Successful Film Collaborations

The writing, production, direction and distribution of the film version of The Godfather is a classic illustration of successful collaborations in the making of movies.

Contrastingly, Alan J Pakula – famous for films such as Klute and To Kill A Mockingbird – was best known for his skills as humanist and willingness to compromise in order to extract a successful product from a variety of sources. He held a life-long interest in Freudian psychology.

Prior to his collaboration with Mario Puzo and the production of The Godfather , Francis Ford Coppola confined himself to an intensive process of detailed note-taking, working directly from Puzo’s text and highlighting key expositions which he felt would become pinnacles in the film.

Once such example is the scene in an Italian restaurant where the film’s central character, Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino) avenges the attempted assassination of his father, Don Vito Corleone (played by Marlon Brando). When Coppola wrote this scene, the actors had not yet been cast.

Coppola used his now-famous skills of persuasion to convince the nervous Paramount executives to cast both Pacino and Brando. The executives did not, under any circumstances, want the destructive Brando in their film, nor were they enthusiastic about the casting of the little-known Al Pacino. Technically, the studio executives were not wrong in originally wanting to cast the well-known Robert Redford in the role of Michael Corleone.

In the original narrative by Mario Puzo, the protagonist is characterised by his blond and Aryan looks, uncharacteristic of the Italian. Coppola had wanted to alter this characterisation in his family saga and was set on casting the much shorter Italian-American, Pacino, not anywhere close in looks to the original story’s character.

Alan J Pakula took a similar approach to Coppola in wanting to cast unknown actors in his films in order to deflect attention to the film as a whole and not allow a central ‘star attraction’ dominate his story creation. Robert Redford was the producer of All The President’s Men and was enthusiastic about taking on one of the two leading roles as the journalist Bob Woodward in spite of not resembling the Washington Post reporter in looks or personality.

While Redford co-produced the film and Pakula directed, they both collaborated as screen writers to come up with a definitive and apt script after many disagreements and revisions.

Similarly, Pakula wanted to cast an originally unknown Polish actress to play the part of the story’s Polish war victim, Sophie Zawistowska in Sophie’s Choice.

Redford famously commended Pakula for his amenable manner and the way in which he negotiated with his staff and co-producers. Given the volume of the original texts, it was necessary for Pakula to condense his screenplays and directions of William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and Woodward’s version of All The President’s Men.

Through no fault of his own, Coppola was under more severe pressure from his film executives, mainly due to them not being comfortable with his innovative ideas in genre selection, scene setting and choice of actors. They were not comfortable with the idolization of the gangster, nor were they happy with the expensive choice of a New York suburb. Coppola gave licence to his production designer to find an authentic location for the filming of The Godfather.

Ultimately, the mis-en-scene created was effective. The camera placing in this suburb follows a young Vito Corleone (played by Robert de Niro), stalking his street-walking nemesis from the top of buildings during The Godfather Part II. In The Godfather Part III. Andy Garcia’s character was seem chasing his enemy on horseback through the same streets over sixty years later.

Such masterful collaborations did not go unnoticed by film critics and the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences. In 1972, The Godfather won the Best Picture Oscar while Coppola and Puzo were awarded Oscars for Best Screenplay.

Three years later, Coppola received the award for Best Director while The Godfather Part II was notably the Best Picture. Again, Coppola and Puzo won awards for their screenplay. There were also awards for Best Art and Set Decoration for Dean Tavoularis, Angelo Graham and George Nelson.

Two years later, William Goldman won the award for Best Writing and Screenplay for Material based on another Medium for All the President’s Men. Years later, Meryl Streep won the Best Actress Oscar for her role in Sophie’s Choice. Sadly, there were no awards for producer and director Alan Pakula.

Film, Literature and Society

HOW FILM MAKERS RECREATE  MEANING AND VALUE FROM THE LITERARY TEXT

Legendary American producer & director, Francis Ford Coppola is recognised as one the best in his field, but recent viewing of his famous film trilogy led me to ask critical questions of the director.

My probing of the craft of Coppola, and how he dissects author Mario Puzo’s original novel, led me to Coppola’s more daring collaborative enterprise of reinterpreting Joseph Conrad’s controversial turn of the century novel, Heart of Darkness. It also led me to his work on the re-make of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

I will unleash my thoughts on Fitzgerald’s great American novel and Conrad’s controversial take on colonialism in a later post.

In The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola began his process of de-constructing gangster mythology by convincing nervous studio executives that he would instead be creating a family drama rather than a violent gangster epic. He persuaded the executives that his film would endear studio audiences. He convinced the bean counters that audiences would be able to relate to his characters.

When The Godfather hit the silver screen and broke most box-office records (for its time) the murderous blood-letting gangsters of the powerful Corleone family had certainly found a place in most American hearts. But what of its consequences? Showtime’s successful modern-day ‘hit’ series of The Sopranos indicates how the gangster myth is glamorised way out of proportion.

Today, in many, mostly poor, villages around the world,  not just in lower-class neighbourhoods around the USA, male teenagers, in the face of danger, are attracted to the allure of success, wealth and prestige. Such aspirations come about as a result of the perceived lack of opportunities in other conventional areas such as education and free enterprise.

Did Coppola create a monster rather than a hero?

Since the era of Al Capone the American gangster was justifiably frowned upon. Both authorities, particularly the bent J Edgar Hoover, and society recognised that these gangsters rebelled against the American ideals of progress, and were rightfully portrayed as villains.

The golden era of nineteen thirties (black and white) films produced a surplus of gangster movies with actors James Cagney & Edward G Robinson probably emerging as the industry’s most prominent villainous icons.

Mario Puzo originally wrote The Godfather as an epic on gangsterism in the context of poor Italian immigrants’ monumental migrations to the United States of America in search of a better life, following the American dream and the pursuit of happiness as enshrined in the US constitution.

Coppola’s intention as director is to de-construct negative connotations and myths of the Italian-American gangster and transpose an epic drama into an ambitious story about one family. His films, The Godfather, The Godfather II & The Godfather III were adapted from the literary work of Mario Puzo.

Coppola’s version of The Godfather romanticizes the gangster icon as an American hero.

Immortality on the silver screen reigns not only for the gangster, whether Italian, Latino, or African-American.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, American film producers seized opportunities to capitalise on history and create an effective tool of propaganda that is still prevalent today in light of the anti-Islamic trends seen across media platforms.

Hollywood blockbusters were created to highlight the bravery and heroism displayed by soldiers fighting on the side of the Western allies. German soldiers, alongside their Nazi bosses, were cast as ineffective villains. Today’s belligerence by the American regime in opposition to the axis of evil, as proclaimed by George W Bush, is no different.

The modern era of film making has seen the production of stories which are far more understanding & balanced in revising the events of the Second World War & what has followed it.

Film critics believed Stephen Daldry’s interpretation of Bernhard Schlink’s novel, The Reader, was controversial & inaccurate. Daldry was heavily criticised for his direction of prolonged sex scenes between the story’s protagonist & his Nazi lover. Conservative critics believed that the use of a teenage boy, or a young actor who closely replicates the original story character, was offensive.

Critics felt that lengthy graphic love scenes were unnecessary, irrelevant & not essential to the original story. Stephen Daldry’s film, The Reader, was adapted from Bernhard Schlink’s novel, originally written in German.

The film’s screen writer, David Hare, was invariably challenged when adapting a remarkable literary text and transforming it into a credible mis-en-scene which closely resembles the original story.

 

Such negative criticism of vivid cinematic scenes depicting nudity & sex between a teenager & an older, ‘experienced’ woman is unwarranted. The visual imagery does not deviate too much from Schlink’s original novel.

Such imagery is poignant. It highlights the non-sexual intimacy between the two actors, David Kross & Kate Winslet. It highlights the problems associated with illiteracy. And it highlights the reactions of Germany’s educated youth to the revelations exposed during court trials of Nazis accused of crimes against humanity.

In such stories there are no heroes, nor are there villains.

Next week: Robert Redford, All the President’s Men & Successful Collaborations.