Has anyone read this big bugger? It's Coppola's development notebook for the first movie. He basically copied the novel onto notebook paper, put annotations in the resulting margins. Also inserting pages with scene summaries, etc. I got it at the library, and it's huge, so I doubt I'll actually read it all, but will just flip through pages here and there. I only got as far as the Sonny-Lucy tryst so far. A few things I noticed:

1. Coppola was circulating a draft of The Conversation before he was hired onto The Godfather project. I've long wondered if some of GF2's "what the heck is going on" quality didn't bleed out from his work on The Conversation. I wonder that more now.

2. Puzo apparently thought that his mother was one of the stronger influences on the way Vito expressed himself: "a very practical woman given to pithy remarks."

3. The wedding: early notes lament that they couldn't plausibly portray Michael in his Marine uniform, because he had already been back at school for a while. Also, Coppola says the two of them in the little alcove reflects his own experience with his wife-to-be at her first big family wedding.

4. There's a funny picture from the mortuary scene, Caan sticking his bloody face out of the blanket and Brando laughing.