When Coppola very first read Mario Puzo‘s The Godfather, the filmmaker was dissatisfied to discover that the story was more of a “potboiler” and not the intellectual writing on power that he visualized.
But simply as he felt Puzo– whose previous books he appreciated– had actually produced some bestseller fodder to earn money in this case, he confessed that he required the income, too, so he took the task.
Reservations aside, the movie’s story hews carefully to the unique, minus the subplot including– as Coppola put it on NPR’s Fresh Air in 2016– the character Lucy Mancini’s “private anatomy problems.” Cutting that out, he stated, “didn’t harm the remaining part, which we all know.”
But finalizing on to make the film was just the start of an apparently limitless range of disputes with the studio, over whatever from the time duration (“the script had hippies in it,” he remembered to NPR) to the area (“they took me on a trip to look around at Italian neighborhoods in Kansas City”) to every star he desired for the primary functions.
When all was stated and sparred over, however, The Godfather made more than $250 million at the around the world ticket office (making it the highest-grossing release ever till Jaws came out in 1975) and is extensively thought about among the best motion pictures of perpetuity. But though it was called Best Picture at the 1973 Academy Awards and Coppola and Puzo shared the Adapted Screenplay Oscar, Coppola lost Best Director to Cabaret helmer Bob Fosse ( you can see all that jazz unfold in the FX miniseries Fosse/Verdon). He’d win for The Godfather: Part II in 1975.
