Godfather is a very strange movie in the way FFC conceived and directed it--it's not quite ad libbed, but it wasn't filmed from a conventional script. Or at least it wasn't filmed from whatever screenplay treatment Coppola had given to producer Robert Evans beforehand.
I actually don't like the idea of a Godfather directed by Sergio Leone fresh off 'Once Upon A Time In The West'. That movie has none of the intimacy or dramatic realism of Coppola's work--also, as far as I know 'Once Upon A Time In America' is very much Leone responding to a decade and a half of New Hollywood. And it's deliberately not a crowdpleaser.
A Godfather that looks like OUATIA just isn't going to get a sequel. It's not going to be one of the first modern blockbusters.
Coppola's two movies were violent but they presented the mob in a somewhat romantic light. He had grand sweeping characters in a grand sweeping narrative.
This is broadly true, but I've always maintained that the Italian-speaking gangsters in GF II that DeNiro's character goes up against are about as hardcore & ugly as any mobsters in the genre. The criminals in the town of Corleone want to kill a boy, they murder his mother instead; Don Fanucci in Hell's Kitchen is as intimidating as any Scorcese capo. None of them are truly Shakespearian characters like Frankie Five Angels or Old Man Roth are. They're just vicious sleazebags.
I think this is because Mario Puzo wrote this section of the movie and therefore had more creative control over those characters who wouldn't appear in the Coppola part of the movie...
Leone, on the other hand, showed mobsters for what they actually are, vicious petty amoral thugs, so his mob movie had vicious petty amoral thugs in a grand sweeping narrative.
Putting it another way, in Coppola's hands De Niro played a noble young man whose struggles as an immigrant led him to life of crime and in Leone's hands De Niro played a rapist.
I don't know enough about Leone as a scenarist to know if he was capable of either collaborating with or outright replacing FFC as writer of the series, but seeing as Coppola originally didn't want to direct 2, instead wanting Scorceses to direct his and Puzo's script, I wonder if Leone could have directed the screenplay instead?
More intriguingly: Leone directs the DeNiro sequences (Puzos' writing) in GF II, while either Coppola or Scorcese directs the Pacino sequences?
I also think that, unlike Coppola, Leone wouldn't shy away from the Johnny Fontaine/Frank Sinatra plot which was a large part of Puzo's novel.
Meh. The less airport novel potboiler story arch the better, IMO.
