Al Pacino‘s “The Godfather” is one of those movies everyone just assumes was always destined for greatness. It wasn’t. It started out as a guy trying to pay off his gambling debts.
Mario Puzo owed around $20,000 from gambling when he sat down to write “The Godfather” in the late ’60s. He’d already written two critically acclaimed novels that made basically no money, so this time he had one goal: write something people would actually buy. Funny enough, he’d never met a real-life mobster in his life, the whole thing came from research and imagination. It worked a little better than he probably expected. The book spent 67 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than 9 million copies in its first two years alone.
Paramount was so confident in the story that they bought the film rights before Puzo had even finished writing the book, for a grand total of $12,500, which is almost funny given what the movie would go on to become.
Burt Lancaster wanted in so badly that he reportedly offered the studio $1 million just to buy the rights himself, specifically so he could play Don Vito Corleone. Paramount said no thanks, and the role went to Marlon Brando instead, which, in hindsight, worked out fine. There was also a version of this movie where the whole story got yanked out of the 1940s and ’50s and dropped into the 1970s instead, and moved out of New York entirely, all because the studio was looking to cut costs. Thankfully, that idea got scrapped too.
When the film finally hit theaters in 1972, it swept Best Picture, Best Actor for Brando, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Since then, it’s been named the greatest movie ever made more than once, Entertainment Weekly called it exactly that in 1999, and a 2014 Hollywood Reporter poll of over 2,100 industry professionals agreed.
