The
Godfather Effect: Changing Hollywood, America and Me by Tom Santopietro
(In this exclusive article for Cinema Retro, author Tom Santopietro takes an introspective look at his motivations for writing his acclaimed book, The Godfather Effect: Changing Hollywood, America and Me and provides an extended excerpt from the book).
Arthur Laurents, the
author of Gypsy, West Side Story, The Way We
Were, Rope, and The Turning Point, once stated that
whatever book you think you’re sitting down to write, it will inevitably turn
out quite differently. That, in a nutshell, is exactly what happened to me in
writing my recent book The Godfather
Effect: Changing Hollywood, America, and Me. I thought I was sitting down
to examine the film trilogy I, along with millions of others around the world, love and obsess over. Write about the films I
did, but I also unexpectedly ended up delving into the history of Italian
immigration to the United States, learning about those, like my grandparents,
who left the horrendous living conditions in southern Italy and journeyed to
the United States for a new start in life. More to the point, and most
surprising of all, I also ended up writing about my own life, growing up
half-Italian in an overwhelmingly WASPy world of private schools and country
clubs. In the process I ended up confronting the irony at the heart of my
obsession with The Godfather: It took
The Godfather, or more specifically, The Godfather Part II, epic sagas concerning gangsters with whom I
thought I had nothing in common, to make me fully connect with a sense of being
Italian, fostering a pride in my heritage that had never previously existed in
my genetically half-Italian, but culturally three-quarters anglo upbringing.
Time
Magazine
dubbed The Godfather “The
Italian-American Gone With the Windâ€,
but for me it was more a case of the personal rather than the epic. One look at
the very young Don Corleone sailing past the Statue of Liberty in Part II, staring in awe at the new world
which awaited him, and I was overcome with a personalized emotion I had never
before experienced in a movie theater. There on the screen, in the person of
young Vito, was my grandfather, Orazio Santopietro, thirteen years old, twenty
lira in his pocket, arriving in America for the very first time. The power of
the image of this solitary boy made me realize for the first time in my
comfortable, cocooned, upper-middle-class life just what had transpired in my
grandfather’s lap to L’America. Thanks to Coppola and co-screenwriter Mario
Puzo, I finally got it. Well, it would take decades and the loss of both of my
parents before I fully understood, but that one image of young Vito and the
Statue of Liberty first opened the door to a sense of “Italian-ness†that had
heretofore utterly escaped me.
When The Godfather Effect was published early in 2012, I was actually
unprepared for the very personal letters and e-mails that I received from
readers. My previous three books dealt with the careers of music and acting
legends Barbra Streisand, Doris Day, and Frank Sinatra, and I had always
enjoyed hearing from fans of the stars. But—those responses had never been so
personal, so nakedly emotional, as the letters I received regarding The Godfather Effect. People all over
the globe love the Corleones- for all sorts of complicated reasons- and my view
of the immigrant experience through the lens of The Godfather seemed to remind readers of their own families and
immigrant ancestors. Italian, Irish, eastern European, Hispanic- we all have
ancestors whose journeys made our own twenty-first century lives possible. By
the time I received my fifth letter which began “I’m not Italian but your story made me think
about my grandparents and their own journey to the United Statesâ€, I realized
that the Corleones don’t just register as Italian-American: they are American. The
sort of personal response engendered by the book has little to do with my writing, but
everything to do with the intense reaction that the Corleones evoke in movie
audiences of all ages and ethnicities. Thanks to the work of extraordinary artists like Coppola, Brando and
Pacino, The Godfather, like all great
pop culture, provides us glimpses of our
own journeys and very American lives.
So- with that as
background I here offer an excerpt from the beginning of The Godfather Effect- part film history, part immigrant journey,
and a salute to two of the best films ever made. Not just the best gangster
movies, but the best movies. Ever.
(Continue reading for excerpt from the book)