Paramount has decided to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of "The Godfather" by making a ten part miniseries dramatizing the creation of the film. As a film nerd, I love media like this. Non-film nerds may not have the patience for watching how the sausage is made, but I love seeing all the ups and downs of the creative process, especially when such colorful artists and personalities are involved. As someone who is already pretty familiar with a lot of this story, "The Offer" isn't telling me much I don't know, but its obvious love of "The Godfather" and the enthusiastic performances kept me happily watching all the way through.
Producer Albert Ruddy (Miles Teller) is positioned as the main character, a successful television creator trying to move into film projects. Turning "The Godfather" into a film is fight from the start, and it takes considerable effort to win over Paramount's head of production, Robert Evans (Matthew Goode), executive Barry Lapidus (Colin Hanks), and Paramount's owner Charles Bludhorn (Burn Gorman), and then to hire writer Mario Puzo (Patrick Gallo), director Francis Ford Coppola (Dan Fogler), and Al Pacino (Anthony Ippolito). There are fights over everything from budget to casting to locations, and Ruddy and his intrepid secretary Bettye (Juno Temple) have to juggle one crisis after another. If that weren't enough, Ruddy also faces opposition from the mob, lead by Joe Colombo (Giovanni Ribisi), who thinks the film will portray Italians negatively.
Hollywood in the '70s was a different planet, and the chief joys of "The Offer" are really just basking in the glamor and the excitement of New Hollywood. All the boozing, the smoking, the foul-mouthed diatribes, and the macho posturing have been lovingly recreated. The show is exceptionally well cast, with the standouts being Dan Fogler as the uncompromising auteur, Coppola, and Matthew Goode in high powered schmoozer mode as the legendary Robert Evans. The accent's not quite right, and neither is the look, but Goode oozes charisma, and is clearly having such a good time that he's a lot of fun to watch. Juno Temple has carved out a nice niche for herself playing Girl Friday types, and it's always good to see her in anything. Also, after this and his recent films, Miles Teller is making a good case for himself as a solid leading man.
There's no getting away from the fact that "The Offer" is pretty indulgent and overlong. If you've never heard of "The Godfather," I can't imagine that the series' gleeful namedropping and shameless fascination with movie ephemera would be very interesting. It's been a long time since general audiences cared about Frank Sinatra (Frank John Hughes) or Marlon Brando (Justin Chambers), who make brief appearances. Still, the behind-the-scenes chaos of "The Godfather" does provide plenty of material for drama and excitement. There seem to be endless issues with securing talent, getting permits, staying ahead of bad press, and just when everything seems to be going right, Bludhorn wants to sell the studio. There's quite a lot of pandering to the fans and lionizing the surviving participants like Ruddy and Coppola. On the other hand, the execution is swell. It's lovely to see so many of the old locations recreated, and smaller players like Bettye get their due.
The less successful parts of the show are easy to ignore, mostly involving storylines and characters who don't really work. Ruddy's wife Francoise (Nora Arnzeder) shows up for a few episodes before divorcing him and evaporating into thin air. Ribisi's Joe Colombo never seems like much of a threat, and really everything involving the real mobsters feels pretty perfunctory. However, despite what the marketing might suggest, Colombo's not in the story much. The series takes plenty of creative license when it comes to the mob encounters, but ironically the writers aren't ever able to make Colombo and his crew ever feel like more than the cliches they were so worried about being portrayed as. I get the sense that the creators simply weren't as interested in this part of the story as the power plays going on at Paramount.
In the end I came away from "The Offer" decently entertained and a little wistful. The show delivers nostalgia more than anything, not just for "The Godfather," but for that brief time in Hollywood where pictures like "Love Story" and "The Longest Yard" could top the box office, and a ragtag bunch of guys with enough gumption could put art ahead of business, and make a movie classic. And as time goes on that time feels ever briefer, and farther away than ever.
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