¤ø All Things Considered ø¤

It’s always tricky to transform a well renowned book into a screenplay. And it wasn’t different for Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola. Puzo cut the 446-page novel down to a 150-page first draft of a screenplay. This draft opened with Michael and Kay driving to the wedding, followed by a courthouse scene of Bonasera’s daughter attacker’s being absolved. Later on, a reedited version starts with a love scene, suggested by the studio, between Michael and Kay.
By the time Coppola got his hands on the screenplay, the story had become a joke. As he described in Time Magazine: “Puzo’s screenplay had turned into a slick, contemporary gangster picture of no importance. It wasn’t Puzo’s fault. He just did what they told him to do.”
Coppola dissected the novel and came up with his own treatment to the screenplay. He and Puzo, then, proceeded to edit the screenplay and a second draft emerged, now a 173 pages long. A third and final shooting script was running at 158 pages – which was a longer picture than the studio had imagined.
The movie is so faithful to the book that some dialog seemed to be copied and pasted into the screenplay. The characters turned out to be very similar to the original and few of them were cut from the screen version. The rest resumed to plausible changes made in any movie adapted from a novel. Puzo and Coppola were careful not to use the word “mafia” while writing and filming The Godfather. They didn’t want to resume in one word the whole complexity lived by the characters in the story so decided to work with what was essential to it. The focus is not always the family business but the personal and emotional matters of this clan. That’s what made this movie a success. That’s why it’s not another “mafia movie”. It’s a story about family, loyalty, crime and the human being’s capacity to change and to cause change. To find contradiction in this screenplay is a tough job. The pace is always adequate; every scene offers some sort of importance to the storyline, to the construction of the characters or just for plain entertainment.
Bottom line is, Coppola and Puzo were a complement to each other. I can’t imagine this film being so good if it wasn’t for them working together. Every detail (like when oranges appear in a scene, you can expect someone to die, or almost die) every action that propels the story forward only takes you back to the fact that this was one of the most successful collaborations in the history of cinema.
A Master Piece!

***This is a piece I wrote for my film class last year. The assignment was to comment and contrast The Godfather screenplay and the actual feature film.***