NPR "Godfather" Comms?
Seems like some spoopy messaging being sent by NPR in this article dated 3/11 (11.3). What say ye, anons?
'The Godfather' bridged old and new Hollywood to save American moviegoing
When The Godfather premiered 50 years ago, people knew it was sensational, controversial, precedent-shattering, a masterpiece even. But they couldn't know what we know now: It was a bridge between old Hollywood and new.
The film industry had been struggling all through the 1960s, a rough decade for big-screen entertainment as color television siphoned off much of what was left of the moviegoing audience.
Cinemas had tried everything they could think of to compete. They'd widened screens, adopted stereophonic sound, even experimented with 3-D glasses, but American moviegoing, having peaked in the 1930s, had dropped precipitously with the advent of home viewing.
Film attendance reached its nadir in 1971, which until the pandemic, had the lowest ticket sales on record, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.
Grand old movie palaces were being torn down to make way for parking lots. Rough-hewn, low-budget indies like Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces were capturing the audience's imagination, while extravagantly made and marketed studio projects like the Gertrude Lawrence bio-pic Star!, starring Julie Andrews, were going belly-up.
Things got so rough for the industry that actor and memoirist David Niven speculated that we might someday look back on movies the way we now look back on vaudeville – as a quaint pastime the public had briefly enjoyed and abandoned.
And in the middle of all that, along comes this kid, Francis Ford Coppola, with a gangster flick.
"It's a Sicilian message: Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes."
The 32-year-old filmmaker had initially – and emphatically — turned The Godfather down. He'd just co-founded American Zoetrope with George Lucas specifically hoping to steer clear of big Hollywood projects after his recent experience directing the Fred Astaire/Petula Clark musical Finian's Rainbow. He wanted to make smaller, more personal films.
But Zoetrope needed cash so Coppola bit the bullet. Producer Robert Evans thought it was important that the film be directed by someone of Italian descent so he was pushing hard.
Coppola finally agreed, on the condition that he be allowed to co-write the screenplay (with Mario Puzo, author of the novel) and that the period setting be retained (producers had hoped to save money by resetting the story in the 1970s).
He immediately alarmed studio execs by insisting on casting Marlon Brando, who at 47 was thought by many in the industry to be both difficult, and past his prime.
"I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse."
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https://www.npr.org/2022/03/11/1085688897/the-godfather-bridged-old-and-new-hollywood-to-save-american-moviegoing?