First of all, hello to everyone, i am a huge fan of the GF trilogy..I have a question about rumoured rough cut that allegedly was six hours long, and there was allot more Robert De Niro as Vito scenes..this from The Godfather museum blog:

Before work began on Part II, Coppola was again struck with the "extended edition" idea and in 1973, announced to the press that Part II would not be a standalone film. Instead, it was to be edited together with Part I to form one long, continuous theatrical movie to be titled The Godfather Saga. "The movie isn't a sequel in the Hollywood sense of the word. They're two distinct pieces that are formed together to make one story. They should be told together. I want the [Saga] to be an event... like, you have to call out sick and take the day off because you know you're going to be sitting in the theater for 8 hours!"

When Paramount got word of this, they quickly reminded Coppola that the complete artistic freedom granted to him for Part II did not extend to any repackaging of Part I. Part II was to be a "Hollywood sequel", albeit an unconventional one.

When the rough cut of Part II was assembled, Coppola had a movie that was 6 hours long. It was basically two different films separated by an intermission- the first three hours detailing the rise of Vito Corleone and the last three hours chronicling the fall of Michael Corleone. At this point, the idea of combining the two stories as a flashback-driven narrative had not been thought of.

Paramount's idea was to make two different films, a prequel and a sequel, to be released a year apart from each other. Coppola hated the idea. His partner at American Zoetrope, George Lucas, was blunt: "Francis, you have two different movies. Throw one of them away, you'll never make them work together." But Coppola played around with the flashback idea until he had a "dynamite" structure that told both stories in tandem. This first "parallel narrative" cut ran 4 hours and 45 minutes. This 285 minute version was cut down to 200 minutes for theaters (210 minutes for theaters that snuck in an intermission). This left approximately 2 hours and 25 minutes* sitting on the cutting room floor.

(*About half of this 185 minutes of excised footage was made up of more of Vito's earlier exploits, the rest mainly taking place after Michael Corleone kills his brother Fredo. Many fans would be surprised to know that after Michael kills Fredo, the movie goes on for another hour and a half. Some of these plot points (Michael getting involved in Washington politics, later ending up running what's left of Hyman Roth's Miami business) would be touched upon by Mark Winegardner in his atrociously-written and poorly conceived Godfather Returns and Godfather's Revenge books. The film finally ends in 1972, with Michael Corleone back in his Long Island estate, sitting in a chair, smoking and contemplating his life of crime. After this sequence was shortened and the preceding hour cut, this scene was re-shot with Michael in slightly-less aged makeup and the time frame was bumped up to 1968.)

The Young Vito sequence likewise lost about an hour and a half. In the finished film, his story stops in 1925 as he's leaving Sicily. But much more took place when he returned to America. There are scenes with Vito establishing his budding empire, recruiting a young Luca Brasi, teaching a young Sonny the ins and outs of gangster life, and a long sequence in the 30's where the Corleone family is busy fighting off a war with a rival Mafia clan (even Al Capone sends some guys after Vito!)

De Niro gained an additional 40 pounds for these later sequences. Some stills from these shots were released as publicity photos. (The cover of The Godfather Companion contains the only known studio still from the 30's sequence; here, De Niro's bulk is much more apparent and his resemblance to Marlon Brando's Don is startling.)



so, can anyone confirm, is this all truth or false?