Hearing that New York City exhibitors disliked the three-hour length (Biskind, 1998: 159), Coppola escaped to the Oscar Wilde room at Paris's L'Hotel, where he wrote a Great Gatsby screenplay in three weeks (Cowie, 1989: 78; Biskind, 1998: 162). After Coppola and his assistant editor saw William Friedkin's French Connection (1973), Coppola admitted: "Well, I guess I failed. I took a pulpy, salacious novel, and turned it into a bunch'a guys sitting around in dark rooms talking." (Biskind, 1998, 159).

The film's world premiere was 11 March 1972 (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 134), followed by a New York City premiere on 15 March 1972 (Biskind, 1998: 161). Pauline Kael claimed that The Godfather was "the best gangster film ever made in this country" (Biskind, 1998: 163) and likened the film to Charles Dickens's popular novels: "The abundance is from the book, [but] the quality of feeling is Coppolas' . . . there's a classic grandeur to the narrative flow. The Godfather is popular melodrama, but it expresses a new tragic realism." (Goodwin and Wise, 1989, 138). The film was nominated for ten Oscars and won Best Actor (Brando), Best Picture, and Best Adapted Screenplay (Coppola and Puzo) on 27 March 1973. (Biskind, 1998: 181).

Sociopolitical Sub-texts

Coppola realized that "the reason the book was so popular was that people love to read about an organization that's really going to take take care of us." (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 119). In post-release interviews, Coppola touted Puzo's book as an allegorical romance "about a great king with three sons" (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 118), alluding to the Kennedy clan. Although conceding that the film projected "a certain idealised image of the Mafia in the public consciousness" (Cowie, 1989: 66), mirrored in the film's "extravagantly violent scenes" (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 136), Coppola cautioned that his mobsters were bound together by blood ties (Cowie, 1989: 67), and had "a kind of folk reliance on the ancestral pattern of life – and death." (Cowie, 1989: 73). Coppola's battles with Paramount studio executives were mirrored in The Godfather's portrayal of power, hierarchical patriarchy, masculinity, and sibling rivalry, which "hit home as they never would again in any other film he would make." (Biskind, 1998: 164).

Unlike Puzo's novel, Coppola's film conveys its sociopolitical sub-text in two key sequences. The closing montage, "probably the single most admired sequence in the film" (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 136) inter-cuts the baptism of Connie's son with the death of Michael's enemies, the decision to move to Las Vegas, and Michael's final confrontation with Kay (Cowie, 1989, 70). The opening sequence where Bonasera petitions Don Corleone for help, sustains dramatic tension by a long, slow zoom, establishing the film's theme that "the American Dream has failed, the melting pot is an illusion, and that the ethnic poor are trapped at the bottom of an unjust system." (Biskind, 1998: 164). Coppola's mise en scene draws attention to "the act of storytelling that lies at the center of Puzo's book and Coppola's film." (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 136).

The "Blockbuster Mentality" Effect

"Coppola had always complained that the success of The Godfather derailed his career" (Biskind, 1998: 424), although in retrospect the trilogy is "the most personal films he ever made." (Biskind, 1998: 124). Even before The Godfatherwas screened, Paramount was considering a sequel (working title: "The Son of Don Corleone") "to start shooting in July; Puzo was reportedly in Italy, working on the screenplay." (Goodwin and Wise, 1989: 135).

Frank Yabland had created the "blockbuster mentality" by negotiating a 90/10 exhibition fees split in Paramount's favor (Biskind, 1998: 162-163), and the film "transformed Paramount's cashflow (Paramount owned 84 of 100 points" (Biskind, 1998: 163), grossing $86.2 million on domestic rentals, and $10 million for NBC's television rights in July 1974 (Cowie, 1989: 77). Coppola won a Mercedes 600 stretch limo in a studio bet (Biskind, 1998: 141). His back-end salary anointed "the new aesthetic and moral legitimacy of the director with enormous economic power." (Biskind, 1998: 166). His success convinced Universal to release George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973), (Lewis, 1995: 79). Coppola subsequently formed The Directors Company with William Friedkin and Peter Bogdanovich, financed by Paramount for $35.1 million (Lewis, 1995: 15-16). He was paid $1 million upfront for The Conversation deal (Biskind, 1998: 183). He recreated Zoetrope as a traditional production company, and bought City magazine and a radio station (Biskind, 1998: 167).

Unlike Dennis Hopper and Robert Altman, Coppola's collaboration with Puzo revived a dead genre, glancing forward to Lucas and Spielberg. But their next collaboration was doomed to failure. Puzo wrote the first draft of the 1984 film The Cotton Club (Lewis, 1995: 115), and Coppola was hired by Evans to re-write it (Lewis, 1995: 19), only to be outmanouvered, so Evans claims, as revenge for him re-cutting The Godfather (Lewis, 1995: 137). Coppola was finally bankrupted when the $27 million One From the Heart (1982) made less than $2 million (Biskind, 1998: 418), leaving his chimeric dream in ruins of Zoetrope providing the 1970s director-driven cinema with independent production/distribution (Biskind, 1998: 419).

Betraying a Generation?

In retrospect, Coppola's auterism "had less to do with his control of the film than with submission of self and loss of energy." (Corrigan, 1998: 56). For producer Al Ruddy, The Godfather propelled Coppola from a "nobody" to one of the most revered directors: "He lost some of his focus, was another example of a director destroyed by living the movie." (Biskind, 1998: 418). Mardik Martin is more succinct about the outcome of the Puzo/Coppola collaboration: "The auteur theory killed all these people . . . They went completely bananas. They thought they were God." (Biskind, 1998: 415).

In its exaltation of ethnicity, inter-generation reconciliation, and the Mafia as de-facto vigilante justice, The Godfather anticipated the rise-to-globalism of the Reagan right (Biskind, 1998: 164, 223). Although Heaven's Gate (1980) is often cited as the locus of Hollywood's counter-revolution against the Movie Brats, it was The Godfather that changed studio economics (Biskind, 1998: 401), catapulting Roger Corman-style B-movies into 'high-concept' A-pictures (Maltby, 1998: 34; Biskind, 1998: 278). Taken not just as an artefact but as the determinant of an unfolding production process, Puzo and Coppola's collaboration created a trend that split the Movie Brats between the "bad kids" (Coppola, Bob Rafelson, William Friedkin, and Robert Altman) who rebelled, and "good kids" like Spielberg "who never competed with studio executives." (Biskind, 1998: 413). Spielberg defended himself against these allegations: "Francis has only floundered when he determined to succeed commercially . . . I expect Francis to take risks." (Biskind, 1998: 418). The heirs to Puzo and Coppola's script deal were not visionary 1970s auteur directors but mega-deal producers like Don Simpson, Joel Silver, and uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer: "the producers were auteurs – of crash-and-burn action pictures – but their medium was not so much film as money." (Biskind, 1998: 414).

When The Godfather was released in 1997, Peter Biskind posed a scenario that we will never know the answer to: "Consider what might have been had Coppola dug in his heels, refused to direct The Godfather, made personal films instead." (Biskind, 1998: 435). He summed up the evolutionary path of New Hollywood after the Puzo/Coppola collaboration: "We are the children of Lucas, not Coppola." (Biskind, 1998: 344).

Bibliography:

Peter Bart. Who Killed Hollywood? . . . and Put the Tarnish on Tinseltown. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999.

Peter Biskind. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

Nick Browne (ed.). Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Trilogy New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.