Saving the Studio

Hey y'all, it's your girl Cheekies and I'm back with a brand new season of your favorite podcast

Cheekies and Chill. I'll be sharing even more personal stories with you guys and as always

you'll get my exclusive take on topics like love, personal growth, health, family ties, and more.

And don't forget I'll also be dishing out my best advice to you on episodes of Dear Cheekies.

It's going to be an exciting year and I hope that you can join me. Listen to Cheekies and Chill, Season 4, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Pod of Rebellion, our new Star Wars Rebels rewatch podcast.

I'm Vanessa Marshall, voice of Harrison Dula Specter 2.

I'm Tia Zerkar, Sabine Wren, Specter 5.

I'm Taylor Gray, Ezra Bridger, Specter 6.

And I'm Jon Lee Brody, the Ghost Crew Stowaway moderator. Each week, we're going to rewatch and discuss an episode from the series.
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She's not going to be a good one. Ren, Spectre 5.
I'm Taylor Gray, Ezra Bridger, Spectre 6. And I'm John Librody, the Ghost Crew Stowaway Moderator.

Each week, we're going to re-watch and discuss an episode from this series, and share some fun behind-the-scenes stories. Sometimes we'll be visited by special guests like Steve Bloom, voice of Zabarelio, Spectre 4, or Dante Bosco, voice of Jai Kel, and many others.
So hang on, because it's going to be a fun ride. Cue the music.
Listen to Potter Rebellion on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 45 years ago, a Virginia soul band called The Edge of Daybreak recorded their debut album, Behind Bars.
Record collectors consider it a masterpiece. The band's surviving members are long out of prison, but they say they have some unfinished business.
The end of daybreak, eyes of love, was supposed to have been fouling up by another Apple. Listen to Soul Incarcerated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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From Airmail and iHeartMedia, this is Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli, the epic story of the making of The Godfather. 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.
Cast my fucking movie, excuse my language. My kids came in all hysterical.
They'd heard gunshots, and they went outside, and all the windows had been shot out of the Fusil Vega. He was consumed with taking us down.
He couldn't trash us out of there and saving the picture. I'm Mark Seal, author of Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli, published by Simon & Schuster in 2021.
And I'm Nathan King, deputy editor at Our Mail. I came to this story in 2008.
I was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. 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.
And resulted in Mark's hit book that would become known as the definitive truth behind a story filled with so many lies. But the truth is fickle, and to this day, the principles of this story have different versions of how it all unfolded.
Over the next ten 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.
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. 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 Puzo's novel to casting, filming, and The Godfather's rapturous premiere.
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.
That's very funny. Robert Evans was one of the most legendary producers in Hollywood history.
He helped rescue Paramount from a shameful demise with pictures like Rosemary's Baby, Love Story, and, of course, The Godfather. It's called The Godfather's Godfather.
As the head of production, Evans was involved in every aspect of the movie. I devoted my entire four years to this.
There was a lot of fights and everything. He financed the struggling author of the novel on which the movie is based.
A very good writer named Mario Puzo. He's real short on green.
He greenlit the film's development. Nobody wanted to make it.
As a matter of fact, Paramount refused to make it for a while. He hired its producer and its director.
He was operatic. Francis made it operatic.
And he fostered the film's legend before and after its release. It's my most important legacy in life.
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. Picture this.
I'm in a rent car coming from Los Angeles International Airport, and I drive to Robert Evans' home called Woodland. And as I pull up to Woodland, I have no idea what I'm getting into.
I'm reminded of how Robert Evans described this place in his memoir, The Kid Stays in the Picture. The grounds, the trees, the acreage, the towering eucalyptus, thousands of roses, and everything is quiet and secret behind walls.
I get out 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.
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.
And as I'm looking at all of 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. He's wearing his trademark black sweater and bolo tie.
His black hair is slicked back. His face is deeply tanned.
He flashes a wide, dazzling grin and stares at me through rose-colored glasses. And then he speaks in his gravelly voice.
It's stranger than fiction. 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.
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? Evans explains that a fire had consumed his screening room and now he and his friends watch movies from his bed.
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? And I say, frankly, I think I'd rather be in the chair.
And he goes, take those shoes off. And pretty soon we're lying side by side on top of this fur coverlet.
He calls in the butler, who arrives with food, drinks, and a huge TV is queued up with scenes from The Godfather.

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

The truth be, The God father has made their mistakes. 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.
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, and I knew absolutely nothing about this movie, except on the marquee it said two words, The Godfather. I walk into the theater, the lights go down, and the music comes up, the Godfather logo comes on the screen and the moon face of The Undertaker, Bonasera, comes out of the darkness and he says, I believe in America.
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.

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.

Which is how you ended up in Robert Evans' bed 35 years later.

Exactly.

How did you land the Vanity Fair story?

It seems like it would be a dream come true for you.

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. And you couldn't hold these kinds of stories because the crime had just happened or the scandal had just occurred.
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.
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. 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. 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.
And when you started reporting the story, you started with Robert Evans. Exactly.
I started with Robert Evans, but soon all roads led to a man equally as mythic as Evans, Charlie Bluedorn. 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. 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.

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. And so he gets to America, Mark.
And what does he do? Well, he immediately starts working. His daughter told me that there was never a day in Charlie Bluedorn's life when he wasn't thinking about business or working in business.
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.
And he was soon bringing in a million dollars a year into this small company. 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.
Then he got into the coffee business, and then he got into the auto parts business. 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.
Bluedorn had a huge appetite for what most people would consider ill-advised business ventures. He loved what he called rec jobs, which are businesses that are almost beyond repair.
And in 1966, he bought what he thought was the biggest rec job at the mall, Paramount Pictures.

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. 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. 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. 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.
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? I mean, he loved what he called the Schmaltz Factor, movies like Dr.
Zhivago and The Sound of Music. All of these things represented America to him, and he thought he could identify the secret ingredient that made the magic.
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.
How did that work for him, thinking that he could re-engineer Hollywood? 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.
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.
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.

And Hollywood took one look at Charlie Bluthorn, and many people laughed.

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.

Yes, but he proved them wrong, because underneath the scorn and the laughter, Charlie was smart. 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. And by genius, he means artistic genius, right? 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.
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.
Where did he dig up Evans? Funny enough, he found him in the New York Times. It was an article written by Peter Bard, a young reporter who we'll talk about later.
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, let's sew it up.
Mark, that headline sort of gives you a hint as to what Robert Evans was doing before he got in the producing business. 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 L.A. often.
And one day, he's sitting out by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. And this shows how lucky Evans was.
Norma Shearer, the famous actress, was on the lookout for the perfect actor to play her late husband, the producer Irving Wahlberg, in a movie called The Man with a Thousand Faces. And she took one look at Evans by the pool, who was so handsome and deeply tanned, and said, that's him.
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.
And just like that, Robert Evans is an actor. 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.
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 Zanuck, the producer, heard about it.
And in the classic scene with a bullhorn,

while Evans is in the bullfighting ring, Zanuck yells out,

The kid stays in the picture.

And that becomes the title of Robert Evans' autobiography.

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Coming soon to Gilroy. Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok.
You come across a video of a teenage girl and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her. And I was like, what? Like, it was him? I was like, oh my God.
It was shocking. It was very shocking.
I'm Jen Swan. I'm a journalist in Los Angeles, and I've spent the past few years investigating the story behind the viral posts and the extraordinary events that followed.
I started investing my time to get her justice. They put out something on social media, so I'd get calls in the middle of the night all the time.
It's like, how do you think you're going to get away with something like this?

Like, you killed somebody.

It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turned to social media to help track down their friend's killer.

This is their story.

This is My Friend Daisy.

Listen to My Friend Daisy on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. September 1979.
Virginia's top prison band, Edge of Daybreak, is about to record their debut album behind bars. In just five hours.
Okay, we're rolling. One, two, three, four.
I'm Jamie Petras, music and culture writer. For the past five years, I've been talking to the band's three surviving members.
They're out of prison now and in their 70s. Their past behind them.
But they also have some unfinished business. The end of daybreak, Eyes of Love was supposed to have been followed up by another album.
It's a story about the liberating power of music, the American justice system, and ultimately, second chances. Listen to Soul Incarcerated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Consult a healthcare provider to determine if treatment is right for you. So he's working as an actor.
How does he get into production? Well, you can say a lot of things about Robert Evans, but one thing is he's really smart. He's a businessman, first of all, and he started acquiring properties, including a novel, The Detective, which he produced and was a fairly substantial hit starring Frank Sinatra, of all people.
And suddenly Evans is a producer and he became a man about town. And this is when Peter Bard starts to take notice.
He's a young writer, fresh from New York, in Hollywood, to write stories about the town. They wanted a young guy to come out here and talk like this.
It was a great job. He keeps hearing about Robert Evans, and he thinks to himself, this is the perfect story.
I wrote kind of a snarky piece about how this guy from the garment business was buying books and making deals for himself. And he was sort of a glam story about how somebody at a time when Hollywood was in its doldrums could come in and have an impact.
Yes, and it gets better. Charlie Bluedorn reads the story about Robert Evans in the New York Times.
What I wrote, which talked about what a self-promoter Bob was, Charlie said, ah, this guy's this fucking guy, he's a self-promoter. He may be a good guy for me.
He gets on the phone and he says, get Evans up here. And Evans said he wasn't interested.
He's out in Hollywood. What's he want to go to New York for, especially to meet the new owner of Paramount Pictures,

the last place studio?

But his lawyer, the legendary Greg Balzer, says, Charlie Bluedorn, he's a shoot operator. When he wants something, he wants it.
You should get up there and meet him. Evans was reluctant, of course, but he goes to New York.
He meets Bluedorn. and like a miracle, like something out of the movie,

Charlie Bluedorn taps Robert Evans to run Paramount, first stationing him in London and then bringing him to L.A. as the head of production.
So Charlie Bluedorn picked Robert Evans to run Paramount all on a hunch in a New York Times article. 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.

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?

He's never really produced a movie.

What was Evans' directive from Bluedorn? Nothing short of this. Save this studio.
Greenlight and produce hits. Quick.
Bluedorn told him, Bobby, I want 20 pictures a year from you. I want pictures that people in Cincinnati are going to want to see.
I want beautiful girls. I want action.
I want fun. Charlie had boundless energy and enthusiasm, and it seems like Evans fed off of that.
His first order of business was to find his own right-hand man, right? 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 Barr.
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.
It was a comedy of errors. It started that way anyway.
Everybody was laughing about these new hires. I took the job because Bob was a friend of mine.
And he was in a bit over his head, and he said, you know, I would be, why don't you work with me? You know, the blind will lead the blind. What was their strategy? How were Evans and Barth going to save the studio? Well, their strategy was really pretty simple.
Peter Barth was a voracious reader, and Robert Evans, who might not have been, respected his taste in novels. 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.
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.

They produced The Odd Couple, Rosemary's Baby, and then finally, A Thin Book, which became an even thinner script,

which turned into a huge hit for Paramount, Love Story, starring Evans' future wife, Allie McGraw. 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.
But as big of a hit as the film was, they'd need a bigger reprieve for Paramount. 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. So let's talk about how Paramount came to acquire the rights to The Godfather.
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. 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. I got a call one day from George Weezer.
He said, do you think of the Bible? Yeah. He's a pal of mine.
He's a writer named Mario Puzo. He's a very good writer.
He's real short on green. He's deep with the bookies.
He owes the bookies a lot of money. He has 35-page treatment called Mafia.
Meet him, will you please, and see if you can help him. So Evans says, okay, he'll meet with Puzo.
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. And pretty soon, over cigars and conversation in Evans' office, the two men strike a deal.
I said, 35 pages isn't very much.

And I didn't know him as an author, really, even though he wasn't a literary author. Well, I'll tell you what, 210 Gs were as an option against, let's say, $75,000 if it becomes a book.
And he says, could you make it $15,000? And I said, how about $12,500? 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. Exactly.
And of course, Evans' version is my favorite version of the events, even though Peter Bart would remember it very differently. So this whole story of Fuso coming in with 30 pages or whatever, and Bart saying, what are you in for? That's nonsense.
There were 60 pages. They came in, this big pile of stuff came in to me, and I read it.
Of course, George nagged me to read it, and I thought it was really interesting stuff. Well, for the sake of the story, I'll take Evans' version to be true.
But no matter what, Puzo did sell the option to Paramount for $12,500. And once they made the deal, was Evans hopeful that it would come through? Not really.
You know, he bought it and basically forgot about it until he heard from Puzo again. A treatment to a movie.
A ticket to a lottery. Five months pass.
Puzo calls him, says, I got to speak to you. I'm in L.A.
again. What does he want to talk about? The name of the book.
He said, would I be in breach of my contract if I change the name of my book? I forgot he was even running away. I don't understand.
I want to call it The Godfather. I had no idea.
I hadn't read one page.

I didn't read the 35 pages.

I did it as a favor.

And what became almost as a favor became the biggest favor of my life.

Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli is a production of Airmail and iHeartMedia. The podcast is based on the book of the same name, written by our very own Mark Seal.
Our producer is Tina Mullen. Research assistance by Jack Sullivan.
Jonathan Dressler was our development producer. Our music supervisor is Randall Poster.

Our executive producers are me, Nathan King, Mark Seal, Dylan Fagan, and Graydon Carter.

Special thanks to Bridget Arsenault and everyone at CDM Studios.

A comprehensive list of sources and acknowledgments can be found in Mark Seal's book,

Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli,

published by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.