History of The Godfather: 50 Years Ago

Tonight, the streaming service Paramount+ begins a 10-part mini-series called The Offer, dramatizing the making of The Godfather.

But here’s how I remember it…

In March of 1972, fifty years ago, the Francis Ford Coppola film, The Godfather premiered. Based on a screenplay by Coppola and the author of the original novel, Mario Puzo (who together won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay), it had been optioned by Paramount executive Peter Bart when Puzo had only written a twenty-page outline of the novel. In less than four weeks of national distribution, Paramount Pictures touted,

“it was the twelfth highest-grossing film, domestically, of all time. No motion picture had grossed so much in such a short period of time.”

It became a critical success and a commercial blockbuster, the highest-grossing film of 1972. Adjusted for inflation, it is still among the top 25 highest-grossing films in American history.

The Godfather: Aged Well

The movie has aged well, perhaps because it was not set in the present but the decade immediately after World War II. Like the Borgia family in 15th-century Rome that it was based on, it used classic themes and motifs that are as tragic as Greek plays and as timeless as Shakespeare.

The Godfather: What’s In A Name

While the heads of crime families were not called “Godfather” until Mario Puzo made it up, the world of organized crime, especially in New York, was very much alive, especially during the novel’s writing. In New York City in the ’60s, there were six Italian crime families, and Puzo had a rich vein to mine in telling his narrative; Puzo had in mind mob bosses Joe Profaci and Vito Genovese when he wrote the character of Vito Corleone.

During the Spring of 1972, when the film came out, I was taking a class at Berkeley on the history and sociology of immigrants. I wrote a 50-page thesis on Italian immigrants because my grandparents came from Sicily. Half the paper discussed the presence of the Mafia and how organized crime…