Writer unravels rare secrets of ‘The Godfather’

Colorful book not only details making of film but also dives into world of Mafia

A colorful new book tells you everything you thought you knew about the making of “The Godfather” but didn’t.

Author Mark Seal has won a coveted “star” from Publishers Weekly for the book, whose title comes from one of the film’s wellknown lines, “Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli.”

Publishers Weekly praises the book for being full of “enthralling portraits,” eye-opening details and “fascinating morsels for fans to savor.”

But so many miles had to be traveled, so much cannoli had to be eaten, before Seal’s effort became a handsome hardcover book, published by Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster.

“I was a college freshman when I saw the movie on spring break in 1972 in Memphis. I felt like I was a kid when I walked in and an adult when I walked out,” Seal, now 68, says. “I had never seen such a world before. It was so foreign to me. I just loved the movie and like everybody else became obsessed with it. You felt like you were part of that family, part of that whole world.”

In 2008, Seal was contributing editor at Vanity Fair, which assigned him to write a story on the making of “The Godfather,” whose 50th anniversary arrives in March. Feeling once again like the college kid who marveled at the cinematic classic that flickered in front of him, Seal was thrilled.

He began by jetting to the Beverly Hills mansion of Paramount studio executive Robert Evans, who told “the story of the film that had both made him and destroyed him.”

Evans died in 2019, and author Mario Puzo, whose novel gave birth to “The Godfather” trilogy, passed away a decade before that. But the Vanity Fair piece, because of the legwork it demanded, begat a nearly 400-page book 13 years later. Seal conducted almost 100 interviews for the book alone.

The enigmatic Evans was a good place to start. Evans took the enormous step of greenlighting a project that culminated in a fact he shared with Seal: “‘The Godfather’ did more business in six months than ‘Gone with the Wind’ did in 36 years.”

And yet, the wrongheadedness of some of his wishes defies the imagination. At various times, Evans lobbied to have Robert Redford or even Ryan O’Neal, the star of Love Story, play Michael Corleone, whose portrayal landed Al Pacino an Oscar nomination.

In what would have been Paramount’s biggest potential blunder, Evans and others at the studio initially opposed Coppola’s desire to have an aging Marlon Brando play the title role. At one point, Evans suggested that Ernest Borgnine, the star of a 1960s sitcom called “McHale’s Navy,” would be better as Don Vito Corleone.

In Seal’s words, the driven but tormented

Actor Marlon Brando, left, and director Francis Ford Coppola get ready to film a scene for“The Godfather.”Mark Seal conducted almost 100 interviews for his book on the making of the movie. ANTHONY PESCATORE/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE/GETTY

By Mark Seal, Gallery Books, 448 pages, $29.

Coppola “saw the movie he wanted to make from the beginning,” with casting at the heart of his vision. For the role of Michael, Coppola wanted thenstage actor Pacino, and Brando as the godfather, despite the studio thinking, in Seal’s words, that the Oscar-winning best actor for the 1955 triumph “On the Waterfront” was “a washed-up has-been” at 47.

The details Seal uncovers make his book a fun read, as do its wide array of profiles, which in this case are as rich as cannoli.

And then, of course, there’s the force that makes “Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli” such a pageturner: the Mafia itself. The book offers a deep dive into the scary world of La Cosa Nostra, about which Seal learned a lot from, among others, singer Al Martino, who plays a facsimile of Frank Sinatra in “The Godfather.”

“Hollywood’s greatest movie about the Mafia,” Seal writes, “seemed to have been produced in some ways in tandem with the Mafia, as the capos of the mob went to war with the tough guys of the movie business, in some instances trading places, mobsters as actors, filmmakers as fixers.”

He calls the influence of the real Mafia “substantial” in the making of “The Godfather.”

Before “The Godfather” began shooting, the film’s producer, Al Ruddy, was constantly being threatened. He and his staff “would trade cars,” Seal says, to avoid being trailed. One night, his female assistant parked Ruddy’s car in front of her home, only to hear gunshots blasting out the windshield, with a note attached “saying they didn’t want the movie made.”

And that, the author says, “was only the beginning.”

At the center of it all was Coppola, who badly needed a break. Initially, Coppola was skeptical of Puzo’s novel becoming anything more than a marginal motion picture. A breakthrough came when the director finally began to see it as the saga of a king and his sons, a Shakespearean story of family, which in Seal’s view gave it the magic it needed.

Even so, moments after its release, Coppola felt less like a potential Oscar winner and more like a doomed failure. It wasn’t until his wife phoned him in Paris, where he had traveled to write the screenplay for another Evans-Paramount film, “The Great Gatsby,” that he began to see what soon became obvious — that he’d created something great. His wife told him that, in New York City alone, people were lining up around the block, clamoring to see his movie.

With an estimated budget of $6 million, a film once feared to be an economic boondoggle now has a worldwide gross approaching $250 million. Nominated for 11 Academy Awards, it won three: for best picture, best actor (Brando) and best adapted screenplay (Puzo and Coppola).

“I think it’s the greatest picture of all time,” Seal says, “and it wouldn’t have been what it became without Francis Ford Coppola.”