IN the spring of 1971, the biggest show in town wasn’t on Broadway – it was on the streets, where thousands gathered to watch the filming of “The Godfather.”
The hugely anticipated version of Mario Puzo’s best-selling saga almost wasn’t shot here, thanks to opposition from real-life Mafia don Joe Colombo.
Colombo, head of the Italian-American Anti-Defamation League – and, authorities said, chief of one of the five crime families depicted in Puzo’s book – rallied at Madison Square Garden to stop the filming.
He only green-lighted the film after Al Ruddy, the movie’s street-smart producer, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse – deleting the terms “Mafia” and “Costra Nostra” from the script and agreeing to donate opening-day receipts in Manhattan to one of the league’s charities.
“Without the Mafia’s help, it would have been impossible to make the picture,” Ruddy told Harlan Lebo, author of the 1997 book “The Godfather Legacy.”
“There would have been pickets, breakdowns, labor problems, cut cables, all kinds of things.”
Though Paramount’s parent company, Gulf + Western Industries, reneged on the second part of the deal, director Francis Coppola started filming in Manhattan on March 23, outside the old Best and Co. clothing store on Fifth Avenue – where Michael (Al Pacino) and girlfriend Kay Adams (Diane Keaton) go Christmas shopping.
That scene drew crowds – but nothing like the tens of thousands who strained to catch a glimpse of Marlon Brando on Mott Street, which was decked out with pushcarts and other period details.
When Don Corleone – Brando – collapsed to the pavement in a hail of (fake) bullets, “there were gasps from the crowds and a horrified silence,” Ruddy recalled. “When Marlon stood up after Coppola yelled ‘cut,’ the crowd cheered and Brando made a low, sweeping bow.”
The opening wedding sequence was filmed on Staten Island and most of the interiors were shot at the old Filmways studio in East Harlem.
Things went pretty much without hitch – except when Pacino fell off a running board of a vintage car and hurt his leg while filming the famous restaurant shootout scene in the Bronx.
Ironically, Colombo never saw the film: He was gunned down on June 28, 1971 at a league rally in Columbus Circle, steps from Gulf + Western headquarters.
For the next decade came a decade-long series of retaliatory mob shootings – straight out of “The Godfather.”
The the movie itself – which The Post’s critic, Archer Winsten, called “a film of great force, excitement and quality” – has since achieved classic status, especially in the city in which it was filmed.
* Lou Lumenick is a movie critic for The Post.