Movies are really long these days. Even the next movie about a rich guy who dresses up as a flying mammal is pushing three hours. Back in the early ’70s, movies were shorter. Indeed, super mogul Robert Evans claims he had to coerce director Francis Ford Coppola into making his gangster saga, The Godfather, into a three-hour epic. It’s one of many things you may learn when you watch Paramount+’s forthcoming miniseries about the making of the deathless mob classic, which by the way runs 10 episodes, meaning it will last about 10 hours — or about an hour longer than the entire trilogy put together.
It’s called The Offer, and it stars Miles Teller, who famously stepped in after Armie Hammer’s unsettling personal life destroyed his career. (He can still be seen in the upcoming Hercule Poirot romp Death on the Nile.) Teller plays Albert S. Ruddy, whose career spans Burt Reynolds vehicles to Clint Eastwood movies to the Rodney Dangerfield cross-dressing soccer comedy Ladybugs.
One of Ruddy’s earliest successes was the first Godfather, but it wasn’t easy. As the trailer teases, he had to battle both Hollywood and its outsized egos (including Matthew Goode’s Evans) as well as the mob, who didn’t take kindly that a movie would portray them so accurately. And it all comes from screenwriter Michael Tolkin, who knows a thing or two about how Hollywood works, having savagely it in his script for the Robert Altman favorite The Player.
You can watch the trailer for The Offer above.