David Chase and The Godfather, too!
October 3, 2008

Since the release of The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration (Paramount) on DVD and Blu-ray last week, there’s been a helluva lot of press on the outstanding quality of the first two films in the Godfather trilogy. (And deservedly so—The Godfather and The Godfather Part II have never, ever looked this fine in any home entertainment format.) But I’m surprised that there aren’t more celluloid pundits talking about some of the new supplements found in the collection, particularly one that finds David Chase, the creator and “Godfather,” if you will) of The Sopranos spilling the beans as to what is his favorite Godfather film and Godfather moment.

“I should go on record as saying that it didn’t really all click for me until Godfather Part II, Chase said. “I suppose the whole thing about Godfather II for me was The Feast—the street fair and that killing along the rooftops. I had never seen a sequence like that—the music, the lighting, the firecracker, the saint, the intercutting, Fanucci—it was just the best thing I had ever seen. It still goes down as one of the best scenes in movie history.”

Mutual back-slapping between the two most famous mob serials in popular culture goes back to the earliest days of The Sopranos—indeed, references to The Godfather were made in the very first Sopranos episode broadcast on HBO back in 1999.

My favorite acknowledgement of the Coppola saga by the boys in Jersey can be found on an Easter Egg in the original Godfather DVD Collection issued by Paramount in 2001. I haven’t been able to find it yet on the Coppola Restoration collection (and I’m not even sure it’s on there!), but it’s easy to obtain online. Here it is:

Posted by Laurence Lerman on October 3, 2008 | Comments (0)