A closer look
Paramount Pictures genuinely believed that 'The Godfather' was going to be an unmitigated disaster during its chaotic production and constantly threatened to fire director Francis Ford Coppola because the studio despised the casting of Marlon Brando due to his reputation for being difficult and hated Al Pacino because they thought he was too short and completely unknown to audiences; Coppola only kept his job by staging a series of dramatic corporate interventions and allegedly utilizing a few real-life mobster intimidation tactics of his own to keep the studio executives at bay, which perfectly explains why an objectively flawless masterpiece of American cinema being born from a toxic corporate environment of constant panic and screaming makes Hollywood such a brilliantly dysfunctional nightmare
