Italians, Stallions, and Corporate Lackeys

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Speaker 5 It's March 17th, 1971, St. Patrick's Day.
The Corleone family is sitting down to dinner with the man who brought them all together, Francis Ford Coppola.

Speaker 5 Earlier that day, every member of the newly minted cast received their first call sheet, 3.30 p.m., Patsy's Restaurant, 117th Street and First Avenue.

Speaker 5 Coppola's idea was to have everyone sit down to dinner, Italian family style, and Patsy's was perfect. It was a known hangout for gangsters and made men.

Speaker 5 When Gianni Russo, who'd landed the role of Carlo, reports for his first day on the set, he feels right at home.

Speaker 19 So I go up a little early because I see all the guys.

Speaker 20 I know everybody.

Speaker 21 Do I hug him and kiss him?

Speaker 20 I go around the corner, see a hat, people I had to pay my respects to them. And he saw I was so happy.

Speaker 19 It's like, God, it's so crazy.

Speaker 5 Gianni walks into the back room where the cast is gathering.

Speaker 20 It was the first time everybody met everybody.

Speaker 20 And I'm watching like Sterling Hayden, Richard Conti, John Moore. These are the great actors.

Speaker 20 These guys, they were the legends to me.

Speaker 5 Marlon Brando arrives wearing an orange cashmere turtleneck sweater. Producer Al Ruddy described it as Christ coming down from the cross.
The room falls silent.

Speaker 5 Then the world's greatest living actor cracks a joke. From that moment forward, the cast doesn't just respect Marlon Brando, they love him.

Speaker 20 Here comes Brando. He's like, God.

Speaker 20 He watched every Brando movie man.

Speaker 5 As everyone stands around, not sure what to do with themselves, Marlon opens a bottle of wine. He takes his seat, and the rest of the cast follows suit.

Speaker 5 Robert Duvall remembers how easy it was to look to Brando as a father figure.

Speaker 21 And we all sat around as if we were kind of approximating the family situation around Brando.

Speaker 21 He was, you know, when we were young, Brando would like a godfather of actors to us, really, and we all respected him.

Speaker 5 Coppola looks at his newly minted cast, the family he had fought so hard for. Brando at the head of the table, James Kahn on his left, Al Pacino on his right.

Speaker 5 For the first time, Coppola can feel the production coming together just as he had envisioned it.

Speaker 5 I'm Mark Seale.

Speaker 22 And I'm Nathan King.

Speaker 5 And this is Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli.

Speaker 22 In today's episode, we shoot our first frame of what turns into 90 hours of film.

Speaker 5 We'll detail the day-to-day life on the set, including cast pranks and crew turmoil.

Speaker 22 Mark, I'm always amazed that amid Coppola's constant power struggle with executives, he was able to play the part of a strong leader with his cast.

Speaker 5 Yes, that's right. He was a great compartmentalizer.
The sky is falling. People are threatening to fire him.
But he has a job to do and he gets it done. So let's back up.

Speaker 22 The cast meeting wasn't really the first step in filming, which is what we're getting into in today's episode.

Speaker 5 No, I'd say it was the creative production meeting that started it all, which Coppola had called for a few months earlier.

Speaker 22 January 25th, 1971.

Speaker 5 That's right. He invited the production team together to establish the visual style of the film.
I first heard about this this meeting from Dean Tavalares, the film's production designer.

Speaker 5 That two, three hour meeting cemented the look of the film.

Speaker 5 And I emailed Francis Coppel about the meeting, just asking if he could tell me more about it. And he said, I'll do one better.

Speaker 5 I'll send you the transcript from the meeting, which was incredible, because you can really see the workings of a film in progress and the vision he had for so many things in the movie that actually came to pass.

Speaker 5 And he had a

Speaker 5 to record it, he had a stenographer, a court stenographer,

Speaker 5 with

Speaker 5 a little type machine that a court stenographer has.

Speaker 22 And this is the transcript right here. This is massive.

Speaker 5 That's right. It's 84 single space pages written on what seems to be a manual typewriter.

Speaker 22 So tell me about this meeting, Mark. We've got Coppola, Tavalares, a court stenographer.

Speaker 5 Who else is there? Well, it's Gordon Willis, cinematographer, and the great Anahill Johnstone.

Speaker 22 Tell me about Gordon Willis. He was a bit of a legend, right?

Speaker 5 He sure was. Gordon Willis was an esteemed cinematographer.
People called him the Prince of Darkness. He liked shooting his shadows.

Speaker 22 Gordon and Francis had a bit of animosity between them, didn't they?

Speaker 5 Well, they would later, but at this meeting, they were very much on the same page.

Speaker 22 Okay, what about Dean Tavalares?

Speaker 5 Tavaleris is great. He's a longtime production designer, artistic designer, and artist himself.

Speaker 5 I got to know Dean quite a bit and I was able to even visit him in Paris not too long ago and he found so many of the classic locations in The Godfather.

Speaker 5 As he told me for the book, he spent a lot of time looking for places to kill people.

Speaker 5 And then we have costume designer Anna Hill Johnstone, who got her start on Broadway and made a name for herself on movies like On the Waterfront and East of Eden.

Speaker 22 Coppola is the youngest in the group, right?

Speaker 5 And at least for now, he's the group's undisputed leader.

Speaker 22 Okay, let's crack this transcript open. How does the meeting start?

Speaker 5 Well, at first, Coppola sets his intentions. He wants to have a freewheeling discussion and take the script scene by scene.
He had his vision for the film.

Speaker 5 He did not want to make a traditional gangster movie. Here's Dean Tabalais again.

Speaker 5 He wanted to show them as human, to see the human side, the family side of their lives, the ironic thing of them loving their children, etc., and then turning around and committing terrible crimes and brutal murders.

Speaker 22 And what about the look of the film?

Speaker 5 Well, in the production meeting transcript, you know, they go back and forth and one word kept jumping out and that was operatic. Both Tabaleris and Coppola seem to use that word a lot.

Speaker 5 This dark operatic image where the camera is fixed and things come into the frame and things leave the frame, but the camera doesn't cut that much. It doesn't pan that much.

Speaker 22 You can really see that fixed camera technique in the film. So tell us a little bit more about the production meeting because they go over over a lot.

Speaker 22 They talk about every detail of the wedding from the wine that's going to be served to the wait staff. They talk about costumes at length.
Take us through some of what they go over.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's pretty amazing because so many things, so many of the classic scenes that you remember from the movie were first outlined in this production meeting. They talk about the bridge.

Speaker 5 Which bridge should we use? Where Michael's going to meet Salazzo and the corrupt police captain. You know, where the Don is hospitalized after getting shot, which hospital should we use?

Speaker 5 Even the wedding, of course, was a major, major thing that Coppola talked about quite a bit.

Speaker 5 He wanted the wedding to be like the weddings that he had gone to in his youth or, you know, that he was going to even now at the time when he was still a young man, of course, where everybody's talking all at once.

Speaker 5 Johnstone would say, do you think 10 waiters would be enough for the wedding? And Coppola said, no, we're not going to, there's no waiters at an Italian-American wedding. They didn't have that.

Speaker 5 The women would do it. The sandwiches would be ordered from a place on 9th Avenue.
And people would bring in their own food. Everything was done homemade and natural.

Speaker 5 And so that was the key to this incredible scene.

Speaker 22 He was adamant in the meeting that they not over-formalize it. He said the only people in formal attire would be the wedding party and that kids would wear their confirmation clothes

Speaker 22 and everyone else would wear their Sunday dresses and outfits, but it wouldn't be too buttoned up.

Speaker 5 Yeah, he said he's going to try to make the wedding an experience instead of a scene. Take the dialogue out of it and immerse the audience with hundreds and hundreds of details.

Speaker 22 They also talk a lot about how the wedding will be juxtaposed with the setting inside the house, in the Don's office.

Speaker 5 So here's where the Prince of Darkness comes in.

Speaker 5 The cinematographer Gordon Willis, he uses the shadows to show the darkness of the Don's office as juxtaposed against the bright lights and the sunny scene of the wedding where Johnny Fontaine comes in and sings a song and everybody's happy and dancing.

Speaker 22 It's amazing how granular they get. At one point in the meeting, they're talking about Tom Hagin's flight to Los Angeles and the type of airplane he would fly on.

Speaker 22 And they decide it's going to be a 1946 Lockheed Constellation because that's the type of airplane that would make that trans-American flight in those days, in the late 40s.

Speaker 5 They debate the pros and cons of that plane, you know, and that plane is only on the screen for a second, you know. It lands and then you see Tom walking into the Wolt studio.

Speaker 5 So there's a million little details in this film that they discuss in this production meeting. And I think that's where the magic of this film was born, obviously in the script as well.

Speaker 5 But once the script was done, then they had to hammer out all these other details that were in this meeting.

Speaker 22 One of the most visually lush parts of the film is Jack Waltz's house in Beverly Hills. What did they say about that in the meeting?

Speaker 5 Coppola says this in the meeting, you know, I like the idea of Tom with a big shot where you can't even sit down with him. You have to catch him between other things.

Speaker 5 Talk to me while I'm walking and talking kind of thing. That really puts Tom in second place.

Speaker 22 They go into great detail about the fake blood with corn syrup to give it the right viscosity.

Speaker 5 Coppola said, blood never looks right to me in a movie. You know, and he wanted this blood to look real.

Speaker 5 And Coppola said in a meeting, why don't we use real blood, 20 gallons of animal blood? Any butcher can give you some blood.

Speaker 5 And Tabalaris points out real blood coagulates, so you can't use real blood. They had to mix their own blood.

Speaker 22 It's funny because reading the transcript, you get a sense of harmony and that they're all excited about working together and they share a lot of the same ideas or could come to agree on a lot of these things, but it doesn't betray what's going to come.

Speaker 5 Yeah, they're all on the same page, and you can see the back and forth. It goes on for some time.

Speaker 5 I mean, they only get halfway through the script, and then Coppola calls it a night and says, we'll get together again, and then there's no more transcript. This is the only one that exists.

Speaker 22 Do you think they ever got together again?

Speaker 5 I don't think so, or they would have a transcript of it. So this is the only kind of window you have as far as some of these artistic and creative decisions were made.

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Speaker 22 Mark, you write about the filming process with such detail in your book. You have scenes pinned down to the day of shooting.
What was your research process like?

Speaker 5 Well, luck counts for a lot of it, and I was very lucky that we have a day-to-day accounting of filming from none other than Coppola's then assistant, Ira Zuckerman.

Speaker 5 He wrote The Godfather Journal, which is a short but very detailed accounting of the shooting of the film.

Speaker 22 Well, let's get into it. For starters, we know that the cast of The Godfather had a lot of fun on set.

Speaker 5 Yeah, they sure did, and it started right away.

Speaker 5 James Kahn told me a great story about riding home from that first cast dinner at Patsy's with Robert DuBall when suddenly Brando's car pulls up to them.

Speaker 21 So we're coming back down 2nd Avenue and Brando was in the back seat of a station wagon. He goes, come on, Muna, we're going down 2nd Avenue.
I go, are you crazy? I don't do that.

Speaker 21 You're the king of that. He's, I can't.
I'm in a bad spot. You know, da-da-da-da-da.
He's, come on. Now, he's starting with,

Speaker 28 you got to do this. He says, it'll be funny.

Speaker 28 So,

Speaker 28 so. I pull up next to Brando.
I roll my window down. I just stick my ass out the thing.
This is the first day he's met us. He was just,

Speaker 28 he just started falling down.

Speaker 21 We went away, you know, crying, laughing, you know. So that was the first moon of my life.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and that first moon really set the tone for the shooting. The cast was constantly pulling pranks on each other.
And this really made everyone feel comfortable from the start.

Speaker 5 Have you ever mooned anybody?

Speaker 22 Probably when I was a kid, yeah, non-men.

Speaker 22 And did that culture of camaraderie last?

Speaker 5 It seems like it did with the cast for sure. With the crew, well, not so much.
There was a lot of turmoil behind the scenes.

Speaker 22 Coppola has repeatedly called the Godfather the most miserable time in his life. Was it just the micromanaging?

Speaker 5 It was micromanaging to an extreme degree. Robert Evans was trying to control Coppola's moves from across the country.

Speaker 5 Just weeks before filming starts, Coppola is finalizing locations, meeting with his creative team, making last-minute script revisions, coordinating coordinating lighting and makeup tests, and Robert Evans is sending him these memos, just picking apart every decision he makes.

Speaker 5 Nathan, maybe you can read this particularly scathing memo sent on March 5th, just 18 days before filming is set to begin.

Speaker 22 Sure, I can do that. Evans said, quote, Feel that the character of Sonny is not nearly as flamboyant and exciting as in the book.

Speaker 22 The sexuality that everyone remembers is totally missing in the script.

Speaker 22 I think that the size of his cock and the horse's head are the two most remembered scenes from the book, and the former is so lacking that I think we would be criticized for not doing more with Sonny.

Speaker 5 Yes, and this goes on and on, a few more excerpts. Who's gonna play Mama Corleone? Fredo's casting.
I'm not sure I'm satisfied.

Speaker 5 Are you sure the picture can be cut with a straightforward story if you decide not to go with Flash Forwards?

Speaker 22 And Coppola is still living in an apartment with his entire family at this point, right?

Speaker 5 Yes, and apparently it's being painted, so it reeks of paint fumes. He described that time as going to war every morning.
And once again, it's a miracle that this movie got made.

Speaker 22 But somehow, filming begins on March 23rd, 1971. What was the first scene, Mark?

Speaker 5 The first scene, Christmas in Springtime, at Best ⁇ Company, the department store on Fifth Avenue.

Speaker 5 The store had conveniently shuttered the year before, and so it had been restored to its 1940s glory for filming.

Speaker 5 And in keeping with his ability to make miracles happen, the amazing Al Ruddy makes it snow.

Speaker 22 He's fresh off of being fired and rehired by Charlie Bluedorn, right?

Speaker 5 Yes, but that doesn't stop Al Ruddy.

Speaker 5 He brings in snow machines, and when the temperatures rise too high for them to work, he turns to Plan B, synthetic snow and wind machines to create the magical scene of Kay and Michael walking out of the store amid a swirl of fake snow.

Speaker 5 And then the crew moves through the city, landing at Radio City Music Hall, where Michael and Kay are leaving a movie and about to find out the terrible news.

Speaker 12 Would you like me better if I were Ingrid Bergman?

Speaker 4 Now that's a thought.

Speaker 5 Michael.

Speaker 22 No, I would not like you better if you were Ingrid Bergman.

Speaker 5 And these scenes are all coming together to create the iconic montage that ends with the attempt on the Don's life.

Speaker 22 It seems like this first day should be a triumph, but Coppola doesn't feel that way, does he?

Speaker 5 No, unfortunately, all anyone can seem to see is Coppola's shortcomings, and it really is getting to him. He's having nightmares about being fired, and he's getting more and more paranoid.

Speaker 22 Do you think that paranoia is justified?

Speaker 5 I really do. The studio essentially sent a spy to keep watch over him, a paramount finance guy named Jack Ballard.
Here's how how Gray Frederickson remembers Jack.

Speaker 19 He was like a

Speaker 19 shaved head, tough, rough-speaking kind of a staff sergeant kind of guy, scaring everybody.

Speaker 22 He sounds like a cartoon villain.

Speaker 5 Well, you know, I wasn't able to talk to Jack Ballard. He had passed away years before, but DeCoppola, he was.
And here's what he had to say about Jack Ballard.

Speaker 5 Jack Ballard was hired basically by Robert Evans to be there on the set and to haunt me and to constantly be challenging my decisions and telling me what I could do or not do.

Speaker 5 And he was the enforcer, as it were, for Paramount. And

Speaker 5 he knew about classical film production, but he had no idea of what I was trying to do.

Speaker 5 So as Ira Zuckerman wrote in his book, Ballard's task was to keep an eye on the day-to-day production planning, scheduling, and shooting, and to immediately advise Paramount on any budget overruns.

Speaker 22 Even with Jack Boward reporting back to Evans every day, shooting must go on. Let's transition to the restaurant shooting scene if we can.

Speaker 22 This is really a turning point for Michael as he goes from college boy to his father's successor. And it's also a turning point for Al Pacino, isn't it?

Speaker 5 Oh my gosh, that's right. I mean, the restaurant scene, it's so much going on.

Speaker 5 It's a turning point both in the movie and it's a turning point for Al Pacino in real life on the set because he's really struggling with his confidence.

Speaker 5 Like Coppola, he thinks he's on the verge of being fired. He later said they only hired him because they liked his performance in The Panic of Needle Park, which hadn't yet been released.

Speaker 5 But so far, the Paramount execs don't like what they're seeing.

Speaker 22 So what changed?

Speaker 5 Well, Coppola really encouraged him, and when the time came, Pacino steps up to the plate and hits a home run.

Speaker 29 What I want,

Speaker 5 what's most important to me,

Speaker 30 is that I have a guarantee. No more attempts on my father's life.

Speaker 22 It really is a magical scene.

Speaker 30 I have to go to the bathroom.

Speaker 30 Is it all right?

Speaker 5 Not only is Al Pacino's performance incredible, but the visual and the sonic elements all come together so perfectly.

Speaker 5 You know, a huge amount of preparation went into this scene. Here's Koppel in that interview about his prompt book.

Speaker 27 Scene 26, Michael picked up by Solazzo and the killing, parenthesis, key scene.

Speaker 27 The core to show the killing as terrifying and explicitly as possible having taken attention to an unbearable degree to further define Michael's character in regards to his cool, totally calm execution of these men.

Speaker 22 But even that scene wasn't immune to the disasters that seemed to follow filming.

Speaker 22 Ira Zuckerman writes that just as Al Pacino is leaving the restaurant to jump onto the getaway car, he leaps onto the side of the car and injures his ankle.

Speaker 5 He's rushed to the emergency room and he'd later say, I thought it was a sign from God that now I was injured and they would have to release me.

Speaker 22 It feels symbolic that right when things start going well, they shoot this iconic scene and disaster strikes again.

Speaker 5 Absolutely, like in the movies, as they say, it's got to be one thing after another. Pacino has a sprained ligament, but the show's got to go on.

Speaker 5 Brando is due on the set the next morning for his first scene as the dawn, and the execs at Paramount are anxious to see if the fading star can deliver.

Speaker 22 Does Coppola feel responsible for him because he pushed so hard to have him as Don Corleone?

Speaker 5 Oh yeah, I'm sure he did. He's truly under a microscope and he really needs Brando to come through and deliver an amazing performance.

Speaker 22 So what happens?

Speaker 5 Well, Brando's flight from L.A. lands in New York City at 6 a.m.

Speaker 5 and Brando's not on it.

Speaker 22 He missed his flight?

Speaker 5 And Coppola's fuming.

Speaker 22 But Brando eventually makes it to set. And when he does, how does his first scene go?

Speaker 5 Well, it went pretty well because all he has to do is lay in a hospital bed, but apparently it was great for morale.

Speaker 5 The cast crew and even the staff at the hospital were so excited to have the greatest living actor among them.

Speaker 22 Well, that excitement follows the film all the way to Little Italy, right?

Speaker 5 It sure does. Pretty soon, the crew descends into the center of Italian-American culture in New York City, and the word is out.
The Godfather's in the neighborhood.

Speaker 5 Nicholas Pellegi was a reporter back then, and he was working on a story about the movie for the New York Times magazine. He was the only reporter allowed on the set.

Speaker 5 And here's how he described the scene. There was security at both ends of the block.
They stopped traffic.

Speaker 5 And, you know, it's a very close neighborhood. These are five and six story tenements.

Speaker 5 And everybody has been living in those tenements for the last 30 years. And most of their parents lived in those tenements pediments back in 1910.

Speaker 5 They know the world, and they know the wise guys and the mobsters. And I mean,

Speaker 5 they were all still there,

Speaker 5 including Carlo Gambino.

Speaker 22 So he mentions Carlo Gambino. Were mobsters on set?

Speaker 5 Apparently, yes. They were shooting the scene where the Don is shot by the fruit stand and Fredo's fumbling with the gun.

Speaker 5 And a crowd of locals form with so-called wise guys peppered through the crowd.

Speaker 22 And Marlon Brando knows he's playing to an audience. He sort of hams it up.
So when the shot is done and they say cut,

Speaker 22 and he starts to get up, he hears this roar of applause. It must have reminded him of when he was in the theater.
It was such a moving thing to me.

Speaker 22 And when he stands up, he bows just like a theater afterward.

Speaker 5 Every time Coppola would yell cut, Brando would harken back to his theater days, take off his hat, and take a deep bow before the crowd, which would obviously roar with with applause.

Speaker 22 What about Gambino?

Speaker 5 Well, according to Nicholas Pelleggi, Gambino came to the neighborhood on the day of shooting and held a court at a coffee shop nearby. Can you believe it? I meet Gambino.

Speaker 5 This is really fact-meeting fiction.

Speaker 22 Don Corleone is at least partially based on Carlo Gambino, right? So it's sort of amazing that he found his way to the neighborhood on the day of shooting.

Speaker 5 Well, I don't think it's a coincidence. Nick said that after conducting his business, he popped around the corner and watched a bit of the shooting.
No real godfather watched a godfather.

Speaker 22 So do things ever turn around for Kopolov? At some point, even Jack Ballard has to admit they're seeing a real masterpiece unfold.

Speaker 5 Well, I'm not sure Jack Ballard ever comes around. In fact, a month into shooting, things are more tense than ever.

Speaker 22 What's going on?

Speaker 5 Well, Coppola is running further and further behind schedule, and according to Gray Frederickson, he's under siege.

Speaker 5 He was consumed with taking us down, getting Francis out of there and saving the picture.

Speaker 5 Gray apparently would hear Jack on the phone with Evans reporting every time shooting went long or went over budget, and it always is in Hollywood.

Speaker 22 And there was particular contention with the scene of the Don in his office.

Speaker 5 Yes, apparently there was $100,000 spent on that office set in the Don's office. And when the execs saw the dailies, they did not like what they saw.
Gordon Lewis shot everything so dark.

Speaker 5 They were used to Rock Hudson Doris Day, big bright technicolor movies.

Speaker 19 And all of a sudden they had this sort of sepia gold, looked dark and gloomy. And they couldn't even see the set that they spent so much money on for the $10,000 desk.
Plus Brando had picked up a cat.

Speaker 22 The cat, of course, is iconic now. Don Corleone pets him throughout the opening scene.
But that was a total accident. It was a stray cat that wandered onto the soundstage.

Speaker 22 And apparently when Marlon Brando picked up the cat, it was purring right into his microphone, which only made things worse.

Speaker 19 So the cat was purring into the light. He was speaking, and it was his first day, and he had that implant in his mouth, so he couldn't speak very clearly.
So he was bumbling with a cat purring.

Speaker 19 On a scene, it was so dark that no one could see. And they said, we're finished.
This is over. The movie's not going to work.
You've got to get rid of those guys. It's a disaster.

Speaker 22 The most memorable things about that scene are the darkness, Brando's voice, and the cat. But it seems like those were the things the executives thought would be the movie's downfall.

Speaker 5 Yeah, the studio just didn't see Coppola's vision.

Speaker 5 In fact, there was believed to be an effort between Jack Ballard and Coppola's assistant director Steve Keston to have Coppola fired and replaced with the editor Aram Abakian, who, by the way, Coppola had actually hired for the movie.

Speaker 22 Do you think any of this was justified?

Speaker 5 Well, you know, Coppola was having arguments with his cinematographer, Gordon Willis, and apparently in the beginning, it was really very tough to understand Brando's mumbling.

Speaker 5 But, of course, Francis insisted he needed more time.

Speaker 22 Does he know about the plot against him?

Speaker 5 Word travels really fast on a movie set, right? Especially bad news. Coppola decided to strike first and fire six of the conspirators at once.

Speaker 19 The Assistant Director Steve Kesten and

Speaker 19 Supervisor Aaron and his crew,

Speaker 19 Francis Parnabal.

Speaker 22 And how does Robert Evans respond to all of this?

Speaker 5 Robert Evans claimed that he had no idea about the mutiny on the set.

Speaker 5 He claimed instead that he spent an entire weekend editing together the scene of Michael shooting Salazzo and McCluskey in the restaurant.

Speaker 31 And upon seeing editing it together, I realized that I was dealing with a brilliant guy.

Speaker 22 So conveniently, once Evans is behind the editing, it's coming together brilliantly.

Speaker 5 Well, of course.

Speaker 22 So with Evans suddenly behind him, do things turn around for Coppola?

Speaker 5 Well, he does have a brief moment of glory. Charlie Blue Dorn takes him and his father to the Palm, his favorite restaurant in New York.

Speaker 5 They order steak and they order lobster, and according to Coppola, at least, they're best friends from this point forward.

Speaker 4 Are your AI agents helping users or just creating more work?

Speaker 2 If you can't compare your users' workflows before and after adding AI, how do you know it's even paying off?

Speaker 9 Pendo Agent Analytics is the first tool to connect agent prompts and conversations to downstream outcomes like time saved so you know what's working and what to fix.

Speaker 6 Start improving agent performance at pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 11 That's pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 23 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

Speaker 24 It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Track Mania, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 Plus 4, and Tekken 8.

Speaker 25 Season Zero of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch. Head over to GlobalGamingLeague.com.

Speaker 26 Com, com.

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Speaker 12 When you say Lego Star Wars, the first thing you think of is imagination or action or both. Definitely both.
Like with Django Fett's Starship.

Speaker 12 I mean, with stud blasters, seismic charges, and three minifigures, your kid is going to be creating stories until the Banthas come home.

Speaker 12 And for yourself, there's the Django Fett's Fire Spray Class Starship Lego set from the Ultimate Collector series. Enjoy some Jedi Master level mindfulness during your building time.

Speaker 12 Shop now for Star Wars Lego sets on LEGO.com or in LEGO retail stores.

Speaker 22 So Copla is rotting high. What's next on the shooting schedule?

Speaker 5 Another killing, of course. This time, the victim is that cutthroat, Pauli Gato.

Speaker 5 Polly Gato picks up Clemenza at his home, and they're supposedly going shopping for mattresses for the war that's about to begin. And Clemenza's wife yells from the stoop, don't forget the cannoli.

Speaker 5 And they drive out to what turns out to be a desolate road in the middle of nowhere with the Statue of Liberty looming in the background.

Speaker 5 The Statue of Liberty's back to the scene that's about to unfold. Clemenza gets out of the car to take a leak.
Pauligato is shot from behind, slumped over the steering wheel.

Speaker 5 Clemenza zips up his pants, comes over to the car, and tells the driver, leave the gun, take the cannoli.

Speaker 22 Do you think they knew that the scene was going to play so well when they filmed it?

Speaker 5 Well, I think they knew it was going to turn out to be a great scene, but they didn't know about that line, leave the gun, take the cannoli, which turned out to be one of the great lines in the film, totally out-lived by Richard Castellano as Clemenza.

Speaker 5 So it turned out to be a lot more than they expected, I'm sure.

Speaker 22 And then we move on to the wedding. Mark, the wedding scene was always more than a wedding, right?

Speaker 5 Well, the wedding scene that opened the movie would show all the themes that Coppola wanted to explore in the movie. It would set the stage for all all the things that were coming.

Speaker 5 It would show that the mob was more than brute force and bloody fights. It would show that it's fathers and sons and aunts and uncles and cousins.
It would show that the mob is made up of families.

Speaker 5 And what could be more family than an Italian-American wedding?

Speaker 22 And let's talk about the location because there was some trouble locking down the Staten Island compound.

Speaker 5 Yes, there was, as always trouble. It was actually a few houses adjacent to each other to give the look of a compound, and one of the homeowners was holding out.

Speaker 5 According to Al Ruddy, they had to call in a favor from the production's new guardian angel, Joe Colombo.

Speaker 19 And the guy said, look, Mr. Ruddy, you don't understand.
I worked my whole life, and I've saved my whole life after buying this house. And I don't like what you want to do.

Speaker 19 with my home because I've got the home of a gangster. So I looked at Joe.

Speaker 19 Joe says, give me the fucking pen. Signed a fucking pen.

Speaker 20 Joseph's, it's good for our people.

Speaker 7 Doesn't he say?

Speaker 19 It's good for our people.

Speaker 5 And he did.

Speaker 19 Are you kidding?

Speaker 19 The pen almost went through the paper.

Speaker 22 And of course, the wedding scene gives us Johnny Fontaine crying to the godfather and the iconic slap.

Speaker 5 Which takes us to the classic scene of the producer, Jack Waltz, waking up to find a horse's head in his bed.

Speaker 22 And Coppola gave us some insight into his his thinking on acquiring the horse's head.

Speaker 5 Personally, I would not kill any living creature for a movie. It's not in my philosophy, my personal conviction.
I don't believe movies are something that

Speaker 5 any creature, even a fly, should be hurt in order to do it. It was very controversial, but they came up with a really creative plan to acquire this horse's head, which had to be fresh.

Speaker 5 Yes, that was a real horse's head. But the way we did it is we went to a dog food company.
All the animal lovers who feed their little dogs and cats

Speaker 5 pet food have to,

Speaker 5 maybe they don't realize it, but the pet food is very often made from horse meat.

Speaker 5 Because when the horses are killed, they go as the main ingredient in pet food.

Speaker 5 So we went to one of those companies, and they, of of course, had a whole bunch of horses and we chose a horse that looked like the real horse in the movie, was the same coloring and had a unique marking.

Speaker 5 So we chose the horse to be like the horse that was

Speaker 5 in the pet food company. We asked the pet food company to not kill that horse until we said, okay,

Speaker 5 it's time to do that. And then we wanted the head.

Speaker 5 I don't even know what to say about this.

Speaker 22 It's such an outrageous thing. Mark, do you think that they would have done something like this today?

Speaker 5 Well, I don't know if people today would be that adamant to find a real horse's head. Maybe they would be able to do it with animatronics or something like that.

Speaker 5 I mean, would you really have to go and find a real horse's head to put in the bed? I think you could find a lot of ways to do it today.

Speaker 5 But you can't deny that it was one of the most effective and bloody scenes in the movie, truly.

Speaker 22 So Coppola finally quells the mutiny, but things aren't going much better for him, right?

Speaker 5 Not at all. Jack Ballard's still breathing down his neck, and now Coppola and his cinematographer Gordon Willis are going at it.

Speaker 22 And the root of their disagreements comes from the fact that Coppola wanted to work too quickly for Willis.

Speaker 5 Well, Coppola and Willis drove each other crazy. One day Coppola wants to go handheld, the next he wants the thousand millimeter lens.
So they went back and forth on a lot of things.

Speaker 22 And amid the turmoil, Coppola's wife Eleanor has a baby.

Speaker 5 Right, right in the middle of filming, Sophia Coppola is born.

Speaker 5 She would, of course, later become a director, but first she would become an actress, and her first role as an infant is in The Godfather.

Speaker 22 At just three weeks old, Sophia Coppola appears in the baptism scene in St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, playing the son of Connie and Carlo Rizzi.

Speaker 5 A huge talent from day one.

Speaker 22 Let's move on to the succession scene, because there's quite a story here.

Speaker 5 Yes, and the succession scene wasn't even written yet. There's no succession scene in Mario Puzzo's book, but Coppola thought it would be a really important thing to show the transfer of power.

Speaker 22 Why did they have such difficulty with this scene?

Speaker 5 Coppola felt he needed some help. I mean, he's directing this movie.
There are a thousand things happening.

Speaker 5 And he wisely tapped Robert Towne, who was one of the great legendary screenwriters of Hollywood. He was still a young man at that point and still early in his career.

Speaker 5 And so Robert Towne told me for the book that he gets a call in his house one day in LA and Coppola's on the phone asking him to come to New York to write this scene.

Speaker 5 Takes his typewriter, flies to New York, stays in Buck Henry's apartment. And here's how Robert Towne remembers it.

Speaker 5 As it happened, I had one night to write the scene, and I had no idea what to do, but I remember looking.

Speaker 5 Do you remember the book, The Godfather, the cover of it yeah of course and he stays up all night and he's looking at the cover of the novel and he sees those puppet strings you know dangling down on the novel's cover I remember looking at the at the book cover and thinking

Speaker 5 that's that's a possibility all of a sudden maybe at 4 a.m. or whatever these words come to him

Speaker 29 I live my own life I don't apologize to take care of my family.

Speaker 29 And I refused to be a fool.

Speaker 29 Dancing on a string, held by all those.

Speaker 29 Big shots.

Speaker 5 Copla picks up town at Buck Henry's apartment really early the next morning. He didn't say much.

Speaker 19 And I didn't say anything.

Speaker 21 And Francis, finally, about halfway there, said, any luck?

Speaker 19 I said, well, I think so.

Speaker 19 I gave him the script. And

Speaker 21 he read it and said he liked it.

Speaker 5 Copland nods. And he says, you show it to Marlon.
And Robert Town went, what? You mean I have to present this to Marlon Brando?

Speaker 17 And he said, yeah, yeah, show it to Marlon.

Speaker 5 Takes it to Marlon on the set. Apparently he loved it, as everyone else did.
It's one of the great scenes in American cinema history.

Speaker 5 At the end of the day's shooting, Marlon turned to me and said, who the fuck are you?

Speaker 19 And I said, yeah, I'm nobody, really.

Speaker 29 I thought that

Speaker 29 when it was your time, that

Speaker 29 you would be the one to hold the strings.

Speaker 29 Senator Corleone,

Speaker 29 Governor Corleone, something.

Speaker 31 We'll get there, Pop.

Speaker 29 We'll get there.

Speaker 5 So great that when Copla won the Oscar for screenwriting, he thanked Robert Towne for this scene. And the interesting thing is the scene was written on cue cards for Brando, as were many other scenes.

Speaker 5 And you could see them holding up the cue cards for this scene and some of the classic pictures from the shooting of the movie.

Speaker 22 Because at this point in his career, he had trouble memorizing his lines.

Speaker 5 Right, right. So he had cue cards for a lot of these things, including this succession scene.

Speaker 22 Let's fast forward to June 28th, 1971. It's the 66th day of filming in New York, and Coppola is about to shoot a love scene at the St.
Regis Hotel.

Speaker 5 Yes, and just a few blocks away in Columbus Circle, the Italian-American Civil Rights League is hosting its second annual Unity Day. The lineup includes B.B.

Speaker 5 King, Frankie Valley in the Four Seasons, Sammy Davis Jr., and of course, the headliner, Joe Columbo.

Speaker 22 And Al Ruddy had planned to attend, right?

Speaker 5 Yes, but the night before the rally, he received a call.

Speaker 21 I was supposed to have been on the dais,

Speaker 21 standing next to Joe Colombo when he was shot, okay?

Speaker 21 And I was told not to to be there that day.

Speaker 21 Not ask me not to be there. So under no circumstance, you to be in Columbus Circle tomorrow, sitting next to Joe Columbo.

Speaker 21 And the phone goes click dead.

Speaker 5 No one from the movie attended the rally,

Speaker 5 and it's probably best that they did not. Because at 11.45 a.m., Joe Colombo is walking through the crowd.
when he's approached by a man who appears to be a press photographer.

Speaker 5 The man crouches down, but he's not pointing a camera anymore. Instead, he points a pistol at Colombo and fires three times.
In the St.

Speaker 5 Regis Hotel a few blocks away, Coppola is watching this scene play out on the news. And in that instance, the mob and the movie makers become one.

Speaker 5 Filming in New York ends days later on July 2nd as Joe Colombo languishes in a coma at Roosevelt Hospital. But filming isn't truly over because they still have a few pivotal scenes to shoot.

Speaker 5 For those, the crew needs to head to the birthplace of the mafia, Sicily.

Speaker 5 Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli is a production of Air Mail and iHeart Media.

Speaker 22 The podcast is based on the book of the same name written by our very own Mark Seale.

Speaker 5 Our producer is Tina Mullen.

Speaker 22 Research Assistants by Jack Sullivan.

Speaker 5 Jonathan Dressler was our development producer.

Speaker 22 Our music supervisor is Randall Poster. Our executive producers are me, Nathan King, Mark Seale, Dylan Fagan, and Graydon Carter.

Speaker 5 Special thanks to Bridget Arseneau and everyone at CDM Studios.

Speaker 22 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 4 Are your AI agents helping users or just creating more work?

Speaker 2 If you can't compare your users' workflows before and after adding AI, how do you know it's even paying off?

Speaker 9 Pendo Agent Analytics is the first tool to connect agent prompts and conversations to downstream outcomes like time saved so you know what's working and what to fix.

Speaker 6 Start improving agent performance at pendo.io/slash podcast.

Speaker 11 That's pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 23 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

Speaker 24 It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Track Mania, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 Plus 4, and Tekken 8.

Speaker 25 Season Zero of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch. Head over to GlobalGamingLeague.com.

Speaker 26 Con, con.

Speaker 26 Global, global, double, double, double, double, double. Global, global, double, global, double, double, double.

Speaker 29 Ah.

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Speaker 12 When you say LEGO Star Wars, the first thing you think of is imagination or action or both. Definitely both.
Like with Django Fett's Starship.

Speaker 12 I mean with stud blasters, seismic charges, and three minifigures, your kid is going to be creating stories until the Panthers come home.

Speaker 12 And for yourself, there's the Django Fett's Fire Spray-class Starship Lego set from the Ultimate Collector series. Enjoy some Jedi Master level mindfulness during your building time.

Speaker 12 Shop now for Star Wars Lego sets on Lego.com or in Lego retail stores.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart Podcast.