Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1474575
7 0 P E R S P E C T I V E | J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 2 2 New York City, 1968, novelist Mario Puzo was broke. His latest book, while getting good reviews, had not sold at all well. Convinced that he could turn things around with a bestseller, he feverishly began work on a potboiler that would draw from his Hell's Kitchen roots. A gambler as well as a writer, he needed quick cash to relieve pressure from loan sharks, whose threats were quickly escalating. When Robert Evans and Peter Bart at Paramount took an early option on the galleys, Puzo got some breathing room. For a fifteen thousand dllar advance they thought they might never see come to anything, Evans and Bart sowed the seeds of a singular icon of American cinema, The Godfather. Evans desperately needed a hit. Paramount's standing among the eight major studios in box office was at the bottom, and Gulf and Western owner Charlie Bluhdorn ('the Mad Austrian of Wall Street'), who'd acquired the studio a few years earlier, was threatening to sell the Hollywood property itself for development if Evans didn't start delivering hits. Evans was, without exaggeration, fighting to save not ust his job, but the historic studio itself. T h e O f f e r : A C e l e b r a t i o n o f t h e M e s s i n e s s o f M o v i e m a k i n g U N R E L I A B L E N A R R A T O R S B Y L A U R E N C E B E N N E T T, P R O D U C T I O N D E S I G N E R A