Written in Francis Ford Coppola’s hand, here we have a list of potential cast members for The Godfather from one of the filmmaker’s notepads. It’s difficult to imagine a different set of actors playing the parts eventually taken by Brando, Pacino, Caan and Duvall, but it so easily could’ve happened.
I’m presuming the numbers on the left are the characters’ ages. As for the asterisks, I’m unsure.
Transcript follows. Image kindly supplied by Henry, who tells me the original is on display at Coppola’s Winery in California.
Transcript
CAST
Don Corleone:
Marlon Brando
Laurence Olivier
*Frank Dekova
John Marley
Carlo Ponti
Michael Corleone:
*Al Pacino
*Scott Marlowe
Mike Margota
(Richard Romanos)
Jimmy Caan
Martin Sheen
Robert di Niro
Art Genovese
Dustin Hoffman
Mike Parks
SONNY CORLEONE:
*Jimmy Caan
Carmine Caridi
*Scott Marlowe
*Don Gordon
*(Tony Zerbe)
*Lou Antonio
(Paul Banteo)
Robert Viharo
(Rudy Solari)
John Saxon
John Brascia
Johnny Sette (7)
Adam Roake
Ben Gazzara
Harry Guardino
Tony Lo Bianco
Peter Falk
Al Letteiri
TOM HAGEN:
Ben Piazza
*Robert Duvall
Tony Zerbe
*Peter Donat
Source: listsofnote.com
The Anniversary You Can’t Refuse: 40 Things You Didn’t Know About The Godfather
From early on in his legendary career, Marlon Brando used cue cards for his lines, which he felt increased his spontaneity. His lines were printed and placed in his character’s line of sight; stills from the production show that they sometimes required clever placement. In one photo, a cue card is taped on the wall behind a lamp. In another, Robert Duvall is seen holding Brando’s cue cards up to his chest. In the scene above, they are held just beyond the view of the camera.
Some thought Brando used the cards out of laziness or an inability to memorize his lines. Once on The Godfather set, Brando was asked why he wanted his lines printed out. “Because I can read them that way,” he said. And that was the end of the cue-card discussion. —Nate Rawlings
Robert Duvall with Brando’s Godfather cue cards twitpic.com/bk4lov
— Emma Green (@emmafgreen) December 8, 2012
An intense page from Coppola’s ‘Godfather’ Notebook. This is an amazing example of the intensity Francis Ford Coppola once brought to his films.
A fascinating article from the March 2009 issue of Vanity Fair describes how The Godfather got made, even though the producers, the real-life Mafia, Frank Sinatra, and Paramount executives all fought against it.
One of the most quoted lines from Puzo’s novel never made it to the screen: “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.” Before his death, in 1999, Puzo said in a symposium, “I think the movie business is far more crooked than Vegas, and, I was going to say, than the Mafia.” By the time The Godfather had begun production, Mob lawyers and business operatives were walking down the hallways of Gulf & Western together. Unbeknownst to the moviemakers, Charlie Bluhdorn was even doing business with a shadowy Sicilian named Michele Sindona, a money-launderer and adviser to the Gambino and other Mob families as well as to the Vatican Bank, in Rome (elements that Coppola would use in plotting The Godfather: Part III). In 1970, the year The Godfather began production at Paramount, Bluhdorn made a deal with Sindona that resulted in the mobster’s construction and real-estate company’s owning a major share of the Paramount lot. In 1980, Sindona was convicted on 65 counts, including fraud and perjury. Four years later he was extradited to Italy and found guilty of ordering a murder. In his Milan jail cell, he swallowed—or got fed—a lethal dose of cyanide, the prescription favored by the Mob to silence stool pigeons.
The Mob and the moviemakers had been acting in unison all along.
Get this. Google Books is hosting a digital archive of the first 30 years of New York Magazine (1968 through 1997). Amongst this bewildering wilderness of magazines is a real treasure - an August 21, 1972, article written by Mario Puzo on his experience writing the novel and the screenplay for The Godfather. Yeah, baby!
It’s a great article, too. First, you gotta go here, which will take you to the contents page. In the upper left-hand corner you’ll see the little summary of the Puzo article and above that, you’ll see “page 22.” That’s a link. Click that, and it’ll take you to the article. (source: Mario Puzo Speaks from the Grave!)
Marlon Brando did not memorize most of his lines and read from cue cards during most of the film.
The Godfather (1972)
Previously on Cinephilia & Beyond:
Mario Puzo Speaks from the Grave!
LIFE Magazine, March 10 1972: Grandfather of all cool actors becomes the Godfather
More: The Godfather
Get this. Google Books is hosting a digital archive of the first 30 years of New York Magazine (1968 through 1997). Amongst this bewildering wilderness of magazines is a real treasure - an August 21, 1972, article written by Mario Puzo on his experience writing the novel and the screenplay for The Godfather. Yeah, baby!
It’s a great article, too. First, you gotta go here, which will take you to the contents page. In the upper left-hand corner you’ll see the little summary of the Puzo article and above that, you’ll see “page 22.” That’s a link. Click that, and it’ll take you to the article. (source: Mario Puzo Speaks from the Grave!)
The Godfather screenplay
A fascinating article from the March 2009 issue of Vanity Fair describes how The Godfather got made, even though the producers, the real-life Mafia, Frank Sinatra, and Paramount executives all fought against it.
One of the most quoted lines from Puzo’s novel never made it to the screen: “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.” Before his death, in 1999, Puzo said in a symposium, “I think the movie business is far more crooked than Vegas, and, I was going to say, than the Mafia.” By the time The Godfather had begun production, Mob lawyers and business operatives were walking down the hallways of Gulf & Western together. Unbeknownst to the moviemakers, Charlie Bluhdorn was even doing business with a shadowy Sicilian named Michele Sindona, a money-launderer and adviser to the Gambino and other Mob families as well as to the Vatican Bank, in Rome (elements that Coppola would use in plotting The Godfather: Part III). In 1970, the year The Godfather began production at Paramount, Bluhdorn made a deal with Sindona that resulted in the mobster’s construction and real-estate company’s owning a major share of the Paramount lot. In 1980, Sindona was convicted on 65 counts, including fraud and perjury. Four years later he was extradited to Italy and found guilty of ordering a murder. In his Milan jail cell, he swallowed—or got fed—a lethal dose of cyanide, the prescription favored by the Mob to silence stool pigeons.
The Mob and the moviemakers had been acting in unison all along.
Get this. Google Books is hosting a digital archive of the first 30 years of New York Magazine (1968 through 1997). Amongst this bewildering wilderness of magazines is a real treasure - an August 21, 1972, article written by Mario Puzo on his experience writing the novel and the screenplay for The Godfather. Yeah, baby!
It’s a great article, too. First, you gotta go here, which will take you to the contents page. In the upper left-hand corner you’ll see the little summary of the Puzo article and above that, you’ll see “page 22.” That’s a link. Click that, and it’ll take you to the article.
(Source: Mario Puzo Speaks from the Grave!)
