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April 2, 2025 40 mins

From a strict budget and a tight timetable to the interference of the Mafia, Francis Ford Coppola had more than enough on his plate directing “The Godfather”—and that was before his own studio turned against him. During the early days of filming, in 1971, Paramount disparaged Coppola’s decision making at every turn, both through disgruntled messages sent by Robert Evans and in the form of Jack Ballard, a Paramount executive who shadowed Coppola on-set with the express goal of scrutinizing his every move. And yet, Coppola’s hellish experience couldn’t have been more different from the cast’s. Beginning with an Italian-style dinner in New York on St. Patrick’s Day that year (which ended with James Caan mooning Marlon Brando from his car), “The Godfather’s” stars remained more or less happy throughout filming—an attitude aided heavily by the presence of Brando, whom the cast and crew idolized. In Episode Seven, Mark and Nathan explore the transition from the scripting process to filming, from Coppola’s production design philosophy and securing the infamous horse’s head to the moment Al Pacino first demonstrated his greatness.

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
It's March seventeenth, nineteen seventy one, Saint Patrick's day. The
Corleone family is sitting down to dinner with the man
who brought them all together, Francis Ford Coppola. Earlier that day,
every member of the newly minted cast received their first
call sheet three thirty pm Patsy's Restaurant, one hundred and

(00:23):
seventeenth Street and First Avenue. 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. When Gianny Russo, who'd landed the role of Carlo,
reports for us first down the set, he feels right
at home.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
So I go up a little early, Casillo Guyson, I
know everybody can do a hug kissing. I go around
the corner. See you had people I had to pay
my respects to, and so I was so happy for you.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
It's so crazy.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Walks into the back room where the cast is gathering.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
What's the first time everybody met everybody? And I'm watching
next Terling Hayden, Richie County, John Mooley, He's the great actist.

Speaker 4 (01:12):
These they were the legends to me.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
Marlon Brando arrives wearing an orange cashmere turtle neckt sweater.
Producer Al Ruddy described it as Christ coming down from
the cross. The room falls silent. 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 5 (01:37):
The nickers Brando was like God, and I watched every
Brando movie.

Speaker 3 (01:41):
Man.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
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. Robert Duval
remembers how easy it was to look to Brando as
a father figure.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
And we all sat around as if we were kind
of approximating the family situation around Brando's and he was,
you know.

Speaker 6 (02:04):
When we were young, Branda was like a godfather of actors.

Speaker 3 (02:07):
To this feeling, we all respect him.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
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. For the first time, Coppola can feel the
production coming together, just as he had envisioned it. I'm

(02:39):
Mark Seal and I'm Nathan King, and this is leave
the Gun, Take the Canoli.

Speaker 7 (02:44):
In today's episode, we shoot our first frame of what
turns into ninety hours of film.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
We'll detail the day to day life on the set,
including cass pranks and crew turmoil.

Speaker 7 (03:01):
Mark, I'm always amazed at a mid Copola's constant power
struggle with executives. He was able to play the part
of a strong leader with his cast.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
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.

Speaker 7 (03:19):
So let's back up. The cast meeting wasn't really the
first step in filming, which is what we're getting into
in today's episode.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
No, I'd say it was the creative production meeting that
started it all, which Coppola had called for a few months.

Speaker 7 (03:32):
Earlier January twenty fifth, nineteen seventy one.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
That's right. He invited the production team together to establish
the visual style of the film. I first heard about
this meeting from Dean Tabalis, the film's production designer.

Speaker 3 (03:48):
That two three hour meeting cemented the colicto of film.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
And I emailed Francis Coppola about the meeting, just asking
if he could tell me more about it, and he said,
I'll do one better. I'll send you the transcript from
the meeting, which was incredible because you can really see
the workings of a film and progress and a vision
he had for so many things in the movie that
actually came to pass.

Speaker 3 (04:15):
And he had a recorded He had a stenographer, a
court stenographer with a little type machine that a courttenographer has.

Speaker 7 (04:30):
And this is the transcript right here. This is massive,
that's right.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
It's eighty four single space pages written on what seems
to be a manual typewriter.

Speaker 7 (04:39):
So tell me about this meeting. Mark, We've got Coppola, Tavalaris,
a court stenographer.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
Who else is there, Well, it's Gordon Willis, cinematographer and
the great Anahill Johnstone.

Speaker 7 (04:52):
Tell me about Gordon Willis. He was a bit of
a legend, right.

Speaker 1 (04:55):
He sure was. Gordon Willis was an esteemed cinematographer, called
him the Prince of darkness. He liked shooting his shadows.

Speaker 7 (05:04):
Gordon and Francis had a bit of animosity between them,
didn't they.

Speaker 1 (05:08):
Well they would later, But at this meeting they were
very much on the same page.

Speaker 7 (05:12):
Okay, what about Dean Tavalius.

Speaker 1 (05:15):
Tavalius is great, He's a longtime production designer, artistic designer,
and artist himself. 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 and the Godfather, as he told me
for the book, he spent a lot of time looking

(05:35):
for places to kill people. And then we have costume
designer Anahill Johnstone, who got her start on Broadway and
made a name for herself on movies like On the
Waterfront and East of Eden.

Speaker 7 (05:48):
Coppola is the youngest in the group right.

Speaker 1 (05:50):
And at least for now, he's the group's undisputed leader.

Speaker 7 (05:55):
Okay, let's crack this transcript open. How does the meeting start?

Speaker 1 (05:59):
Well? At first, Coppola sets his intentions. He wants to
have a freewheeling discussion and take the script seen by scene.
He had his vision for the film. He did not
want to make a traditional gangster movie. Here's Dean Tabalius again.

Speaker 3 (06:15):
He wanted to show them as human, see the human side,
the family side of their lives. The ironic thing of
them loving their children and then turning around and committing
terrible crimes and brutal mergers.

Speaker 7 (06:37):
And what about the look of the film.

Speaker 1 (06:39):
Well, in the production meeting transcript, you know, they go
back and forth and one word kept jumping out, and
that was operatic. Both Tabalairas and Kappola seemed to use
that word a lot, this.

Speaker 3 (06:52):
Dark operatic image where the camera is fixed and things
come into the frame and things sleep the frame, but
the camera doesn't cut that much, it doesn't pan that much.

Speaker 7 (07:06):
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 a lot. 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 1 (07:26):
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, which bridge should we use, Where Michael's going
to meet Salazzo in the Corrupt Police Captain, you know,
where the Dawn is hospitalized after getting shot, which hospital
should we use even the wedding, of course, was a

(07:50):
major thing that Coppola talked about quite a bit. 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. Johnstone would say, do you think
ten waiters would be enough for the wedding, and Kapala said, no,
we're not gonna There's no waiters at an Italian American wedding.

(08:13):
They didn't have that. The women would do it. The
sandwiches would be ordered from a place on Ninth Avenue,
and people would bring in their own food. Everything was
done homemade and natural, and so that was the key
to this incredible scene.

Speaker 7 (08:28):
He was adamant in the meeting that they not overformalize it.
He said the only people in formal attire would be
the wedding party, and that kids would wear their confirmation
clothes and everyone else would wear their Sunday dresses and outfits.
But it wouldn't be too buttoned up.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
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 7 (08:56):
They also talk a lot about how the wedding will
be juxtaposed with the setting inside the house in the
Don's office.

Speaker 1 (09:04):
So here's where the prince of darkness comes in. The
cinematographer Gordon Willis. He uses the shadows to show the
darkness of the Don's office as juxtaposed against the bright
lights in the sunny scene of the wedding where Johnny
Fonteyne comes in and sings a song and everybody's happy

(09:26):
in dancing.

Speaker 7 (09:27):
It's amazing how granular they get. At one point in
the meeting, they're talking about Tom Hagen's flight to Los
Angeles and the type of airplane he would fly on,
and they decide it's going to be a nineteen forty
six Lockheed Constellation because that's the type of airplane that
would make that Transamerican flight in those days in the

(09:48):
late forties.

Speaker 1 (09:49):
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 Walt studios. So there's a million little details
in this film that they discussed in this production meeting,
and I think that's where the magic of this film
was born. Obviously in the script as well, but once

(10:12):
this script was done, then they had to hammer out
all these other details that were in this meeting.

Speaker 7 (10:17):
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 1 (10:27):
Copla 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
in between other things. Talk to me while I'm walking
and talking kind of thing that really puts Tom in
second place.

Speaker 7 (10:41):
They go into great detail about the fake blood with
corn syrup to give it the right viscosity.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
Coppola said, blood never looks right to me in a movie,
you know, and he wanted this blood to look real.
And Coppola said in the meeting, why don't we use
real blood? Twenty gallons of animal blood. Any butcher can
give you some blood, and Taboalius points out real blood coagulates,
so you can't use real blood. They had to mix

(11:07):
their own blood.

Speaker 7 (11:09):
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 1 (11:26):
Yeah, they're all on the same page and you can
see the back and forth. It goes on for some time.
I mean they only get halfway through the script and
then Copple of calls it a night, says we'll get
together again, and then there's no more transcript. This is
the only one that exists.

Speaker 7 (11:42):
Do you think they ever gotten together again?

Speaker 1 (11:44):
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.

Speaker 7 (11:55):
Mark, You're right about the filming process with such detail
in your book. You have scenes pinned down the day
of shooting. What was your research process like?

Speaker 1 (12:03):
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 than assistant
Ara Zuckerman. He wrote The Godfather Journal, which is a
short but very detailed accounting of the shooting of the film.

Speaker 7 (12:21):
Well, let's get into it. For starters, we know that
the cast of the Godfather had a lot of fun
on set.

Speaker 1 (12:27):
Yeah, they sure did, and it started right away. James
con 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 2 (12:41):
So we're coming back down Second Avenue and Brando was
in the in the backseat of a station wagon. He goes,
come on, moon them, we're going that second Avenue. I
go crazy.

Speaker 8 (12:51):
I don't do that.

Speaker 3 (12:51):
You're the king of that.

Speaker 9 (12:53):
He's I can't.

Speaker 5 (12:53):
I'm in a bad spot, you know, He's come on,
now he's starting. You go to do this, it'd be funny.
So I'd pull up next to the red of well
By wind and down. I just sticked my ass up
and think, this is the first day he's met us.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
Just started falling down and we ran away, you know, cry, laughing,
you know.

Speaker 1 (13:16):
So that was the first boon of my life. 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. Have
you ever mooned anybody?

Speaker 7 (13:31):
Probably when I was a kid. Yeah, time, and did
that culture of camaraderie last It seems like it did.

Speaker 1 (13:41):
With the cast for sure. With the crew, well, not
so much. There was a lot of turmoil behind the scenes.

Speaker 7 (13:48):
Coppola has repeatedly called the godfather of the most miserable
time in his life. Was it just the micromanaging?

Speaker 1 (13:55):
It was micromanaging to an extreme degree. Robert Evans was
under control Coppola's moves from across the country. Just weeks
before filming starts, Coppola is finalizing locations, meeting with his
creative team, making last minute script revisions, coordinating lighting and
makeup tests, and Robert Evans is sending him these memos,

(14:17):
just picking apart every decision he makes. Nathan, maybe you
can read this particularly scathing memo sent on March fifth,
just eighteen days before filming is set to begin.

Speaker 7 (14:28):
Sure I can do that, Evan said, quote. Feel that
the character of Sonny is not nearly as flamboyant and
exciting as in the book. The sexuality that everyone remembers
is totally missing in the script. I think that the
size of his cock and the horses head are the
two most remembered scenes from the book, and the former
is so lacking that I think we would be criticized

(14:50):
for not doing more with Sonny.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yes, and this goes on and on a few more excerpts.
Who's going to play Mamma Corleone? Fredo's casting? I'm not
sure I'm satisfied. Are you sure the picture can be
cut with a straightforward story if you decide not to
go with flash forwards?

Speaker 7 (15:07):
And Copla is still living in an apartment with his
entire family at this point, right.

Speaker 1 (15:12):
Yes, And apparently it's being painted, so are rigs 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 7 (15:23):
But somehow filming begins on March twenty third, nineteen seventy one.

Speaker 1 (15:28):
What was the first scene? Mark the first scene? Christmas
in springtime at Best in Company, the department store on
Fifth Avenue. The story had conveniently shuttered the year before,
and so it had been restored to its nineteen forties
glory for filming and in keeping with his ability to
make miracles, happen. The amazing already makes it snow.

Speaker 7 (15:51):
He's fresh off of being fired and rehired by Charlie Bludorn.

Speaker 1 (15:54):
Right, yes, but that doesn't stop Ourready he brings in
snow machines, and when the temperatures r is 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, and then the crew moves through
the city, landing at Radio City Music Hall, where Michael

(16:18):
and Kay are leaving a movie and about to find
out the terrible news.

Speaker 7 (16:24):
Would you like me better for were Ingrid Bergmann?

Speaker 1 (16:27):
Now that's a thought, thank him, No, I would not
like your better. F Equid Burbons and these scenes are
all coming together to create the iconic montage that ends
with the attempt on the Don's life.

Speaker 7 (16:43):
It seems like this first day should be a triumph,
but Copola doesn't feel that way, does he.

Speaker 3 (16:48):
No.

Speaker 1 (16:48):
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 7 (17:01):
Do you think that paranoia is justified?

Speaker 1 (17:04):
I really do. The studio essentially sent a spy to
keep watch over him, a Paramount finance guy named Jack Ballard.
Here's how great Frederickson remembers Jack.

Speaker 3 (17:15):
He was like a.

Speaker 10 (17:18):
Tough rough speaking kind of a fast, scared everybody.

Speaker 7 (17:24):
He sounds like a cartoon villain.

Speaker 1 (17:27):
Well, you know, I wasn't able to talk to Jack Ballard,
he had passed away years before. But Tacappola he was.
And here's what he had to say about Jack Ballard.

Speaker 11 (17:36):
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. And and he was the enforcer,
as it were, for Paramount, and he was it was

(17:56):
it was. He knew about classical film production, but he
had no idea of what I was trying to do.

Speaker 1 (18:06):
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 7 (18:19):
Even with Jack Bauard reporting back to Evans. Every day,
shooting must go on. Let's transition to the restaurant shooting
scene if we can. 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 1 (18:35):
Oh my gosh, that's right. I mean the restaurant's scene.
It's so much going on. 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. Like Coppole, 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. But so

(18:58):
far the Paramount execs don't like what they're seeing.

Speaker 7 (19:02):
So what changed.

Speaker 1 (19:03):
Well, Coppler really encouraged him, and when the time came,
Paccino steps up to the plate and hits a home run.

Speaker 9 (19:12):
What I want.

Speaker 1 (19:14):
What's most important to me?

Speaker 10 (19:17):
Said, I have a guarantee no more attempts on my
father's life.

Speaker 7 (19:24):
It really is a magical scene.

Speaker 1 (19:27):
I have to go to the bathroom.

Speaker 9 (19:30):
Is that all right?

Speaker 1 (19:32):
Not only is al Pacino's performance incredible, but the visual
and the sonic elements all come together so perfectly. You know,

(20:01):
a huge amount of preparation went into the scene. Here's
koppland that interview about his prompt book.

Speaker 9 (20:08):
Scene twenty six, Michael picked up by Salazzo in the
killing parenthesis key scene 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 7 (20:27):
But even that scene was an immune to the disasters
that seemed to follow filming. 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 1 (20:41):
He's rushed to the emergency room, and he'd later say
I thought it was a sign from God that now
was injured and they would have to release me.

Speaker 7 (20:50):
It feels symbolic that right when things start going well,
they shoot this iconic scene and disaster strikes again.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
Absolutely like in the movies. As they say, it's got
to be one thing after another. Pacino has a sprain ligament,
but the show's got to go on. Brando is due
on the set the next morning for his first scene
as the Don, and the execs a paramount are anxious
to see if the fading star can deliver.

Speaker 7 (21:16):
Does Copla feel responsible for him because he pushed so
hard to have him as Don Corleone?

Speaker 1 (21:22):
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 7 (21:30):
So what happens?

Speaker 1 (21:31):
Well, Brando's flight from La lands in New York City
at six am, and Brando's not on it.

Speaker 7 (21:38):
He missed his flight and Coppola is fuming. But Brando
eventually makes it to set. And when he does, how
does his first scene go?

Speaker 1 (21:46):
Well, it went pretty well because all he has to
do is lay in a hospital bed. But apparently it
was a great for morale. The cast crew and even
the staff at the hospital were so excited to have
the greatest living actor among them.

Speaker 7 (22:00):
Well, that excitement follows the film all the way to
Little Italy, right.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
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 Godfathers in the neighborhood. Nicholas
Peleggi 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.
And here's how he described the scene.

Speaker 6 (22:26):
It was security at both ends of the block, the
stuff traffic. I you know, it's a very close neighborhood.
These are five six story tediments. Everybody has been living
in those tediments the last thirty years, and most of
their parents looked at those tediments buck in nineteen King
they know the world and they know it. The white

(22:46):
guys and the lobsters, and I mean they were all
they were all still there at the depleted Carlo Gamvidio.

Speaker 7 (22:54):
So we mentioned Carlo Gambino. Were mobsters on set?

Speaker 1 (22:58):
Apparently? Yes, they were shooting scene where the Don is
shot by the fruit stand and Fredo's fumbling with the
gun and a crowd of locals form with so called
wise guys Pepper through the crowd.

Speaker 7 (23:11):
And Marlon Brando knows he's playing to an audience. He
sort of hams it up.

Speaker 6 (23:15):
The oneness shot is going to cut. How 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 be and when
he sits up, files just like a theater out of
the wood.

Speaker 1 (23:31):
Every time Cofflo 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 applause. What about Gambino, Well, according to Nicholas Pelegi,
Gambino came to the neighborhood on the day of shooting
and held a court at a coffee shop nearby. Can

(23:52):
you believe it? I mean, Gambino, this is really fact
meeting fiction.

Speaker 7 (23:57):
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 1 (24:04):
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.

Speaker 6 (24:12):
But a real gun bathera why's the gun Baba?

Speaker 7 (24:15):
So do things ever turned around for Coppola? At some
point even Jack Ballard has to admit they're seeing a
real masterpiece unfold.

Speaker 1 (24:22):
Well, I'm not sure Jack Ballard ever comes around. In fact,
a month into shooting, things are more tense than ever.

Speaker 7 (24:29):
What's going on?

Speaker 1 (24:30):
Well, Coppola is running further and further behind schedule, and
according to Greg Frederickson, he's under siege.

Speaker 10 (24:38):
He was consumed was taking us down press out of
the Gray.

Speaker 1 (24:44):
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 7 (24:53):
And there was particular contention with the scene of the
Don in his office.

Speaker 1 (24:58):
Yes, apparently there was a hunt. You're a one thousand
dollars spent on that office set in the Don's office,
And when the execs saw the dailies, they did not
like what they saw.

Speaker 10 (25:08):
Gordon Loose shot everything's so dark. They were used to
rock huts. The doors day they right take the colored
goovie and all of a sudden they had this sort
of CPI of gold looked dark goovie and they couldn't
even see the set that they spent so much money
on for the ten thousand dollars disk plus Brando it

(25:30):
picked up a cat.

Speaker 7 (25:32):
The cat, of course, is iconic now Don cor Leone
pets him throughout the opening scene, but that was a
total accident. It was a stray cat that wandered onto
the soundstage, and apparently when Marlon Brando picked up the cat,
it was purring right into his microphone, which only made
things worse.

Speaker 10 (25:49):
So the cat was purring into the night.

Speaker 11 (25:51):
He was speaking.

Speaker 10 (25:52):
It was his first day and he had that impred
in his mouth, so he couldn't speak very good. So
it was bumbling with a cat purring kind of scenes.
It was so dark that no one could see and
they said, we'll finished.

Speaker 4 (26:05):
This is over.

Speaker 10 (26:08):
Jarget ris.

Speaker 7 (26:12):
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 executive thought would be the movie's downfall.

Speaker 1 (26:22):
Yeah, the studio just didn't see Coppola's vision. In fact,
there was believed to be an effort between Jack Ballard
and Coppola's assistant director Steve Kesten to have Coppola fired
and replaced with the editor Aaron Obakian, who by the way,
Coppola had actually hired for the movie.

Speaker 7 (26:40):
Do you think any of this was justified?

Speaker 1 (26:42):
Well, you know, Coppola was having arguments with this cinematographer,
Gordon Willis, and apparently in the beginning it was really
very tough to understand Brando's mumbling, But of course Francis
insisted he needed more time.

Speaker 7 (26:57):
Does he know about the plot against him?

Speaker 1 (27:00):
Is really fast on a movie set, right, especially bad news?
Kafla decided to strike first and fire six of the
conspirators at once, the.

Speaker 10 (27:09):
Assessor, director, catch structure provisor Arab and his crew Franks
as fireable.

Speaker 7 (27:17):
And how does Robert Evans respond to all of this?

Speaker 1 (27:20):
Robert Evans claimed that he had no idea about the
mutiny on the set. He claimed instead that he spent
an entire weekend editing together the scene of Michael shooting
Salazzo and McCluskey in the restaurant.

Speaker 3 (27:33):
And if I'm seeing edited together, I realized that I'm
doing with a brief guy.

Speaker 7 (27:40):
So conveniently, once Evans is behind the editing, it's coming
together brilliantly. Well, of course, so with Evans suddenly behind him,
do things turn around for Coppola?

Speaker 1 (27:50):
Well, he does have a brief moment of glory. Charlie
Bludorn takes him and his father to the Palm, his
favorite restaurant in New York. They order stay and they
order lobster, and according to Koppla, at least they're best
friends from this point forward.

Speaker 7 (28:06):
So Copla is riding high. What's next on the shooting schedule?

Speaker 1 (28:11):
Another killing, of course, this time the victim is that
cutthroat Polygtto. Polygtto 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 canoli, and they drive out to what

(28:33):
turns out to be a desolate road in the middle
of nowhere, with the Statue of Liberty looming in the background.
The Statue of Liberties. Back to the scene that's about
to unfold. Clemenza gets out of the car to take
a leak. Pol Gotto is shot from behind, slumped over
the steering wheel. Clemenza zips up his pants, comes over

(28:54):
to the car and tells the driver leave the gun,
take the canoli.

Speaker 7 (29:00):
Do you think they knew that the scene was going
to play so well when they filmed it.

Speaker 1 (29:04):
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 Canoli, which
turned out to be one of the great lines in
the film, totally a lived by Richard Castellano as Clemenza.
So it turned out to be a lot more than
they expected, I'm sure.

Speaker 7 (29:20):
And then we move on to the wedding mark. The
wedding scene was always more than a wedding, right.

Speaker 1 (29:26):
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 the things that
were coming. It would show that the Mob was more
than brute forests and bloody fights. It would show that
its fathers and sons and aunts and uncles and cousins.

(29:47):
It would show that the Mob is made up of families.
And what could be more family than an Italian American wedding.

Speaker 7 (29:55):
And let's talk about the location, because there was some
trouble locking down the Staten Island compound.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
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.
According to al Ruddy, they had to call in a
favor from the production's new guardian, angel Joe Colombo.

Speaker 12 (30:20):
And then I said, look, miss already, you don't understand.
I worked my whole life and I've saved my whole
life out to buying this house. And I don't like
what you want to do with my home because I've
want the home of a gangster. So I looked at Jones,
Jose it's going to be the fun sign a fucking
Jose's it's good for our people. He said, it's good

(30:42):
for our people, and he did, are you kidding? The
pennelmus went through the.

Speaker 7 (30:48):
Paper, and of course the wedding scene gives us Johnny
Fontaine crying to the Godfather and the iconic slap.

Speaker 1 (30:55):
Which takes us to the classic scene of the producer
Jack Woltz waking up to buyd a horse's head and
his bad.

Speaker 7 (31:04):
And Copola gave us some insight into his thinking on
acquiring the horse's head.

Speaker 11 (31:09):
Personally, I would not kill any living creature for a movie.
It's not in my philosophy. And my personal conviction, I
don't believe movies are something that any creature, even a fly,
should be hurt. In order to do it.

Speaker 1 (31:29):
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 11 (31:37):
Yes, that was a real horse's head. But the way
we did it is we went to a dog food company.
With all the animal lovers who feed their little dogs
and cats pet food have to Maybe they don't realize it,
but the pet food is very often made from horse
meat because when the horses are so they go as

(32:01):
a main ingredient in pet food. So we went to
one of those companies and they 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. So we chose
the horse to be like the horse that was in

(32:24):
the pet food coming. We asked the pet food company
to not kill that horse until we said, okay, it's
time to do that, and then we wanted the head.

Speaker 7 (32:35):
I don't even know what to say about this. It's
such an outrageous thing.

Speaker 1 (32:38):
Mark.

Speaker 7 (32:39):
Do you think that they would have done something like
this today.

Speaker 1 (32:42):
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.
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. But you can't deny that it was one
of them most effective and bloody scenes in the movie, truly.

Speaker 7 (33:05):
So Copla finally quells the mutiny, but things aren't going
much better for him, right.

Speaker 11 (33:11):
Not at all.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
Jack Ballard still breathing down his neck, And now Coppola
and his cinematographer Gordon Willis are going at it.

Speaker 7 (33:18):
And the root of their disagreements comes from the fact
that Copola wanted to work too quickly for Willis.

Speaker 1 (33:24):
Well, Coppola and Willis drove each other crazy. One day
Coppola wants to go handheld, the next he wants a
thousand millimeter Lyns. So they went back and forth on
a lot of things.

Speaker 7 (33:35):
And amid the turmoil, Copola's wife Eleanor has a baby
right right.

Speaker 1 (33:39):
In the middle of filming. Sophia Coppola is born. 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 7 (33:51):
At just three weeks old, Sophia Copla appears in the
baptism scene in Saint Patrick's Old Cathedral, playing the son
of Connie and Carlo Rizzy.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
A huge talent from day one.

Speaker 7 (34:03):
Let's move on to the succession scene, because there's quite
a story here, yes.

Speaker 1 (34:08):
And the succession scene wasn't even written yet. There's no
succession scene in Mario Puzo's book, but Coppola thought it
would be a really important thing to show the transfer
of power.

Speaker 7 (34:19):
Why did they have such difficulty with this scene?

Speaker 1 (34:22):
Coppola felt he needed some help. I mean, he's directing
this movie. There are a thousand things happening, and he
wisely tapped Robert Town, 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. And
so Robert Town told me for the book that he
gets a call in his house one day in la

(34:43):
and Coppola is on the phone asking him to come
to New York to write this scene. Takes his typewriter,
flies to New York, stays in Buck Henry's apartment, and
here's how Robert Town remembers it as it happened.

Speaker 4 (34:57):
I had one night to write the scene. I had
no idea what to do, but I remember looking, do
you remember.

Speaker 3 (35:04):
The book The Godfather? The cover of it.

Speaker 12 (35:07):
Yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 (35:08):
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.

Speaker 4 (35:19):
I remember looking at it, at the book cover and
thinking that's a possibility.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
All of a sudden, maybe at four am or whatever,
these words come to him. I went my own life.

Speaker 13 (35:34):
I don't apologize to think care of my family, and
I refused to be a fool dancing on a string.
Have I all those big shots.

Speaker 1 (35:47):
A couple of picks up Town at buck Henry's apartment
really early the next morning.

Speaker 4 (35:52):
He didn't say much, and I didn't say anything, and
Practice finally about halfway there, said any luck, I said, well,
I think so. I gave him the script and he
read it.

Speaker 11 (36:09):
He liked it.

Speaker 1 (36:09):
Copla nods and he says, you show it Tomorrowlin and
Robert Town went, what you mean, I have to present
this tomorrow and Brando and he said, yeah, yeah, show
it tomorrow and takes it to Marrowlin on the set.
Apparently he loved it as everyone else did. It's one
of the great scenes in American cinema history.

Speaker 4 (36:26):
At the end of the today shooting with Tomorrowland turned
to me said who the fuck are you and I said, yeah,
nobody really.

Speaker 9 (36:37):
I thought that.

Speaker 13 (36:40):
When it was your time that did you would be
the one of all the strings. Senator go on, governor
going on.

Speaker 11 (36:51):
So we'll get that, we'll get that.

Speaker 1 (36:57):
So great that when Coppla won the Oscar for screenwriting,
he thanked Robert Town for this scene. And the interesting
thing is the scene was written on Q cards for Brando,
as were many other scenes, and you could see them
holding up the Q cards for this scene in some
of the classic pictures from the shooting of the movie.

Speaker 7 (37:14):
Because at this point in his career he had trouble
memorizing his line.

Speaker 1 (37:17):
Right right, so he had Q cards for a lot
of these things, including this succession scene.

Speaker 7 (37:23):
Let's fast forward to June twenty eighth, nineteen seventy one.
It's the sixty sixth day of filming in New York,
and Coppola is about to shoot a love scene at
the Saint Regis Hotel.

Speaker 1 (37:34):
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 bb King, Frankie Valley
in The Four Seasons, Sammy Davis Junior, and of course
the headliner Joe Colombo.

Speaker 7 (37:53):
And now Ruddy had planned to attend right.

Speaker 1 (37:55):
Yes, but the night before the rally he received a call.

Speaker 8 (38:00):
Has been on the dais sitting next to Joe Columbo
when he was shot?

Speaker 12 (38:04):
Okay, and I was told not to.

Speaker 8 (38:06):
Be there that day, not asking me not to be
there under no circumstances. You to be a Columbus Circle
tomorrow sitting next to Joe Columbu and the phonecos clicked death.

Speaker 1 (38:18):
No one from the movie attended the rally, and it's
probably best that they did not, because at eleven forty
five am, Joe Colombo is walking through the crowd when
he's approached by a man who appears to be a
press photographer. The man crouches down, but he's not pointing
a camera anymore. Instead, he points a pistol at Colombo

(38:41):
and fires three times in the St. 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. Filming in New York ends
days later on July. Tewod as Joe Colombo anguishes in
a coma at Roosevelt Hospital, but filming isn't truly over

(39:06):
because they still have a few pivotal scenes to shoot.
For those, the crew needs to head to the birthplace
of the Mafia sicily, Leave the Gun, Take the Canoli.

(39:28):
As a production of Airmail and iHeartMedia.

Speaker 7 (39:32):
The podcast is based on the book of the same name,
written by our very own Mark Seal.

Speaker 1 (39:37):
Our producer is Tina Mullen.

Speaker 7 (39:39):
Research assistance by Jack Sullivan.

Speaker 1 (39:41):
Jonathan Dressler was our development producer.

Speaker 7 (39:45):
Our music supervisor is Randall Poster. Our executive producers are
Meet Nathan King, Mark Seal, Doan Fagan, and Graydon Carter.

Speaker 1 (39:54):
Special thanks to Bridget Arseno and everyone at CDM Studios.

Speaker 7 (40:00):
Comprehensive list of sources and acknowledgments can be found in
Mark Sieal's book, Leave the Gun, Take the Canolli, published
by gallery Books. An imprint of Simon and Schuster
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Hosts And Creators

Mark Seal

Mark Seal

Nathan King

Nathan King

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