Flashback, December 1990: ‘The Godfather Part III’ Ends Saga in a Dying Fall

The Godfather Part III arrived in American theaters over the 1990 holiday season burdened with reports of a troubled production that eventually outweighed the hopes for a repeat of its two Oscar-winning predecessors. 

Though not a disaster, it didn’t live up to box-office expectations either, grossing approximately $136.9 million worldwide against a $54 million budget—hardly the record-shattering blockbuster that the original was.

Much of the pre-release bad press concentrated on the decision by director Francis Ford Coppola to cast daughter Sofia in the pivotal role of Michael Corleone’s daughter Mary. This derision had an element of Schadenfreude, in the way that many critics have of taking an award-winning filmmaker down a peg after a string of successes.

More in a minute on alternatives to Sofia Coppola. But there was another casting choice—a refusal to bring back a key cast member from the earlier films—that had just as critical an impact on the project.

Viewers expecting to see Robert Duvall as consiglieri Tom Hagen were in for a big letdown. The actor, nominated for Best Supporting Actor in the role in The Godfather Part I, wanted more than the $1 million he was offered for this second sequel, believing it wasn’t close to what Al Pacino ($5 million) and Diane Keaton ($1.5 million) would be receiving.

Coppola, facing financing and scheduling restrictions by studio Paramount Pictures, couldn’t accommodate the demand. But he incurred stiff creative consequences for rewriting Hagen out of the script.

It wasn’t just that Hagen’s straight-arrow son, Fr. Andrew Hagen (played by John Savage), was only a shadow of his dad, given how little he figured in the final cut. It wasn’t even that the bland WASP lawyer character invented to replace Hagen, B.J. Harrison (played by George Hamilton), was likewise a pale reminder of Hagen.

No, it meant that Michael couldn’t turn to Hagen as his natural choice to run the foundation meant to launder the Corleone family’s blood-stained reputation, but instead would select Mary. 

Moreover, the new movie would abruptly short-circuit a running thread of the first two films without explanation: Hagen’s struggle to balance his intense loyalty as an adopted member of the Corleones with his conscience.

Though Duvall was sorely missed, it was by casting his daughter that Coppola turned himself into the pinata for critics. In his defense, it was a decision made under tremendous duress.

Julia Roberts was originally cast as Mary Corleone, but had to withdraw because of scheduling conflicts in finishing the film that would lift her to superstardom, Pretty Woman.

Her replacement, Winona Ryder, was a seasoned actress who could have brought heat to the love scenes with illegitimate cousin Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia, in an explosive Oscar-nominated performance), and personified an independence strongly suggestive of her mother, the family outsider Kay Adams-Corleone.

But what was described in press reports as “nervous exhaustion” (i.e., working nonstop on several films back to back) led to a prolonged medical absence for the actress.

Coppola could have waited for Ryder to recover, or he could have gone with two other rising young actresses, Laura San Giacomo (recently in Sex, Lies, and Videotape) or Annabella Sciorra (Jungle Fever). But the director had decided that Mary Corleone should be a teenager, and in looking around for a member of that age group who saw someone close at hand: Sofia.

Sofia Coppola was 19 years old at the time of production, with neither experience nor interest to date in becoming an actress. Her mother Eleanor, a documentary filmmaker who had observed and chronicled the excesses of her husband, feared that this was another one of his mistakes.

With a production deadline bearing down on him and a belief that she was closer to his conception of Mary Corleone, Francis chose to go with her, perhaps believing he could elicit a fine performance from the neophyte. The decision was reminiscent of John Huston’s in casting his similarly inexperienced teen daughter, Anjelica Huston, in the 1969 movie A Walk With Love and Death.

But Francis Ford Coppola was dealing not with a one-off art house historical drama as Huston was but a high-stakes movie franchise. Sofia became collateral damage.

The vacuums caused by the absence of Duvall and Ryder led to frenzied rewrites, a process that had begun a decade before Coppola and novelist-screenwriter Mario Puzo formally committed to the project. By the time it was over, 16 script variations had been produced.

All this rewriting resulted in problems with plot and characterization. The real-life scandal that became intertwined with Michael Corleone’s effort at redemption—the Vatican Bank—wasn’t introduced until 40 minutes into the film. And why did Connie Corleone (played by Talia Shire) evolve from the wayward and outraged sister of Michael in Parts I and II to one not only wholly supportive but exceeding him in calculation and cunning in Part III?

Given all of these issues, as well as Coppola’s acceptance of the project as a means of extricating himself from his financial reverses of the prior decade, the wonder is not merely that The Godfather Part III was made at all but that it turned out as well as it did, with seven Oscar nominations including Best Picture. (Inexplicably, Pacino wasn’t nominated for Best Actor.)

Pacino, Keaton and Garcia turned in superb performances, the cinematography was excellent, and, for all its imperfections, the Puzo-Coppola screenplay contained its share of excellent lines (e.g., Michael’s oft-quoted, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”).Coppola’s 2020 re-edit prompted a more positive reappraisal of this conclusion to this indispensable crime family epic.

This Day in Television History (“Lonesome Dove” Premieres)

February 5, 1989—Debuting on a Sunday night when a Canadian cold front made many Americans disinclined to step outside the warm confines of their homes, Lonesome Dove became a major critical and ratings success for CBS. The star-studded adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel not only marked the end of a way of life for the two aging Texas cowboys at its center, but also the end of the heyday of the major network miniseries. 

Though I had seen a prior issue of the magazine in, of all places, a Manhattan newsstand, the February/March issue of American Cowboy finally led me to part with some of my hard-earned cash. The cover story on the 20th anniversary of Lonesome Dove was every bit as good as I had hoped. It brought to mind many fond memories of the mini-series that I followed breathlessly at the time, and it filled me in on quite a bit I didn’t know before. 

(McMurtry is not a fan of the miniseries made from his book, believe it or not. According to an Entertainment Weekly article, one of the major bones he has to pick with it is that Clara Allen—my favorite character in the creative property and, evidently, one of his—looked nothing like the actress who played her, Anjelica Huston. Instead, the person he visualized in the role was—are you ready?—Diane Keaton. Now, I’m as much of a fan of Keaton as anyone, but I have serious doubts about how her 20th-century urban sensibility would translate into the century before.) 

The author of the article, Tom Wilmes, obviously did his homework, rustling up nearly every surviving major person associated with the TV epic (with the notable exceptions of Robert Duvall and Danny Glover). For many who’ve seen the show or read the book, Wilmes’ description of the creative genesis of this property will be eye-opening (I did not realize, for instance, that the rights were optioned by, of all companies, Motown). Believe it or not, however, I think I’ll be able to add more sidelights about this tangled (or should that be tumbleweed?) tale. 

Before he fleshed it out as a novel, McMurtry sketched out the story of former Texas Rangers Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call as a film treatment, Streets of Laredo (a title dropped temporarily, then picked up as the sequel to the book and mini-series). Peter Bogdanovich, fresh off his triumph with another McMurtry project, The Last Picture Show, was set to direct. Several of the cast members—Bogdanovich’s new paramour Cybill Shepherd, Cloris Leachman, Ben Johnson, and Ellen Burstyn—had starred in that critically acclaimed 1971 movie. Another set of actors, the Clancy Brothers, were, to say the least, unconventional choices. 

But the real projected stars of the film would have made this a project for the ages. Think of it: Henry Fonda, James Stewart, and John Wayne, all in the sunset movie of their careers. 

When contacted for the American Cowboy article, McMurtry noted that the project appeared to be coming together when it ran into an obstacle: Wayne. “He would have been the Call character in that story, and he didn’t want to play what he considered to be an unlikable, hard-ass character. When he wouldn’t do it, everyone else lost interest.” 

That statement is intriguing, but I think there might have been somewhat more than this at play. If Wayne did not want to play an unsympathetic character, there would have been an easy way around that: Pick either Fonda or Stewart to do it. 

The glorious thing about all three actors is that each could have probably played McCrae as well as Call because they had displayed such versatility in their prior westerns. With a bit of negotiation, one of these two could have switched roles with Wayne, so that he’d get to play talkative Gus while Fonda/Stewart would handle reticent Call. 

But there was another problem with the casting issue: the best roles of Wayne’s career had been as hardasses. I’m not talking about his Sgt. Stryker of Sands of Iwo Jima, his Oscar-nominated turn as the marine who’s tough on his men mostly because the Japanese will destroy them if he doesn’t turn them into killing machines. No, I mean Red River, in which he played a cattle boss who gives adopted son Montgomery Clift the most awful of times, or, better yet, The Searchers, in which he offered a daring portrait of an unregenerate Western racist. 

Even suppose, for the sake of argument, that he was now balking at playing these kinds of antiheroes. I think Wayne would have come around if advised to do so by his mentor, John Ford. Why do I believe this? Because in 1997, I went to an author lecture/signing at Fairleigh Dickinson University featuring Bogdanovich, who was promoting his book Who the Devil Made It: Conversations With Legendary Film Directors. I can see now how Bogdanovich came to play a psychoanalyst on The Sopranos: he may have come to filmmaking originally through his work as a movie critic, but his brilliance as a mimic, imitating, in turn, Stewart, Fonda and Wayne, convinced me that he could have made a very comfortable career as an actor as well as a director, had he chosen to do so. 

According to what Bogdanovich said at the FDU lecture, Wayne had, in fact, asked Ford his opinion of the script. The problem was that the great director was now dying. A film about the death of the West—in fact, at a point when the western, the genre that Ford had brought to a creative apogee, was itself going through a decline—was too grim a reminder of Ford’s own mortality. 

So Ford told Wayne not to do the film, and the project collapsed, only to be revived, more than a decade later, with a nearly equally brilliant cast (with Tommy Lee Jones cast as Call, along with Duvall, Glover, Huston, Diane Lane, and the late Robert Urich)—though, inevitably, not one so mythically associated with the western genre. 

Lonesome Dove also arrived toward the end of the heyday of the multipart miniseries on American network TV. Arguably the first, an adaptation of Leon Uris' QB7, had been telecast in 1974. A year after Lonesome Dove saw the appearance of War and Remembrance, which was not the success of its predecessor, The Winds of War. Thereafter the networks left these prestige projects for cable TV. The broadcast landscape has been the poorer for its departure.