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It’s a story you can’t refuse to read.
Fifty years ago, the first installment of Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” hit theaters on March 24, 1972, revitalizing the career of Marlon Brando and making a star out of Al Pacino.
To celebrate the momentous occasion, the film was just re-released in theatres, and the entire trilogy had been painstakingly restored and will be out in 4k Ultra HD for the first time in March.
“We felt privileged to restore these films and a little in awe,” said Andrea Kalas, the senior vice president of the archive for Paramount Pictures. “We were able to witness first-hand how the brilliant cinematography, score, production design, costume design, editing, performances, and, of course, screenwriting and direction became famously more than the sum of their parts.”
Here, cast and crew recall some memorable moments from behind the scenes of the cinematic masterpiece.
Marlon Brando was quite the prankster
“Robert Duvall, Jimmy Caan, and even Marlon participated in a lot of pranks and fun on the set. They kept mooning each other and things like that,” Fred Roos, who served as a producer and casting director on the first two films, told The Post. “Once there was a sequence where Marlon had been wounded and had to be carried by Jimmy and Duvall. He had the prop people put heavy rocks in with his clothing so it weighed a ton. Those were the kind of jokes that Marlon liked to play.”
Co-star James Caan also recalled Brando having a great sense of humor, but said “he would have trouble figuring out the f–king punchline sometimes . . . he was like a child.”
But Al Pacino was all business
Pacino wasn’t part of the shenanigans and just focused on playing Michael Corleone.
“Al was too into his character and it was a major, major break in his career. He was totally consumed by his character and preparing that he was not in the mood for fun or hijinks,” Roos said. “He was still part of the team and there was no animosity or anything, he was just very into himself during the shoot … he just had a different way of working.”
Brando was feared to be ‘box office poison’
The higher-ups in Hollywood almost whacked Brando’s chance at playing the boss.
“The studio heads were just dead against [Brando] because of his down position in the industry, being considered box office poison, being difficult, and all of that,” Roos told The Post.
To convince the bigwigs, Coppola went over to Brando’s house with a very early video camera.
“Francis didn’t explain it to Marlon like it was a screen test, it was just, ‘Let’s experiment with some things on this character just for the fun of it.’” Roos said. “Marlon probably knew what was going on, but he didn’t object and Francis went to New York and showed the tape to the owner of Paramount, Charlie Bluhdorn, and he was blown away by what he saw and let us cast him.”
Conditions were dangerous
Shooting the scene in which Sonny, the Corleone brother played by Caan, is killed involved some heavy artillery. “I told Francis the other night I would never have shot that scene under any other conditions — but there were girls on the set, and I couldn’t look like a p—y,” Caan said. “That’s the only reason I did it. There were 147 squibs on my body … Those squibs were made like brass caskets, a square inch of brass with a little V on top where they pour gundpowder and they were sewn into my jacket. The effects guy, AD Flowers, said, “I don’t know if I ever put this many squibs on anybody, ever.”
Frank Sinatra wasn’t a fan
Sinatra took issue with the Mario Puzo novel that served as the films’ source material, according to John Martino, who was a friend of the singer’s and played Paulie Gatto in the first film.
“He said … ‘It’s about Italian people killing people and selling drugs, is that what we are?’”
But still, Sinatra — widely considered to be the inspiration for the films’ Johnny Fontane character — encouraged Martino to take the part.
“He said, ‘Johnny, I know you’re starting out, if you can get a part in this movie, you gotta do it because it probably is going to be a famous film.’”
But John Gotti was
“[Gotti] loved ‘The Godfather,’” said Martino, who became close with the real-life don after the film’s debut. He remembered meeting the notorious crime boss at a Manhattan club in the 1980s.
“[He] got up, buttoned his jacket, [and] comes right to me, grabs my two hands, kissed me on the lips,” Martino continued. “And he said, ‘Johnny, I’m so glad you came, I wanted to meet you so bad. If there’s anything I could ever do for you…’”
Gotti went on to introduce Martino to his inner circle and regularly invited him to their meetings. “I became very close to them at that time.”
Robert De Niro almost wasn’t the don in ‘The Godfather Part II’
Originally, De Niro was cast to play the supporting — and terminal — role of Martino’s Gatto, who was famously whacked in the “Leave the gun, take the cannoli” scene in the first “Godfather.” But then he got a better role.
“Approaching shooting, [De Niro] had gotten a big break in ‘The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight’ and he asked if we could release him so he could take this big break in his career. And, of course, we did,” Roos said.
That left him open to being cast as the young don in the trilogy’s second installment, but Roos said there was still some uncertainty.
“We weren’t sure that he could really be the young don, the young Marlon,” Roos continued. He and Coppola arranged for an informal, secret audition.
“We took him out to dinner at a restaurant, which he thought was just a social dinner, but actually during this whole course of the dinner we were looking him over and kind of imagining in our minds if he could believably be the young don, and that was his audition, he didn’t even know it.”
‘Leave the gun, take the cannoli’ was improvised
One of the most immortalized lines in cinema was improvised by Richard S. Castellano, who played Peter Clemenza, a capo charged with killing Martino’s Gatto.
Martino recalled that Coppola originally told Castellano to just leave the gun and not mention the Italian pastries, but the actor adlibbed.
“It was truly improvised. I never thought it was going to become one of the most famous lines ever,” said Martino, who was playing dead behind the wheel of the car as the line was uttered.
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