The mooning contest that plagued the shoot of ‘The Godfather’
The Godfather is genuinely regarded as a serious movie that holds a certain gravitas within the cultural zeitgeist; it was a record-breaking film that launched the career of one of the most notorious filmmakers and created many of the storytelling techniques that we associate with the gangster epic.
It has been endlessly studied and picked apart by despondent high school students who would much rather be studying something else and film theorists who analyze every frame. The score has been revered as one of the greatest ever made, with a theme that wriggles its way into your brain each time you hear it and will be hummed for days on end. It was so serious that the actors found new ways of dealing with the pressure of making it by flashing their bare arses at each other on set.
The cast of The Godfather have gone down in cinema history for their performances in the Italian family epic about organised crime, revenge and loyalty, with Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall and James Caan being revered for their intricate and immersive family dynamic. There are many stories about the production itself, from Brando’s struggle to learn lines to the relocation of the crew around Sicily, where a group of criminals demanded money from them.
However, one of the sillier stories from the set is Brando and Duvall mooning each other in between takes. Apparently, this began when Duvall dared Caan to stick his bum out of a car window and flash Brando, who was sitting in another car nearby. Cann agreed, and it inadvertently sparked a huge mooning contest that lasted the entire production and was eventually won by Brando.
When asked about this, Duvall said, “Yeah, we did all that stuff. I can’t tell you all the stories because my wife will hit me over the head with a frying pan if I do.”
Duvall’s coyness about divulging any further stories only leads to further speculation about the other antics that took place on set. Coppola is known for being a serious director, so it is also fun to imagine how he responded to this behaviour, but perhaps the director also joined in. On a production that was so demanding, everyone needed a bit of humour to get through the day and ease the pressure of the task at hand.
The Godfather famously went on to spark two more sequels, and recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. While Coppola has recently tried his hand at another ‘epic’ project with Megalopolis, he has not yet stopped making films and has announced his next project, which he has said is more challenging than any of his other productions.
At the age of 85, perhaps Coppola could take a leaf from Duvall’s book and learn how to take himself less seriously, which is an underrated quality when it comes to making films. But in order to see yourself truly and without a clouded judgement, it is a necessary quality that helps you find the fun and understand that the business of making movies is not a matter of life or death, despite how we may feel otherwise.
