THEN: After unsuccessfully auditioning for several roles in The Godfather, Robert De Niro won the role of the young Vito Corleone in Part II. Related: Revisiting the highs (and low) of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino's big-screen collaborations
He's currently having something of a renaissance: 2019 brought acclaimed roles in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and The Irishman (the latter being his first collaboration with director Martin Scorsese) and 2020 saw Pacino's first regular TV role, as a Nazi hunter in Amazon and Jordan Peele's Hunters. NOW: Pacino has had an illustrious career in the ensuing decades, including another turn as Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III and a long-awaited Oscar win for Scent of a Woman in 1993. The Godfather rocketed Pacino to stardom, earning him his first Oscar nomination and kicking off a string of acclaimed performances, with such films as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and, of course, his return as Michael in The Godfather Part II. Go ahead and choke.THEN: Coppola fought hard to cast the then-unknown Al Pacino as Michael Corleone, against executives who wanted a star like Robert Redford or Warren Beatty in the role. My humiliation must have showed because he yelled after me, ‘Choke. “Finally, I walked away and out of the restaurant. Sinatra, again not looking up from his plate, continued to scold Puzo while the author just stared at the crooner, he wrote. Northern Italians never mess with Southern Italians except to get them put in jail or get them deported to some desert island.” “This was roughly equivalent to Einstein pulling a knife on Al Capone. “What hurt was that here he was, a northern Italian, threatening me, a southern Italian, with physical violence,” Puzzo wrote in New York.
While letting him have it, Sinatra also told Puzo “that if it wasn’t that I was so much older than he, he would beat the hell out of me.” That really got to Puzo, he wrote, but not because he was scared of getting injured. The worst thing he called me was a pimp, which rather flattered me since I’ve never been able to get girlfriend to squeeze blackheads out of my back, much less hustle for me,” Puzo wrote in ’72.
“I remember that, contrary to his reputation, he did not use foul language at all. Sinatra, who won an Oscar for his performance in 1953’s From Here to Eternity, was irate and disgusted when the two finally met in the restaurant, according to Puzo’s article in New York.Īlex Rocco, Mobster Moe Greene in 'The Godfather,' Dies at 79 “Obviously Johnny Fontane was inspired by a kind of Frank Sinatra character,” Coppola said on the commentary track.
In the director’s commentary on Blu Ray for The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola briefly mentions Sinatra during Fontane’s first appearance. Singer Al Martino played Johnny Fontane in The Godfather and The Godfather: Part III. In Puzo’s novel, Johnny Fontane’s singing and acting career is helped thanks to his mafia connections. It had been rumored Sinatra had connections to organized crime which allowed to him make certain career moves, including allegedly breaking a contract through threat of violence. ” ‘I’d like you to meet my good friend, Mario Puzo,’ ” said the millionaire friend, according to Puzo, to which Sinatra, not looking up from his plate, replied: ” ‘I don’t think so. Once there, the millionaire wanted to introduce the author to another friend: Sinatra. The writer was busy working on the screenplay for his bestseller in Hollywood - which would go on to be hailed as one of the greatest films of all time - when he was invited by an unnamed “famous millionaire” friend to a dinner party at Chasen’s - a then celebrity hotspot near Beverly Hills, which opened in 1936 and closed in 1995, Puzo recounted in the magazine article.