The Godfather Aesthetic
How “The Godfather” Changed Paramount Pictures…and Me
This is an introduction to a 10-part series exploring the culture of male domination, bravado, and excess that arose out of the milieu of The Godfather — one of the most iconic film sagas ever brought to the screen— at Paramount Pictures.
Mirroring is pretty standard behavior. The thing about The Godfather is this: Many men could not see it as an indictment against their worldview. They saw it as their glory. They did not view the stories as a tragedy. They saw them as their romance.
I worked at Paramount Pictures off and on for seventeen years and through three decades: the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Sometimes, I was fired. Sometimes, I quit. But I always seemed to return.
I started as a story editor and ended up as President. Many of the stories I lived through still haunt me. They all seem to begin and end with The Godfather.
These ten Godfather Aesthetic stories have a vast panorama: from New York to Rome to London to Sicily and to Hollywood.
They involve steely institutions including a Hollywood Studio, the Vatican, the CIA and Mafia families.
The stories entail every kind of crime, befitting a popular potboiler: wiretapping, fraud, sexy escapades, theft, and murder. Not unlike Theodore Dreiser’s, A Place in the Sun or it’s original novel, An American Tragedy, the stories, when viewed together, are an indictment against the American Dream.
Francis Ford Coppola, the writer and director, elevated a populist gangster saga because of his thematic perspective. “The Mafia is only a metaphor for America and capitalism, which will do anything to protect and perpetuate itself,” he wrote to star, Marlon Brando, in 1973.
There was a magic, romance, and style about The Godfather books and movies that carried a certain power. I call this power the “Godfather Aesthetic”, a fashion so seductive, that many at Paramount adopted that aesthetic as a way of life.
Mirroring is pretty standard behavior. The thing about The Godfather is this: Many men could not see it as an indictment against their worldview. They saw it as their glory. They did not view the stories as a tragedy. They saw them as their romance.
Thankfully, I believe, like the era of Mad Men, the era of the Godfather Aesthetic, is largely in the rearview mirror, but it reflects a misguided and privileged patriarchy that still reigns and frustrates, including in America’s White House.
I never planned to write my memoir. Who needs another Hollywood tell-all? But I have been moved to write about these special movies and the impact they had on corporate behavior. Some of the characters are dead. I try not to speak ill of them. Instead, I look to the lessons they have learned through their life.
The ten stories under the Godfather Aesthetic, all now finished, will run on the Medium Platform over the next month.
Back in 1977 when I was Paramount’s story editor, I came into the department to find police and security crowded in the midst of the script library on Melrose Avenue.
“It was a mafia hit on the department!” Marcia Hendricks, the administrator shouted at me.
Apparently, all the Godfather scripts, from Godfather I, II and III had been stolen, including the notes. I was in charge of curating the newest round of scripts for Godfather III. The scripts, not written by the originators, Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Copolla, were terrible.
There was a large smear across Marcia’s mahogany desk and specimen bags in a tin tail nearby. “Someone took a dump on my desk!” Marcia screamed. “That proves the Mafia were here.”
“They must have read the script,” I replied.
They never found the thieves.
Later that day when I explained to the President of Production, Don Simpson, about the theft of the scripts and the defecation on the administrator’s desk, he also said, “They must have read the script.”
How could I have been so wizened and callous at 27. How could the President of production at 35? It was just no big deal. That’s what people did under the spell of The Godfather Aesthetic.
Continue to Story #1, Slouching Toward the Patriarchy
The Godfather Aesthetic: The Complete Series
1. Slouching Toward the Patriarchy
Many men could not see The Godfather as an indictment against their worldview. Instead, they saw it as their glory.
2. Women in a Boy’s Club World
Dawn Steel, a Vice President of Production at Paramount, in the 1980s, was the most powerful woman at Paramount Pictures. She thought she had to be outrageous to be noticed. She may have been right.
3. The Sin Eater
Covering up bad behavior at Paramount Studios during the Godfather era. Anthony Pellicano, who adored The Godfather and spent 15 years in federal prison, handled certain sensitive issues for the studio.
4. Be Like Michael
Never was toxic masculinity so apparent than in Don Simpson, the brilliant but volatile production chief of the studio.
5. Killing Fredo
Sometimes “an offer you can’t refuse” is exactly the one you must: corporate assassination in “The Godfather Aesthetic”.
6. Night Works
“The question is: did the fixer rough you up?” Brutal games of the partiarchy.
7. Fellini Nights
The struggle to deal with a top performer’s intolerable behavior within the Hollywood patriarchy
8. The Agony and The Ecstasy: Godfather III
Calling in the cavalry to get the third movie in The Godfather saga made
9. In God’s Name — Part I
How the legacy of The Godfather movies made Paramount a natural fit for a film that would attract the interest of the Vatican, the CIA, and some real characters from Sicily.
10. In God’s Name — Part II
The ghosts of a troubled melange between the Mafia, the Vatican, the CIA, and — yes—even Paramount Pictures. The final installment of The Godfather Aesthetic.
