Hands up if you want Francis Ford Coppola's personal 'The Godfather' notebook
If you have a literary favourite, there's a world of ephemera out there just in time for December 25
Literary merch is big business. Tracks from David Bowie albums turned into faux Penguin spines. Romeo and Julienne chopping boards. Mr Darcy fragrance for men. Bilbo’s front door shower curtain. I like Tintin, so over the years I’ve accumulated, in addition to the books, keyrings, cushions, posters, little models (including one of the Unicorn ship) and even a life-sized stuffed doll which looks a bit like Snowy after he’s been playing in a hedge. What I have not got is a Hergé original anything.
Bookish bric-à-brac is one thing, but handwritten literary manuscripts, typed copy edits, signed letters, and song lyrics are quite another fish kettle. The market for these is absolutely red hot at the moment. So for example if I fancied Hergé’s original black and white drawing for the 1942 cover of Tintin in America I’d have had to pay roughly £2m when it came up at auction a couple of years ago. Even a pencilled page of Flight 714 for Sydney would have been well beyond my grasp (£200,000, give or take the odd pound), and just a drawing by the great man inspired by the world of the Blue Lotus went for about £40,000. That’s a lot of books I’ve got to sell to get one single little sketch, said green-eyed Tiny Tim.
Coming up for auction next month at Heritage, one of the biggest names in the auction world, is author Mario Puzo’s copy of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Notebook filled with Puzo’s annotations alongside those of the filmmaker. The Godfather Notebook – a three-ring binder overflowing with character studies and scene synopses and Coppola’s page-by-page, line-by-line breakdown of the bestseller — was published in 2016. Anybody can buy that for about 20 quid, but the actual thing itself will end up well north of £50k.
You can see why a Godfatherophile would love to wake up to this under the Christmas tree. As Coppola read the novel, he essentially created a prompt book, the kind of thing used by a stage manager. As he went through Puzo’s novel, he underlined passages and phrases, wrote notes in the margins, and then pasted those pages to larger sheets inserted into the binder. Francis Ford divided the novel into sections and then scenes, focused on what he named “core” moments and warned of “pitfalls,” then made three copies — one for producer Al Ruddy, two for Puzo — and went to writing the screenplay, with Puzo’s input. Coppola carried this notebook in a leather satchel. “The script was really an unnecessary document,” Coppola has said, “because I could’ve made the movie just from this notebook.”
Not keen to make an offer the auctioneer can’t refuse? The same sale also includes
writer Doug Kenney’s hand-annotated script for Animal House, David Seltzer’s first draft of The Omen (then titled The Anti-Christ, and the final working manuscript for ‘The Man That Got Away’ performed by Judy Garland in A Star Is Born, featuring Ira Gershwin’s hand-edited and initialed lyric typescript. Miami Vice fan? Going under the hammer is its creator Anthony Yerkovich’s first draft of the pilot My Brother’s Keeper, 180+ pages on handwritten yellow legal paper. Jaws fan? Perhaps you’d like artist John Holmes’ original painting for the 1974 Pan paperback version of Peter Benchley’s Jaws.
Which is all a longwinded way of saying that my latest book Studios of Their Own is available everywhee and allow you change from a £20 note (not much change I should, add, but still a penny saved is a penny you’ve still got unless you get it online in which case you’ll save about a fiver). Here are some kind words about it from the latest issue of The Artist magazine.
