On Tuesday, March 14, 1972, at the Loew’s State Theatre at 1540 Broadway in Manhattan, Paramount Pictures held the world premiere of a film it had spent four years trying to make and three months trying to fix. The film was The Godfather, an Italian-American gangster epic adapted from Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, a thirty-two-year-old screenwriter from Detroit whom the studio had nearly fired three weeks into production. The premiere ran two hours and fifty-five minutes. Profits from the evening were donated to the Boys Club of New York. The audience included Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire (Coppola’s sister, who played Connie Corleone), and Coppola’s infant daughter Sofia, who had played Michael Rizzi, the baby being baptized in the film’s climactic crosscut.
Paramount had bought the film rights to Puzo’s novel for eighty thousand dollars in 1968, before the book was published. By the time of the premiere the studio had pre-sold fifteen million dollars in advance theatrical exhibition rights. The film opened wide in 316 American theaters on March 24 and earned eighty-one and a half million dollars in domestic theatrical rentals on a production budget of six and a half million. It became the highest-grossing film in American history, displacing Gone with the Wind from a record it had held for thirty-three years.
The Academy Awards ceremony eleven months later gave The Godfather three Oscars including Best Picture. Coppola did not win Best Director. He would win that for the sequel three years later. Brando won Best Actor, refused to accept, and sent the activist Sacheen Littlefeather to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to decline on his behalf.
The Premiere
What The Godfather did in March 1972 was rare. It was simultaneously the highest-grossing film of its year, the most critically respected film of its year, the most commercially aggressive product Paramount had ever released, and a serious work of art directed by a young filmmaker working in deliberate opposition to most of the conventions of mass-market American cinema. The film looked nothing like the studio product Paramount had been releasing for two decades. Gordon Willis, the cinematographer, lit faces from above and behind, leaving eyes in shadow, in deliberate refusal of the high-key Hollywood lighting standard. The studio executives had watched the dailies of the wedding scene in August 1971 and concluded the film was unwatchably dark. They told Coppola to relight. He refused. They considered firing him. They had been considering firing him since the second week of production.
The film’s hold on American culture in the months after release was unusual. Adult fiction was being filmed for adult audiences in the early 1970s with a frequency the industry had not seen since the 1930s, but no film had done at the box office what The Godfather did. It was the first time in the postwar era that the most artistically ambitious film of the year was also the most popular. Within a year it had been parodied on Saturday Night Live, quoted on the Senate floor, and entered the standard vocabulary of American organized-crime journalism. The phrase “go to the mattresses” entered general use. The image of Brando holding a kitten in the opening scene became one of the most reproduced film stills of the decade. The film was a phenomenon of the kind American cinema had not produced in a generation and would not produce again until Star Wars five years later.
Detroit to UCLA
Francis Ford Coppola was born in Detroit, Michigan, on April 7, 1939, the second of three children of Carmine Coppola, an Italian-American flautist who would shortly become the first-chair flute for the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini, and Italia Coppola, a former actress. The middle name Ford honored Henry Ford twice: Coppola was born at Henry Ford Hospital, and his father at the time worked for The Ford Sunday Evening Hour, a radio program sponsored by the Ford Motor Company. When Francis was two, the family moved with Carmine to Queens, where the NBC Symphony was based.
At age nine, Coppola contracted polio. He was bedridden for over a year. The illness, in his own later account, made him into a filmmaker: confined to bed, he built puppet theatres, listened to radio drama, watched television, and began to construct narratives. After his recovery he began to make eight-millimeter films with home equipment. He attended Hofstra University as a drama major from 1956 to 1959, where his classmates included James Caan, then enrolled in graduate film at UCLA, where he completed his MFA in 1967. At UCLA his student screenplay Pilma Pilma won the Samuel Goldwyn Writing Award.
His professional apprenticeship was at Roger Corman’s American International Pictures, the low-budget Los Angeles production company that trained almost every American director of his generation. He worked as sound man, dialogue director, and associate producer before Corman gave him a thirty-eight-thousand-dollar budget and three weeks to write and direct his first feature, Dementia 13, in 1963. He married the set decorator Eleanor Neil on the production. He spent the next six years as a working screenwriter at Seven Arts and other studios, contributing to Is Paris Burning? (1966), This Property Is Condemned (1966), and Patton (1970), the last of which he co-wrote with Edmund H. North and for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay on April 15, 1971. He was thirty-two. He had founded American Zoetrope, his independent production company in San Francisco, with George Lucas in 1969.
Paramount, 1971
Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather was published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in March 1969. Paramount had purchased the film rights for eighty thousand dollars the previous summer, before publication, on the recommendation of producer Robert Evans, who had become head of production for the studio in 1966 and who was looking for a low-budget gangster picture to capitalize on what he saw as a market for Italian-American material. The novel was a runaway bestseller. It sold over nine million copies in its first two years. Paramount upgraded the budget to over two million dollars and began the search for a director. Several directors, including Sergio Leone, passed on the project. Evans wanted, in his term, an Italian director who could film the wedding without making it look like a tourist’s reconstruction.
Coppola accepted the job in September 1970, primarily for the money, after his American Zoetrope partnership with Warner Brothers had collapsed and he was facing personal bankruptcy. He fought Paramount over almost every casting decision. Paramount wanted Robert Redford or Ryan O’Neal as Michael; Coppola insisted on the unknown stage actor Al Pacino, then thirty, with two minor films to his credit. Paramount wanted Anthony Quinn, Edward G. Robinson, Ernest Borgnine, or Burt Lancaster as Don Vito; Coppola insisted on Marlon Brando, then in commercial decline at forty-seven, whom the studio considered uninsurable. Coppola required Brando to perform a screen test. He filmed Brando improvising in his own kitchen with shoe polish in his hair and tissue paper stuffed in his cheeks. The test won the studio over.
The shoot ran from March to August 1971, primarily in New York and Sicily. Paramount executives watched the early dailies of the wedding scene, shot on Staten Island, and called for Coppola’s replacement on the grounds that the lighting was too dark, Pacino was a flop, and the pacing was wrong. Coppola was rescued, by his own later account, by the unexpected commercial success of his Patton Oscar that April and by the loyalty of the producer Albert S. Ruddy. The shoot continued. Pacino’s performance turned around in the restaurant assassination scene, which Coppola filmed in the seventh week of production. Studio confidence returned with the dailies of that sequence. Brando’s screen presence carried the wedding. By August the film Paramount thought it was making had become something else.
Part II
The Godfather Part II premiered at the Loew’s State Theatre on December 12, 1974, and was released wide on December 20. It ran three hours and twenty minutes. Coppola had been reluctant to direct it. He proposed instead to produce a sequel directed by Martin Scorsese, then thirty-one, whose Mean Streets had been released the previous year. Paramount refused. They wanted Coppola or no one. Coppola accepted only after the studio agreed to give him complete creative control, removed Robert Evans from the production, and offered him a one-million-dollar fee plus a percentage of the gross. He delivered a film structured in two interleaved timelines: the rise of the young Vito Corleone, played by the thirty-year-old Robert De Niro in almost entirely Sicilian dialogue, and the disintegration of the adult Michael Corleone, played by Pacino, who had become a star in the three years since the first film.
The film was almost unanimously received by critics as superior to the first. Pauline Kael in The New Yorker called it visually far more complexly beautiful, thematically richer, more shadowed, more full. It earned eleven Oscar nominations at the 47th Academy Awards on April 8, 1975, and won six, including Best Picture (making it the first sequel ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture), Best Director for Coppola, Best Supporting Actor for De Niro, Best Adapted Screenplay for Coppola and Puzo, Best Art Direction, and Best Original Dramatic Score for Coppola’s father Carmine, who shared the award with Nino Rota. Coppola was thirty-five. He was simultaneously the producer, the director, and the co-writer of the Best Picture winner, while his father, who had spent fifty-two years as a working orchestra musician, won his only Oscar for music his son had hired him to compose.
The same year, Coppola’s other film, The Conversation, was also nominated for Best Picture. He became only the second director in Academy history, after Alfred Hitchcock in 1941, to have two films competing for Best Picture in the same year. Both films were director-driven, intellectually serious works released through a major Hollywood studio. The combination has not happened often since.
Apocalypse, Star Wars, Heaven’s Gate
Coppola left for the Philippines in March 1976 to shoot Apocalypse Now, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness relocated to the Vietnam War. The production lasted sixteen months instead of the planned six. A typhoon destroyed the principal sets in May 1976. Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack on location in March 1977. Marlon Brando arrived overweight, unprepared, and demanded over a million dollars for three weeks of shooting. Coppola sold his house and put up his personal assets to finish the film. It was released August 15, 1979. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for eight Academy Awards. Coppola never made another film that was as artistically ambitious as the four he made between 1972 and 1979.
What happened to American cinema in the interval was the death of the model that The Godfather had been the apex of. On May 25, 1977, while Coppola was still in the Philippines completing principal photography on Apocalypse Now, his American Zoetrope partner George Lucas released Star Wars. The film grossed over two hundred million dollars in its first run and changed the economics of American cinema. The new model was the franchise blockbuster, opening wide on opening weekend, designed for repeat viewing by children and adolescents, supported by merchandising and sequels. It was the opposite of the model Coppola had built. Three years later, Michael Cimino, whose career had been launched in part by his work as a writer on Magnum Force alongside the Coppola circle and by The Deer Hunter (1978), released Heaven’s Gate, a Western that lost forty-four million dollars and effectively ended the director-driven New Hollywood model. The Godfather Part II had been its peak in 1974. By 1981 it was over.
The American gangster picture had existed since the 1930s. Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), Scarface (1932), and White Heat (1949) had established it. The Mafia film as a separate genre had not. The Godfather invented it, and every subsequent Mafia picture works in its visual grammar: the Italian-American suit, the kitchen-table conference, the horse’s head, the kiss of death, the ritual baptism crosscut with the killings, the flute on the soundtrack. Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), Donnie Brasco (1997), The Sopranos (1999), The Departed (2006), and The Irishman (2019) all work in some idiom Coppola defined. He did not invent the Italian-American mafia. He invented the way the rest of America would picture it for the next fifty years.
The studio system shot the gangster picture in 1931. New Hollywood made it American epic in 1972. Star Wars buried New Hollywood in 1977. Brando wore a hairpiece and tissue paper in his cheeks. Pacino had his own hair. Both became the face of mid-century American myth. Coppola was thirty-two when he started and thirty-five when he finished, and the four films he made in those three years changed what American cinema was for.