Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Godfather by Mario Puzo List of The Godfather Characters. List of The Godfather characters, including pictures when available. These characters from the movie The Godfather are listed by their importance to the film, so leading roles can be found at the top of the list. From main characters to minor roles and cameos, these characters are a big part of what made the film so great. The names of the actors and actresses who portrayed each character are included below as well, so use this The Godfather character list to find out who played your favorite role. This list below has everything from Captain Mark McCluskey to Tom Hagen. If you want to know, "What are the character's names in The Godfather?" then this list will answer your question. You can view this list of The Godfather roles alphabetically by clicking on "Name" at the top of the list. If one of your favorite characters is missing, you can add them by typing in their name at the bottom of the list. Francis Ford Coppola on the Iconic ‘Godfather’ Scenes Mario Puzo Pushed Back On. In a new essay celebrating the 50th anniversary of "The Godfather" novel, Coppola remembers debating Puzo over the film adaptation's plot. Mar 6, 2019 3:57 pm. Share This Article Reddit LinkedIn WhatsApp Email Print Talk. “The Godfather Part II” Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather” is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and writer-director Francis Ford Coppola has marked the occasion by writing the foreword to the novel’s special new edition. Coppola worked closely with Puzo to turn the “The Godfather” into the landmark 1972 movie of the same name. The two remained close collaborators on “The Godfather Part II” and “The Godfather Part III.” Adapting Puzo’s novel with Puzo himself presented some minor challenges for Coppola, who writes in the forward about reservations the author had about scenes that would end up being some of the franchise’s most iconic. “Not all of my ideas went over so well,” Coppola writes (via Entertainment Weekly). “Mario was dubious about the idea that it was Fredo who betrayed Michael; he didn’t think it was plausible. But he was absolutely against Michael ordering his own brother to be killed. It was a stalemate for a while, as nothing would happen unless we both agreed.” Fredo’s betrayal is the emotional climax of “The Godfather Part II,” immortalized by Michael’s iconic line, “I know it was you, Fredo.” The storyline culminates in Michael having his personal enforcer Al Neri murder Fredo while out on the lake at the Corleone family home. In order to convince Puzo to let him assassinate Fredo in this way, Coppola first pitched the author the death of the Corleone family matriarch, Carmela Corleone. “I tossed him the idea that Michael wouldn’t have Fredo killed until their mother died,” Coppola writes. “He thought about this for a moment, and then said okay, it would work for him. He was the arbiter of what the novel’s characters would do, while I was offering a kind of interpretation from the perspective of what a movie director would do.” The two butted heads again over the idea to have Michael’s wife, Kay, reveal she did not have a miscarriage but instead had an abortion. For Coppola, the abortion reveal was a powerful way to show the extremes people who once loved Michael would go to in order to sever ties with him. “Actually it was my sister, Talia, who came up with that idea,” Coppola writes. “I loved it because it seemed symbolic and the only way a woman married to such a man could halt the satanic dance continuing generation after generation, which Nino Rota’s waltz theme expressed. Mario wasn’t sure about it, but he let me have it. He was a great collaborator, after all.” One thing both Puzzo and Coppola agreed on was not titling the next movie “The Godfather Part III.” The original title idea was “The Death of Michael Corleone,” and the reason why was shared by the two creators. “Mario nor I wanted [‘Godfather Part III’] as the title, as it was not meant to be part of a trilogy, but rather a coda to the first two films,” Coppola writes. “We wished it could be given a different title, one more appropriate. Neither of us had the power to insist on our title but in my mind.” Head over to Entertainment Weekly to read more from Coppola’s foreword to “The Godfather” 50th anniversary publication. This Article is related to: Film and tagged Francis Ford Coppola, Mario Puzzo, The Godfather. Mario Puzo. Mario Gianluigi Puzo (October 15, 1920 – July 2, 1999) was an Italian-American author, screenwriter and journalist. He was the author of many novel about Italian-American organized crime, most famously The Godfather . He co-wrote the screenplay for its three film adaptations, The Godfather , The Godfather Part II and The Godfather Part III . He was also the author of The Sicilian. Contents. Biography. Mario Puzo, receiving the Academy Award. Puzo was born in Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York to a poor family from Pietradefusi, Italy. [1] Many of his books draw heavily on this heritage. After graduating from the City College of New York, he joined the United States Army Air Forces in World War II. Due to his poor eyesight, the military did not let him undertake combat duties but made him a public relations officer stationed in Germany. In 1950, his first short story, The Last Christmas , was published in American Vanguard . After the war, he wrote his first book, The Dark Arena , which was published in 1955. At periods in the 1950s and early 1960s, Puzo worked as a writer/editor for publisher Martin Goodman's Magazine Management Company. Puzo, along with other writers like Bruce Jay Friedman, worked for the company line of men's magazines, pulp titles like Male , True Action , and Swank . Under the pseudonym Mario Cleri , Puzo wrote World War II adventure features for True Action . [2] Puzo's most famous work, The Godfather , was first published in 1969 after he had heard anecdotes about Mafia organizations during his time in pulp journalism. He later said in an interview with Larry King that his principal motivation was to make money. He had already, after all, written two books that had received great reviews, yet had not amounted to much. As a government clerk with five children, he was looking to write something that would appeal to the masses. With a number one bestseller for months on the New York Times Best Seller List, Mario Puzo had found his target audience. The book was later developed into the film The Godfather , directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The movie received 11 Academy Award nominations, winning three, including an Oscar for Puzo for Best Adapted Screenplay. Coppola and Puzo collaborated then to work on sequels to the original film, The Godfather Part II and The Godfather Part III . Puzo wrote the first draft of the script for the 1974 disaster film Earthquake , which he was unable to continue working on due to his commitment to The Godfather Part II . Puzo also co-wrote Richard Donner's Superman and the original draft for Superman II . He also collaborated on the stories for the 1982 film A Time to Die and the 1984 Francis Ford Coppola film The Cotton Club . Puzo never saw the publication of his penultimate book, Omertà , but the manuscript was finished before his death as was the manuscript for The Family . However, in a review originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle , Jules Siegel, who had worked closely with Puzo at Magazine Management Company, speculated that Omertà may have been completed by "some talentless hack". Siegel also acknowledges the temptation to "rationalize avoiding what is probably the correct analysis – that [Puzo] wrote it and it is terrible". [3] Puzo died of heart failure on Friday, July 2, 1999 at his home in Bay Shore, Long Island, New York. His family now lives in East Islip, New York. Mario Puzo at 100: The Godfather author never met a real gangster, but his mafia melodrama remains timeless. M ario Puzo’s 1969 novel The Godfather was on the bestseller list for 67 weeks, selling more than 21 million copies worldwide. Puzo’s screenplay for the 1972 film adaptation, arguably the defining portrait of the Mafia in the 20th century, contained some of cinema’s most memorable lines – “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” among them – and introduced the Italian words consigliere, capo and omerta into the popular vocabulary. In 1996, the author told interviewer Charlie Rose about being approached soon after the movie’s release by two “ominous” figures – one of them was John Roselli, a Chicago mob assassin whose corpse was later found floating in Biscayne Bay, inside a chain-locked 55-gallon barrel – who insisted that Puzo must have “had access to the top guys” to pen such an accurate depiction of organised crime. “I’m ashamed to admit that I wrote The Godfather entirely from research,” Puzo wrote in The Godfather Papers and Other Confessions . “I never met a real honest-to-god gangster. I knew the gambling world pretty good, but that’s all.” The character of the all-powerful Don Vito Corleone – portrayed first by Marlon Brando and later as a young man in The Godfather Part II by Robert De Niro – was actually modelled on Puzo’s Naples-born mother, Maria.