Robert Evans’ Big Idea

In the late 1960s, Paramount was failing. The studio had recently sold off it’s library to Universal. Now the studio facility on Melrose Avenue was on the auction block. There wasn’t much money to make movies. Or, at least, that’s what “New York” (financing) had told “Los Angeles” (production).

Robert Evans in his Beverly Hills Office in 1968

The dapper studio production chief, Robert Evans, had a big idea. He would find conceptually exciting scripts or treatments languishing in the Paramount Story Department shelves, make them into book bestsellers, and be able to convince New York (financing aka Charlie Bluhdorn, Chairman of Gulf and Western) to turn those best sellers into blockbuster movies. The price for publication was cheap compared to the millions to make and launch a movie. Bestsellers would be his proof of concept.

Robert saw something in an old script by Eric Segal that his girlfriend liked. His girlfriend was actress, Ali McGraw. Robert convinced Eric Segal to take his screenplay, Love Story, and over a single weekend, turn it into a novel. Ever wonder why the iconic novel was so short and quippy? Why there was hardly a descriptive word? Segal had a weekend to write it.

When the book first hit bookstores, Robert, deployed the Paramount distribution agents to buy up the copies from the bookstores that the New York Times polled for the bestseller list. Love Story shot up on the list. Then, it stayed there because the book delivered. With such a huge built in book-buying audience, it was easy for Robert to convince New York to make it into a movie.

Charlie Bludhorn at the head of the table. Clockwise from the lfet: Robert Evans, Frank Yablans, Unknown, Ali McGraw; Others Unknown | Frank Yablans’ Archives

The same method was implemented for The Godfather. Mario Puzo had a little longer than Eric Segal to take his 57 page gangster treatment and transform it. With Las Vegas gambling debts owed, the gregarious Puzo was anxious to collect a writing fee of $10,000 for the book. Fueled with booze and a 24/7 secretary-transcriber, Puzo was sequestered by Robert Evans and Paramount in a hotel room for several months while he toiled over the saga about an American gangster family. When the potboiler became an international bestseller, the secretary-transcriber sued for authorship, but Paramount used it’s legal muscle. The suit was thrown out of court.

Mario Puzo at his Typewriter in 1967

The movie was made for 2.5 million dollars. In the USA alone, it grossed over 110 million in its first five weeks. Paramount, with the huge success of Love Story and The Godfather, was back in the game. Two years later in 1974, Paramount released The Godfather II, and it, too, was a critical and commercial blockbuster.

There were other successes in Robert Evan’s steerage of the studio, but the Godfather movies defined the studio’s status. Paramount made commercial art. The Godfather was and is art. “A wide, startlingly vivid view of a Mafia dynasty, “ wrote Pauline Kael in the New Yorker “ in which organized crime becomes an obscene nightmare image of American free enterprise.”

Nothing defined white, privileged patriarchy like the Godfather ethos. Men were powerful and in control. They did bad things to perpetuate their influence. And they could “make offers that you could not refuse”, one of the many iconic lines from the book and movie. Men schemed and killed. Women made pasta. What could Michael Corleone’s wife, Kay Adams, do at the end of The Godfather book? Unlike her husband, she could not aim and shoot. She could not kill. She could not make millions. As the matriarch of the family, she could light a votive and pray.

Publicity Still of the Don and his Three Sons | Paramount Pictures

The thing about the Godfather ethos is this: Many men could not see it as an indictment against their worldview. They saw it as their glory. They did not view the stories as a tragedy. They saw them as their romance.

When Francis Ford Coppola finally agreed to make Godfather III, he reluctantly did so because in the late 1980s, the Chairman of Paramount, Frank Mancuso, made him the offer he could not refuse.

Frank Mancuso, soft-spoken and confident, impeccably dressed, who Newsweek called the Godfather of Hollywood, was created, in part, through the Godfather Aesthetic. A framed still of the movie hung outside his office for years. All good fathers know that patience is key when guiding children. Mancuso patiently waited for just the right time to call Coppola. The brilliant, passionate director was teetering on bankruptcy so that five million offer came just at the right time.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? ~ William Butler Yeats

But even Coppola, the man who helped create the Godfather Aesthetic and raised it to art, got lost in the making of the third movie. Many men lose their way in the bewildering climb, or march, through capitalism. The addictive rungs of the ladder burn our hands but also encourage us to move quickly skyward.

Charles Bluhdorn on The Godfather set in 1968

While working on location in Rome, Coppola rewrote the end of the movie. In his new ending, the aging don, Michael Corleone, blew his head off with his own pistol. Paramount recoiled. For years, Paramount , when Copolla refused to direct Godfather III, tried to seduce director Sylvester Stallone to make Godfather III. Paramount wanted Rocky. Coppola wanted Macbeth.

Now, in the Metoo Era, we see more clearly through the dark glass of the past. Most of us can now envision how the patriarchy of Western Civilization, in large part promulgated by the early patriarchal systems of the Christian church, created a nightmarish world of imbalance between the sexes. Men celebrated at the altar. Women sat in the pews and shut up.

In the early movies of our dreams, men were the gun-toting heroes. Women prepared the home. But perhaps in the gathering new equality following the post metoo era, the nurturing and intuitiveness of women will finally rebalance the often unbridled assertiveness of patriarchal power.

It is a very human trait: to mirror what we know, what has brought us success. The movie, The Godfather, saved the dying Paramount. For decades, the ethos of the studio mirrored the style and aesthetic of the beloved gangster tragedy. The men who worked there did not know The Godfather was a tragedy. They believed it to be a romantic saga. Strange that they could not see the blood and hurt. Even a woman, who aspired to be the don of the Paramount family, didn’t fully see it.

The word “nostalgia” is from the Greek: pain for home. For some time, I had been having nightmares. My dreams were of fedoras, homburgs, and pork-pie hats falling like rain through darkened skies. I heard the iconic Waltz From The Godfather, composed by Nino Rota, who worked not only with Francis Coppola but also the father of Italian Cinema, Frederico Fellini. The hats of authority descending in a downpour.

Awakened by those dreams, I felt an ache to return to The Godfather. I listened to the orchestrations. On my Kindle, I reread the 1969 novel by Mario Puzo. After almost 50 years of reprinting, there were still copy mistakes. Once a story-head, always a story head. I listened to Joe Mantegna’s 2012 narration on Audible. Every bedtime for a week, I watched the movie streaming from Netflix on my Iphone.

While in a small town in Ohio, I read the book in high school. I saw the 1972 movie in college in California. When I played the role of Michael Corleone as President of Paramount in 1991, I worked on Godfather III.

What really held my nostalgic reflections was how the success of the original movie in1972 effected the tone and temperature of Paramount and its people for two decades. People walk, talked, and lived The Godfather.

Newsweek reported that one Chairman of Paramount, “and his underlings had a very Sicilian mentality. Anyone who worked outside of Paramount was considered a bad guy. The agents, the artists were the heathens trying to sack Sicily.”

I am no longer the punk I once was when I worked at the studio, but some of the behavior by me and others is as dark as you can get. I am aware of it. George Barna, the culture-pollster called me “ruthless”. Alec Baldwin, an American actor, referred to me as a “beady-eyed, untalented tool”. But then, again, The Godfather and its sequels were not a walk through a sunny park.

Yuval Noah Harari | From his Website

Entanglement of story

The brilliant historian and philosopher, Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, and Homo Deus, says we live in a post-truth world. That we have always lived there. History is written by the victors. These histories are not necessarily true. The untruthful histories are then guarded by the controlling powers.

For example, the First Peoples of North America were never “savages” or “demons”, but our early histories made them so to satisfy the myth. This new America will be controlled and ruled by the civility of the “Founding Fathers”. Well, behind those Founding Fathers were over two million carcasses of the so called “savages” just in case anyone wanted to check the facts.

I speak about the power of story. Especially fiction. My theme is that “fictions are not real but they are true”. Sapiens communicate through story. It is the marker of our uniqueness. Story is in the very microbes of our DNA. Is it any wonder that Robert Altman speaks through a parody of The Godfather when he wants to scare and hurt me, because I hurt him with the death of his two movies?

Please take note. This account of ten stories on the Godfather Aesthetic is not written by a victor, but a survivor. And I am still here to write it. These personal accounts about Paramount, The Godfather, and the American patriarchy are as real and truthful as I can tell them.

I am certain that these stories will be vilified. A woman, Dawn Steel, with whom I worked in the 1980s, is sketched in her raw outrageousness. People can hate me for it. I was her Henry Higgins, her Iago, and her Brutus.

Dawn Steel broke the glass ceiling and became one of the first women to run a Hollywood studio. She died tragically at an early age , and now she is sanctified. She may have done what she had to do to shake the patriarchal walls of Paramount.

These days, I am seasoned enough to not want to intentionally harm anyone. I have tried to be accurate and honest in the telling. My objective is to to illuminate the nightmarish incidents of a bygone era so that there might be new understanding, even wisdom, as we move forward into the 21st century.

I am also anxious to show how the myths inside movies are utilized in everyday life. The Godfather Aesthetic, a by-product of the fictional fantasies produced by Paramount, ruled the very studio that created it.

Abraham Lincoln believed that the Civil War would never have happened had it not been for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s stirring account of mistreated slaves in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Historically, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the biggest selling book, outside the Bible, in the 20th Century. It ignited the mindset of the North. “So you’re the little woman who started this great big war,” President Lincoln told the author when he finally met on the Gettysburg Field. The Godfather also ignited a corporate culture.