Francis Ford Coppola Had A Good Reason For Not Wanting To Make The Godfather

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Francis Ford Coppola is a marvelous Hollywood contradiction. He's responsible for directing some of the best feature films of all time, all concentrated in the 1970s. From 1972 to 1979, he directed "The Godfather," "The Conversation," "The Godfather Part II," and "Apocalypse Now," all of which are stone-cold classics. They are studied in film schools, and rank high on the IMDb top 250, a list that favors films about criminals and soldiers. 

But Coppola's career has been hit-and-miss ever since, with some of his more recent films being critically panned bombs of the highest order. His 1981 film "One from the Heart" flopped horrendously, although his two 1983 S.E. Hinton adaptations, "The Outsiders" and "Rumble Fish," are well-regarded. He had a hit with "Peggy Sue Got Married" and a huge blockbuster with "Bram Stoker's Dracula," but many of the director's films just bled money. "The Cotton Club" went notoriously over budget. His last four movies were self-funded and ambitious, but none of them put Coppola back on the map. Also, at least two of them are utterly terrible movies. "Twixt" sucks, and "Megalopolis" was notorious for costing $136 million to make but only earning $14.4 million at the box office, and also for being oblique and ridiculous. 

This pattern isn't new. Two films prior to "The Godfather," Coppola directed "Finian's Rainbow," adapted from the hit Broadway show. It was a hit, making $11.6 million on a $3.5 million budget, but it was panned by critics. 

Indeed, it was so critically hated that Coppola was reluctant to take on "The Godfather" in the first place because he wanted to skew back toward smaller, artistically ambitious projects, and not continue with mainstream, studio-backed adaptations. 

Super-producer Robert Evans, as most fans of '70s American cinema know, was an outsize and colorful character, and his recollections about "The Godfather" in Peter Biskind's seminal film history book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" are rather amusing. He remembers flinging $12,500 at "The Godfather" novelist Mario Puzo for Puzo to write the script because, as Evans recalls him saying, "'I owe eleven Gs bad. If I don't come up with it, I'll have a broken arm.'" 

With Puzo's services secured, Evans started scouting for directors. It was Peter Bart, Evans' right-hand man, who felt that a film about Italian-American gangsters should be directed by an Italian-American director, and he zeroed in on Francis Ford Coppola for the project. Coppola was born in Detroit, but his paternal grandfather was Italian, and his mother, while born in New York, was literally named Italia. 

Evans was reluctant to take Bart's suggestion at first, and was quoted as saying that "Finian's Rainbow" was "a top Broadway musical [Coppola] made into a disaster." According to Peter Biskind's book, however, Coppola was also reticent to take on the "Godfather" project. Coppola was, as cineastes know, a self-styled maverick who felt like it was his duty to buck the studio system. As Coppola himself was quoted as saying: 

"I was into the New Wave and Fellini and, like all the kids my age, we wanted to make those kinds of films. So the book [of 'The Godfather'] represented the whole kind of idea I was trying to avoid in my life."

So, yes, Coppola initially wanted to turn down the opportunity to make "The Godfather," despite being in debt at the time and having trouble getting movies made. 

Paramount, though, was persistent. Coppola finally agreed to take the "Godfather" job on the advice of one of his filmmaking peers, George Lucas. Coppola was in the editing room with Lucas when the latter was hard at work on the post-production of "THX 1138," a film Coppola produced. Paramount called Coppola, imploring that he take the gig, and Coppola evidently turned to Lucas for an answer. Lucas recalls saying that Coppola didn't really have a choice. "We're in debt [...] you need a job. I think you should do it."

Just a few years earlier, in 1969, Coppola founded his studio, American Zoetrope, and produced one movie, "The Rain People," under its banner. But the company was struggling financially, and "The Godfather" represented a way to potentially remain solvent. On the Zoetrope website, the studio still notes that it is "known for orchestrating alternative approaches to filmmaking and challenging the Hollywood studio system." Coppola's recent duds like "Megalopolis" maybe oblique, but one cannot accuse the director of not sticking by his mission statement. 

Of course, Coppola ultimately handled "The Godfather" in an exemplary fashion. The $7 million movie made about $291 million at the box office, making it one of the first "mega-hits" in Hollywood. The film won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay. 

But "The Godfather" was also a sell-out moment for Coppola. He wanted to be an indie maverick, but Paramount's gangster epic was a commercial job. In a weird way, the quality and success of "The Godfather" are almost a personal tragedy for Coppola. Like his pal George Lucas, he wanted to subvert the giants and buck the system, but ended up thriving in it.