The Godfather

• 1. Introduction

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  The Godfather opened in five New York theaters on the 15th of March 1972, the morning after its premiere at the Loew's State Theatre, and ticket prices had already been raised from $3 to $3.50. By the end of that first week in the city, the film had grossed $454,000. Within 18 weeks it had earned $101 million, the fastest any film had reached that milestone at the time. What makes those numbers more striking is where the project began: a studio in financial trouble, a director who initially called the source material "pretty cheap stuff", and a leading man who had to stuff cotton balls in his cheeks to audition for a role the studio did not want him to have.

  The questions worth sitting with are not simply whether the film is great. Critics, polls, and industry surveys have settled that debate repeatedly in its favor. The questions worth asking are how it almost never happened, how the people who made it nearly lost their jobs in the process, and what it meant once it arrived.

• 2. The Novel Behind the Film

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  Mario Puzo's novel remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 67 weeks and sold over nine million copies in two years of publication. For several years it held the status of the best-selling published work in history. Yet Paramount Pictures first learned about it in 1967, before any of that had happened, when a literary scout contacted then Paramount Vice President of Production Peter Bart about a sixty-page, unfinished manuscript Puzo had titled Mafia.

  Bart read it and believed the work was "much beyond a Mafia story." He offered Puzo a $12,500 option, with a further $80,000 if the finished work were made into a film. Puzo's agent told him to turn it down. Puzo was desperate for money and accepted anyway. Paramount's Robert Evans later recalled meeting Puzo in early 1968 and offering the deal after the author confided he urgently needed $10,000 to pay off gambling debts.

  The novel's success transformed the studio's leverage over the project. What had begun as a modest option on an unfinished manuscript became, by 1969, a confirmed $80,000 acquisition with aims to release the film on Christmas Day 1971. On the 23rd of March 1970, Albert S. Ruddy was officially announced as producer, in part because executives were impressed by his reputation for bringing films in under budget.

• 3. A Director Nobody Wanted

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  Paramount's chief reason for wanting an Italian-American director was a practical one: its most recent gangster picture, The Brotherhood, had failed at the box office, and executive Robert Evans attributed the failure to its almost complete lack of Italian-descent cast or creative personnel. Sergio Leone was the studio's first choice. He turned the offer down to pursue his own gangster film, Once Upon a Time in America. Peter Bogdanovich was next; he declined because he had no interest in the mafia. Peter Yates, Richard Brooks, Arthur Penn, Franklin J. Schaffner, Costa-Gavras, and Otto Preminger were all offered the position and all declined.

  Evans's assistant Peter Bart then suggested Francis Ford Coppola, a director of Italian ancestry who would work cheaply following the poor performance of his previous picture, The Rain People. Coppola read Puzo's novel and found it "pretty cheap stuff." He turned the job down. What changed his mind was financial reality: his studio, American Zoetrope, owed over $400,000 to Warner Bros. for budget overruns on THX 1138, and Coppola's own finances were in poor shape. Advice from friends and family completed the reversal. Coppola was officially announced as director on the 28th of September 1970, agreeing to receive $125,000 and six percent of the gross rentals.

  Once on the project, Coppola found a framework that interested him. He decided the film should not be about organized crime at all, but a family chronicle, a metaphor for capitalism in America. That reframing would drive almost every conflict with the studio that followed.

• 4. Casting Against the Studio

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  Puzo was the first to advocate for Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone, sending Brando a letter calling him the "only actor who can play the Godfather." Paramount's executives resisted, citing the poor performance of Brando's recent films and his short temper. Coppola favored either Brando or Laurence Olivier. Olivier's agent declined, claiming Olivier was ill; Olivier then went on to star in Sleuth that same year. Evans pushed for Carlo Ponti or Ernest Borgnine. Gulf+Western executive Charles Bluhdorn proposed Charles Bronson. George C. Scott, Anthony Quinn, and Orson Welles were all considered, with Welles personally meeting Puzo to argue for the role.

  Eventually Paramount president Stanley Jaffe required Brando to perform a screen test. Coppola arranged for the test to be filmed at Brando's California home under the pretext of testing equipment. For the audition, Brando stuck cotton balls in his cheeks, darkened his hair with shoe polish, and rolled his collar. Coppola placed Brando's tape in the middle of the other audition reels. The executives approved the choice on the condition that Brando accept a lower salary and post a bond against delays. Brando ultimately earned $1.6 million from a net participation deal.

  The casting of Michael Corleone proved equally contested. Paramount wanted Warren Beatty, Alain Delon, or Robert Redford. Delon had been studying the French paperback edition, Le Parrain, and was considered seriously, but Coppola felt Delon's polished image did not match the intense, brooding quality he wanted. Evans later captured his own preference by saying he had wanted "a guy that sort of looked like him," while Coppola wanted someone who looked like himself. Ryan O'Neal was approached after Delon passed. Jack Nicholson declined because he believed an Italian-American actor should have the role.

  Al Pacino was Coppola's choice from the start. Paramount executives found him too short. Coppola urged producers Ruddy and Evans to see Pacino in Panic in Needle Park. After viewing it they relented, on the condition that James Caan, who had impressed executives, be cast as Sonny. Pacino himself struggled to picture himself in the role; he saw Michael Corleone as someone more glamorous, closer to Delon. He forgot lines in early screen tests and improvised dialogue. He was also contractually obligated to star in MGM's The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, a conflict resolved by a settlement between the two studios, with Pacino signed by Paramount three weeks before shooting began.

• 5. Filming Under Threat

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  Principal photography ran from the 29th of March to the 6th of August 1971. The first scheduled scene, Michael and Kay leaving a New York shop after Christmas shopping, was pushed forward when a weather forecast on March 23 predicted snow flurries. Snow never materialized and a snow machine was used instead.

  Cinematographer Gordon Willis had initially declined to join the production because it seemed "chaotic" to him. Once he accepted, he and Coppola agreed to avoid modern filming devices, helicopters, and zoom lenses, opting instead for a "tableau format" that would make the film resemble a painting. Willis underexposed the film stock to create what he described as a "yellow tone," and he used shadows and low light levels throughout to map psychological states onto the frame. Approximately 90 percent of the film was shot across more than 120 distinct locations in New York City and its surrounding suburbs. The opening wedding scene alone used almost 750 local residents as extras and was shot at 110 Longfellow Avenue in the Todt Hill neighborhood of Staten Island. The Corleone compound wall was built from styrofoam.

  The atmosphere on set was one of sustained institutional pressure. Gulf+Western executive Charles Bluhdorn was frustrated by the volume of screen tests Coppola had conducted without settling the cast, and production costs reached around $40,000 per day. Paramount appointed Vice President Jack Ballard to monitor expenses. Coppola has said that throughout filming he felt he could be fired at any moment. He learned that Evans had privately asked director Elia Kazan to take over. Coppola also became convinced that film editor Aram Avakian and assistant director Steve Kestner were working to have him replaced. Avakian complained to Evans that he could not edit scenes properly because Coppola was not shooting enough footage. Evans reviewed the footage being sent to the West Coast, found it satisfactory, and authorized Coppola to dismiss both men. Brando threatened to quit if Coppola were fired.

  The studio also pushed for more violence. Paramount threatened Coppola with a "violence coach." He complied with a handful of additions, including a scene in which Connie smashes crockery after discovering Carlo's infidelity. The scene of Sonny's murder at a highway tollbooth was shot at Mitchel Field in Uniondale on the 22nd of June 1971, with three purpose-built tollbooths, guard rails, and billboards as set dressing. Sonny's 1941 Lincoln Continental had holes drilled into it to resemble bullet wounds. The sequence took three days to film and cost over $100,000.

• 6. Score, Script, and the Mob's Blessing

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  Coppola hired Italian composer Nino Rota to create the film's underscore, including the piece that became known as "Love Theme from The Godfather." Rota synthesized new music for the project and drew on portions of his 1958 score for the film Fortunella to evoke an Italian feel and a sense of tragedy. Evans found the score too "highbrow" and initially refused it; Coppola persuaded him to keep it. Rota's score later won the Grammy Award for Best Original Score for a Motion Picture or TV Special at the 15th Grammy Awards, though it was subsequently disqualified from the Academy Awards after the music branch determined that Rota had reused material from Fortunella.

  The screenplay was developed through a parallel and sometimes fractured process. Puzo was hired by Paramount on the 14th of April 1970 for $100,000 plus a percentage of profits, and his initial draft of 150 pages was completed on the 10th of August 1970. After Coppola joined the project, the two men wrote their versions separately: Puzo in Los Angeles, Coppola in San Francisco. Coppola created a working notebook by tearing pages from Puzo's novel and pasting them alongside notes on each of the book's fifty scenes. A second draft was completed on the 1st of March 1971 and ran 173 pages. The final screenplay, finished on the 29th of March 1971, was 163 pages, forty pages longer than Paramount had requested. Screenwriter Robert Towne was brought in without credit to work on the dialogue in the garden scene between Pacino and Brando.

  Outside the studio, the production also navigated a different kind of pressure. The Italian-American Civil Rights League, led by mobster Joseph Colombo, objected to the film's portrayal of Italian-Americans and demanded that the words "mafia" and "Cosa Nostra" be removed from the script. Coppola maintained that Puzo's screenplay already contained only two instances of "mafia" and no uses of "Cosa Nostra." The terms were replaced and the league eventually gave the project its support. Producer Ruddy had been meeting personally with Colombo and about 1,500 league delegates since the 25th of February 1971, ultimately agreeing to base the film on individuals rather than stereotypes. Anthony Colombo reportedly made Ruddy an honorary captain of the league.

• 7. Reception and Awards

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  On its opening day across five New York theaters, The Godfather grossed $57,829. Within its first five days of national release it had taken in $6.8 million. It remained at number one at the American box office for 23 consecutive weeks before being briefly displaced by Butterflies Are Free, then returned to the top spot for three more weeks. Its production cost was $6.5 million; it earned $81.5 million in theatrical rentals in the United States and Canada during its initial release alone, a figure that rose to $85.7 million after a 1973 reissue. The film displaced Gone with the Wind as the top rentals earner, a position it held until the release of Jaws in 1975. Earnings were substantial enough to raise Gulf+Western Industries' profit per share from 77 cents to $3.30 for the year, according to a Los Angeles Times article dated the 13th of December 1972.

  At the 45th Academy Awards, which received eleven nominations for the film, it won Best Picture, Best Actor for Brando, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Puzo and Coppola. Brando, who had boycotted the Golden Globes ceremony two months earlier, declined the Oscar and sent American Indian Rights activist Sacheen Littlefeather to the podium to explain his reasons: his objection to Hollywood's depiction of American Indians. Pacino did not attend; his memoir Sonny Boy states he was simply "scared" of his sudden fame. The film also swept the 30th Golden Globe Awards in its categories, winning Best Picture - Drama, Best Director, Best Actor - Drama for Brando, Best Original Score, and Best Screenplay.

  Critics responded with unusual consistency. Pauline Kael in The New Yorker called it "a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art." Roger Ebert named it the best film of 1972. Director Stanley Kubrick believed it had the best cast ever assembled and might be the best movie ever made. On the aggregator Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 97% approval rating from 153 reviews, with a score of 9.4 out of 10. Metacritic assigns it a score of 100 out of 100 from 16 critics.

• 8. Legacy and Cultural Reach

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  The Godfather was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 1990, deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress. The American Film Institute ranked it the second-greatest film in American cinema in its 2007 updated survey, behind Citizen Kane. A 2014 Hollywood Reporter poll of 2,120 industry professionals from every studio, agency, publicity firm, and production house in Hollywood voted it the greatest film ever made.

  The film's effect on how Italian-Americans were depicted in Hollywood was measured directly. A study by the Italic Institute of America covering film from 1914 to 2014 found that over 81 percent of the 430 films featuring Italian-Americans as mobsters had been produced after The Godfather, an average of 10 per year, compared to only 98 such films in the decades before it. Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas and David Chase's The Sopranos are among the works that trace a direct line to Coppola's film. The Sopranos even named a character's establishment the Bada Bing!, a phrase associated with James Caan's portrayal of Sonny Corleone.

  Vito Corleone's line "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse" was voted the second-most memorable line in cinema history by the American Film Institute in 2014. The concept, however, predates the film. French novelist Honore de Balzac used a near-identical formulation in Le Pere Goriot in 1835, and the John Wayne Western Riders of Destiny, released in 1933, contains the line "I've made Denton an offer he can't refuse."

  The film's influence reached into actual criminal culture. Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano, former underboss in the Gambino crime family, said he "floated out of the theater" after seeing it and that many made members he spoke to felt the film depicted their own lives. In 2025, The Times reported that Sicilian Mafia bosses were instructing new recruits to watch The Godfather to learn conduct, expressing concern that younger members "lack a code of honour."