Puzo

“Ruddy is a tall, thin, nervously enthusiastic man who sees himself as a shrewd manipulator,” Nicholas Pileggi wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1971 about the making of “The Godfather,” an adaptation of the Mario Puzo novel about the Corleone crime family.

His reputation for managing costs proved most useful when Paramount Pictures head Robert Evans acquired rights to Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel “The Godfather” and sought a producer for what was supposed to be a minor, profit-taking gangster film.

By 1974, 10 million copies had been sold, making it, at the time, the second-best-selling paperback of all time, behind Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather” and ahead of Erich Segal’s “Love Story.”

“To us, he was thinking outside the box,” said Madeline Puzo, the Taper’s stage manager at the time.

Or a gangster film that sounds like Mario Puzo?