“Contrary to his reputation, Frank Sinatra did not use foul language,” Puzo recalled in 1972.

And his best lines – such as “Never hate your enemies, it affects your judgment”, or the poetic “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes” – remain classics, part of why Puzo deserves to be celebrated as one of the 20th century’s most gifted storytellers. published, avg rating 4.30 — Puzo came up with the film’s famous line about an offer you can’t refuse.

After … Mario Puzo was 49 when he hit big with ‘The Godfather', Keep your friends close... Don Vito ends a vendetta in ‘The Godfather’, Puzo’s own annotations scrawled on early screenplay drafts for director Francis Ford Coppola, Coppola used a real horse head, delivered from the slaughterhouse of a dog-food factory, Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in 'The Godfather: Part III', released in 1990, Don Vito was partly modelled on Puzo’s Naples-born mother, Mario Puzo at 100: The Godfather author never met a real gangster, but his mafia melodrama remains timeless, Rashford launched a petition asking the authorities to take even more measures to combat child hunger, Maslov about the game against Sancho: he was an order of magnitude faster than anyone who was on the field, Andrey Tikhonov is close to being appointed to Astana, Roberto Mancini: Italy will win two matches and reach the play-offs of the Nations League, Didier Deschamps: you can't win at the snap of your fingers just because France is the world champion, Southgate 0:1 with Denmark: a penalty and A penalty ruined everything, Cherchesov on Dzyuba and Sobolev in the match with Hungary: It was their first time playing together. Creator David Chase was a student at Stanford when Puzo’s novel came out. Paramount hired 32-year-old Francis Ford Coppola to direct the movie and co-write the screenplay. “Except for the order to kill, power is exercised in Hollywood exactly as it is in the Mafia – except that the old Mafia had more honour,” Puzo complained in 1996.

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. Puzo’s account of his poverty-stricken childhood is chilling. They had to evacuate the building. On one of his regular trips to the casinos of Las Vegas, Puzo found that a gambling debt he had run up was marked “paid”. When Puzo protested, he was told, “It’s a certain party’s pleasure.” Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, who was a hit man for the Gambino crime syndicate, even gave a newspaper endorsement of the film, saying, “I left The Godfather stunned. published 1978, avg rating 3.85 — “The first Godfather is in the best 20 movies of all time – I don’t think you could say that about the book,” he remarked.

“This guy threw his guns over the airway and my mother took them and held them for him. I remember talking to a multitude of ‘made guys’ who felt exactly the same.”. 160 ratings — He is known for his crime novels about the Italian-American Mafia and Sicilian Mafia, most notably The Godfather (1969), which he later co-adapted into a trilogy directed by Francis Ford Coppola. “I wrote below my gifts in The Godfather… I wished like hell I’d written it better.”. “I only wish I had Hollywood power to get that picture made,” Puzo lamented. Then he came and got back his guns.

11,025 ratings — Mario Gianluigi Puzo was an American author, screenwriter, and journalist. The author of Catch-22 said he and Puzo used to stay up several nights a week playing cards, and even created their own board game, called Scapegoat. After the war, having married 24-year-old German Erika Broske, Puzo took advantage of the provisions of the GI Bill to fund tuition at the New School for Social Research and Columbia University. Although The Fortunate Pilgrim, an autobiographical story about the Italian immigrant experience, was praised by The New York Times as “a small classic”, it sold only 4,000 copies and left him struggling to support his wife and five children. Error rating book. Instead, he saw no royalties when The Godfather became the highest-grossing movie of all time, and it ended up earning Paramount more than $150m. 20,342 ratings — 5,900 ratings — He sold the film rights to Paramount Pictures for a down-payment of $12,500 and a flat fee of $75,000 if the film was made, ignoring his agent’s warning to wait. Puzo thought some of the popularity of his book was down to a “disenchantment with the American justice system”. published 1967, avg rating 3.47 — published 1985, avg rating 0.0 — published 1969, avg rating 3.98 — Yet his timeless tale is so much more than a gangster melodrama; it is a remarkable dissection of the immigrant experience and a biting commentary on greed. “Mario was always a gambler, but after his success he gambled for higher stakes,” said Puzo’s lifelong friend Joseph Heller. 7 ratings — A disbelieving Puzo asked Targ if this was “some kind of Madison Avenue put-on”.

He sold the paperback rights for $2.5m.

“This was roughly equivalent to Einstein pulling a knife on Al Capone,” Puzo noted drolly. Both men earned Oscars. That final instalment, which was nominated for seven Oscars, is being released in a newly restored version in cinemas this December, with a new beginning and ending, under the title Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. And he said, ‘Would you like a rug?’ So she sent my brother to get the rug, and my brother didn’t realise the guy was stealing the rug until he took out the gun when the cop came. “Mario was always correcting with notes on the page,” Coppola said. “Besides, I owed $20,000 to relatives, finance companies, banks and assorted bookmakers and shylocks. For the final 21 years of his life, he lived with Carol Gino, a registered nurse who cared for his wife Erika through the breast cancer that killed the 59-year-old in 1978.

published 1972, avg rating 3.54 — He served with the Fourth Armoured Division and even though he joked about his war record – describing himself as “a wimp” and an “inept” soldier – he earned battlefield stars after coming under fire in France. The Sicilian book. That’s a Mafia decision.”. “We redesigned a board game played with a deck of cards. Amid 45 boxes of papers was a screenplay draft for The Godfather, with a fascinating aside about the notorious scene in which Hollywood producer Jack Woltz wakes up to discover the bloodied head of his prized horse in his bed (Coppola used a real head, delivered from the slaughterhouse of a New Jersey dog food factory). “When I wrote the scene of Clemenza describing how to make a tomato sauce, I said, ‘Well, first, you brown some sausage and then you blah, blah, blah.’ And the note from Mario said, ‘Francis, gangsters don’t brown, gangsters fry.’ It’s true, you know, gangsters would never say brown.” The pair also agreed on casting choices.

He had just finished his final novel, Omerta. published 2006, avg rating 3.42 — “On the first page, it said, ‘The best screenplay ever written was The Godfather.’ After he read that, he threw the book away.”. In the director’s commentary on the Blu-ray edition of The Godfather, Coppola admitted that “obviously Johnny was inspired by a kind of Frank Sinatra character”.

published 1977, avg rating 3.70 — Ol’ Blue Eyes saw red when the film came out; Sinatra launched a furious verbal assault on Puzo when they ran into each other at the celebrated Chasen’s restaurant in Los Angeles. His best-known novel, "The Godfather," was preceded by two critically acclaimed novels, "The Dark Arena" and "The Fortunate Pilgrim." Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. published 2013, avg rating 4.18 — Shortly before he died, Puzo insisted that The Godfather movie was better than his novel. 141 ratings —

It was a big fire.”, Puzo’s upbringing inspired much of The Godfather, including the scene in which Vito disposes of a gun on a roof. Read 712 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. “It just wasn’t done.”. Refresh and try again. Puzo was born 100 years ago, on 15 October 1920, in the west Manhattan area known as “Hell’s Kitchen”. “I never met a real honest-to-god gangster. His education gave him the confidence to earn a living as a writer. In February 1971, The Godfather producer Albert Ruddy was called to the Park-Sheraton Hotel to discuss the movie with mob boss Joseph Colombo. “The worst thing he called me was a pimp.” Sinatra told Puzo that he would like “to beat the hell” out of him, hissing “choke, go ahead and choke” as the “humiliated” author left the restaurant. published 1955, avg rating 3.59 —

Puzo wrote “half a script” telling the story of Sonny Corleone (brilliantly played by James Caan), but it was stymied because Paramount owned the rights.

14,354 ratings — published 1999, avg rating 3.81 —

(2005) 4,109 ratings — I realised the teacher would notice, so I stayed after school and set a fire to burn up her desk and the report card. published 1996, avg rating 3.72 — His literary ambitions were mocked by his siblings, who described him as the family “chooch”, an Italian insult meaning “jackass”. “I didn’t want Fredo to be killed in any case, but I said it can’t be done by his brother Michael until their mother had died,” Puzo said.

In 2016, Puzo’s archive was sold by a Boston auctioneer for $625,000.

When Coppola was battling Paramount to hire Brando, Puzo wrote to the actor suggesting he “used his muscle” to land the part of Vito. Puzo faced wider complaints that his characters were a stereotype of Italian criminality. 1,815 ratings — published 1990, avg rating 3.36 — “The editors just sat around for an hour listening to my Mafia tales and said ‘go ahead’,” Puzo recalled. “I was just ready for that book,” Chase said in 2002.

One project that went unfulfilled was the movie The Godfather Part IV. He received the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the first film in 1972 and Part II in 1974. Mario Puzo at 100: The Godfather author never met a real gangster, but his mafia melodrama remains timeless . 3,205 ratings — “He’d shout, ‘Keep it down, I’m writing a bestseller,’” Puzo’s son Tony later told The New York Post, admitting they laughed at their father’s boasts. She’d bounce a milk bottle on his head and we’d have to take him in for stitches.

Mario Puzo Lifelong New Yorker Mario Puzo drew upon figures in his Italian-American family to create the characters in his smash hit The Godfather in 1969; but he claimed never to have met a real-life mobster, and his detailed portrait of the Mafia world came entirely from diligent research. Maybe it was fiction, but for me, that was our life. This was followed by 1996’s The Last Don, a return to Mafia-based fiction, which was turned into a television mini-series starring Daryl Hannah and KD Lang. She scared me so much that when I was in the eighth grade and got a bad report card, I changed the marks.

published 1965, avg rating 3.58 —

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