When Coppola first learn Mario Puzo‘s The Godfather, the filmmaker used to be dissatisfied to search out that the tale used to be extra of a “potboiler” and now not the highbrow treatise on energy that he envisioned.
However simply as he felt Puzo—whose earlier books he admired—had churned out some bestseller fodder to make cash on this case, he admitted that he wanted the paycheck, too, so he took the process.
Reservations apart, the movie’s tale hews carefully to the radical, minus the subplot involving—as Coppola put it on NPR’s Contemporary Air in 2016—the nature Lucy Mancini’s “non-public anatomy issues.” Reducing that out, he mentioned, “did not hurt the remainder section, which everyone knows.”
However signing directly to make the film used to be most effective the start of a apparently unending array of disagreements with the studio, over the entirety from the period of time (“the script had hippies in it,” he recalled to NPR) to the positioning (“they took me on a commute to go searching at Italian neighborhoods in Kansas Town”) to each actor he sought after for the primary roles.
When all used to be mentioned and sparred over, although, The Godfather made greater than $250 million on the international field place of work (making it the highest-grossing liberate ever till Jaws got here out in 1975) and is broadly regarded as some of the biggest motion pictures of all time. However although it used to be named Best possible Image on the 1973 Academy Awards and Coppola and Puzo shared the Tailored Screenplay Oscar, Coppola misplaced Best possible Director to Cabaret helmer Bob Fosse (you’ll be able to watch all that jazz spread within the FX miniseries Fosse/Verdon). He’d win for The Godfather: Phase II in 1975.
