![]() Evans and Bart, however, thought they knew why: the Mob films of the past had been written, directed, and acted by “Hollywood Italians.” To make The Godfather a success-a film so authentic the audience would “smell the spaghetti,” in Evans’s words-they would need real Italian-Americans to produce, direct, and star.īut in the first of endless contradictions in the making of the film, they chose Albert “Al” Ruddy, a non-Italian, to produce. Mob films didn’t play, they felt, as evidenced by their 1969 flop The Brotherhood, starring Kirk Douglas as a Sicilian gangster. Paramount had bought a blockbuster cheap, but the studio bosses didn’t want to make the movie. Published in 1969, The Godfather spent 67 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and was translated into so many languages that Puzo said he stopped keeping track. “It’s the best picture ever made,” Evans says of the film that he claims “touched magic” and, in the process, almost destroyed him. Since his screening room burned down, in 2003, Evans has taken to showing films in his bedroom.Īs we lie side by side on a fur coverlet, the room swells with Nino Rota’s famous score, and soon the screen fills with the face of Don Corleone on the day of his daughter’s wedding. “Let’s go to bed,” Evans says, leading me through his Hollywood Regency home to his bedroom, where so many starlets have slept that, in the producer’s heyday, his housekeeper would place the name of the previous evening’s conquest beside his coffee cup on the breakfast table so that he could address her properly. So what if Mario Puzo later contended that the meeting hadn’t taken place as Evans describes it, or if Variety editor Peter Bart, who was then Evans’s vice president in charge of creative affairs, says today that Puzo’s pages first came to him, not Evans? This was a project born in violent arguments among its creators and forged by the gun as much as the camera. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” a reporter says in John Ford’s towering 1962 Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Mario Puzo’s book became one of the best-selling novels of all time and later a classic movie that revolutionized filmmaking, saved Paramount Pictures, minted a new generation of movie stars, made the writer rich and famous, and sparked a war between two of the mightiest powers in America: the sharks of Hollywood and the highest echelons of the Mob. Sitting in his Beverly Hills home, Evans clearly relishes describing the modest birth of a modern epic. “I had forgotten he was even writing one.” Puzo said, “I want to call it The Godfather.” A few months later, when Puzo called and asked, “Would I be in breach of contract if I change the name of the book?,” Evans almost laughed out loud. Without even glancing at the pages, Evans sent them to Paramount’s business department, along with a pay order, and never expected to see Puzo, much less his cockamamy novel, again.
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