Coppola's "Godfather Adaptation Notebooks" and Psycho

The Godfather Notebooks sound very interesting, and invaluable really for Godfather scholars and superfans.

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I think so. One hears about the preparation involved in adapting a novel into a screenplay into a movie; here is an opportunity to see how Coppola -- really as an Oscar-winning screenwriter(for Patton) more than as a director -- reshaped Puzo's novel so that the movie avoided being a Harold Robbins-style sex potboiler.

There was a fairly bad book with some interesting aspects of a decade or so ago called "Hitchcock's Notebooks" which showed Hitchcock's similarly meticulous preparation of scripts and novel adaptations. Unlike with the Coppola tome, Hitchcock isn't visible as the "sole auteur" of his screenplays in Hitchcock's Notebooks, but the books have similar material(marked up pages, treatments, etc), as well as similar titles "BLANK Notebooks..."

One critic wrote of "Hitchcock's Notebooks" : "Its as if the editor of the book(Dan Aulier) opened the drawers of Hitchcock's cabinets and dumped everything on the floor." In short, the book was terribly disorganized...

Esp. interesting for us here that Coppola occasionally frames himself as learning lessons from Hitchcock. I dare say that more writers-and-directors should think in such ways - they'd make better movies!

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In reading the notes, it seems that Hitchcock looms large in the suspense-murder sequences(the horse's head, the Godfather's near-fatal shooting, and of course the big Sollozo/Captain McClusky killing in the restaraurant.)

As I noted, I hadn't really thought before of the early shooting of Brando as being Marion Crane-like...but really it is.

A shock in seeing the shooting and then... Don Vito remains in the movie but in very reduced physical state. The other Mafia families are just waiting for Don Vito to die so they can roust Sonny and Michael and "the kids," and THAT becomes the suspense mechanism of the rest of the film. Sonny is "get-able," but Michael is not.

This is why some critics felt that Brando should have been nominated for Best Supporting Actor and Pacino for Best Actor...but I disagree. Brando's Don Vito dominates the first third of the film and then becomes the "father figure" for everybody after he is shot. Then, like Marion Crane, after he dies(ironically, in his garden with his grandson), Vito haunts the duration of the movie.

Of course, like everyone else, Hitchcock has his limits, and there are plenty of good lessons to be learned from other directors that you can't get from Hitch. (I'd keep an eye out in Coppola's notebooks for when he sees himself as learning lessons from Visconti and Bertolucci's The Conformist in particular.)

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I don't recall any "notes in the margins" from Coppola with "Visconti" listed, but Coppola in various interviews spoke of how he was very influenced by European filmmakers and he likely brought that sensibility("Visconti") to bear when he was directing The Godfather as much as when he was adapting the screenplay.

Its perhaps in the cinematography, and in the interweave of business politics and family politics, that Coppola shows the European influence. He would show it even more in "The Conversation," which his then business-partner William Friedkin groused about: "Francis said this would be a Hitchcock thriller, but it was clearly a European art film!" Well a little of both, you ask me.

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But if you're making a commercial thriller then Hitchcock had better loom large.

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Which reminds us, yet again, that The Godfather is perhaps more a thriller(and a "shock thriller" in the Psycho tradition) than a drama or a historical epic.

1972 saw the coming of some Film School Grads to Hollywood. Bogdanovich made "What's Up Doc?"(a semi-remake of Hawks' Bringing Up Baby), and Coppola gave us the Hitchcockian Godfather . As for Hitchcock himself, he brought us Frenzy in 1972 and rather rode the "Film School/Old Hollywood Nostalgia" wave for himself. Had Hitchcock worked in 1977 amongst Star Wars and Close Encounters, he likely would have seemed passe.

Somewhat relatedly, a new-to-me half-hour interview with Hitchcock from the mid '70s popped up in youtube recently:
https://youtu.be/xoiS1b5alDw

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I'll take a look. Thank you!

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The interview is in two halves. The first half with a French (?) woman isn't very interesting, but the second with an English (?) guy is quite good: he asks good questions, Hitch gets on well with him, relaxes, etc..

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I've been interested to see Hitchcock do interviews with a command of German and French. Also Anthony Perkins doing one in French. These guys had a little more going on than the average film person.

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At one point the guy (who teaches at a film school) says that his students first year films tend to be imitation-Ingmar-Bergman pieces but their second year projects tend to be imitation-Hitchcocks. Hitch looks very pleased to hear this!

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Camille Paglia, a rather self-styled Hitchcock expert, has written that when she taught film classes from the 70's on, she was surprised to see students gradually eschewing Bergman(or wanting to make Bergman-like films) and moving much more wholeheartedly to liking Hitchcocks films(to watch) and to emulate(with new touches) in their own films. Paglia said she never expected film studies to take this curve. Hitchcock was attacked a whole lot in the Bergman era for the "fakeness" of his work; but turns out that fakeness was cool -- and there were Bergman-esuqe themes running through that fake work, too.)