Hey, uh, get me a martini. It's not a real bar, sir. My name's Doug Fox. I'm the Property Master on<i> The
Offer.</i> What my job is, is to
make the actors believe that everything is real. The scope of the whole
project is pretty immense. A paperweight for Bluhdorn's
office. We made a lot of Varietys. Ruddy's briefcase. We made menus, we made matches. Francis used a Leica camera. Screen test with Brando. Wine bottle from Louis
Restaurant. Mario Puzo's typewriter that he typed<i> The Godfather</i> on. The first thing I do is
start researching the actors, because I gotta get the
jewelry, glasses, 'cause they wanna come out
onto the set in character, and they won't be in character until they have all their props
on. Look at this. That's for you, right there. [Doug] For Giovanni, the
first thing he wanted to know, Colombo had this pin on his
thing, and I pulled it out and handed
it to him, and he was like, "Wow." He got it just perfect. I mean, it was really great. He knew from the beginning
that we had him covered. That attention to detail, and that support really comes
through. It is meaningful for an
audience. Matthew Goode was very excited 'cause his character's all about
glasses. You got yourself a go picture. We laid out a lot of
glasses, and he saw one, you know, "These are great,
these are great," put 'em on. And suddenly he was Robert
Evans. Oh and lighten up. Back in those days when they
did the schedules for movies, they had this thing called "the
board." It's a big red cardboard
thing that unfolds, and it basically has every day's
shooting in little strips. And you can take the strips,
and you can move them around. And that's the way they used
to make schedules back then. I found the board, and I
needed to find the strips. So I called a guy that had
done strips for another show, and it turns out he was
a second AD for Francis on all the movies after<i> The
Godfather.</i> And he put together a whole
board for me, pretty darn close to what was really done back
then. The recreations of Best & Co. That street looked pretty
amazing. He comes out the door with
an armful of presents, and she's got a shopping bag. We had to custom make the
shopping bag, because we didn't have
a 1970s shopping bag in our back pocket. Francis! We're finally here. [Doug] Francis's prompt book. When I first opened the
script and started reading it, I said, prompt book. I had no idea what a prompt book
was. This book that Francis
carries around with him where he cut all the pages
out of<i> The Godfather</i> novel, pasted them onto larger sheets
of paper, and then bound all that
together, so he can write his notes in the
corners. And he made this giant book, that's probably this thick of
all his notes from the movie, and it was his Bible for the
movie. Okay, so I gotta make that. He probably spent eight
months making that thing, and the only way we could have
done it is because they published the
prompt book. So we knew every page, page by
page, but the handwritten, the
cutting out, pasting in things, that process took a long time. Getting on set, having that
book, feeling the weight of it,
and seeing his notes there, it's very humanizing. And the other thing of course is the horse's head. What the f*** is that? Francis says it's so bad, he will never shoot the
scene with this horse's head. I'm not going to put
this crap on screen. Well that one they didn't like, somehow ended up on auction many years later. Well it was good for me,
'cause there was a picture, and I knew exactly what
I was trying to make. One of my guys, his grandfather, was the special effects
person for Francis, and got the horse's head. You didn't get this from me. You know, I said I don't even
wanna know how he got all that stuff. Not bad, right? There's no way we're
using a real horse's head. So we got the best
taxidermy place in town, that had made a really
good looking horse's head. It's not f***ing real, right? No, no. Of course not, come on Bob. Well, f*** me, props to props. The more we make the actors
believe the more the actors make you
believe.
