When Coppola first learn Mario Puzo‘s The Godfather, the filmmaker was dissatisfied to seek out that the story was extra of a “potboiler” and never the mental treatise on energy that he envisioned.
However simply as he felt Puzo—whose earlier books he admired—had churned out some bestseller fodder to earn cash on this case, he admitted that he wanted the paycheck, too, so he took the job.
Reservations apart, the movie’s story hews carefully to the novel, minus the subplot involving—as Coppola put it on NPR’s Contemporary Air in 2016—the character Lucy Mancini’s “non-public anatomy issues.” Reducing that out, he mentioned, “did not hurt the remaining half, which everyone knows.”
However signing on to make the film was solely the start of a seemingly infinite array of disagreements with the studio, over every thing from the time interval (“the script had hippies in it,” he recalled to NPR) to the situation (“they took me on a visit to go searching at Italian neighborhoods in Kansas Metropolis”) to each actor he wished for the principle roles.
When all was mentioned and sparred over, although, The Godfather made greater than $250 million on the worldwide field workplace (making it the highest-grossing launch ever till Jaws got here out in 1975) and is extensively thought of one of many biggest films of all time. However although it was named Greatest Image on the 1973 Academy Awards and Coppola and Puzo shared the Tailored Screenplay Oscar, Coppola misplaced Greatest Director to Cabaret helmer Bob Fosse (you may watch all that jazz unfold within the FX miniseries Fosse/Verdon). He’d win for The Godfather: Half II in 1975.
