Man Kept Grandmother's Decaying Corpse In N.Y. House For 5 Months So He Could Keep Living There, Police Say. A Queens man has been arrested after his 85-year-old grandmother was found dead and wrapped in garbage bags, cops said Thursday. Join the Bloomsbury Book Club! Share your passion for books with like-minded people. Meets the 2nd Tuesday of each month, 7 pm on the Mezzanine at Bloomsbury Books. The first funny book I remember reading was James Thurber’s “My Life and Hard Times.” I read it over and over, and it never failed to make me laugh.
It signified one of the most terrifying forces on earth, the Italian- American faction of organized crime, and naturally the men who headed this force wanted to keep the word from being spoken, if not obliterate it altogether. When it became the basis of a best- selling book, and the book was sold to the movies, those men decided that they had to take action. It all began in the spring of 1. Mario Puzo walked into the office of Robert Evans, the head of production at Paramount Pictures. He had a big cigar and a belly to match, and the all- powerful Evans had consented to take a meeting with this nobody from New York only as a favor to a friend. Under the writer’s arm was a rumpled envelope containing 5. In trouble?,” Evans asked. And how. Puzo was a gambler, into the bookies for ten grand, and perhaps his only hope of not getting his legs broken was in the envelope—a treatment for a novel about organized crime, bearing as its title the very word the underworld guys wanted to stamp out: Mafia. Though the word had been in use in its current meaning in Italy since the 1. America in a 1. 95. Kefauver Committee, a congressional group headed by Democratic senator Estes Kefauver, of Tennessee, created to investigate organized crime. The good news, Puzo claimed, was that the word had never before been used in a book or film title.“I’ll give you ten G’s for it as an option against $7. Evans remembers telling the writer, more out of pity than excitement. A few months later, when Puzo called and asked, “Would I be in breach of contract if I change the name of the book?,” Evans almost laughed out loud. Mario Puzo’s book became one of the best- selling novels of all time and later a classic movie that revolutionized filmmaking, saved Paramount Pictures, minted a new generation of movie stars, made the writer rich and famous, and sparked a war between two of the mightiest powers in America: the sharks of Hollywood and the highest echelons of the Mob.“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” a reporter says in John Ford’s towering 1. Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. So what if Mario Puzo later contended that the meeting hadn’t taken place as Evans describes it, or if Variety editor Peter Bart, who was then Evans’s vice president in charge of creative affairs, says today that Puzo’s pages first came to him, not Evans? This was a project born in violent arguments among its creators and forged by the gun as much as the camera.“Let’s go to bed,” Evans says, leading me through his Hollywood Regency home to his bedroom, where so many starlets have slept that, in the producer’s heyday, his housekeeper would place the name of the previous evening’s conquest beside his coffee cup on the breakfast table so that he could address her properly. Ace Hotel New York lives in a building formerly known as the Breslin Hotel, built in 1904. The building and the neighborhood have always been full of life. Since his screening room burned down, in 2. Evans has taken to showing films in his bedroom. Mark Seal recalls how a clash of Hollywood sharks, Mafia kingpins, and cinematic geniuses shaped the Hollywood masterpiece. As we lie side by side on a fur coverlet, the room swells with Nino Rota’s famous score, and soon the screen fills with the face of Don Corleone on the day of his daughter’s wedding. Paramount had bought a blockbuster cheap, but the studio bosses didn’t want to make the movie. Mob films didn’t play, they felt, as evidenced by their 1. The Brotherhood, starring Kirk Douglas as a Sicilian gangster. Evans and Bart, however, thought they knew why: the Mob films of the past had been written, directed, and acted by “Hollywood Italians.” To make The Godfather a success—a film so authentic the audience would “smell the spaghetti,” in Evans’s words—they would need real Italian- Americans to produce, direct, and star. But in the first of endless contradictions in the making of the film, they chose Albert “Al” Ruddy, a non- Italian, to produce. A tall, tough, gravel- voiced New Yorker, he had recently muscled a crazy idea for a comedy about a Nazi P. O. W. Whatever his artistic talent may have been, Ruddy was known for being able to get a movie made cheaply and quickly.“I got a call on a Sunday. Bluhdorn’s eyebrows shot skyward and his grin grew wide. As the book’s popularity grew, however, so did the budget (to $6 million), and so did the executives’ ambitions. Bluhdorn and Paramount’s president, Stanley Jaffe, began interviewing every possible superstar director, all of whom turned it down. Romanticizing the Mafia would be immoral, they declared. Peter Bart pushed to hire Francis Ford Coppola, a 3. Italian- American who had directed a handful of films, including the musical Finian’s Rainbow, but had never had a hit. He felt that Coppola would not be expensive and would work with a small budget. Coppola passed on the project, confessing that he had tried to read Puzo’s book but, repulsed by its graphic sex scenes, had stopped at page 5. He had a problem, however: he was broke. His San Francisco–based independent film company, American Zoetrope, owed $6. Warner Bros., and his partners, especially George Lucas, urged him to accept. What have you got to lose?” Coppola went to the San Francisco library, checked out books on the Mafia, and found a deeper theme for the material. He decided it should be not a film about organized crime but a family chronicle, a metaphor for capitalism in America.“Is he nuts?” was Evans’s reaction to Coppola’s take. But with Paramount pushing to sell the rights to the book for $1 million to Burt Lancaster, who wanted to play Don Corleone, Evans felt that he had to act fast or lose the project. So he dispatched Coppola to New York to meet with Bluhdorn. Coppola’s presentation persuaded Bluhdorn to hire him. Immediately, he began re- writing the script with Mario Puzo, and the two Italian- Americans grew to love each other. Gangsters don’t brown.’”Two things quickly became apparent to Coppola: for the film to be authentic, it had to be a period piece, set in the 1. New York City, the stomping ground of the Mob. Puzo knew the Mob world extremely well, but from a distance. Ed Walters, formerly a pit boss at the Sands hotel in Las Vegas, recalls Puzo’s distinctive style of research. He would stand for hours on end at the roulette wheel, asking questions between bets. Courtesy of American Zoetrope.“I never met a real, honest- to- god gangster,” Puzo added in his memoir. While most mobsters shunned the spotlight, Joseph Colombo Sr., the short, dapper, media- savvy head at 4. New York’s Five Families, brazenly stepped into it. In an outrageously bold move, he helped create the Italian- American Civil Rights League, claiming that the F. B. I.’s pursuit of the Mob was in fact persecution and a violation of civil rights. A top priority of the league’s was to eradicate “Mafia” from the English language, since Colombo contended that it had been turned into a one- word smear campaign. What is Mafia?” he asked a reporter in 1. Am I the head of a family? My wife, and four sons and a daughter. That’s my family.”What began with the picketing of F. B. I. An estimated quarter of a million people showed up at the league’s inaugural rally in New York City in order to put the feds and everyone else on notice. He became so concerned that he began swapping cars routinely with members of his staff to avoid recognition. One night, after he had traded his late- model sports car for Mc. Cartt’s company car, she heard the sound of gunfire outside her house on Mulholland Drive. It was a warning—to Al.”On the dashboard was a note, which essentially said, Shut down the movie—or else. Warren Beatty as Michael Corleone? Screen- testing nevertheless commenced. From the beginning, Coppola had envisioned all of the four male actors who would eventually be cast in the leading roles, including Marlon Brando. But he had to fight Paramount’s executives for each and every one. But, yes, we did those tests, including Diane Keaton, very inexpensively in San Francisco. But Bob Evans didn’t really go for it, so we later spent hundreds of thousands of dollars shooting practically every young actor in New York and Hollywood.”Evans, Bluhdorn, and the other executives hated Coppola’s casting choices, especially Pacino, who they felt was far too short to play the soldier who becomes the future don. Shortly after Roos says the name “Beatty,” the office door opens and the actor himself—whose offices Fred Roos works out of—is standing in the doorway.“You almost got the role of Michael?,” I ask.“There’s a story there,” says Beatty. I was offered The Godfather when Danny Thomas was the leading candidate for the Godfather. And I remember something else. I was offered The Godfather to produce and direct. Charlie Bluhdorn was a fan of Bonnie and Clyde and sent me the book. So I flew to New York, this huge studio, for these tests. There must’ve been 3. Every actor you can think of was testing for this and that.” Paramount eventually spent $4. Caan says, and he tested not only for the part of Michael but also for that of consigliere Tom Hagen. At one point, Caan was cast as Michael and Carmine Caridi as Sonny. Caridi was a Sonny straight out of Puzo’s book: a six- foot- four, black- haired Italian- American bull who came from a tough section of New York. Told that he had the part, Caridi quit the play he was appearing in and got fitted for wardrobe. When he walked down the block he had grown up on, people hanging out of windows screamed, “One of the boys made it!” “Women were coming up to me with their babies to kiss for good luck,” Caridi says. Caan recalls, “He was running around with some friends of mine, celebrating. They’re very shaky up there, and I know what Francis wants—no disgrace to you.’ . We’ll throw you out of the fucking car at 9. Caridi got eliminated, but not by the Mob.“The war over casting the family Corleone was more volatile than the war the Corleone family fought on screen,” Evans writes in his 1. The Kid Stays in the Picture, before describing his eventual capitulation to letting Coppola cast Pacino as Michael.“You’ve got Pacino on one condition, Francis,” he told Coppola.“What’s that?”“Jimmy Caan plays Sonny.”“Carmine Caridi’s signed. He’s right for the role.
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