LEAVE THE GUN, TAKE THE CANNOLI

The latest book about one of cinema’s groundbreaking achievements.

How did an author of pulp fiction, an “abject failure” who had never met a gangster, write a bestselling novel about the mob that would inspire one of the most celebrated films in movie history? How did a garment industry executive finagle his way into the job of head of production at Paramount? How did a shoe salesman who admitted, “I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about,” become the film’s producer? Seal answers these questions in this book, an expansion on his 2009 Vanity Fairinterview with Robert Evans, the former Paramount head, about the 1972 classic. The author bookends this work with that interview, in which Evans invites him to climb into his fur-covered bed to rewatch the film. The material in between recounts the story of the film’s driving forces, including the actors; Mario Puzo, the food- and gambling-obsessed author of the novel; and Francis Ford Coppola, the broke writer/director who “wasn’t interested in directing some cockamamie gangster picture” yet grew so passionate about it that he wanted to “smell the garlic coming off the screen.” Much of this material appears elsewhere, and Seal is sometimes too intellectual about the film. The moment in which Richard Castellano, as Clemenza, tells the associate who carried out an execution in a car, “Leave the gun,” then goes off-script to add, “Take the cannoli,” may very well have been a commentary “about the country that had turned its back on these men and their community,” or maybe it was just an inspired ad-lib. But Godfatherfans will enjoy the behind-the-scenes squabbles that threatened the picture, the dealings with real-life mobsters, and other details, such as Marlon Brando’s needing to have his lines on cue cards and James Caan’s building his character by purchasing used shoes “so tight that they hurt, which gave Sonny his strutting, cocky, lady-killer gait.”

A lively film biography that amply shows how great films aren’t necessarily born great, but they can grow great.