Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli: The Epic Story of the Making of The Godfather

by Mark Seal

Among the many books I relied upon were The Godfather Legacy by Harlan Lebo; The Godfather Book by Peter Cowie; The Godfather Notebook by Francis Ford Coppola; The Kid Stays in the Picture by Robert Evans; Infamous Players by Peter Bart; Mario Puzo’s The Godfather Papers and Other Confessions; Mario Puzo: A Writer’s Quest by M. J. Moore; The Godfather Companion and Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, both by Peter Biskind; The Annotated Godfather by Jenny M. Jones; Hollywood Godfather by Gianni Russo; Me and Marlon by Alice Marchak…

The Godfather Journal, by Ira Zuckerman, who served as Francis Ford Coppola’s assistant on the film and produced an extraordinary day-by-day account of the filming.

“The Godfather did more business in six months than Gone with the Wind did in thirty-six years,” Evans said. “It was the first time a picture opened in four hundred theaters.”

Everything is monetarily focused. And I was looking to touch magic. Magic, to me, lasts longer. Why is it that Mozart is remembered far longer than Napoleon? Because the world of art is remembered far longer than the world of greed.”

By 1964, Gulf+Western was one of the fastest-growing companies on the New York Stock Exchange. The next year, with only $5 million in cash on hand, Bluhdorn borrowed $85 million from Chase Manhattan. It was one of the largest unsecured loans in history, three times as much as the combined annual worth of the companies comprising Gulf+Western. It landed Bluhdorn on the cover of Time, as one of its “Millionaires Under 40.”

Fawcett had bought the paperback rights to The Godfather for a record-breaking $410,000. In today’s money, it was more than $3 million.

Gravano, for one, didn’t believe that Puzo could have written The Godfather without assistance from the Mafia. “No way,” he told a writer for the New York Times. “Somebody had to be helping him… because he knew about our life cold. He had the whole atmosphere, the way we talked. That wedding scene—I mean, that was so real.”

He was summoned to the palatial office where Evans held court. There, the former garment industry executive Evans and the former newspaper reporter Bart offered the former shoe salesman Ruddy what would turn out to be the opportunity of a lifetime. Ruddy asked Bart for a copy of the novel. “I instructed him to set a precedent and buy his own,” Bart said. The penny pinching had begun.

“I’m now the producer of The Godfather?” Ruddy asked, dumbfounded. “He thinks you’re great,” said Jaffe. “Stanley, can you do me a favor?” Ruddy asked. “Can you get me a night flight back to Los Angeles? I just want to be the producer of The Godfather for a week before they find out I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.”

He had based much of The Godfather on a 1910 Western classic, “a book I read when I was a kid, Zane Grey’s Heritage of the Desert,”