The Godfather. After two previous critically acclaimed but unpopular novels, Puzo produces what has been described as the fastest-selling novel in American history. The story of Don Vito Corleone's career as a Mafia don remains number one on the bestseller list for sixty-seven weeks and sells eight million paperback copies. Puzo would share the Academy Award with Francis Ford Coppola for their screenplays for The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974), the first two films based on the novel. Puzo would follow up his success with other popular novels about organized crime: The Sicilian (1984), The Last Don (1996), and Omerta (2000).
"He was a degenerate gambler. That is, a man who gambled simply to gamble and must lose. As a hero who goes to war must die. Show me a gambler and I'll show you a loser, show me a hero and I'll show you a corpse."
"A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns."
"Like many businessmen of genius he learned that free competition was wasteful, monopoly efficient. And so he simply set about achieving that efficient monopoly."
"What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy."
Born: Oct 15, 1920 in Manhattan, New York City, New York
Died: Jul 02, 1999 in Long Island, New York
Occupation: Writer
Active: '70s-'90s
Major Genres: Crime, Action
Career Highlights: The Godfather Part II, The Godfather, The Godfather Part III
First Major Screen Credit: The Godfather (1972)
Biography
Academy Award-winning scriptwriter Mario Puzo openly confessed to having written The Godfather for money. He had been struggling to support his family and was in need of a commercial success when he sold the script adaptation of his novel to Paramount Pictures for 10,000 dollars. What happened next is Hollywood legend. The movie earned 11 Academy Award nominations and received three, including a 1973 Best Adapted Screenplay award for Puzo. Two years later, he won another Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for The Godfather Part II.
Puzo was born October 15, 1920, in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen to Italian immigrants. A military stint in Germany during WWII led the way, via the G.I. Bill, to studies at New York's New School for Social Research, as well as further study at Columbia University. Puzo's first novel, The Dark Arena, was published in 1955; his second and his best, in the opinion of many, The Fortunate Pilgrim, was printed in 1964. Both met with critical but not financial success, which led to the aforementioned fiscal difficulties that forced Puzo to write his third novel, The Godfather. Although the author was not connected with the Mafia (or so he claimed), the novel was extremely popular with the people whose lifestyles it portrayed, as well as the moviegoing public. It spawned two sequels, for which Puzo supplied the screenplays. He also acted as the screenwriter for Earthquake (1974), Superman: The Movie (1978) and Superman II (1980), as well as The Cotton Club (1984), The Sicilian (a 1987 film based on his 1984 novel of the same name), and Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992). In 1997, Puzo's 1996 novel The Last Don was made into a television miniseries starring Danny Aiello and Joe Mantegna, and the same year, his novel The Fortunate Pilgrim was reprinted. Puzo died at his home on Long Island, on July 2, 1999. ~ Ryan Shriver, All Movie Guide
Puzo was born in a poor family of Neapolitan immigrants living in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City.[1] Many of his books draw heavily on this heritage. After graduating from the City College of New York, he joined the United States Army Air Forces in World War II. Due to his poor eyesight, the military did not let him undertake combat duties but made him a public relations officer stationed in Germany. In 1950, his first short story "The Last Christmas" was published in American Vanguard. After the war, he wrote his first book, The Dark Arena, which was published in 1955.
At periods in the 1950s and early 1960s, Puzo worked as a writer/editor for publisher Martin Goodman's Magazine Management Company. Puzo, along with other writers like Bruce Jay Friedman, worked for the company line of men's magazines, pulp titles like Male, True Action, and Swank. Under the pseudonym Mario Cleri, Puzo wrote World War II adventure features for True Action.[2]
Puzo's most famous work, The Godfather, was first published in 1969 after he had heard anecdotes about Mafia organizations during his time in pulp journalism. He later said in an interview with Larry King that his principal motivation was to make money. He had already, after all, written two books that had received great reviews, yet had not amounted to much. As a government clerk with five kids, he was looking to write something that would appeal to the masses. With a number one bestseller for months on The New York Times Best Seller List, Mario Puzo had found his target audience. The book was later developed into the filmThe Godfather directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The movie received 11 Academy Award nominations, winning three, including an Oscar for Puzo for Best Adapted Screenplay. Coppola and Puzo collaborated then to work on sequels to the original film, The Godfather Part II and The Godfather Part III.
Puzo wrote the first draft of the script for the 1974 disaster film Earthquake, which he was unable to continue working on due to his commitment to The Godfather: Part II. Puzo also co-wrote Richard Donner'sSuperman: The Movie and the original draft for Superman II. He also collaborated on the stories for the 1982 movie A Time to Die and the 1984 Francis Ford Coppola movie The Cotton Club.
Puzo never saw the publication of his penultimate book, Omertà, but the manuscript was finished before his death, as was the manuscript for The Family. However, in a review originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Jules Siegel, who had worked closely with Puzo at Magazine Management Company, speculated that Omertà may have been completed by "some talentless hack." Siegel also acknowledges the temptation to "rationalize avoiding what is probably the correct analysis -- that [Puzo] wrote it and it is terrible."[3]
