Al Pacino was considered too short, Marlon Brando was required to do a screen test and director Francis Ford Coppola was almost fired.
The director and cast of The Godfather on Saturday reminisced in a 45th anniversary reunion in New York City about the trials, perseverance and inspiration that resulted in the Oscar-winning Mafia movies.
Coppola, Pacino, Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, James Caan, Talia Shire and Robert Duvall watched back-to-back screenings of The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather: Part II (1974) along with an audience of 6,000 on the closing night of the Tribeca film festival.
“I haven’t seen these movies for years,” Coppola said. “I found [watching] a very emotional experience. I forgot a lot about the making of it and thought about the story, and the story used a lot of family and my personal stuff.”
The two films won nine Oscars and became movie classics.
However, The Godfather had a less than auspicious start. Coppola recalled that Hollywood studio Paramount wanted to set the movie in the 1970s and make something “cheap and quick.”
Coppola was almost fired several times and met stiff resistance to the casting of both Pacino as Michael Corleone and Brando as the titular Godfather.
“I was told [by studio executives] that having Brando in the film would make it less commercial than having a total unknown,” Coppola said, adding that the studio later agreed “if Marlon will do a screen test and do it for nothing and put up a million dollar bond that he wouldn’t cause trouble during the production.”
Newcomer Pacino had to screen test “countless times” because studio bosses though he was too short and wanted to cast Robert Redford or Ryan O’Neal.
A ship that appears to be taking on the identity of a scrapped gas carrier exited the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, showing how strategies to get through the waterway are evolving as the Middle East war progresses. The vessel identifying as liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Jamal left the Strait on Friday morning, ship-tracking data show. However, the same tanker was also recorded as having beached at an Indian demolition yard in October last year, where it is being broken up, according to market participants and port agent’s reports. The ship claiming to be Jamal is likely a zombie vessel that
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) yesterday faced a regional election battle in Rhineland-Palatinate, now held by the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). Merz’s CDU has enjoyed a narrow poll lead over the SPD — their coalition partners at the national level — who have ruled the mid-sized state for 35 years. Polling third is the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which spells a greater threat to the two centrist parties in several state elections in September in the country’s ex-communist east. The picturesque state of Rhineland-Palatinate, bordering France, Belgium and Luxembourg and with a population of about 4 million,
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Ugandan wildlife authorities have reintroduced rhinos into a remote protected area where they were once poached into extinction, an event seen by conservationists as a milestone in efforts to support the recovery of a species threatened by poaching. On Tuesday, two southern white rhinos from a private ranch in the East African country were reintroduced into Kidepo Valley National Park in the country’s northeast. Two more rhinos in metallic crates arrived on Thursday. There have been no rhinos in the park since 1983, the result of poaching. However, a private ranch in central Uganda — the Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary — has been
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