Paramount celebrated the 50th anniversary of “The Godfather” by creating an excellent mini-series about the making of the film, available on Paramount+. It is essential viewing for fans of 1970’s blockbuster films.
The central character is Albert Ruddy (portrayed by Miles Teller), a film producer who had a success with the 1960’s TV series “Hogan’s Heroes”, which was actually pretty good despite a dubious premise. Ruddy is now 93 years old, and still making films. His daughter, Alexandra Ruddy, was an associate producer of this series. Paramount had bought the rights to the Godfather book two years prior to its publication, and Ruddy was given the job of turning it into a film. He proceeded to recruit Francis Ford Coppola (Dan Fogler) to direct the film. Coppola agreed to co-write the script with Mario Puzo (Patrick Gallo), author of the book. Coppola recruited Marlon Brando (Justin Chambers) to play the lead role, and Al Pacino (Anthony Ippolito) to play Michael Corleone.
Now, recruiting Brando for the film (who agreed to work at scale) was a major coup, and you would think that the suits at Paramount would be very impressed. You would be wrong. Instead, they developed a pathological hatred of Pacino, and tried very hard to remove him from the cast. The suits are portrayed as dinosaurs, although Robert Evans (Matthew Goode) eventually came around, after a drug and alcohol binge following his marital breakup with Ali MacGraw (Meredith Garretson), star of “Love Story”.
Ruddy had another problem; the Godfather book offended some people. One of them was Frank Sinatra (Frank John Hughes), who believed that the Johnny Fontane character was him. He then proceeded to prove that the resemblance was justified, by contacting his Mafia buddies and asking them to shut down the production.
I don’t know if this was intentional on the part of the script writers, but I saw a contrast between the Paramount suits and Joe Colombo (Giovanni Ribisi), who became a friend of Ruddy as part of the process that took place to get organized crime permission to film in New York City. Colombo was presented as a man who keeps his word. (One of my take-aways: from now on, when I see a news story about Harvey Weinstein and his ilk, my reaction will be “why is this news?”)
Another major character is Ruddy’s assistant, Bettye McCartt (Juno Temple). She served as a major problem solver. Among other things, she came up with a horse’s head when Coppola insisted that a papier-mâché one wouldn’t do, no matter how much ketchup they put on it.
Now, about factual inaccuracies: the biggest one is about Joe Gallo (Joseph Russo). His murder didn’t happen until after the film was released, and according to all accounts, he had nothing to do with the production. The character Barry Lapidus (Colin Hanks) is a composite. And I noticed a lot of verbal anachronisms; characters using 21st-century expressions that were unknown in the 1970’s. Here’s a good article in Time about the factual accuracy: The True Story Behind The Offer, a Series About the Making of The Godfather. If you want to go even deeper into the topic, Michael Balderston wrote a good Fact vs fiction series, broken down by episodes. Then there is the book this film was based on, Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli, by Mark Seal. If you recognize the title, you qualify as a hard-core “The Godfather” fan.
