Albert Ruddy obituary: producer of The Godfather (2024)

Alerted by Los Angeles police that he was being tailed, Al Ruddy swapped cars with his assistants to throw his pursuers off the scent. One night, after the film producer’s secretary had parked his sports car at her home, the windows were shattered by gunfire. A note on the dashboard said: “Stop making the mafia movie.”

Ruddy did not, though it seemed many times that The Godfather would never make it to the silver screen. Lauded for its naturalistic portrayal of bloody mob rivalries in postwar New York, the novel by Mario Puzo was a bestseller when it was published in 1969, but it was a source of angst for image-conscious real-life mafiosos.

A few weeks before filming was scheduled to begin in 1971, Ruddy and studio executives at Paramount were bombarded with letters from prominent Italian-Americans, including politicians, judges and civic leaders, who demanded that the film be scrapped on the grounds that it would stoke xenophobia and unfairly tarnish the reputations of scores of family-loving legitimate businessmen.

Ruddy feared that production would be disrupted by demonstrations, union-led boycotts and strikes. Owners refused permission for their properties to be used as filming locations. A protest rally at Madison Square Garden raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for a campaign against the project, and even Frank Sinatra was hostile. Sinatra bristled at the novel’s character, Johnny Fontaine, a not-dissimilar crooner with mob connections.

Opposition was orchestrated by the Italian-American Civil Rights League, a pressure group formed in 1970 with the stated goal of combating stereotypical depictions of Italian-Americans. Said to have 45,000 members, the league was greatly exercised by the notion that a blockbuster portraying homicidal gangsters in an unsympathetic light might be detrimental to the wider community. Few dared to point out that, as the league was founded by Joseph Colombo Sr, the boss of one of New York’s five mafia families, there was a uniquely vested interest behind its professed outrage.

“First, they’d complain that we would bring additional cars into the area and take up parking space,” Ruddy said. “So we’d promise to bus our people to the locations. Then they’d say they didn’t want buses in the area. We were ready to pay, rent, replant, repaint, replace everything in the area for them. We were ready to make all kinds of concessions, but in the end I realised that they just didn’t want us.”

The ambitious, tenacious and silver-tongued Ruddy decided that if The Godfather were ever to reach cinemas he would need to appease what amounted to a mafia public relations department. He met Colombo and his son, Anthony, and made them an offer they did not refuse. The meeting took place at the Park Sheraton Hotel, where 1,500 members of the league had gathered in the grand ballroom to listen to the negotiations. Anthony quieted the resounding boos by announcing the concessions Ruddy had agreed to make, and gradually there were whooping cheers as Ruddy explained that the film was about corrupt American society and what happens to poor immigrants faced with discrimination. Ruddy agreed to donate the proceeds from the film’s premiere to the league’s hospital fund and to let the group review the script, promising that no character would utter the words “mafia” or “La Cosa Nostra”. Ruddy also hired Colombo underlings as extras. By the end of the meeting, Colombo placed a pin in Ruddy’s lapel designating him a “captain” in the league.

As if by magic, obstacles vanished from his path. The protests and complaints melted away. After friendly visits from league officials, property owners and business people who had blacklisted the cast and crew had abrupt changes of heart. Wise guys showed up to protect filming from disruption.

Ruddy’s biggest problem was now his furious overlords at Gulf and Western, the parent company of Paramount, who accused him of making deals without their authorisation and sacked him after he was photographed with Colombo at a press conference. He was swiftly rehired when it became clear that his relationship with the godfather was essential to making The Godfather, though he would not be involved in its sequels.

Luckily for Ruddy, by the time Colombo was shot and grievously wounded at an Italian-American Unity Day celebration in the summer of 1971, on-location filming in New York had wrapped. Released the next year, The Godfather, a nearly three-hour mafia epic that did not mention the mafia, became a box-office smash that made Ruddy rich and established him as a Hollywood power player.

Albert Stotland Ruddy was born into a Jewish family in 1930 in Montreal, Canada, to Hy Stotland, a businessman, and Ruth Ruddy, a fur fashion designer, and was raised in New York by his mother. He studied architectural design at the University of Southern California and chemical engineering at the City College of New York.

In 1967 he married Françoise Wizenberg, a Paris-born Holocaust survivor who was also a film producer. She became the personal assistant to Rajneesh, an Indian mystic and guru, and took the name Ma Prem Hasya. The marriage ended in divorce; Ruddy remarried in 1981, to Wanda McDaniel, a Beverly Hills-based Giorgio Armani executive liaison for the media and elite clients. They met in 1979 when she was a society journalist. They had a son, John, and a daughter, Alexandra, an actress.

Ruddy was working for a construction company in Hackensack, New Jersey, when he met the Warner Bros president, Jack L Warner, at a party, and smooth-talked the mogul into giving him a short-lived job. After a spell with the Rand Corporation, a defence industry think tank, he tried his luck in Hollywood again and co-created Hogan’s Heroes, a successful television sitcom about life in a Nazi prisoner of war camp, that ran from 1965 to 1971.

He produced Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), which starred Robert Redford. The public were not enthused, but Paramount executives noted that Ruddy had stewarded Little Fauss to completion ahead of schedule and under budget.

“I got a call on a Sunday. ‘Do you want to do The Godfather?’” Ruddy told Vanity Fair in 2009. “I said, ‘Yes, of course, I love that book’ — which I had never read.” He flew to New York for a meeting with Charles Bluhdorn, the volcanic head of Gulf and Western, who was rumoured to have mob links. Given a minute to make his pitch, Ruddy told him: “Charlie, I want to make an ice-blue, terrifying movie about the people you love.” Bluhdorn grinned, banged on the table and walked out. Ruddy had the job.

He met Puzo to discuss the script, but told him that novelists rarely made good screenwriters. Aiming to persuade Ruddy that he was flexible enough for the task, Puzo flung a copy of his book on the floor and promised not to re-read it. Ruddy hired him.

After The Godfather, Ruddy produced and wrote the story for The Longest Yard (1974, titled The Mean Machine in the UK), a sports prison comedy starring Burt Reynolds, and reunited with Reynolds in 1981 for a screwball car-race comedy, The Cannonball Run.

Clint Eastwood had presented Ruddy with an Oscar in 1973, when The Godfather won best picture. They worked together 31 years later when Ruddy persuaded a reluctant Eastwood to direct and star alongside Hilary Swank in the boxing drama Million Dollar Baby. Ruddy, who had acquired the rights to the story, won his second Academy Award as co-producer of the film.

In an industry focused on the short term, Ruddy was prepared to play a long game. He and Eastwood collaborated again in 2021 — when both were 91 — with Ruddy a producer and Eastwood starring in and directing Cry Macho, a western drama Ruddy had wanted to make since the mid-Seventies.

He had approached Ayn Rand in the Seventies about the rights to her 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, but the negotiations deteriorated after he refused to give her script approval. “I’ll put in my will, the one person who can’t get it is you,” she told him, Ruddy said later. In 2015, 33 years after her death, he got permission for an adaptation after making a deal with an investor who held the rights.

His plans did not bear fruit, but after more than five decades the gravel-voiced Ruddy was philosophical about the nature of the business. “Everything’s hanging on f***ing threads,” he told the Slashfilm website in 2020. “You have to know how to fail with happiness on your face. Just keep going. And never, never stop,” he said. “How did you get that made? Because you have f***ing gall, you have balls, you have luck, timing; everything.”

In 2022 Ruddy was executive producer of The Offer, a TV drama based on his recollections of the making of The Godfather — some of them faulty or exaggerated, according to Peter Bart, a former Paramount executive. Ruddy was played by Miles Teller in the ten-part series, which a Times critic described as “spectacularly indulgent, as overweight as [Marlon] Brando himself”.

Despite the stress and threats, Ruddy looked back on the film with nostalgia. “I’d rather deal with a mob guy shaking hands on a deal than a Hollywood lawyer,” he said.

Albert S Ruddy, film producer, was born on March 28, 1930. He died on May 25, 2024, aged 94

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