The Godfather lives on

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

When I suggested in yesterday’s column that perhaps, all of us who love “The Godfather” movies may well organize a cult and mount our own unique activities, I was joking. Little did I know that there is indeed something of a cult around these immortal classic American movies and their platform is, you guessed it, the social networking site Facebook.

There is an official “The Godfather” page on FB, and it has had, as of yesterday when I checked, almost 7 million “likes”, meaning that big a number of people has logged on to the site and well, like it. Simply on a serendipitous note, I came across the page Sunday, after I had emailed yesterday’s column and while lingering around cyberspace.

The page has plenty of stuff from “The Godfather” – trivia, notes, quotes, even games. Here, people discuss the movies, and what they like in them. It’s like the movies were currently screening. Why, there is even a post from a bakery that did a cake designed as a mogul’s bed with a horse head on it – a tribute to one of the many iconic scenes of “The Godfather I”.

Going through it, one can safely conclude that this cinematic legend will simply live on. It’s been 40 years since the first of the trilogy hit the screens in the United States on March 15, 1972 and it still generates plenty of interest.

The story behind the making of “The Godfather”, of course, had been told in a long-running interview with its director, Francis Ford Coppola, which was released as a bonus material in the DVD collection.

Coppola was just 30 when he did “The Godfather I”. As he himself relates in the video, he was chosen because he was young and Italian – the material was about Italians and his age was supposed to make him pliable, meaning to say controllable. This was the late 60s, when the movie industry was still trying to strike the balance between the requirements of artistic freedom and the demands of return on investments.

As a young artist, Coppola was deemed controllable, or so Paramount thought. The budget was $3.5M, and the film was finished at $6.5M and several times, the studio had planned to fire Coppola for what it deemed as his unwarranted expenses. Example: He refused to work with actors acting out as the musicians in an orchestra, he insisted on bringing in a professional orchestra, which was more expensive. The studio executives edited out from the shoot list the death scene of Vito Corleone in the tomato garden, deeming it extraneous. Coppola shot it anyway.

There was also the question of casting Marlon Brando as Vito. Paramount would not agree to casting him because Brando had been branded eccentric and uncontrollable, a pain for the production. It only relented when Coppola showed them a test sequence where Brando displayed his extraordinarily intelligent interpretation of the role; but the actor was made to post bond for any delay he may cause and he was paid way below his asking price.

Brando went on to win an Oscar for his work here, where he transformed himself into an old but powerful man. Interestingly, he stuffed his mouth with tissue and cotton to produce the rambling, almost mumbling, speech in the movie.

Aside from Brando, the rest of the cast delivers unforgettable performances, which is another strength of “The Godfather” movies. There is James Caan as the fiery Santino Corleone; Al Pacino as the introspective and intelligent, but no less criminal Michael Corleone; and even Al Lettiere as Sollozo. In the second movie, Robert de Niro delivers a tour de force as a young Vito that he wisely links to Brando’s performance in the first movie.

Other elements such as music and the production design come together beautifully and well in the trilogy that began as a book by Mario Puzo. So successful were the elements here that Coppola, asked what exactly was the most important thing he did, replied, “Bring all of [these talents] together.”*

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