The Family Corleone (2012)¶

At a glance¶

Author: Ed Falco
Based on: An unproduced screenplay by Mario Puzo
Published: May 8, 2012
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Story years: 1933–1934
Setting: New York City
Series position: Prequel — earliest in the sequence apart from Part II's flashbacks

The prequel, and the closest thing that exists to the fourth film that was never made.

Where it came from¶

Through the 1990s, Coppola and Puzo developed a Godfather Part IV built on the Part II template — two timelines, cut against each other. One half would follow Vito Corleone in the 1930s, consolidating power as Prohibition ended, with a young Sonny entering the business; Robert De Niro would return, and Coppola discussed the young Sonny role with Leonardo DiCaprio. The other half would follow Vincent in the 1980s, destroying everything.

Puzo died on July 2, 1999. The film was never made.

The 1930s half of Puzo's material survived as a screenplay, and in 2012 the novelist and playwright Ed Falco — a Virginia Tech professor, and, as it happens, an uncle of the actor Edie Falco — was commissioned to turn it into a novel.

Plot¶

New York, 1933. Prohibition is ending, which means the most profitable business in organized crime is about to become legal, and every family in the city needs a new plan.

Vito Corleone is not yet the Don of the 1945 novel. He is a successful olive oil importer with a growing criminal operation and a careful reputation, working beneath the dominant boss Giuseppe Mariposa, who is preparing to take everything.

Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Santino Corleone — furious, charming, entirely without judgment — has assembled a crew of neighborhood kids and is hijacking trucks, some of which turn out to belong to people his father cannot afford to offend. Vito has spent Sonny's whole life keeping him out of the business. Sonny has decided otherwise, and the novel's real subject is a father losing that argument.

Around them: Tom Hagen at college, being groomed for the consigliere role he doesn't yet know he's being groomed for; Clemenza and Tessio as young men; and Luca Brasi, introduced as a genuinely frightening independent operator, whose recruitment into the family is one of the book's set pieces.

Is it good?¶

It's the best of the three continuation novels, for a simple structural reason: it's a prequel, so it isn't squeezed between things the films already fixed. It has room.

Falco is also a better prose writer than the material requires, and the Sonny-and-Vito material has genuine pathos — you are watching a man fail to save a son whose death you already know the shape of.

The weaknesses are the ones prequels always have. Everyone is where you know they'll be. Luca Brasi's origin explains a character who was more frightening unexplained. And the novel has to be careful never to contradict Part II, which sets the outer boundaries of what Vito can be doing in the 1920s and 1930s.

The lawsuit¶

Publication triggered a fight that had been building since The Godfather's Revenge.

Paramount Pictures sued the Puzo estate, arguing the estate had no right to keep licensing new Godfather novels and that the books damaged the film property. The estate counter-sued, arguing Paramount had failed to exploit the property and had no standing over publishing.

It settled in 2013. The practical outcome: Paramount emerged with clear rights to make further Godfather films, and the estate retained its publishing arrangement. Nothing further has been filmed, and no further novels have been published — so the settlement's most visible effect has been to stop the continuation series at three books.