- Al Pacino said Paramount once offered him $1 million to star in “The Godfather Part II.”
- In his memoir, “Sonny Boy,” Pacino said he initially turned it down because the script was incomplete.
- Mario Puzo, one of the screenwriters, said the first draft was “crap.”
Al Pacino said that Paramount was so keen to make “The Godfather Part II” that they offered him $1 million to star in the film. But he turned it down until the script was complete.
Production studios often raise salaries for cast members and directors when making sequels to persuade them to return.
In his new memoir, “Sonny Boy,” Pacino wrote that Paramount, the studio behind “The Godfather,” did the same when they realized it was a hit.
“The Godfather” was the first modern blockbuster, making over $250 million at the box office and winning three Oscars.
Pacino wrote that Mario Puzo, the film series’ co-screenwriter, first approached him about reprising his role as Michael Corleone, and gave him the script’s first draft.
Per the memoir, Puzo told him: “‘It’s crap,’ he said, ‘I don’t think the script is very good. But they gave it to me to give to you. I just want to tell you.'”
After reading the script, Pacino agreed with Puzo and thought he couldn’t star in the film. Then Paramount approached him to raise his salary.
“They kept coming to me with prices, and the prices kept going higher. First $100,000. Then $200,000. Then they got it to up to $600,000. That was real money at the time,” he wrote.
Later, a producer called Pacino to his office to convince him.
“And then he reached into his desk, and he pulled out a tin box. He said to me: ‘Al, what if I told you there’s one million dollars in cash in that box?'” Pacino wrote. “It could have been a million bucks or packets of sugar, or it could have been empty. It was all out of my league. It was an abstraction. And it did not make one bit of difference.”
What Pacino made from the first film is not publicly known, but he wrote that he was broke and owed money after starring in “The Godfather.”
Pacino signed on to “The Godfather Part II” after he helped write a new draft
Pacino wrote that Francis Ford Coppola, who directed the first film, joined the sequel and made Paramount send him a new script.
“He must have told them straight out, ‘Stop raising his salary. He doesn’t want money. He just wants a script. He’ll do it,'” Pacino wrote.
Pacino still didn’t sign on to the film, writing in the memoir that he wanted a “better script” because the current one was “unfinished.”
Per the memoir, Pacino agreed to appear in the film after working on a new draft in a hotel with Charlie Laughton, a mentor and friend, and Coppola for “six days and six nights.”
Pacino wrote: “We’d talk to Francis, Francis would write, bring it back, we’d talk again, write, bring it back. I had no idea how to write a script. I just knew that the furniture was already there, but you need moving men to carry it into the house.
“When we left the hotel at the end of the week, Charlie looked up at the room number, 617. ‘I think we all made history here, Al.'”
There are various accounts of how much “The Godfather Part II” made, but all agree that it was not as big a box office hit as the prequel. However, the film won six Oscars, including best screenplay, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time.
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