Genre: True Story/Comedy
Premise: Facing financial ruin, auteur filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola is forced to direct the adaptation of Mario Puzo’s pulp novel, The Godfather.
About: Andrew Farotte is another fresh-faced writer no one knew about until he landed on the low end of last year’s Black List with this script. He’d done a few shorts, a tiny TV series, but this is first big breakthrough moment.
Writer: Andrew Farotte
Details: 107 pages (undated)
Personally, I’m not a fan of these “making of movies” scripts. My issue with them is that the writer is piggy-backing on top of something so gigantic, so successful, that all they have to do is stand around and let the story tell itself. They don’t have to display any skills of their own, which feels like a cheat.
Plus, let’s face it, these “making of movies” scripts are getting out of control. We’ve seen it with Star Wars. We’ve seen it with Jaws. I could’ve sworn one was written about Apocalypse Now. We’re teetering on the next biopic-era craze here.
But a script about the making of The Godfather has an ace up its sleeve. Robert Evans. Talk about a personality. He’s like the male version of Carrie Fischer. I figured, if there was any “making of” script that had a shot at entertaining me, it would be one with this guy. And so away I read…
It’s 1970 and director Francis Ford Coppola, as many of you know, was in the midst of his experimental hippy-ish studio project, Zoetrope (whose members included, among others, George Lucas). The idea was to move away from the corrupt profits-obsessed studio system and have a place where everyone just, like, shared, man.
Well sharing didn’t turn into caring as everyone in Zoetrope did a lot more taking than giving. As a result, Zoetrope was in some financial dire straits, which brings us to Paramount’s upcoming adaptation of the popular novel, The Godfather. Legendary weirdo/studio-head Robert Evans was ready to turn this into a hit, but nobody wanted to direct it for him. Reluctantly, then, he called up Coppola.
The funny thing? Coppola didn’t want to do it either! In one of the many surprising tidbits you learn from this script, The Godfather novel was considered trashy smut. Which is exactly why Coppola didn’t want anything to do with it. But with Lucas chirping in his ear about Zoetrope bills needing to be paid, Coppola finally relented.
Once committed, that’s when the real fun began, starting with who they were going to cast as the star, Michael Corleone. Evans was set on pretty boy, Ryan O’Neal. But Coppola wanted an unknown, a little mumbling troll of an actor named Al Pacino. This war would be fought viciously throughout pre-production.
In addition to worrying about Pacino, the local New York Italian League, fresh off being smeared in the media, was set on erasing Italian stereotypes, and when they found out about the mafia-sensationalizing Godfather, stopping the production became their number 1 priority. If Coppola and Evans even thought about filming in New York, they would feel the full wrath of the Italian community. It was ironic, to say the least, since this league also happened to be a front for a major Italian crime syndicate.
And who could forget Brando? Needing that big splashy name to sell tickets, Coppola went after Brando hard, who’d only recently started his descent into madness. At the time, Brando was set on giving the land back to its rightful owners, the Native Americans, and had scheduled regular Native American ritualistic dances at his Hollywood Hills home, which he procured by promising said Native Americans SAG cards (of which he had no sway to actually deliver).
After getting the mob off their back by promising them roles in the film, the final battle was whether Pacino or O’Neal would win the role. It would be a race that went down to the wire, and one that would end up affecting the history of film forevermore.
So what’s the first thing I noticed about “Francis & The Godfather?” The TIGHT SPACING feature on Final Draft!!! Guys, you think we can’t tell that the bottom of the letters and the top of the letters on the next line aren’t touching??? We know you want your page count to be low, but this attempted gimmick never gets past savvy readers and actually infuriates them.
Moving on from there, I have to admit that this is the best “making of movie” script I’ve read so far. Part of that is due to me not knowing much about the production. So when I read fellow Black Lister, Chewie, there wasn’t a single Star Wars production fact I hadn’t heard before. Here, I was learning something new on every page.
But it wasn’t just that. When you write these scripts, it’s important that you’re not just transcribing, but rather ELEVATING the material. And Farrote elevates. I’ll give you an example. This easily could’ve been a straight-forward facts-driven “making-of” project. But Farotte appears to bypass some of the hard facts in favor of humor, which gives the story a point-of-view, which makes it feel like more than a wikipedia entry.
The Italian League subplot was the perfect embodiment of this. That these guys were fuming about being portrayed as gangsters when they were, in fact, gangsters.
On top of that, there’s a nice theme woven into the story about art versus commerce. We tend to look back at the 70s as this “golden era” where people made movies without money in mind. But going off of this script, the argument was just as intense back then as it is now. I loved Mario Puzo’s (the author of the book) monologue that he’d tried to stay true to himself for his first three books and barely made 15 thousand dollars. Then he sold out, wrote The Godfather, and became rich. And his takeaway? So the fuck what.
If there’s a weak link in the script, it’s probably Francis himself. This is the risk you run when you have so many big characters in your story and your main character has to play the straight man. How do they not get swept away in the tornado of personalities? Especially since Francis didn’t want to make the movie in the first place.
I always have an issue with that – protagonists who don’t want to achieve their goal. Because then you can say, “Well if he fails, he gets exactly what he wants.” And if that’s the case, why would we care if he successfully directs the film?
But I realized through reading this that there’s an addendum to that rule: NEED. Francis may not have wanted to make the movie, but he NEEDED to make the movie because his business, with all his friends’ livelihoods, was at stake. My only issue is that they didn’t make this need powerful enough. If we would’ve felt Zoetrope’s potential collapse as inevitable without the success of The Godfather, we may have been more invested in Francis’s journey.
This was a really amusing screenplay nonetheless and of all the “making of movies” projects out there, this is the one I’d pay for in the theater. Definitely worth checking out.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: So just this week, I was giving notes on a script where there was an ensemble of characters, two of whom (both major), I kept mixing up. Didn’t matter if I was on page 20 or 80. Every time we’d cut back to them, I had to go back to my notes to remember who was who. And I wondered, “Why am I having such a hard time differentiating these two??” And I realized that both characters spoke EXACTLY THE SAME. There weren’t any differences in their cadence, speech patterns, vocabulary, demeanor. While it’s not a necessity, if we can identify a character through their dialogue alone, it’s a huge advantage. It doesn’t just make it easier to read, it makes the script better. I noticed here with Robert Evans, that he always spoke in the third person: “Robert doesn’t like that.” It was such a simple thing, and yet I could instantly identify him solely through his dialogue. Look for ways to differentiate your own characters through dialogue alone.
