What’s left to say about “The Godfather"? Upon the film’s release in 1972, it almost instantly became a byword for the best Hollywood has to offer. It minted a ...
It was the fall of 1963, and Mario Puzo—a gambler, glutton, and dead-broke pulp fiction writer with outsize artistic ambitions—was glued to his television. Like the rest of America, he was captivated by the widely broadcasted Valachi hearings, in which a Mafia foot soldier publicly revealed the inner-workings of the Italian-American criminal underworld. Puzo also happened to be on the hunt for the subject of his next book, and what could be more appealing to a man who'd grown up surrounded by crooks and hustlers in Hell's Kitchen than a shadowy underworld filled with strongmen and wiseguys? In Episode Two, Mark and Nathan chronicle Mario Puzo's life before "The Godfather," and explain how the writer's chosen subject matter coincided with a growing public interest in the Mafia, resulting in Puzo becoming one of the best-selling authors of his time. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Saving the Studio
The genesis of "The Godfather" dates back to 1966, when Paramount Pictures was Hollywood's last-place studio, financially flailing and desperate for a hit movie. Enter Charles Bluhdorn, an Austrian-born industrialist captivated by the romance of Hollywood and in the market for a studio with which he could prove himself as a movie mogul. Upon taking hold of Paramount through his conglomerate, Gulf and Western, Bluhdorn hired as head of production Robert Evans—a green but dogged producer and former actor—based solely on the strength of a profile he had read in "The New York Times." In Episode 1, Mark and Nathan examine how Bluhdorn’s immigration to New York led to Evans's hiring and a chance meeting with a certain cigar-puffing, gambling-addicted pulp fiction writer named Mario Puzo, who was hawking the option on an unfinished draft of his novel about a New York crime family—a novel that would change their lives, and Paramount’s legacy, forever.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Introducing: Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
What’s left to say about “The Godfather"? Upon the film’s release in 1972, it almost instantly became a byword for the best Hollywood has to offer. It minted a new generation of stars, earned hundreds of millions of dollars, established Francis Ford Coppola as one of the best directors of his generation, and changed the way Americans viewed the mafia—and cinema—forever.
And yet, “The Godfather” almost never got made, with meddling studio executives and vindictive members of the real-life mafia trying to smother the movie at every turn. During production, location permits were revoked, war was waged over casting decisions, author Mario Puzo got into a public brawl with Frank Sinatra, a producer’s car was riddled with bullets, and “connected” men auditioned for—and in some cases landed—parts in the film.
On “Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli,” Mark Seal, author of the 2021 book by the same title, and Nathan King, a deputy editor of AIR MAIL, present new and archival interviews with Coppola, James Caan, Robert Evans, Talia Shire, Al Ruddy, and many others, stripping back the varnish of movie history to reveal the complicated genesis of a modern masterpiece.
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