Coppola celebrated the deal by holidaying at Italy's Sorrento Festival (Cowie, 1989: 61). During sailing on the Michaelangelo for Europe, "he commandeered the bar on the ship as his office, broke down the book, and pasted the pages all over the windows." (Biskind, 1998: 152). This work process explained why Coppola's screenplay transferred the book's key components to the screen: "he started by tearing the pages from Puzo's novel, pasting them down in a stage director's notebook, and summarizing the action with hand-written notes on each page." (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 117). Coppola and Puzo didn't work together: Puzo wrote the first draft, then they rewrote and corrected each-other's material, working on and exchanging halves. (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 118-119).

Coppola told casting agent and producer Fred Roos, "I can't do this as a Harold Robbins type of movie," (Cowie, 1989: 75), shortening the novel's Johnny Fontaine subplot, and jettisoning another subplot "involving Sonny's oversized genitals." (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 117). "I hated that whole Hollywood sequence," Coppola once said, "but I knew I had to do it because I had to cut off that stupid horse's head." (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 117). Coppola's depiction of Don Corleone was synthesized from Mafia chieftains Vito Genovese and Joseph Profaci (Cowie, 1989: 75). A paragraph on Clemenza's obsession with his Cadillac survived in the film as a shot during the Eisenstein-like closing finale (Cowie, 1989: 75). The key change concerned consigliori Tom Hagen (Rubert Duvall), whose predecessor (Genco Abbandando) is unmentioned, and who has a more ambiguous role in the film version (Cowie, 1989: 75). These overall changes created a "sympathetic portrayal [that] was a highly cinematic element" (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 118), and dialogue that was "not literary though it comes from a novel, but seems to issue directly from the milieu." (Browne, 2000: 3-4).

Casting Battles

The transition from Puzo's novel to Coppola's script was also affected by casting battles "between the Old Hollywood's approach of Evans and the New Hollywood ideas of Coppola." (Biskind, 1998: 153, Lewis, 1995: 111). Coppola lobbied for Al Pacino and Marlon Brando, who Evans detested. Paramount president Stanley Jaffe didn't want Brando either, but Jaffe resigned during mid-production (Cowie, 1989: 62). Coppola only discovered whilst collaborating with Puzo that the novelist had Brando in mind when creating Don Corleone (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 121); Brando read Puzo's novel in three days, and dazzled studio executives with a video-taped transformation into Corleone (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 122). Brando perceived Puzo's novel as an allegory about corporatist America, citing General Motors' battle with Ralph Nader. This impelled Coppola "toward a more radical, socially conscious interpretation of the book." (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 119). Using theater games to help the actors immerse into their roles, the director created a family mood the first time they met, by taking Barndo, Pacino, James Caan, and Coppola's family out for dinner at an Italian restaurant, and improvising (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 126).

Meanwhile, Puzo's novel had become a best-seller (Biskind, 1998: 112), and although Ruddy planned to shoot present-day in St. Louise to avoid New York's mob-run unions (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 115), as the movie moved up the 1971 production slate, other studio executives felt it should be a 1940s period film (Cowie, 1989, 61). Coppola fought for New York and period settings, and for a larger budget. His unwillingness to compromise, and the book's continuing success "brought the studios around, transformed the film from a low-budget quickie into something very different." (Biskind, 1998: 152).

Lobby Group and Production Problems

Production began on 29 March 1971 (Biskind, 1998: 151). The producers had problems as mob-run unions blocked access to locations (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 124) and the Italian-American Civil Rights League ran a high-profile campaign to stop the film (Lewis, 2000: 33), including a rally with Frank Sinatra (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 125), and an ad campaign insisting that the Mafia was Puzo's creation, which kept the novel in the best-seller lists (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 125). Coppola substituted "the Five Families" for "Mafia" and "Cosa Nostra" (Cowie, 1989: 64), and although Puzo claimed the words were never in the script, they were frequently used in the novel (Lewis, 2000: 32).

Coppola rehearsed actors in the morning, only leaving a half day for shooting (Biskind, 1998: 155), so by the fifteenth day, production was lagging by two days per week (Cowie, 1989: 64). This resulted in several ingenious improvisations, including Don Corleone's death, and a scene where actor Lenny Montana (Luca Brasi), awed by Brando, can't remember his lines, so Coppola rewrote the scene to depict Brasi rehearsing his speech, and used a bad take (Goodwin and Wise, 1989, 131).

The crew considered Coppola was an amateur (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 114), Coppola was scared that Elia Kazan would replace him, Gulf + Western executives were terrified that organized crime would infiltrate the studio (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 127), and Evans complained that "the lighting was too dark, the pace too slow, the film too long." (Lewis, 1995: 111). An angry Coppola was about to be fired mid-shoot (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 115), but saved "because he had just won an Oscar for writing Patton." (Biskind, 1998: 158). Coppola was also buffered by an ensemble crew, including script adviser Nancy Tonery (Biskind, 1998: 350), Dean Tavoularis (production design), Nino Rota (music), Anna Hill Johnstone (costumes), and Gordon Willis (cinematography). (Cowie, 1989: 76). Willis framed shots, whereas Coppola's talent was "writing dialogue, storytelling, and working with actors, not visual composition." (Biskind, 1998: 157).

Script-Doctor: Robert Towne

After the shooting schedule's first week, Coppola was creating production chaos by rewriting the script at night and during the day's set-ups (Biskind, 1998: 155). Faced with daunting production logistics and demands by Warner to repay the Zoetrope debt from his Godfather fees, Coppola "couldn't concentrate on critical script revisions." (Goodwin and Wise, 1989, 128). He brought Robert Towne in as script-doctor. After The Godfather, Evans and Towne packaged the Chinatown deal (Biskind, 1998: 160-161).

Towne realized that the film needed a reconciliation scene between Michael Corleone and his father, which must be expressed through melodramatic action (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 128-129). In this crucial scene, for which Towne was paid $3000 (Biskind, 1998: 158), Don Corleone considers Senatorial and Gubernatorial careers that might have occurred, during which "the mantle passes almost imperceptibly to Michael. The son begins to draw on a dark reservoir of cunning and malevolence that lurks in the Mafia tradition." (Cowie, 1989: 69).

Critics have compared this sequence to Five Easy Pieces (1970), where no inter-generation reconciliation occurs (Biskind, 1998: 164). Robert Towne also rewrote the sequence where Michael plots to kill McCluskey (Sterling Hayden), the corrupt police lieutenant, by reversing the sequence's order, beginning with the murder and then Michael's justification of his vengeful actions (Cowie, 1989: 75). This sequence relied on genre-driven stereotyping, as McCluskey is "corase, Irish, and corruptible." (Rafter, 2000: 72). Coppola "envisaged the film as a circular dance, generation meeting generation." (Cowie, 1989: 76).

Evans and The Editing Battle

On his last day of shooting, Coppola told an assistant that he had broken his three rules of filmmaking by working with an unfinished script, working with people he distrusted, and enabling the studio to alter the film in post-production (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 132). After six months of shooting, production ended in September 1971 (Biskind, 1998: 157).