Francis Ford Coppola

UPDATE- The cycle of honors around the 50th Anniversary of The Godfather will close in full regalia this weekend. On Saturday, October 29, at 7:30 PM,  Francis Ford Coppola’s classic film, winner of five Golden Globes, will screen for one night only, to the sound of Nino Rota’s score, played live by a 61-piece orchestra at the Dolby Theatre, 6801 Hollywood Blvd.

It was a night of celebration to honor a classic. The red carpet was laid out a few meters from the main movie theater of the Paramount studio, which kicked off its year-long commemoration of The Godfather , considered in many lists of filmmakers and critics as the best film of all time.

.

The Caffe Trieste still stands in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. There in 1970, Francis Ford Coppola, 31 at the time, spent many an afternoon typing away on his yellow Olivetti Lettera 32, working on what he calls a “prompt book”: the voluminous and extensively detailed blueprint that would serve as the basis of his screenplay for The Godfather.

"If I do have some period in which I know some power or money, I will watch out that it does not corrupt me", Francis Ford Coppola told us in December of 1990, when the last installment on his extraordinary Godfather trilogy was being released. Nominated seven times for Golden Globes in the writer and director categories - for The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Cotton Club and The Godfather Part III - Coppola won three times: in 1973, for best director and best screenplay, for The Godfather.