Francis Ford Coppola's “Godfather Notebook” | Hacker News Reader

Francis Ford Coppola's “Godfather Notebook”

jillianhess.substack.com

146 pointsbenbreen26 comments

In "The Kid Stays In The Picture" (autobiography of Robert Evans, who helped produce The Godfather) he says that Coppola did not initially want to make the film and had to be convinced. He also forced Coppola to make The Godfather longer and pushed back release to do so, in order to tell the fuller story of the family.

I watched the documentary adaptation of his book and it is quite interesting, Paramount helped to pioneer the practice of helping to foster good books for film adaptation - The Godfather being the most notable example.

Coppola also said tha he did not want to direct the second movie of the saga, so he asked three conditions: to have no interference, a lot of money and to name the the movie the Godfather part 2. Strangely the third condition was the one which was most difficult to satisfy.

Of those three conditions it’s the one that sounds the most like it’s just there to give the studio a chance of getting the last word in a negotiation.

Why was the name "The Godfather part 2" problematic?

Was pleasantly surprised, seeing a hackernews post on films!

It involves note taking which is an HN obsession

I don't care at all about note taking, but I am obsessed with algebra, and seeing how Coppola evaluates the "directors' homomorphism": first analysing Puzo's linear (aperiodic crystal) text into a set of chunks of meaning ("glass beads") explicitly connected by arrows and implicitly connected by order in The Book, then forgetting everything superfluous (in general, novels contain way more ideas than feature-length screenplays), and finally synthesising a new linear video stream encoding the few remaining beads (plus a few of your own, if you're feeling cosettish?); seeing that would almost be worth being indebted to Don Corleone.

[Some day (and that day may never come) I hope to be able to carry out, as masterfully as Coppola, the work of transmutation]

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZXHoWwBcDc

If only I could find the perfect note taking system/app combo I could create my own Godfather! (I am 100% guilty of this type of thinking)

Looks handy for me as I've started to write a short, story driven game.

Not sure if common knowledge but Coppola wrote a lot of the Godfather in San Francisco's Cafe Trieste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffe_Trieste#:~:text=Francis%....

That’s nice colour. I’d love to find somewhere that acts as the “neighbourhoods lounge” in SF now.

Fun fact, but I doubt anyone on HN still lives in San Francisco.

Why? There are plenty…

I'll even recommend visiting the town of Trieste itself!

It’s a city

Please, don't come. There are already too many tourists. The city center has become almost unlivable in the Summer.

The curse of living in the most desirable country on Earth to visit!

The alternative would have probably been worse, considering that Trieste has been slowly dying since WWI, more or less. Like Venezia (and arguably, various other parts of Italy), it was built to do something that is now largely unnecessary, so it will likely survive only as a curiosity.

I come occasionally for pizza and ice cream, sorry.

I learned this fact because I had a first date with a girl who suggested that place, knowing I'm a writer. Five years later I chose that same spot to propose :)

And, by coincidence,in The Godfather Part II he shot some scenes in the actual city of Trieste. The Ellis Island building is a an old fish market in Trieste.

On the subject, I really enjoyed The Offer miniseries about the story behind making The Godfather. It's fiction, not documentary, but really well made.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt13111040/

I always had this question for many years after watching the movie.

In the opening scene of the movie, the actor making the monologue has his face highly contorted. Why is that so? What does that signify?

This is my jam, my 9/11, the diamond arrow, everything.

Look at the artistry in that title page! The typesetting is striking.

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