Written by Mark Seal / Gallery Books
19th January 2022 (Released: 28th October 2021)
The Pitch: The story of how The Godfather was made is as dramatic, operatic, and entertaining as the film itself. Over the years, many versions of various aspects of the movie’s fiery creation have been told—sometimes conflicting, but always compelling. Mark Seal sifts through the evidence, has extensive new conversations with director Francis Ford Coppola and several heretofore silent sources, and complements them with colorful interviews with key players including actors Al Pacino, James Caan, Talia Shire, and others for irresistible insights into how the movie whose success some initially doubted roared to glory. On top of the usual complications of filmmaking, the creators of The Godfather had to contend with the real-life members of its subject matter: the Mob. During the production of the movie, location permits were inexplicably revoked, author Mario Puzo got into a public brawl with an irate Frank Sinatra, producer Al Ruddy’s car was found riddled with bullets, men with “connections” vied to be in the cast, and some were given film roles. Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli is the lively and complete story of how a masterpiece was made, perfect for anyone who loves the movies.
“When truth becomes legend, print the legend”.
So goes the line in another well-loved American movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance. Over the years, it's a quote that's been re-applied to an awful lot of things, some deserving of its mythic status, some not. It's also been applied to a lot of careers, like Liberty Vallance's director John Ford. I don't doubt it could as easily stick to the life and career of another great Ford – Francis Ford Coppola – and to possibly the greatest film in his canon, The Godfather. As the film inches towards its fiftieth anniversary in March, the stories around it grow. It's been in the public consciousness so long that stories and myths around its making have grown perhaps larger than the work itself, almost threatening to shrink the art and make it a footnote in another fifty years. But the stories about how it came to be live on and grow. The question is, do they mature? Do they move from myth to fact? Or are we still, after fifty years, just reading the legend rather than the truth?
Seal, like any great reporter, certainly does everything he can to move us to a factual place. Although the Godfather is an elegant, sometimes stately film about bad people doing bad things, Seal doesn't adopt a stately, upper-class Mahanttanite tone. Instead, he gets down and dirty, letting the voices of the often very real gangsters and people in their orbit come through and tell the story in a truth-telling story. Seal cuts through the myth, giving us the complex characters and their motivations and very real, often surprising heart and emotions behind their decisions and in that, you begin to get a picture of just how important this work was always destined to be. As a novel, it gave the American public a glimpse at the hidden machinery of the mafia (despite its fictional claims) and as film, it changed the bad luck of its author, Mario Puzo. If The Godfather is a story of the American Dream poisoned, then Leave The Gun… is the story of Puzo's dreams being realised and his life-changing. And as Seal proceeds, it becomes Coppola's dream, pouring his heart and family into the film, giving it a texture and smell of realism.
That's not to say the book is short on Hyperbole. How could anything on one of the greatest films ever made not be? What’s interesting here is most of it comes from the cast, rather than Coppola or Seal. They talk up their roles, their lives before, their research (which for Caan seemed to just be his life). They talk up Brando, once an actor bigger than any movie he starred in but a fading supernova when he began this film. There's an energy, a burn that comes from the horse's mouth nature of these stories, You feel like the actors are finally taking confession after all these years. The aforementioned Caan is brutally honest about his life and dealings with characters who could have easily been inspirations for the ones in The Godfather. Seal gets it all down, machine-gun fast and blisteringly entertaining. He knows how to make it a pleasurable read for even the most jaded of us.
As sources, Seal has the luxury of seemingly every piece of writing ever written about the making of The Godfather being at his disposal (the bibliography even had books I hadn't heard of and I've been chest-deep in film writing for nearly forty years). But Leave The Gun… isn't a litany of quotes from other sources. Seal has constructed a blow by blow, bullet by bullet account of the way it went down. From the first glimmers of the idea to the final shot, Seal has done his research, talking to every living person involved and coaxing the real deal out of them. He clearly has a passion for American film and this truly Italian-American film in particular. Like all of us, he's a man who is in awe of the work and its creators. However, he's doesn't let himself get blinded by the starlight. There are unsavoury elements involved in this film and he isn't afraid to shine a light on them. The book feels of the film's time, rather than being a tome that seeks to apologise for the bad guys (both real and fictional), the way so much of our entertainment does now. It's an honest account of how great things are accomplished – sometimes through purity and faith in ideas and ideals, but often through deals with devils and compromises just to get you through the day. The Godfather is a film about whose making you can never grow tired of hearing, fact or legend. Seal has, in this book, reminded us exactly why and perhaps added to the list of the best film books ever written.
Leave The Gun, Take The Canoli is available now from Simon & Schuster UK and other retailers elsewhere in the world.