Tahoe locals on making of ‘Godfather Part II’

Fifty years ago, director Francis Ford Coppola wasn’t interested in helming a sequel to “The Godfather.” But Paramount felt it needed him back in the director’s chair immediately to replicate the success of the first film, which won a trio of Oscars in 1973 and was the highest-grossing film in history to date.

Once he agreed to another installment, one place helped lure him back on set: Lake Tahoe. On the golden anniversary of the film’s production there, locals are recalling the days they spent with Coppola, Al Pacino and Diane Keaton filming on the west shore. 

“It’s interesting that Lake Tahoe had a lot to do with finding the key to making this movie,” Coppola said on the 2002 DVD commentary track of “The Godfather Part II.” “I was traveling, and I came upon this big Henry Kaiser estate on Lake Tahoe and thought it was such an incredible estate that what if the Corleones had moved west to get into the gambling casino?

“It translated the compound that they had in Staten Island in the first movie into a totally new world.”   

‘The challenge of working with awkward situations’

The Tahoe portion of the film took place on the former estate of San Francisco-based shipbuilder, automobile manufacturer and eponymous health care juggernaut Henry J. Kaiser. 

The property, known as Fleur du Lac, which today is subdivided into condominium units, was commissioned and built in 1935 on a 15-acre lakefront parcel on the west shore. 

Kaiser — who was no stranger to big undertakings (see: the Hoover Dam) — had construction crews working around the clock, and the entire estate was completed by a crew of 300 in just 29 days. 

The estate’s facade and interiors were heavy on wood, stone, leaded glass and wrought iron. The natural darkness of the forest, fresh-fallen snow and the isolation of a granite shelf filled with deep blue waters created a compelling, but complicated, backdrop for art director Dean Tavoularis, one of a trio who won the Oscar for best art direction-set decoration for “The Godfather Part II.”

“Locations provide the challenge of working with awkward situations,” he told the Los Angeles Times in October 1980. “It’s interesting to have to force things to work.” 

Lake Tahoe ‘the key to making this movie’ 

In 1962, San Francisco real estate investor and Ross resident John B. DeMaria represented a group that acquired Fleur du Lac from the Kaiser estate. The initial plan was to convert the property into a private school, but that didn’t come to fruition. Eventually, DeMaria agreed to sell the resort to Santa Clara-based entrepreneur James Viso.

While the property was technically out of the DeMaria family’s hands during the production of the “Godfather” sequel, Phillip DeMaria, John’s son, says it was his father who convinced Coppola to scout the estate. 

“My father, John DeMaria, was a friend of Coppola in [the] North Beach area of San Francisco and had sold him a building,” Phillip DeMaria told SFGATE via email. “I always heard that my dad was a catalyst in putting it all together.”

Phillip himself played a small, but pivotal, part in movie history: The little boat Fredo died in — an aluminum dinghy with a single-stroke engine — was his. 

“As to the boat, I was a kid. This was a small aluminum boat that came with the property when my dad bought it. I was the only one that used it because I liked to fish. I remember watching the movie in the theater with my wife and saying with great surprise, ‘That’s my boat!’ Everyone else had big boats to play with.”

The modern sequel started with ‘The Godfather Part II’

The movie that brought Tahoe immortality in Technicolor almost didn’t happen.

“You know, I didn’t love my experience working on the first ‘Godfather,’ and I had a lot of bad memories about the picture,” Coppola said. “The idea of doing it again, being involved with those executives and [producer] Bob Evans was too much to even think of.”

In order to get back into the director’s chair, Coppola came up with a list of demands, including no studio involvement and ousting Evans as producer. In addition, he requested a $1 million salary. “The third was I don’t want to call it any name of a sequel. I want to call it ‘The Godfather Part II,’” Coppola said.

Paramount capitulated right away on Coppola’s first two requests, but the director said the studio initially balked at calling the sequel part two. Executives felt audiences might be thrown off, thinking the release was simply a repackaging of the second half of the first movie. 

Coppola eventually got his way on the title, too. Because of that, he ended up inadvertently inventing the modern sequel and the tentpole movie franchise — and it was the first movie to use the words “Part II” in the title. 

“It was the first American movie that really used ‘Part II.’ … That tradition was begun with ‘The Godfather Part II,’” Coppola said. 

The film delivered. The second installment of the “Godfather” franchise won six Oscars, including awards for best picture, best director for Coppola and best supporting actor for Robert De Niro. With De Niro’s win, he and his predecessor Marlon Brando became the first actors to win Oscars for portraying the same character (Vito Corleone). 

‘Keep your mouths shut’

By late 1973, news stories about the shoot in Tahoe were filled with speculation — including possible Mafia ties with the shoot itself — about exactly what and who was involved in the film’s production. 

The Boston Globe reported further intrigue: The set was “ringed by a wall built specially by Paramount,” the Kaiser estate was reportedly “barred to reporters,” and the production staff had “been memoed, ‘Keep your mouths shut.’”

“Filming of Paramount’s sequel to the Oscar-winning movie ‘The Godfather’ began here recently under conditions of secrecy worthy of the Mafia itself,” the Boston Globe reported with a Lake Tahoe dateline Dec. 19, 1973. 

The newspaper went on to further speculate that Mafia ties kept the shoot on the q.t. on the West Coast, as they reportedly did in New York during the making of the first film. 

“Although the secrecy order led to speculation that the studio is hoping to avoid stirring up the west coast crime syndicate, Paramount’s Bob Goodfried termed it ‘absolutely untrue.’ But he refused to give a reason for the news blackout,” the Globe reported.

While rumors of real organized crime ties informing the shoot in Lake Tahoe were never substantiated, the buzz of a major film landing on the shores of the lake continues to strike up conversation in the Tahoe Basin today. 

“We still get people in here all the time telling stories,” Susan Winter, director of the Gatekeeper’s Museum in Tahoe City and the North Lake Tahoe Historical Society, told SFGATE. “I have people come in here and tell me, ‘I was an extra.’ I had people last week who said their [ancestors] sold the land to the Kaiser family to build the estate.”

What it was like to be Mary Corleone

Former Tahoe residents who took part in the shoot still recall with clarity what it was like to be on set 50 years ago. “I loved being part of the family and had no idea they were Mafia,” BJ Topol, now a Manhattan resident, told SFGATE. “It was such a special time, and now I watch it, and I’m like ‘Oh my God!’”

Topol was 5 years old and attending kindergarten at Tahoe Lake Elementary School when one of the film’s scouts chose her to audition. “They were looking for a particular look,” Reno resident Ginny Topol, BJ’s mother, told SFGATE. “She had dark brown eyes and brown hair, and the rest of the class was blonde and blue-eyed. They asked if I would bring her by for an interview.”

BJ said she auditioned for Coppola and Pacino, going up against “all these cute girls who had like their hair done and these dresses on with stage moms,” she recalled. “They were like real actresses.”

The Topols said that Coppola wasn’t looking for a professional actress to play Mary Corleone. Once BJ got the job, she spent weeks living and interacting with Pacino and Keaton during the day at the home they shared on the Fleur du Lac property prior to filming.

“My mother would drop me off in the morning, and I’d come home at night,” she said. “I spent the whole day playing family with Al and Diane. I thought my name was Mary. It was kind of a little bit of a dream world.

“They were so, so kind. You know, Diane Keaton was so loving and so warm. I remember Al as my dad was super stressed because he was in character. Back then, I didn’t really get it. He had that brooding look. I remember having lunch and wondering why he wasn’t talking more.”

Ginny Topol said that by the time they started filming, her daughter was very comfortable with her actor parents, and especially with Coppola, who took a shine to her on the set. “There were never any tears, never ‘I don’t want to go!’ — just a really lovely experience,” Ginny said. “But it’s not all fun and games for the actors. It’s hours and hours and hours and retakes and sitting around when the sun wasn’t shining. 

“I spent a lot of time with Diane Keaton. I felt like her older sister,” Ginny continued. “I couldn’t say one bad thing. Al Pacino was not — I didn’t spend any personal time with him. He was a very intense character, very into his acting and, you know, very dark, and that’s what the movie was. He didn’t visit with the people on set, but he was very kind to my daughter — and that was all that mattered.”

Topol’s role of Mary Corleone went on to be expanded in 1990’s “The Godfather Part III.” In the third installment, Mary was portrayed by Coppola’s daughter, Sofia, who was only 2 when “The Godfather Part II” was in production.

“It’s the best party line at any dinner party,” BJ Topol said. “It like stops people in their tracks. Somehow the ‘Godfather’ comes up, and people are obsessed.” 

Coppola ‘encouraged’ by time filming in Tahoe

Beyond the Tahoe locals who appeared on camera, the film’s cast and crew captured imaginations.

Bacchi’s Inn near Dollar Point, which closed for good last fall after 90 years, was the site of at least one date night between co-stars — and then couple — Pacino and Keaton. 

Tahoe tales from beyond the set even have a place in my own family’s yarns. My father recalled meeting members of the cast and crew at the Cal-Neva Lodge & Casino, which straddles the state line on the north shore, between call times in the winter of 1973-74. Some would show up at the blackjack tables in full wardrobe and makeup.

One story, which he’d tell to just about anyone who’d listen, was that he had no idea his blackjack buddies Al and Diane were the stars of a major film: “They didn’t tell me they were actors. They said they were up here working,” he would deadpan.

For those looking to relive the 50th anniversary of the shoot at Tahoe, there is a current exhibit of local artifacts and articles from “The Godfather Part II” at the Gatekeeper’s Museum. 

“We’ve tried to also get items from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,” Winter told SFGATE, “but they’re also planning some kind of celebration.”

Last November, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened a “Godfather” exhibit, set to run until March 17, 2024. The Los Angeles museum’s exhibit features a “wide array of original objects” from “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II.” 

Most Tahoe locals involved in the production of the film have moved on, and stories from that time ease their way into becoming folklore. For Coppola, Lake Tahoe remains the place where he started “feeling encouraged” with the movie’s direction. 

For the film’s climax, Fredo’s death on the lake, Coppola even used a piece of his own personal history in the Corleone family failson’s final frames — the famous assassination in the middle of the lake, whispering a Hail Mary before dipping his line into the lake, a ritual Coppola said he’d made up for himself as a young boy. 

“I gave Fredo the story for his own,” Coppola said, “that he would catch the, uh, fish every time he said a prayer. 

“And at the end, have him say the prayer just before [Al] Neri pulls the trigger.”