February 19, 2025 • 25 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
From Airmail and iHeartMedia. This is Leave the Gun, Take
the Canoli, the epic story of the making of The Godfather.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
The Five Families did not want us to shoot that
picture in New York.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
He said, as long as I'm president of Paramount, there
is no way that Ryan Rendo will play this role.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
So this is going on and on and on, and
Francis just got.
Speaker 5 (00:43):
So sick of everything.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
He goes, I'm going to sicily just cast my fucking movie.
Speaker 5 (00:49):
Excuse my language.
Speaker 4 (00:50):
My kids came in all hysterical. They'd heard gunshots, and
they went outside and all the windows had been shot
out of the fuss over.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
He was consumed. He was taking us down. Put crash
us out of there, and say the piction.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
I'm Mark Seal, author of Leave the Gun, Take the Canoli,
published by Simon and Schuster in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
One, and I'm Nathan King, deputy editor at dearmoul I.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Came to this story in two thousand and eight. 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 twenty years.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
And resulted in Mark's hit book that would become known
as the definitive Truth behind a story filled with so
many lies.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
But the truth is fickle, and to this day, the
principles of this story have different versions of how it
all unfolded.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
As well as some brand new interviews and rarely heard
archival tape.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
The stories they tell are sometimes hard to believe and
will 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.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
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.
Speaker 5 (02:41):
That's very funny.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
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.
Speaker 5 (02:56):
It's cool be the Godfather's Godfather.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
As the head of production, and Evans was involved in
every aspect of the movie.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Take the Food antire four years, there's a lot of
fights and everything.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
He financed the struggling author of the novel on which
the movie is based.
Speaker 5 (03:15):
A very good writer named Mary Apruzzo, Short and green.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
He green lit the film's development.
Speaker 5 (03:21):
Nobody wanted to make it.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
As a matter of fact, Peramount refused to make it
for a while.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
He hired its producer and its director.
Speaker 5 (03:29):
He is opreading Francis Upretting, and.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
He fostered the film's legend before and after its release.
Speaker 5 (03:37):
It's my most supporting legacy in life.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Here picture this. I'm in a rent car coming from
Los Angeles International Airport and I drive to Robert Evans's
home called Woodland. And as I pulled 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
(04:08):
The kid stays in the picture.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
The grounds, the trees, the acreage, the towering eucalyptus, thousands
of roses.
Speaker 5 (04:15):
Everything is quiet and secret behind walls.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
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, mister Seal, Mister 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
(04:41):
the room turns silent, and Robert Evans walks in and
it's a typically grand entrance. He's seventy eight, 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,
(05:04):
dazzling grin and stares at me through rose colored glasses,
and then he speaks, in his gravelly.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Voice, it's stranger than fiction.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
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 le thario, looks me in
the eye and says, let's go to bed. I'll admit
(05:37):
I was a little taken aback. I don't think I
got out much except to 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?
(05:59):
Or I'd 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, Alan, who arrives with food, drinks,
(06:20):
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.
Speaker 5 (06:31):
It just be it. Godfather is Nahor and the State.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Mark.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
You've been researching and reporting on the myth behind this
film for almost twenty years, but your obsession with the
movie started much earlier than that.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
That's true. It really started in March of nineteen seventy two.
When I first saw the movie. I was nineteen years old,
and one afternoon, some friends and I decided to go
see a movie. And I knew asolutely nothing about this
movie except on the marquee had said two words, the Godfather.
(07:08):
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 Bonas Sara comes
out of the darkness and.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
He says, I believe in America.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
This is a movie I soon realize about family and
expectations and legacy, and I started thinking about my own
family and my own future, which was sort of unsettled.
Speaker 6 (07:36):
Then.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Arts, which is how you ended up in Robert Evans's
bet thirty five years later. Exactly how did you land
the Vanity Fair story? It seems like it would be
a dream come true for you.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
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,
(08:18):
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
(08:39):
any of his season film writers, which Vanity Fair had
in abundance. But I dutifully wrote a pitch and gave
it to my editor, the great Wayne Lawson and Wade
said we'll see what Grayden says. So he took it
to Graydon and suddenly they said, you're on.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
And when you started reporting the story, you started with
Robert Evans exactly.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
I started with Robert Evans. But soon all roads led
to a man equally as mythic as Evans, Charlie Bluedorn.
He bought Paramount in nineteen sixty six, and he was
known as Hurricane Charlie, an Austrian born business titan with
an insatiable appetite for acquiring companies. His story begins at
(09:22):
age nineteen in nineteen forty two. Charlie was the son
of a Jewish mother and he was enrolled in the
Carlton 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
(09:42):
the HMS Hillary bound for America, and it was trailed
by Nazi submarines intent on seeking it. But thankfully Charlie
made it to America.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
And so he gets to America, mark and what does
he do.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Well, he immediately starts work. His daughter told me that
there was never a day in Charlie Bluedorn's life when
he wasn't thinking about business or working a business. And
there's a story when he was a very, very young man,
he got a job as a broker in a commodity's
house in New York City and he was soon bringing
(10:18):
in a million dollars a year into this small company.
And Charlie had the ability to sell anything in 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 autoparts business, and really he had his hands in everything,
(10:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Blue Dorn had a huge appetite for what most people
would consider it will advised business ventures. He loved what
he called rec jobs, which are businesses that are almost
beyond repair. And in nineteen sixty six he bought what
he thought was the biggest wreck job of them all,
Paramount Pictures.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
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 sixties, Paramount was in trouble. Robert Evans famously once
said there were eight major studios at the time, and
(11:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Yes, and Paramount was the impossible job. Like so many
immigrants to America, Charlie thought what could be more America?
And then Hollywood and movies and the dreams that they sold.
I mean, he loved what he called the Schmaltz factor.
Movies like Doctor j Evago and the sound of music.
All of these things represented America to him, and he
thought he could identify this secret ingredient that made the magic.
(12:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
How did that work for him? Thinking that he could
re engineer Hollywood.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
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
(13:01):
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 Bluehorn
and many people laughed.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
They called him a cliche, a show business neophyte who
had no sense of what art is, and they sort
of dismissed him as a know nothing.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yes, but he proved him 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.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
And by genius he means artistic genius.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Where did he dig up Evans?
Speaker 1 (14:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Mark That headline sort of gives you a hint as
to what Robert Evans was doing before he got in
the producing business exactly.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
So Evans was in the clothing business. He and his brother,
Charlie Evans were partners in a company called Evan Pocone
Clothing Company, and so Bob traveled to La 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
(15:10):
the perfect actor to play her late husband, the producer
Irving Lahlberg, 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
(15:32):
and Shearer ask Evans if he's an actor, and Evans,
being Evans, says no, I'm in ladies' pants. It's nineteen
fifty six.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
And just like that, Robert Evans is an actor.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
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 It's so skeptical about his acting abilities
that some of them threatened to walk off the set
(16:05):
over it. And Darryl Zanik, the producer, heard about it,
and in the classic scene with a bullhorn, while Evans
is in the bullfighting ring, Zanick yells out, the kid
stays in the picture, and that becomes the title of
Robert Evans's autobiography.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
So he's working as an actor. How does he get
into production.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
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 inquiring 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.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
And this is when Peter bart starts to take notice.
He's a young writer, fresh from New York in Hollywood
to write stories about the town.
Speaker 6 (17:00):
Guy, to come out here tell you like this, it
was a great job.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
He keeps hearing about Robert Evans and he thinks to himself,
this is the perfect story.
Speaker 6 (17:09):
I will kind of a snarky piece about how this
guy from the garment business. He was buying books and
making deals for himself. And he knew as he was saying,
sort of a glam story about how somebody he had
a time when Hollywood was in its gold Brooks could
come in.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
And have an impact.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Yes, and it gets better. Charlie Bluedorn reads the story
about Robert Evans and the New York Times.
Speaker 6 (17:31):
What I wrote, which talked about what a sub promoter
Bob was. Charlie said, Ah, this guy's a fucking guy's
a sup promoter.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
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 Baltzer, says
Charlie Bluedoor, and he's a true operator. When he wants something,
(18:01):
he wants said you should get up there and meet him.
Evans was reluctant, of course, but he goes to New York.
He meets Blueorn and like a miracle, like something out
of the movie. Charlie Bludorn taps Robert Evans to run Paramount,
first stationing him in London and then bringing him to
la as the head of production.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
So Charlie Bludorn picked Robert Evans to run Paramount all
on a hunch. In a New York Times article.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
Yeah, and blue Doorn'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 blue Dorn
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.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
What was Evans's directive from blue Dorn.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Nothing short of this, save this studio, green light and
produce hits quick. Blue Doorn told him, Bobby, I want
twenty pictures a year from you. I want pictures that
people in Cincinnati are gonna want to see. I want
beautiful girls, I want action, I want fun.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
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 Bark.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
It was a comedy of errors. It started that way anyway.
Everybody was laughing about these new hires.
Speaker 6 (19:48):
I took there because Bob was a friend of mine,
and he was in a bit over his head and said,
you know, I've got to work with me. The brine
will leave the brine.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
What was their strategy? How are Evans and bar going
to save the studio?
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Where their strategy was really pretty simple. Peter Bart 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 bluedrn had
directed him to find films that could save the studio.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
And as it turns out, Evans's hunch about Peter Bart
was actually right. They started unearthing these great stories and
hit books and best sellers 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
(20:50):
Evans's future wife Ali McGraw.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
But as big of a hit as the film was,
they'd need a bigger reprieve for Paramount.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Yeah, a 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 will become The Godfather.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
So let's talk about how Paramount came to acquire the
rights to The Godfather.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
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 ask him for a favor.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
He had from George Weezer above the Palamid. He's a
writer named Mary Epuso, a very good writer. He's real,
short and green. He's the deep of the bookies. Here's
the bookies, a lot of money and he has thirty
five peech sheep being called mafia meet him, will you
peez and see if you can help him?
Speaker 1 (22:08):
So Evans says, okay, he'll meet with Puzzo. And as
Evans told me the story, this dead, broke, fat writer
comes into his office with a thirty five page treatment
under his arm, a big fat cigar hanging out of
his mouth, and uh, pretty soon, over cigars and conversation
in Evans's office, the two men strike a deal.
Speaker 5 (22:32):
Isn't very much.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
And I didn't know him as an author really, even
though he was a legitate author.
Speaker 5 (22:38):
Well, i'll tell you what Frit and G's for it.
There's an option against. Let's see serventy five thousand.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
Dollars it because a book it says make it fifteen,
and they said, how about twelve five?
Speaker 2 (22:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Fate exactly, and of course Evans' version is my favorite
version of the events, even though Peter Bart would remember
it very differently. So that this whole story of Puso
come in with the thirty pages or whatever, and Bob saying,
what are you in for?
Speaker 5 (23:13):
That's nonsense.
Speaker 6 (23:14):
There were sixty pages. They came in, this big pilot.
Stuff came into me and I read it because George
nag Lui and I thought it was really interesting stuff.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Well, for the sake of the story, I'll take Evans's
version to be true.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
But no matter what, Puso did sell the option to
pair him out for.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Twelve five and once they made the deal, was Evans
hopeful that it would come through?
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Not really, you know, he bought it and basically forgot
about it until he heard from Puso again.
Speaker 5 (23:44):
The treatment to a movie Take it to a lottery.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Five months past. Poso calls him, says, I got to
speak to you. I'm in LA again.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
What does he want to talk about the name of
the book?
Speaker 3 (23:58):
Would I be in breaches by contract if I changed
the name of my book. I forgot to use even ruddyway,
and I said, I want to call it a Godfather
and I had no idea.
Speaker 5 (24:10):
I hadn't read one page. I didn't read the thirty
five page.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
I did it as a.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Favorite, and what became almost was a favor became the
biggest favorite of my life.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Leave the Gun, Take the Canoli as a production of
Airmail and iHeartMedia.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
The podcast is based on the book of the same name,
written by our very own Mark Seal.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
Our producer is Tina Mullin.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Research assistance by Jack Sullivan.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Jonathan Dressler was our development producer.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
Our music supervisor is Randall Poster. Our executive producers are
Me Nathan King, Mark Seal, Dan Fagan, and Graydon Carter.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Special thanks to Bridget Arsenal and everyone at CDM Studios.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
A comprehensive list of sources and acknowledgments can be found
in Mark Seal's book, Leave the Gun, Take the Canoli,
published by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster.
From Airmail and iHeartMedia. This is Leave the Gun, Take
the Canoli, the epic story of the making of The Godfather.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
The Five Families did not want us to shoot that
picture in New York.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
He said, as long as I'm president of Paramount, there
is no way that Ryan Rendo will play this role.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
So this is going on and on and on, and
Francis just got.
Speaker 5 (00:43):
So sick of everything.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
He goes, I'm going to sicily just cast my fucking movie.
Speaker 5 (00:49):
Excuse my language.
Speaker 4 (00:50):
My kids came in all hysterical. They'd heard gunshots, and
they went outside and all the windows had been shot
out of the fuss over.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
He was consumed. He was taking us down. Put crash
us out of there, and say the piction.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
I'm Mark Seal, author of Leave the Gun, Take the Canoli,
published by Simon and Schuster in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
One, and I'm Nathan King, deputy editor at dearmoul I.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Came to this story in two thousand and eight. 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 twenty years.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
And resulted in Mark's hit book that would become known
as the definitive Truth behind a story filled with so
many lies.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
But the truth is fickle, and to this day, the
principles of this story have different versions of how it
all unfolded.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
As well as some brand new interviews and rarely heard
archival tape.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
The stories they tell are sometimes hard to believe and
will 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.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
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.
Speaker 5 (02:41):
That's very funny.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
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.
Speaker 5 (02:56):
It's cool be the Godfather's Godfather.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
As the head of production, and Evans was involved in
every aspect of the movie.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Take the Food antire four years, there's a lot of
fights and everything.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
He financed the struggling author of the novel on which
the movie is based.
Speaker 5 (03:15):
A very good writer named Mary Apruzzo, Short and green.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
He green lit the film's development.
Speaker 5 (03:21):
Nobody wanted to make it.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
As a matter of fact, Peramount refused to make it
for a while.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
He hired its producer and its director.
Speaker 5 (03:29):
He is opreading Francis Upretting, and.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
He fostered the film's legend before and after its release.
Speaker 5 (03:37):
It's my most supporting legacy in life.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Here picture this. I'm in a rent car coming from
Los Angeles International Airport and I drive to Robert Evans's
home called Woodland. And as I pulled 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
(04:08):
The kid stays in the picture.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
The grounds, the trees, the acreage, the towering eucalyptus, thousands
of roses.
Speaker 5 (04:15):
Everything is quiet and secret behind walls.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
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, mister Seal, Mister 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
(04:41):
the room turns silent, and Robert Evans walks in and
it's a typically grand entrance. He's seventy eight, 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,
(05:04):
dazzling grin and stares at me through rose colored glasses,
and then he speaks, in his gravelly.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Voice, it's stranger than fiction.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
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 le thario, looks me in
the eye and says, let's go to bed. I'll admit
(05:37):
I was a little taken aback. I don't think I
got out much except to 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?
(05:59):
Or I'd 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, Alan, who arrives with food, drinks,
(06:20):
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.
Speaker 5 (06:31):
It just be it. Godfather is Nahor and the State.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Mark.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
You've been researching and reporting on the myth behind this
film for almost twenty years, but your obsession with the
movie started much earlier than that.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
That's true. It really started in March of nineteen seventy two.
When I first saw the movie. I was nineteen years old,
and one afternoon, some friends and I decided to go
see a movie. And I knew asolutely nothing about this
movie except on the marquee had said two words, the Godfather.
(07:08):
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 Bonas Sara comes
out of the darkness and.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
He says, I believe in America.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
This is a movie I soon realize about family and
expectations and legacy, and I started thinking about my own
family and my own future, which was sort of unsettled.
Speaker 6 (07:36):
Then.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Arts, which is how you ended up in Robert Evans's
bet thirty five years later. Exactly how did you land
the Vanity Fair story? It seems like it would be
a dream come true for you.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
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,
(08:18):
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
(08:39):
any of his season film writers, which Vanity Fair had
in abundance. But I dutifully wrote a pitch and gave
it to my editor, the great Wayne Lawson and Wade
said we'll see what Grayden says. So he took it
to Graydon and suddenly they said, you're on.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
And when you started reporting the story, you started with
Robert Evans exactly.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
I started with Robert Evans. But soon all roads led
to a man equally as mythic as Evans, Charlie Bluedorn.
He bought Paramount in nineteen sixty six, and he was
known as Hurricane Charlie, an Austrian born business titan with
an insatiable appetite for acquiring companies. His story begins at
(09:22):
age nineteen in nineteen forty two. Charlie was the son
of a Jewish mother and he was enrolled in the
Carlton 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
(09:42):
the HMS Hillary bound for America, and it was trailed
by Nazi submarines intent on seeking it. But thankfully Charlie
made it to America.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
And so he gets to America, mark and what does
he do.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Well, he immediately starts work. His daughter told me that
there was never a day in Charlie Bluedorn's life when
he wasn't thinking about business or working a business. And
there's a story when he was a very, very young man,
he got a job as a broker in a commodity's
house in New York City and he was soon bringing
(10:18):
in a million dollars a year into this small company.
And Charlie had the ability to sell anything in 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 autoparts business, and really he had his hands in everything,
(10:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Blue Dorn had a huge appetite for what most people
would consider it will advised business ventures. He loved what
he called rec jobs, which are businesses that are almost
beyond repair. And in nineteen sixty six he bought what
he thought was the biggest wreck job of them all,
Paramount Pictures.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
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 sixties, Paramount was in trouble. Robert Evans famously once
said there were eight major studios at the time, and
(11:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Yes, and Paramount was the impossible job. Like so many
immigrants to America, Charlie thought what could be more America?
And then Hollywood and movies and the dreams that they sold.
I mean, he loved what he called the Schmaltz factor.
Movies like Doctor j Evago and the sound of music.
All of these things represented America to him, and he
thought he could identify this secret ingredient that made the magic.
(12:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
How did that work for him? Thinking that he could
re engineer Hollywood.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
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
(13:01):
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 Bluehorn
and many people laughed.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
They called him a cliche, a show business neophyte who
had no sense of what art is, and they sort
of dismissed him as a know nothing.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yes, but he proved him 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.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
And by genius he means artistic genius.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Where did he dig up Evans?
Speaker 1 (14:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Mark That headline sort of gives you a hint as
to what Robert Evans was doing before he got in
the producing business exactly.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
So Evans was in the clothing business. He and his brother,
Charlie Evans were partners in a company called Evan Pocone
Clothing Company, and so Bob traveled to La 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
(15:10):
the perfect actor to play her late husband, the producer
Irving Lahlberg, 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
(15:32):
and Shearer ask Evans if he's an actor, and Evans,
being Evans, says no, I'm in ladies' pants. It's nineteen
fifty six.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
And just like that, Robert Evans is an actor.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
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 It's so skeptical about his acting abilities
that some of them threatened to walk off the set
(16:05):
over it. And Darryl Zanik, the producer, heard about it,
and in the classic scene with a bullhorn, while Evans
is in the bullfighting ring, Zanick yells out, the kid
stays in the picture, and that becomes the title of
Robert Evans's autobiography.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
So he's working as an actor. How does he get
into production.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
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 inquiring 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.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
And this is when Peter bart starts to take notice.
He's a young writer, fresh from New York in Hollywood
to write stories about the town.
Speaker 6 (17:00):
Guy, to come out here tell you like this, it
was a great job.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
He keeps hearing about Robert Evans and he thinks to himself,
this is the perfect story.
Speaker 6 (17:09):
I will kind of a snarky piece about how this
guy from the garment business. He was buying books and
making deals for himself. And he knew as he was saying,
sort of a glam story about how somebody he had
a time when Hollywood was in its gold Brooks could
come in.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
And have an impact.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Yes, and it gets better. Charlie Bluedorn reads the story
about Robert Evans and the New York Times.
Speaker 6 (17:31):
What I wrote, which talked about what a sub promoter
Bob was. Charlie said, Ah, this guy's a fucking guy's
a sup promoter.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
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 Baltzer, says
Charlie Bluedoor, and he's a true operator. When he wants something,
(18:01):
he wants said you should get up there and meet him.
Evans was reluctant, of course, but he goes to New York.
He meets Blueorn and like a miracle, like something out
of the movie. Charlie Bludorn taps Robert Evans to run Paramount,
first stationing him in London and then bringing him to
la as the head of production.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
So Charlie Bludorn picked Robert Evans to run Paramount all
on a hunch. In a New York Times article.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
Yeah, and blue Doorn'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 blue Dorn
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.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
What was Evans's directive from blue Dorn.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Nothing short of this, save this studio, green light and
produce hits quick. Blue Doorn told him, Bobby, I want
twenty pictures a year from you. I want pictures that
people in Cincinnati are gonna want to see. I want
beautiful girls, I want action, I want fun.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
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 Bark.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
It was a comedy of errors. It started that way anyway.
Everybody was laughing about these new hires.
Speaker 6 (19:48):
I took there because Bob was a friend of mine,
and he was in a bit over his head and said,
you know, I've got to work with me. The brine
will leave the brine.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
What was their strategy? How are Evans and bar going
to save the studio?
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Where their strategy was really pretty simple. Peter Bart 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 bluedrn had
directed him to find films that could save the studio.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
And as it turns out, Evans's hunch about Peter Bart
was actually right. They started unearthing these great stories and
hit books and best sellers 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
(20:50):
Evans's future wife Ali McGraw.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
But as big of a hit as the film was,
they'd need a bigger reprieve for Paramount.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Yeah, a 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 will become The Godfather.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
So let's talk about how Paramount came to acquire the
rights to The Godfather.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
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 ask him for a favor.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
He had from George Weezer above the Palamid. He's a
writer named Mary Epuso, a very good writer. He's real,
short and green. He's the deep of the bookies. Here's
the bookies, a lot of money and he has thirty
five peech sheep being called mafia meet him, will you
peez and see if you can help him?
Speaker 1 (22:08):
So Evans says, okay, he'll meet with Puzzo. And as
Evans told me the story, this dead, broke, fat writer
comes into his office with a thirty five page treatment
under his arm, a big fat cigar hanging out of
his mouth, and uh, pretty soon, over cigars and conversation
in Evans's office, the two men strike a deal.
Speaker 5 (22:32):
Isn't very much.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
And I didn't know him as an author really, even
though he was a legitate author.
Speaker 5 (22:38):
Well, i'll tell you what Frit and G's for it.
There's an option against. Let's see serventy five thousand.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
Dollars it because a book it says make it fifteen,
and they said, how about twelve five?
Speaker 2 (22:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Fate exactly, and of course Evans' version is my favorite
version of the events, even though Peter Bart would remember
it very differently. So that this whole story of Puso
come in with the thirty pages or whatever, and Bob saying,
what are you in for?
Speaker 5 (23:13):
That's nonsense.
Speaker 6 (23:14):
There were sixty pages. They came in, this big pilot.
Stuff came into me and I read it because George
nag Lui and I thought it was really interesting stuff.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Well, for the sake of the story, I'll take Evans's
version to be true.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
But no matter what, Puso did sell the option to
pair him out for.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Twelve five and once they made the deal, was Evans
hopeful that it would come through?
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Not really, you know, he bought it and basically forgot
about it until he heard from Puso again.
Speaker 5 (23:44):
The treatment to a movie Take it to a lottery.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Five months past. Poso calls him, says, I got to
speak to you. I'm in LA again.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
What does he want to talk about the name of
the book?
Speaker 3 (23:58):
Would I be in breaches by contract if I changed
the name of my book. I forgot to use even ruddyway,
and I said, I want to call it a Godfather
and I had no idea.
Speaker 5 (24:10):
I hadn't read one page. I didn't read the thirty
five page.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
I did it as a.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Favorite, and what became almost was a favor became the
biggest favorite of my life.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Leave the Gun, Take the Canoli as a production of
Airmail and iHeartMedia.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
The podcast is based on the book of the same name,
written by our very own Mark Seal.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
Our producer is Tina Mullin.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Research assistance by Jack Sullivan.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Jonathan Dressler was our development producer.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
Our music supervisor is Randall Poster. Our executive producers are
Me Nathan King, Mark Seal, Dan Fagan, and Graydon Carter.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Special thanks to Bridget Arsenal and everyone at CDM Studios.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
A comprehensive list of sources and acknowledgments can be found
in Mark Seal's book, Leave the Gun, Take the Canoli,
published by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster.
Hosts And Creators
Mark Seal
Nathan King
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