Albert S. Ruddy¶
At a glance¶
- Born
- March 28, 1930, Montreal, Canada
- Died
- May 25, 2024, Los Angeles, aged 94
- Before films
- Computer programmer; co-creator of Hogan's Heroes
- Godfather role
- Producer
- Academy Awards
- 2 — Best Picture, The Godfather (1973) and Million Dollar Baby (2005)
The least likely person in the story: a former computer programmer who talked his way into producing the most valuable property in Hollywood, negotiated directly with the head of a New York crime family, and won two Best Picture Oscars thirty-two years apart.
Before¶
Montreal-born, raised in New York, with a degree from USC and a job as a computer programmer at the Rand Corporation. He got into television essentially by nerve, co-creating Hogan's Heroes (1965–71) — a sitcom set in a German POW camp, which is its own remarkable fact.
His film production credits by 1970 amounted to Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), a Robert Redford motorcycle picture that lost money.
He got The Godfather by pitching Robert Evans and Charles Bluhdorn on a version of himself: fast, cheap, and unintimidated. His reported line, that he would make an ice-blue terrifying movie about people you love, is the kind of thing that sounds invented and appears in every account.
The job¶
He was, in practice, the man standing between Coppola and the studio, and between the production and New York.
The League. Joe Colombo — the Colombo family boss, and simultaneously the founder of a genuinely popular Italian-American anti-defamation movement — organized against the film. Ruddy's car windows were shot out with a note. Permits evaporated. Union trouble appeared.
Ruddy did the thing nobody expected, which was to meet Colombo directly and negotiate. The agreement, reached in February 1971: the words Mafia and Cosa Nostra would be struck from the script, and premiere proceeds would go to the League's hospital fund. Coppola has always maintained the words appeared twice and cost the film nothing.
Paramount was furious — not at the deal, but at Ruddy announcing it publicly without clearance. Bluhdorn fired him and reinstated him within days.
Everything else. Riding the budget, holding the schedule, and repeatedly talking the studio out of firing his director. Coppola and Ruddy have disagreed over the years about how much of the near-firing was real, and about who did what, but neither has ever disparaged the other, which distinguishes their relationship from Coppola's with Evans.
He collected the Best Picture Academy Award in 1973. Evans, who was not a credited producer, has never entirely accepted this.
After¶
He did not produce Part II — Coppola took the producer role himself — and his subsequent career was, by the standards of the man who made The Godfather, remarkably unglamorous: The Longest Yard (1974) and its 2005 remake, The Cannonball Run (1981) and its sequels, Megaforce, Ladybugs, and a great deal of television.
Then, at 74, he produced Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby (2004), which won Best Picture — giving him a second Academy Award thirty-two years after the first, for two films that could not have less in common.
He died on May 25, 2024, aged 94.
The Offer¶
Ruddy's account of the production is the basis for The Offer (2022), the Paramount+ miniseries in which he is played by Miles Teller, with Ruddy himself as an executive producer.
Which is the necessary caveat on everything above: the most detailed version of this story comes from the man it makes the hero of, told over fifty years, with nobody left alive to contradict the good parts. Mark Seal's Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli (2021) is the more skeptical account and the better source.