By the spring of 1969, The Godfather had turned its author, Mario Puzo, into an overnight celebrity. Tasked with adapting his best-selling book for the screen, Puzo’s life soon became that of a Hollywood big-shot. He took up residence at the Beverly Hills Hotel, had an office on the Paramount lot, and even hired a personal assistant, Janet Snow, who spent as much time playing tennis with the overweight writer as she did driving him to-and-from dinners with Puzo's newfound friends and admirers such as Orson Welles. All the while, Paramount still had a movie to make. The studio turned to Al Ruddy, a no-nonsense, pennywise producer and former shoe salesman who—like Robert Evans and Puzo—found success by good luck as much as by tenacity. In Episode Three, Mark and Nathan trace Ruddy’s unorthodox path to the top of the film industry, and explore the circumstances of Puzo’s new life in the spotlight—which included an unfortunate dust-up at Chasen's with the real-life inspiration for The Godfather's Johnny Fontaine, Frank Sinatra.

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It was the fall of 1963, and Mario Puzo—a gambler, overeater, and dead-broke pulp fiction writer with outsize artistic ambitions—was glued to his television. Like the rest of America, he was captivated by the widely broadcasted Valachi hearings, in which a Mafia foot soldier publicly revealed the inner-workings of the Italian-American criminal underworld. Puzo also happened to be on the hunt for the subject of his next book, and what could be more appealing to a man who'd grown up surrounded by crooks and hustlers in Hell's Kitchen than a shadowy underworld filled with strongmen and wiseguys? In Episode Two, Mark and Nathan chronicle Mario Puzo's life before "The Godfather," and explain how the writer's chosen subject matter coincided with a growing public interest in the Mafia, resulting in Puzo becoming one of the best-selling authors of his time.

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The genesis of "The Godfather" dates back to 1966, when Paramount Pictures was Hollywood's last-place studio, financially flailing and desperate for a hit movie. Enter Charles Bluhdorn, an Austrian-born industrialist captivated by the romance of Hollywood and in the market for a studio with which he could prove himself as a movie mogul. Upon taking hold of Paramount through his conglomerate, Gulf and Western, Bluhdorn hired as head of production Robert Evans—a green but dogged producer and former actor—based solely on the strength of a profile he had read in "The New York Times." In Episode 1, Mark and Nathan examine how Bluhdorn’s immigration to New York led to Evans's hiring and a chance meeting with a certain cigar-puffing, gambling-addicted pulp fiction writer named Mario Puzo, who was hawking the option on an unfinished draft of his novel about a New York crime family—a novel that would change their lives, and Paramount’s legacy, forever.

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