 3 But by the 60s, Paramount was in trouble. Robert Evans famously once said there were eight major studios at the time and Paramount was ninth.

Speaker 3 And Hurricane Charlie felt like he wanted to buy something that he could revive. The only thing in this case is that Charlie knew absolutely nothing about the movie business.

Speaker 11 And that fits with what Barry Diller said about him, which is that to Charlie, the only thing that was worth anything was doing the impossible.

Speaker 3 Yes, and Paramount was the impossible job. Like so many immigrants to America, Charlie thought, what could be more American than Hollywood and movies and the dreams that they sold?

Speaker 3 I mean, he loved what he called the Schmaltz factor. Movies like Dr.
Zavago and the sound of music.

Speaker 3 All of these things represented America to him, and he thought he could identify the secret ingredient that made the magic.

Speaker 3 So he felt like he could run the studio, at least in the beginning, and Charlie, who knew nothing about running a studio, who knew nothing about movies except what he'd seen on the screen, started getting into the editing room and saying things like, I'm going to remake this whole goddamn town.

Speaker 11 How did that work for him, thinking that he could re-engineer Hollywood?

Speaker 3 Well, as you can imagine, it really didn't work out. He produced a movie called Is Paris Burning? It premiered in Paris, no less.

Speaker 3 It was a big, big budget movie, but the reviews were quite big, big, brutal. Mad Magazine even said it should be called Is Paris Boring? It was something of a flop, but Charlie persevered.

Speaker 3 He would walk through the back lot of Paramount and through the bonanza set and felt like the studio was just filled with older men who were out of touch and that he was going to remake and rekindle that old Paramount magic again.

Speaker 3 And Hollywood took one look at Charlie Bluethorn and many people laughed.

Speaker 11 They called him a cliché, a show business neophyte who had no sense of what art is, and they sort of dismissed him as a know-nothing.

Speaker 3 Yes, but he proved him wrong because underneath the scorn and the laughter, Charlie was smart.

Speaker 3 He was brilliant. He knew he had to do something, and what he had to do was find what he called, and this was one of his favorite terms, a genius.

Speaker 11 And by genius, he means artistic genius, right?

Speaker 3 Well, I think he meant a business genius, someone who could guide him through the treacheries of Hollywood, which can be a cutthroat town if you don't know what you're doing.

Speaker 3 He wanted a genius to help him revive the studio, revive the magic, to make the movies like Paramount used to make. And that's how he found the most unlikely genius of them all, Robert Evans.

Speaker 11 Where did he dig up Evans?

Speaker 3 Funny enough, he found him in the New York Times. It was an article written by Peter Bart, a young reporter who we'll talk about later.

Speaker 3 And the story was about this rising producer who was on the lookout for books and scripts and properties that he could make into films. And the headline was, and I love this one.
I like it. I want it.

Speaker 3 Let's sew it up.

Speaker 11 Mark, that headline sort of gives you a hint as to what Robert Evans was doing before he got in the producing business.

Speaker 3 Exactly. So Evans was in the clothing business.
He and his brother, Charlie Evans, were partners in a company called Evan Bacone Clothing Company. And so Bob traveled to LA often.

Speaker 3 And one day he's sitting out by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. And this shows how lucky Evans was.

Speaker 3 Norma Shearer, the famous actress, was on the lookout for the perfect actor to play her late husband, the producer Irving Thahlberg, in a movie called The Man with a Thousand Faces.

Speaker 3 And she took one look at Evans by the pool, who was so handsome and deeply tanned and said, that's him.

Speaker 3 So she sends her new husband over to make an introduction. The three of them get to talking, and Shearer asks Evans if he's an actor.
And Evans, being Evans, says, no, I'm in ladies' pants. It's 1956.

Speaker 11 And just like that, Robert Evans is an actor.

Speaker 3 It's as easy as that. He stars in the movie, The Man with a Thousand Faces, with no less than James Cagney and pretty soon he's in other films including The Sun Also Rises.

Speaker 3 And according to Evans, the cast and crew were so skeptical about his acting abilities that some of them threatened to walk off the set over it. And Daryl Zanik, the producer, heard about it.

Speaker 3 And in the classic scene, with a bullhorn, While Evans is in the bullfighting ring, Zanik yells out, The kid stays in the picture.

Speaker 3 And that becomes the title of Robert Evans' autobiography.

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Speaker 11 So he's working as an actor. How does he get into production?

Speaker 3 Well, you can say a lot of things about Robert Evans, but one thing is he's really smart.

Speaker 3 He's a businessman, first of all, and he started acquiring properties, including a novel, The Detective, which he produced, and it was a fairly substantial hit starring Frank Sinatra, of all people.

Speaker 3 And suddenly, Evans is a producer and he became a man about town.

Speaker 11 And this is when Peter Bart starts to take notice. He's a young writer fresh from New York in Hollywood to write stories about the town.

Speaker 20 He's wanted a young guy to come out here to write like this. That's a great job.

Speaker 11 He keeps hearing about Robert Evans and he thinks to himself, this is the perfect story.

Speaker 20 I wrote kind of a snarky piece about how this guy from the garment business was buying books and making deals for himself. And you know what?

Speaker 20 it's sort of a bland story about how somebody, at a time when Hollywood was in its dollars, could come in and have an impact.

Speaker 3 Yes, and it gets better. Charlie Bludorn reads the story about Robert Evans in the New York Times.

Speaker 20 What I wrote, which talked about what a self-promoter bar was, Charlie said, ah,

Speaker 20 this guy is this fucking guy. It's a self-promoter.
He may be a good guy for me.

Speaker 3 He gets on the phone and he says, get Evans up here. And Evans said he wasn't interested.
He's out in Hollywood.

Speaker 3 What's he he want to go to New York for, especially to meet the new owner of Paramount Pictures, the last place studio?

Speaker 3 But his lawyer, the legendary Greg Baltzer, says, Charlie Bludorn, he's a shrewd operator. When he wants something, he wants it.
You should get up there and meet him.

Speaker 3 Evans was reluctant, of course, but he goes to New York. He meets Bluedorn.

Speaker 3 And like a miracle, like something out of the movie, Charlie Bludorn taps Robert Evans to run Paramount, first stationing him in London and then bringing him to LA as the head of production.

Speaker 11 So Charlie Bludorn picked Robert Evans to run Paramount All on a Hunch in a New York Times article.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and Bluedorn's wife would later say that maybe he picked him because he was handsome, he was glamorous, he could fit into the town.

Speaker 3 But if Bluedorn was considered a laughingstock when he bought Paramount, oh my gosh, Evans was even more so because people said, what does he know about motion pictures?

Speaker 3 He's never really produced a movie.

Speaker 11 What was Evans' directive from Bludorn?

Speaker 3 Nothing short of this. Save this studio.
Green light and produce hits. Quick.
Bludorn told him, Bobby, I want 20 pictures a year from you.

Speaker 3 I want pictures that people in Cincinnati are going to want to see. I want beautiful girls.
I want action. I want fun.

Speaker 11 Charlie had boundless energy and enthusiasm, and it seems like Evans fed off of that. His first order of business was to find find his own right-hand man, right?

Speaker 3 Yes, and this is where it gets even crazier. Who does he hire as his right-hand man? But the author of the New York Times story about him, which got him his job, the reporter, Peter Bart.

Speaker 11 You get the sense that none of these people actually knew anyone. They kind of just, you know, hired the first person that came to mind.

Speaker 3 It was a comedy of errors. It started that way anyway.
Everybody was laughing about these new hires.

Speaker 20 I took the job because Bob was a friend of mine and he was in a bit over his head and said, you know, I thought you'd work with me.

Speaker 20 The blind will lead the blind.

Speaker 11 What was their strategy? How were Evans and Bart going to save the studio?

Speaker 3 Well, their strategy was really pretty simple. Peter Bart was a voracious reader.
And Robert Evans, who might not have been, respected his taste in novels.

Speaker 3 He was looking for hot properties, best-selling books that could be turned into films, You know, with all of the attributes that Bluedorn had directed him to find, films that could save the studio.

Speaker 11 And as it turns out, Evans' hunch about Peter Bart was actually right. They started unearthing these great stories and hit books and bestsellers that they could make into films.

Speaker 11 They produced The Odd Couple, Rosemary's Baby, and then finally, a thin book.

Speaker 11 which became an even thinner script, which turned into a huge hit for Paramount, Love Story, starring Evans' future wife, Allie McGraw.

Speaker 3 Exactly. And Love Story was a smash hit.
Evans liked to say that people were crying so hard, the audience turned into one big Kleenex.

Speaker 11 But as big of a hit as the film was, they'd need a bigger reprieve for Paramount.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Love Story, as I wrote in the book, was a reprieve, not a rescue. They needed another hit, an even bigger hit.
And that's when they found the novel that would become The Godfather.

Speaker 11 So let's talk about how Paramount came to acquire the rights of The Godfather.

Speaker 3 Well, this is another one of the biggest myths of The Godfather, and who knows what's true and what's not. But Evans knows how to tell a story.

Speaker 3 He knows how to make a myth out of reality, and this is what he told me. A guy named George Weezer, a veteran of the New York literary scene, calls him up one day and asks him for a favor.

Speaker 15 Hey, I had to call one day from George Weezer.

Speaker 15 Do you a favor, Barbara?

Speaker 15 He's a pal of mine. He's a writer named Marion Puzzo.
He's a very good writer. He's real short on green.
He's deep with the bookies.

Speaker 15 He knows the bookies a lot of money and he has a 35-page treatment called Mafia.

Speaker 15 Meet him, will you please and see if you can help him?

Speaker 3 So Evans says, okay, he'll meet with Puzzo.

Speaker 3 And as Evans told me the story, this dead broke, fat writer comes into his office with a 35-page treatment under his arm, a big fat cigar hanging out of his mouth.

Speaker 3 And pretty soon, over cigars and conversation in Evans' office, the two men strike a deal.

Speaker 15 I said, 35 pages isn't very much.

Speaker 15 And I didn't know him as an author, really, even though he was a legitimate author. Well, I'll tell you what, two or 10 Gs for it as an option against, let's say, $75,000 if it becomes a book.

Speaker 15 And he says, could you make it $15,000? And I I said, how about $1,250?

Speaker 11 I mean, if true, that's really an incredible story that these two men, both desperate in their own way, came together in this twist of fate.

Speaker 3 Exactly. And of course, Evans' version is my favorite version of the events, even though Peter Bart would remember it very differently.

Speaker 20 So this whole story of Fuso coming in with the 30 pages or whatever, and Bob saying, what are you in for? That's nonsense. There were 60 pages.

Speaker 20 They came in, this big pile of stuff came in to me, and I read it. Of course, George lagged me to read it, and I thought it was really interesting stuff.

Speaker 11 Well, for the sake of the story, I'll take Evans' version to be true.

Speaker 3 But no matter what, Puzo did sell the option to Paramount for $12.50.

Speaker 11 And once they made the deal, was Evans hopeful that it would come through?

Speaker 3 Not really. You know, he bought it and basically forgot about it until he heard from Puzo again.

Speaker 15 A treatment to the movie. Did they buy a ticket to a lottery?

Speaker 3 Five months pass, Puzo calls him, says, I got to speak to you. I'm in LA again.

Speaker 11 What does he want to talk about?

Speaker 3 The name of the book.

Speaker 15 He said, would I be in breach of my contract if I changed the name of

Speaker 15 my book? I forgot he is even writing one.

Speaker 15 I don't understand. I want to call it the Godfather.
I had no idea. I hadn't read one page.

Speaker 15 I didn't read the 55 page. I did it as a favor.
And what became almost was a favor became the biggest favor of my life.

Speaker 3 Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli is a production of Air Mail and iHeart Media.

Speaker 11 The podcast is based on the book of the same name written by our very own Mark Seal.

Speaker 3 Our producer is Tina Mullen.

Speaker 11 Research assistants by Jack Sullivan.

Speaker 3 Jonathan Dressler was our development producer.

Speaker 11 Our music supervisor is Randall Poster. Our executive producers are meet, Nathan King, Mark Seale, Dylan Fagan, and Graydon Carter.

Speaker 3 Special thanks to Bridget Arseneau and everyone at CDM Studios.

Speaker 11 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 and Schuster.

Speaker 12 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.
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Speaker 12 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.

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Speaker 6 The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

Speaker 3 America, y'all better wake the hell up. Bad things happen to good people in small towns.

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Speaker 19 Thanksgiving isn't just about food. It's a day for us to show up for one another.

Speaker 22 It's okay not to be okay sometimes and be able to build strength and love within each other.

Speaker 19 I'm Ellie Aconi, host of the podcast Family Therapy, a series where real families come together to heal and find hope.

Speaker 23 I've always wanted us to have therapy, so this is such a beautiful opportunity.

Speaker 19 Listen to season two of Family Therapy every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 21 I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of Heavyweight.

Speaker 3 And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke.

Speaker 21 A man who robbed a bank when he was 14 years old. And a centenarian rediscovers a love lost 80 years ago.

Speaker 24 How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again?

Speaker 21 Listen to Heavyweight on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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