MovieChat Forums > The Offer (2022) Discussion > Why "The Offer" (About The Godfather) is...

Why "The Offer" (About The Godfather) is Better than "Hitchcock"(About Psycho) SPOILERS

posted a year ago by roger1 (4046)
6 replies | jump to latest

(aka ecarle)

I finally got around to watching the "Paramount Plus" streaming series "The Offer," which is about the events leading up to, and away from the making of The Godfather in 1971 and its stunning success upon release in 1972 and its nail-biting Oscar night in 1973.

Watching "The Offer," I almost immediately thought of the 2012 movie about the making of Psycho(from Stephen Rebello's seminal book "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho") called "Hitchcock."

In many ways, "The Offer" and "Hitchcock" are a matched pair and not in a good way. We feel some falseness as we watch the famous movie people(whether well-known actors or famously written-about moguls) stage rather overly dramatic showdowns .

We are also left to wonder "what really happened?" versus what we see on the screen. For instance, "Hitchcock" suggested that Hitchcock and his wife Alma mortgaged their home and faced financial ruin if Psycho failed -- nah, it wasn't THAT risky. And there's a scene in Hitchocck where Hitchcock shows off photos of Ed Gein's crimes to showbiz reporters. THAT didn't happen, either.

Moreover, "Hitchcock" wastes a lot of time on Alma's near affair with screenwriter Whitfield Cook which -- if it happened, actually happened 10 years earlier during the making of "Stage Fright." That's what McGilligan's Hitchocck bio said..they just moved the affair into the Psycho period.

"The Offer" has similar "made up" scenes and evidently one "near made up character" with Juno Temple(quite pretty and sassy) playing a real Paramount assistant who is here "expanded" into an "important woman" in a story which otherwise has no woman behind the scenes.

"The Offer" also works overtime to play as a " life and death REAL Mafia tale" about how producer Al Ruddy(the lead of the piece) gets too close with one Mafia guy(Giovanni' Ribisi's Joe Columbo) while making enemies of another(Joe Gallo, played by -- I don't know.) Interestingly, the shootings of Columbo and Gallo were also in Scorsese's The Irishman and staged differently here.

Still, once the story gets going, we are given some marvelous characterizations of some real-life "movie men of the 70's" and to see them on screen so nicely acted is a true...yeah, I'll say it...delight.

Especially Robert Evans, the handsome ex-actor and Paramount boss whose manner was somewhere between Hugh Hefner and the Smartest Man in Movies. Matthew Goode has the hair down, the body down, the manner down and the VOICE down(Goode chooses to speak almost all the time as if his nose is stuffed up and its the KEY to the Evans voice.)

But also the scary-faced Burn Gorman as Charles(Charlie) Bluhdorn -- the always-angry, always-firing-people boss of Gulf and Western -- the corporate company who owned Paramount when Evans ran it. Charlie Bluhdorn has been the scary villainous rouge of countless books on the stories of 70's Hollywood(Easy Riders, Raging Bulls; Evans own infamous autobio)...he is here brought to life in all his menacing glory. (As I recall, Bluhdorn's business was not movies at all; but he bought the studio so he could chase women. MeToo without justice -- but not always involuntary on the women's part.)

Bluhdorn and Evans as friends who becomes foes and then back again is the "entertaining meat" of "The Offer," but the chosen lead of the story is Miles Teller as Al Ruddy -- who went from creating Hogan's Heroes to producing The Godfather. This is HIS story. Teller plays him as a macho but kind tough guy troubleshooter, under fire from all sides (Bluhdorn, Evans -- and a smarmy Colin Hanks as the REAL villain of the piece.) , who somehow brings the movie to fruition while backing its overweight Tweedledee and Tweedledum: Writer-director Francis Coppola and The Godfather novelist co-screenwriter Mario Puzo.

The movie focusses on Ruddy, Evans, Bludorn, exec Barry Lapidis, and a rather underused Peter Bart(who was Ruddy's bookish second in command at Paramount) while reducing the actors playing Brando, Pacino, Caan, and Keaton to smallish bits(because its so hard to match a unique star -- the guy doing young Pacino has his voice perfect, but not his look.)

OK: the problem, we all learned later with "Hitchocck" is that it was a Fox indie film that couldn't get any cooperation from the Hitchcock estate or Universal, which owned the rights and the film and the script.

"Hitchcock" famously seemed to scrupulously avoid showing almost ANY of the film's production, we barely got a glimpse of the Psycho house on the backlot, and saw little of the actors acting. It turns out that "Hitchcock" had a lawyer on set who job was to make sure that no scenes SHOWED TOO MUCH of the making of Psycho. So we got a movie about the making of Psycho that hardly showed the making of Psycho.

CONT

[–] roger1 (4046) a year ago

There is a telltale moment in "Hitchcock' where we realize that they couldn't even use Joe Stefano's screenplay. We only HEAR the dialogue for Sheriff Chambers' first scene, and he says of Arbogast "Sounds to me like this private detective was in the cups"(drunk) -- well, there is no such dialogue in the REAL Psycho and they had to re-write the dialogue this way to avoid a lawsuit.

VERSUS: The Offer has the full and complete backing of Paramount and can restage all the scenes it wants. I kept watching scene after scene and thinking: "If only Hitchcock could have been made with this much fealty to the movie." A big deal is that "The Offer" keeps taking us on recreations of famous sets and locations from The Godfather: the WW Best Department store where Michael reads about this father being shot; the real Italian restaurant where Michael shot Captain McKlusky and The Turk; the busy summer streetcorner(complete with playing kids and a spouting fire hydrant of water) where Sonny beats the crap out of his brother in law. "The Offer" brings back the locations and the movie and allows us to watch it being made.

CONT

[–] roger1 (4046) a year ago

HOWEVER: As it turns out, "The Offer" "borrows" one concept straight from the best scene in Hitchcock--and Hitchcock did have about five good scenes, and this one was the best:

In "Hitchcock", we get Alfred Hitchcock himself(Anthony Hopkins) standing in the lobby of a theater holding "the world premiere of Psycho"(I've never been sure if there was one, but there MUST have been). Since "Hitchcock"(the movie, not the man) can't use any clips from the movie Psycho-- we can't SEE any of the start up to the shower scene, but we HEAR it(somebody made new tapes of the shower curtain opening and teh shower being turned on.)

And evidently, the "Hitchcock" makers COULD buy the rights to Bernard Herrmann's score: because we watch Alfred Hitchcock in the lobby as the shower murder starts and the movie keeps cutting to the audience inside(in 1960 suits and dresses) SCREAMING at the top of their lungs at the unseen murder scene and CUTTING out to Hitchocck in the lobby, "conducting the screams" like a composer. Then the scene ends inside the theater and we cut to the audience trying to calm down, chuckling a bit, etc. Psycho is a WINNER. Great scene.

The Offfer "borrows" his scene over and over. We see Coppola call "action" on the murder of McKlusky and the Turk but we don't see it. We see Coppola call "action" on Sonny beating up Carlo by the fire hydrant but we don't see it(as a "dramatic gesture," Coppola has instructed Caan to REALLY beat up the actor playing Carlo because the actor REALLY hit Coppola's sister, Talia Shire, in one of her scenes as his wife Connie.)

That bit where Caan REALLY beats up Carlo because Carlo REALLY beat up Talia Shire? True? I have no idea. I have read that the actor who played Carlo -- a guy with some real mob connections -- was a jerk on The Godfather set, maybe they used that for this "suspension of dramatic license."

Meanwhile, "The Offer" borrows directly from the climax of "Hitchcock" by showing director Francis Coppola sneaking around in the movie theater lobby of HIS premiere and listening as the movie ends inside.

Coppola: That's the end. Its pretty quiet in there.
Ruddy: Give them a moment.

(And we hear HUGE CHEERS and applause.)

The Godfather, like Psycho before it, is a winner. How NICE when a movie is that good on immediate notice.

CONT

[–] roger1 (4046) a year ago

Meanwhile, back on the "behind the scenes drama" of The Offer, we get this predictable -- and maybe not too real -- showdown.

Colin Hanks plays "the villain of the piece"(for awhile at least), Barry Lapidis. Colin Hanks has aged and filled out into his famous father's face(but it is still too "weak and pale" a version) but very much into his father's VOICE and I swear sometimes it feele like Tom Hanks is playing this role.

Anyway, in "The Offer" as we have it, after losing Ali MacGraw to Steve McQueen(on the set of The Getaway) Bob Evans spirals into booze, cocaine and seclusion in his Beverly Hills mansion and get fired by Bludhorn, MIA.

So Hanks' "Snidely Whiplash" takes over Evans' desk and his job, and in one extremely too broad scene, receives updates on the new Paramount production slate from Peter Bart and it goes like this:

Chinatown? "I won't greenlight a movie I don't understand. NO."
Paper Moon "Raise the girl's age to 12. That's my daughter's age."
Save the Tiger?: "About the garment industry?(where Bob Evans started) Is this a Bob Evans vanity project? NO."

And worst of all, Hanks demands that The Godfather be cut down to two hours, which Coppola does practically with tears i n his eyes "they ruined my movie."

Well, of course, our hero Al Ruddy persuades Evans to quit mopin' about Ali MacGraw leaving him for Steve McQueen and to get his own job back AND - Evans comes striding back into his office dispatches Hanks, greenlights Chinatown, etc. Its enjoyable but a bit hokey.

The Hanks character gets his old job back, but two guys who openly try to get Coppola fired are summarily fired -- one by Al Ruddy(the movies' producer) and one by Evans(the studio chief.) Now I have read that this really DID happen -- the main villain was a film editor named Aram Akavian or some such.

CONT

[–] roger1 (4046) a year ago

I found all this behind the scenes studio maneuvering to be pretty interesting -- it was ALSO interesting in Hitchocck -- and if there had been more of it in Hitchcock, Hitchcock would have been a better movie. (I flash back to studio chief Barney Balaban trying to stop the movie being made by citing Bloch's novel: "Is this still a story about a queer dressing up in his mother's clothes to kill people?" Interesting: in terms of 1959 Hollywood, "queer" was an insult. Modernly, "queer" seems to have moved up over "gay" as a term of respect.

I thought about this: "Hitchcock" barely gets into the lives of the Paramount moguls who worked on Psycho -- and tried to stop it . I think Barney Balaban(well played by Richard Portnow) steps in for everybody at Paramount. We never hear of owner Y. Frank Freeman(of whom it was once said: "Why Frank Freeman?")

And then I thought about this: by the time that The Godfather went into production, Y Frank Freeman and Barney Balaban were long gone from Paramount. Everybody quit, retired, or was fired, save a few. Bluhdorn bought the studio and hired Robert Evans(a clothing magnate who turned the book The Detective into a movie deal) and Peter Bart(a New York Times reporter -- or was it the Wall Street Journal) to run the place.

Evans and Bart famously oversaw a run at Paramount that I don't think has been matched: The Odd Couple, Rosemary's Baby, True Grit, Love Story(HUGE, with Ali MacGraw), The Godfather, Chinatown. Marathon Man, Black Sunday(the last three PRODUCED by Evans even as he ran the studio. This all gets into "The Offer.")

CONT

[–] roger1 (4046) a year ago

Al Ruddy started as a "Rand Corporation Computer Programmer" before drifting into TV with his pitch for Hogan's Heroes. We get THAT in The Offer. He made one movie before The Godfather called "Big Fauss and Little Halsey" with Robert Redford, and we see Ruddy fly to the Butch Cassidy South America location to lure Redford in ("Find me the most expensive hotel at that location -- that's where I'll find Redford.") He made one big hit after The Godfather -- The Longest Yard with Burt Reynolds, and we see him lure Reynolds into THAT movie.

So, yeah -- we get lesser actors playing Robert Redford and Burt Reynolds and no, they don't get them.

I thought the guy playing Brando wasn't too bad -- we got a sense of how Brando could be elusive in being lured onto a movie, but actually quite the professional while making it. (Well, while making The Godfather at least.) The Pacino kid only got Al's voice, the Caan guy wasn't a match at all. Like the agent said: "Stars are unique, like the Blue Boy painting.)

Of course , there is this raising The Offer above Hitchocck: Hitchocck was a movie of less than two hours' length.
The Offer is a ten-hour miniseries. A LOT more time to get into things.

Peter Bart is very old but still writing for The Hollywood Reporter. He wrote about The Offer. He couldn't bring himself to like The Offer, even though he is treated well in it. He knows that the woman in the story really had no power or role in making The Godfather at all...but the story needed her. He found the elevation of Al Ruddy to "the guy who solved all problems" was a bit too much...but the story needed THAT. (I like how Teller plays Ruddy as macho enough to bed a few Hollywood women in the story, but always "only business" and respectful of the woman who works by his side --Juno Temple is so good in the role, you WISH the real woman had this much to do.)

CONT

[–] roger1 (4046) a year ago

The Offer starts to just "check trivia boxes" especially near the end when Cabaret almost beats The Godfather at the Oscars and Bob Fosse beats Coppola for Best Director ("Fosse was good" says Coppola to Evans, who says "I never saw Cabaret, and I never will. You'll win next time." Coppola DID for The Godfather II.) And Ali MacGraw leaves Steve McQueen for a night to escort Bob Evans to the Oscars(with Henry Kissinger on his othre arm! They were pals -- Evans was a rare Republican in Hollywood at the time.)

So I don't know -- on balance, "The Offer" is just as fake and lying about how The Godfather was made as Hitchcock was fake and lying about how Psycho was made.

But its just better -- ten hours gives the story the time that Hitchock never got, and the restored sets and locations where key scenes were filmed just WORKS -- "we are there as The Godfather is made before our eyes."

Overall, I think what I liked best in the movie was the interplay among Al Ruddy, Bob Evans, and Charlie Bluhdorn. I read about these guys for years and the movie captures them quite well I think. Especially Evans as some sort of lounge lizard visionary floating through Hollywood like a Boy King and Wheeler Dealer. (In real life, Bob Evans came to a seminar I attended in LA in 1974, to talk about Chinatown and...he' was JUST like that, stuffed nose voice and all.)

Recommended...perhaps after a quick viewing of "Hitchcock" first. To see how Paramount changed in just a decade. And always remember: Paramount did not WANT to make Psycho, ever. They shipped the filming over to the Universal lot and soundstages, and sold Hitchcock enough ownership of the movie that he could SELL it to Universal.

Whereas: the gang at Paramount ALWAYS wanted The Godfather -- its just that some of them wanted it cheap, shorter and contemporary. Those guys lost just as much as the guys who tried to stop Psycho did.