"Leave the gun. ... Take Mario Puzo's personal notebook from 'The Godfather.'"
A handwritten notebook, owned by Mario Puzo with notes from the screenwriting process as he worked with director Francis Ford Coppola on the 1972 Best Picture winner, sold for $100,000 at Heritage Auctions on Saturday.
Soon after deciding to adapt his 1969 novel into a motion picture, Puzo reread his book with extreme attention to detail, marking the book with notes and important plot points. He took this book, removed the pages and transported them onto larger three-hole loose leaf paper.
Coppola would keep this “master control notebook” or “bible” on his person as he and Puzo adapted the screenplay, even carrying it with him during the shooting of the film.
"The notebook was a kind of multilayered road map for me to direct the film, and the script was really an unnecessary document for me. I didn't need a script because I could have made the movie just from this notebook,” Coppola wrote in his 2016 book “The Godfather Notebook." It is now exhibited in The Art of Moviemaking: The Godfather exhibit at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.
From that notebook, three copies were made, including one for producer Al Ruddy and two for Puzo, intended to provide both with the ability to make their own edits, suggestions and annotations.
The Heritage copy was one of Puzo’s, kept for his Los Angeles office, preserved by his personal secretary.
Among the more extraordinary details found in the book are Puzo’s comments on specific decisions planned by Coppola.
Puzo’s most significant notation comes in response to the scene describing Sonny Corleone’s plan to take out the other five families when he wrote, "Sonny should not plan to kill all five: he should just fall into a lust for blood — otherwise he and Michael too alike/ Hagen should caution Sonny.”
“Good idea,” he wrote on one page detailing Coppola’s desire to have Sonny behave calmly after leaving Connie following the discovery she had been the victim of domestic violence.
This book offers a rare glimpse into the collaborative process between the author and the director as they worked jointly to create what would go on to become widely regard as the greatest film in history.
Puzo’s book was a New York Times best-seller, moving 9 million units in its first two years, yet. He didn’t particularly want to write it originally, taking on the project only after receiving a desperately-needed $5,000 advance.
The book was written in the basement of his Long Island home in a small closet with just enough room for a typewriter. When his children were too loud, he would tell them, “Keep it down, I’m writing a best-seller,” his son told the New York Post.
After writing just 100 pages of the book, Paramount swooped in with an offer of a $12,500 option to make the film and an added $50,000 reward if the movie was made.
In 2012, Marlon Brando’s overcoat, worn during the scene in which his Don Corleone character is gunned down in the street, sold for nearly $100,000.
Brando’s personal copy of the film’s script sold for $67,650 the same year.
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct.