Streaming on Paramount Plus - Rod Bishop recommends THE OFFER (Leslie Greif, Michael Tolkin, USA, 2022)

More than twenty years ago I found myself involved in a group project with a former Hollywood studio executive. It was an excruciating experience. 

Let’s call him “Brad”. “Brad” lost a lot of money when he ran a famous Hollywood studio…Lots.

“Brad” is very reminiscent of the Paramount studio head Robert Evans in The Offer. Gross, belligerent, inexperienced, a kind of used-car lot salesman who only knows how to speak in “spin”. How do such people get to run Hollywood studios?

Evans died in 2019 so The Godfather producer Albert S. Ruddy, (whose credits here read “Executive Producer” and “Based on Albert S. Ruddy’s experience of making The Godfather”), presumably had a much freer hand to show Evans as a serious dingbat, putting up major roadblocks - seemingly at every turn – before reluctantly agreeing to greenlight the project.

Evans didn’t want Mario Puzo co-writing the screenplay. He didn’t want Brando. At best, he was only lukewarm about Coppola. And he really didn’t want Al Pacino.

Ruddy’s “experiences” show him rather publicly overcoming these obstacles with head office, but almost quietly, behind the scenes, dealing with the Mafia and Frank Sinatra’s attempts to stop the production of the film.

Ruddy and his assistant Bettye are shot up in the car one night. A dead rat is left on a copy of The Godfather novel on Evans’s bed. Mafia boss Joe Colombo starts up the Italian-American Civil Rights League and holds rallies denouncing the production of the film. Congressman Mario Biaggi tells Ruddy he’ll never get a permit to shoot in New York.

Sinatra’s role is reduced to only two scenes and the Mafia are pleased when Ruddy guarantees the word “Mafia” will be removed from the script. Coppola doesn’t care, it was only used once anyway. Peter Falk is offered a role in the film but writes back to say he’d read it and then employed a private detective to find his role in the script, but he couldn’t find it either. 

And that's just the first four episodes of this ten-part series

“Someone, I forget who, said every film is a miracle”.

Certainly, Ruddy would agree. So would his assistant Bettye McCartt. And Coppola. And Mario Puzo. And anyone else hanging by the coat-tails as The Godfather production lurches from crisis to crisis.

But probably not Robert Evans or “Brad”? They think financing a film is a God-given right for people like them.