The Godfather is treated as an inevitable masterpiece, but its origins were driven by desperation. Mario Puzo sold an unfinished 60-page manuscript to Paramount for a $12,500 option because he needed $10,000 to pay off his bookies. Francis Ford Coppola initially called the novel cheap and sleazy and only took the job because his company American Zoetrope owed Warner Bros. over $400,000. This episode follows how Paramount, still stinging from the failure of The Brotherhood, went looking for an Italian-American director, was turned down by Sergio Leone and Peter Bogdanovich, and finally landed on a young filmmaker who reframed a mob story as a critique of American capitalism.

We dig into the fights over budget and setting, including the studio's plan to shoot in contemporary Kansas City, the secret screen test that got Marlon Brando cast with ...