![]() ![]() Marchak left the house and stayed away for days, waiting for Brando to cool down. “This is my house,” he roared, “and I will not have anyone bringing movie magazines into it!” Brando found the magazine in her office and went ballistic. ![]() “It became my early-morning read to know what was going on in the industry,” she said. To keep track of potential roles, she subscribed to the Hollywood Reporter. He promised Marchak he would limit himself to one Valium a day, and he agreed to make three pictures-but only if the parts required no more than three weeks of shooting. Brando needed millions to climb his way out of debt, and he needed to kick his drug habit to maintain visitation rights with his children. The problem, as Marchak recently emphasized, was simple: “Marlon decided he would not work-and he didn’t.” She turned down offers for Dirty Harry and for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, after Paul Newman offered Brando his choice of the lead roles. Marchak took over the task of reading all the scripts and books that were sent to Brando. Across the top Puzo scrawled his current address: “North Carolina Fat Farm.” The letter began: In what he would call “a panic,” Puzo dashed off a letter in long-hand to Brando, the actor he had imagined in the title role while he was writing The Godfather. “My father was terrified by that prospect,” said Anthony Puzo. Thomas was certainly wealthy enough to buy a stake in the still struggling studio: in addition to starring in The Danny Thomas Show, he had produced a string of television hits that were generating a gusher of syndication rights, including The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show, and The Mod Squad. There, he read a story in the morning paper that caused him even more distress than his bathroom scale: Danny Thomas was thinking about acquiring a controlling interest in Paramount Pictures with the sole purpose of casting himself as Vito Corleone. Back in January 1970, Mario Puzo, the author of the novel The Godfather, had checked into a weight-loss clinic in North Carolina. It was Thomas, oddly, who had inadvertently sparked the movement to cast Brando as Don Corleone. Burt Lancaster was still after the role, as was Danny Thomas, who had starred in the popular and long-running TV sitcom that bore his name. “Marlon was as dead as could be,” Evans said in a 1993 interview with Movieline magazine. Evans pushed for Carlo Ponti, an Italian producer who was married to Sophia Loren, or Ernest Borgnine, who had won an Oscar for his lead role in Marty-anyone but Brando. Stanley Jaffe suggested casting an unknown. “Bluhdorn proposed Charlie Bronson for the Godfather, and, again, chaos prevailed,” Bart added. Bludhorn had his own ideas of who should play Don Corleone. “At the first mention of Brando’s name, Bluhdorn launched into a tirade that he was ‘box-office poison,’” Peter Bart wrote. Charlie Bluhdorn, the head of Paramount’s parent company, Gulf and Western, greeted the idea with his usual hot-tempered, spittle-spewing aplomb. Mixing Brando and Coppola in a film about the Mob seemed certain to produce the kind of pyrotechnics that could cause a film to crash and burn. “I wanted him to accept and have confidence in me but wasn’t at all convinced that he did.”Īnd if Evans continued to harbor doubts about the young, untested director, they were confirmed by Coppola’s choice to play Don Corleone. “Bob Evans was very handsome, tall, and impressive,” Coppola remembered. ![]() On the other side was Robert Evans, a studio chief determined to avoid the miscasting that had plagued Mob films like The Brotherhood. On one side was Coppola, a young director determined to cast the actors he saw so vividly in his imagination. Thus began the major battle of The Godfather, one that would far eclipse the heated skirmishes over where the movie would be shot and its increasingly escalating budget. He wrote out his wish list on lined yellow paper, with asterisks next to his top choices: Al Pacino as Michael, James Caan as Sonny, and Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen. įrom the start, Francis Ford Coppola knew exactly who he wanted for all the major roles. But the studio resisted most of his casting decisions, especially the seemingly washed-up actor he was determined to cast as the lead. A promising young filmmaker named Francis Ford Coppola had begrudgingly taken on the project. Now, the studio had to make the picture, which many bankable directors had turned down. Paramount had snagged the rights to Mario Puzo’s raging best seller, The Godfather, cheap. ![]()
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