Mario Puzo [PUZO - The Making of the Godfather

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Introduction 2013 by Ed Falco.

The Making of the Godfather 1972 by Mario Puzo. Originally published by G.P. Putnams Sons as part of the collection The Godfather Papers.

Excerpt from The Family Corleone 2012 by The Estate of Mario Puzo.

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ISBN 978-1-4555-4893-4

Because Mario Puzos essays are simultaneously buttressed and undermined by a wicked sense of humor, you cant take him literally. For example, in The Making of The Godfather, he tells the reader that he went to Hollywood only to get out of the house. He promised his wife, he tells us, that if he ever hit it big, hed get out from under her feet and go write someplace else. So what could he do? Having made his wife a solemn promise, he had no choice but to go to Hollywood and play tennis a lot while he hung out with celebrities and was feted as a famous writer. Ah, the sacrifices a man has to make for the sake of his marriage! This is funny, but the reader understands both that Puzo is entertaining us with an amusing version of the truth, and that he was cynical from the start about Hollywood and script writing, about movies and the powerbrokers who get movies made. Puzo asks the reader to see him as a likable schlub who also happens to be one of the best technicians of the Western World and, as the author of the acclaimed novel The Fortunate Pilgrim, an accomplished artist. He tells us that for most of his early life he was the family chooch, or screwup, and we sense that he still likes that designation. It allows him the freedom of a clown, though we also understand that hes an artist of substantial gifts. This picture he presents of himself embodies the tone of The Making of The Godfather, which is both funny and serious, as well as passionate and cynical about writing and movie making and the connections between the two.

If we were to take Puzo literally in The Making of The Godfather, wed have to believe that he never held it against Paramount that they got The Godfather so cheap, or that he didnt disapprove of the fact that the William Morris Agency might have sold him down the river (his words) in making the Paramount deal. Nothing, apparently, riles this Mario Puzo. He is so calmly cynical and accepting regarding the machinations of those in power that when he saw The Brotherhooda movie for which he was paid and credited nothing though he believes it was stolen from his outlinehe tells us, I wasnt angry because I thought Paramount hustled me. Nor was he angry, were told, when Lancer Books claimed to have sold nearly two million copies of The Fortunate Pilgrim though they paid him for approximately 30 percent of that amount. He accepts all of this as perfectly reasonable business behavior. This is a Mario Puzo who has nothing in common with the Sicilians he writes about, a people who hold slights and acts of disrespect close to their hearts, a people youd be well advised not to abuse, a people for whom revenge is a dish best served cold. No, this Mario Puzo accepts the outrages and injustices of the world as matters of fact, as ordinary examples of the way, of course, the world operates. All this will strike the reader as true and not true, as funny and not really very funny at all. It is true that the world, as Puzo sees it and convincingly portrays it, is a place of ordinary corruption. It is impossible to believe, though, that Puzo wasnt wounded by itcertainly not after reading the body of his work, novel after novel in which corruption leads to chaos and violence in the lives of men whoseeing that the world is rigged against themgo about creating their own justice, to terrifying effect. Puzo as a lovable comedian who slides amusingly through a world of corruption is funny; Puzo as a victim of unscrupulous businessmen is not really very funny at all.

The one thing Puzo ever truly believed in, he tells us, is art: I didnt believe in religion or love or women or men, I didnt believe in society or philosophy. But I believed in art for forty-five years. If we were to take him literallywhich I have been arguing we should notthen at age forty-five he gave up on art and went about writing books that would make money. Again, this is true and not true. Surely he wrote The Godfather to make moneyand he succeeded magnificently. He wrote the screenplays to The Godfather and its sequels to make money, and again he succeeded. And, yes, it appears that every novel that followed The Godfather was written to make money and with an eye toward the film versionand in all of this he succeeded, writing several more bestsellers that went on to film or TV adaptations. But it is also not true that he gave up on art. In every one of his novels he continued to explore his obsessive themes: the power of those animal impulses that lead to the corruption of men and society, of the violence in the human heart and the hypocrisy of culture. To these themes, pursued through stories of the criminal underworld, Puzo remained a faithful artist. He did all that any artist can do, which is to explore the minds and hearts obsessions honestly.

The essay that follows this introduction tells the story of Mario Puzos, the writers, journey to Hollywood, where he translated The Godfather into a feature film. The essay, like a good raconteur, shares amusing stories of the things that happened to Puzo in Hollywood. And while Puzo is busy at the work of entertaining the reader, he also takes some time to argue for the primacy of the writer in the construction of all narrative art, which is a lesson the film industry seems destined never to learn. But mostly the essay is, as the title makes clear, the story of the things that happened to Mario Puzoincluding his famous and disastrous encounter with Frank Sinatraalong the way to the filming of