THE MAKING OF
THE GODFATHER
Essay by Mario Puzo

We’re here to talk about an essay, which, by the way, you can find online just as you would any other book, that discusses The Godfather, the novel and the film. But to do that, we have to give a bit of our own treatment to the subject. But we can cut to the end, even skipping over the 1969 novel for a second, and just say that The Godfather movie really is a kind of movie empire unto itself in terms of the scope, the scale, the reach, the significance it holds for every generation it touched. In some ways, whether you love it or hate (and I actually know someone who hates it), for it being what it is—a day-in-the-life, life-in-the-life depiction of a mob family—it has no rival, no equal. It’s sort of gangster-film-zero, the inflection point that touches off all other gangster films, even the ones that came before it, as anachronistic as that is when thinking about inflection points. It’s not “a” gangster film. It’s the gangster film, so much so that we don’t have the space here to discuss the myriad ways it influenced everything from fashion to production design to people’s attitudes about real-life mobs and on and on and on. But if you’re looking for that center dot that fans out to all other gangster films, it's The Godfather. In his frank essay, THE MAKING OF THE GODFATHER, Mario Puzo tells us how the book and the film came to be.

Find out more in this video review.