Mario Puzo
American author, screenwriter, and journalist · United States · Writers · Lived 1920 to 1999 · aged 78
Mario Puzo is read about 1,676 times a day, in 73 languages.
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Something wrong?He wrote The Godfather to get out of debt, then won two Oscars adapting it with Coppola. The novel that defined how the world pictures organized crime came from a guy who'd never met a mobster.
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The horse's head in the producer's bed was totally my imagination. I made it up based on Sicilian folklore.
I'm fascinated by the movies simply because it is an enormous machine for making money and no matter how badly they run it, it still makes money.
The Mafia liked the book. They come out looking good. Of course, it's a romantic novel and the Mafia is romanticized.
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Mario Francis Puzo was born October 15, 1920, and spent decades writing without much money or notice. The Godfather arrived in 1969 - a crime novel about the Italian-American Mafia that he'd researched entirely from books and news clippings, no field work. It became a sensation. Francis Ford Coppola brought him in to co-write the screenplay, and they won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1972, then again for Part II in 1974. Between Mafia sequels Puzo wrote the original screenplay for the 1978 Superman film and its 1980 follow-up. He continued writing crime novels about the Sicilian Mafia until his death on July 2, 1999; his last, The Family, came out posthumously in 2001.
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