The making of The Godfather was almost as dramatic as the film: Paramount+’s The Offer reviewed
It’s hard to imagine in the wake of GoodFellas, The Sopranos and Gomorrah but there was a time, not so long ago, when the very existence of the Mafia was widely dismissed as an urban myth. What changed was Mario Puzo’s 1969 bestselling novel The Godfather, which sold nine million copies in two years.
You might assume, not unreasonably, that the 1972 movie version – now acknowledged as one of the greatest films of all time – was one of the most obvious commissions in Hollywood history. But it was dogged by so much controversy and plagued by so many disasters that it was very nearly stillborn. Every stage in the process – script, casting, funding – encountered mammoth resistance, not least from the Mafia themselves who objected violently to the book’s negative portrayal of the blameless, God-fearing and hardworking Italian American community.
That the movie ever got made was thanks in large part to the tenacity, quick thinking and bravura front of its novice producer Al Ruddy, whose experiences have been dramatised in Michael Tolkin’s must-watch drama The Offer. Its cast of real-life characters is at least as colourful as those in the Godfather trilogy: Marlon Brando, the reclusive, difficult actor considered at the time to be box-office poison; Al Pacino, too obscure, it was thought, to play a movie lead; Bob Evans, the flamboyant, mercurial head of production, later indicted for cocaine trafficking; Joe Colombo, the Mafia boss who initially opposed the movie; Ruddy’s French wife, Françoise Glazer, who had been given the Chateau Marmont hotel as a divorce settlement from her first husband…
