Every time Carmine Caridi turns on the TV and sees James Caan kicking the shit out of his brother-in-law or getting gunned down at the toll booth in The Godfather, something inside him dies a little. In his account of the making of that movie in the new Vanity Fair, Mark Seal report that Caridi was cast, as in told that he had the role, as Sonny Corlone, and managed to hold onto it for a few days. "Caridi", Seal writes, "was a Sonny straight out of [Mario] Puzo’s book: a six-foot-four, black-haired Italian-American bull who came from a tough section of New York. Told that he had the part, Caridi quit the play he was appearing in and got fitted for wardrobe. When he walked down the block he had grown up on, people hanging out of windows screamed, 'One of the boys made it!' 'Women were coming up to me with their babies to kiss for good luck,' Caridi says. Caan recalls, 'He was running around with some friends of mine, celebrating. And I said, "Hey, don’t do this. They’re very shaky up there, and I know what Francis wants—no disgrace to you." … He was going to this club and that club,' meaning clubs frequented by the boys from Caan’s old neighborhood. 'They said, "What do you want to hang around us for?" And he says, "Well, I want to get the feeling." They said, "We’ll give you the feeling. We’ll throw you out of the fucking car at 90."'”

Read More...

Hey, happy New Year, everybody, but Josh Rosenblatt ain't having it. Rosenblatt has noticed that our attitudes towards important events in our lives tend to be colored by a template for how those events should look based on similar events they've seen in movies. "Even at my father's memorial service, I couldn't help thinking about Vito Corleone's funeral scene in The Godfather, wondering how ours looked by comparison. (Not too badly, as it turns out. A little light on gangsters and a little heavy on rabbis, but otherwise a perfect, totally depressing scene.)" And as he sees it, New Year's Eve is "when Hollywood really cranks up the fantasy quotient and goes out of its way to create the most unreasonable expectations for what a quality holiday experience – and, by extension, what a quality life – should be. New Year's movies play almost like advertisements: You too can fall madly in love with the perfect girl and commemorate the occasion with a 20-minute dance number set to a Gershwin score, like Gene Kelly in An American in Paris! You too can be blessed with economic and creative freedom at the stroke of midnight, like Tim Robbins in The Hudsucker Proxy! You too can find yourself in the middle of the perfect, fleeting romantic moment just by posting a request on the Internet, like Scoot McNairy in In Search of a Midnight Kiss! It's fantasy after fantasy, cultivating in our minds the most absurd notions of what is and isn't possible, of what we should and shouldn't expect from ourselves, on this one arbitrary night of the year."

Read More...

Francis Ford Coppola has made anumber of attempts to play impresario over the years, but one of his most successful acts of patronage over the years may have one that was partly incidental: he's given Eleanor Coppola, his wife of more than forty-five years, plenty to write about. Eleanor Coppola kept a diary of the making of Apocalypse Now from the period when her husband was assembling his cast and crew to the movie's completion and published her observations in a book called Notes that was published when the movie was in 1979. (That book, and footage she had shot, subsequently served as the core of the classic making-of documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse.) Now Coppola has published her second book, a follow-up volume called Notes on a Life. Coppola told interviewer Margaret Wapper that the new book, which covers events in her family's life from the 1980s to the near-present day, ""doesn't have a specific projection or underpinning, but it's reflective of the way we think. In the present time, we are aware of something, but maybe it reminds us of something else and then we're in the past and then we're back to the present again. . . . As I looked back on the notes, I could see strong themes emerging, repeating themselves, certain images or ideas."

Read More...