Marlon brando

It’s hard to imagine in the wake of GoodFellas, The Sopranos and Gomorrah but there was a time, not so long ago, when the very existence of the Mafia was widely dismissed as an urban myth. What changed was Mario Puzo’s 1969 bestselling novel The Godfather, which sold nine million copies in two years. You might assume, not unreasonably, that the 1972 movie version – now acknowledged as one of the greatest films of all time – was one of the most obvious commissions in Hollywood history. But it was dogged by so much controversy and plagued by so many disasters that it was very nearly stillborn. Every stage in

The actor never knew they would use a real horse’s head. This was May 1971 and John Marley was preparing to perform in the most infamous scene in The Godfather, playing the corrupt movie producer who wakes up to find a horse’s head in his bed. Reportedly, Marley assumed this would just be a plastic prop. But the director, Francis Ford Coppola, had other ideas. In a note to himself, Coppola observed: ‘If the audience does not jump out of their seats on this one, you have failed.’ So he quietly sent an assistant to a dog-food factory to pick up a genuine head, newly hewn from the shoulders of