Latest in The Godfather

The angriest filmmaking fights that I've witnessed over the years have not been about cost or cast; they were about length. The movies were too long but so were the fights. I re-lived some of them this week when I saw Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flo…

Will the Hollywood studio become extinct? One hundred years ago, Louis B. Mayer unfurled his grand idea to mobilize "all the stars in heaven" for his filmmaking adventure. His dream factory, once prolific, now seems adrift amid the economic debris of…

With festivals beckoning and box office wobbling, this obnoxious question looms ever larger: What's next? The strikes will end and a new season will begin but where's that next cycle of movies and streaming content that represent groundbreaking ideas…

There it was in my email, right on the dot, at 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning– the digital equivalent of a dreaded question that follows every industry screening. As the old joke puts it: "How did you love my movie?" I had (finally) visited the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Tuesday afternoon…

The annual Oscar melee always reminds us of this mandate: Never believe the “buzz.” Every important movie arrives with an aura – and it's usually wrong or misleading. The advance buzz on The Godfather was so disastrous even Francis Coppola sensed it was…

Gray Frederickson, an Oscar-winning co-EP on The Godfather films and Apocalypse Now who was one of the busiest and most respected producers and production executives of the 1960s through the '80s, died November 20 of prostate cancer in Oklahoma City. He was 85. His wife, Karen, confirmed his…

The late, great James Caan who died today had a career that spanned 55 years and included classic films such as Howard Hawks’ El Dorado, Michael Mann’s Thief, Rob Reiner’s Misery, Jon Favreau’s Elf and, of course, Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece, The Godfather. Almost from the start, Caan was working opposite…

Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, stars of the Francis Ford Coppola classics The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, remembered their castmate James Caan today as a great actor and friend. "Jimmy was my fictional brother and my lifelong friend,” Pacino said in a statement. “It's hard to believe that he won't be in the…

Francis Ford Coppola, who first directed James Caan in the 1969 feature film The Rain People and would reunite three years later for the Hollywood masterpiece The Godfather, remembered his old friend in a statement provided exclusively to Deadline. "Jimmy was someone who stretched through my life longer and closer…

James Caan, the tough-guy actor who scored an Oscar nom as mafioso Sonny Corleone in The Godfather and an Emmy nom for playing NFL running back Brian Piccolo in Brian’s Song, among a host of big film and TV roles including Elf and Las Vegas, died Wednesday night in Los Angeles. He was 82. His family confirmed the news…

Al Pacino was constantly on the verge of getting fired from The Godfather but director Francis Ford Coppola saved the role that launched his career by shifting around shooting sequences to move up a scene – the one where Michael Corleone commits to the family business by popping another mobster and a crooked cop in a…