Theodore K. Nasos

In the spring of 1972, a film about a New York crime family opened in a handful of theaters and quietly rewired the American political imagination. It was not supposed to be a political film. Mario Puzo wrote a bestseller about gangsters; Francis Ford Coppola, a young director with a precarious career, was hired to adapt it. Yet Coppola insisted from the outset that he was making "less about gangsters, than about power and powerful families, and the succession of power, and the Machiavellian