‘Whatever it takes, Bubbi’: Why you shouldn’t refuse TV’s The Offer

If you believe the reviews, The Offer is a TV show you really can, and should, refuse. But if you believe the punters – who’ve given it an 8.7 out of 10 on IMDB and 97 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes – you’d be mad not to take it up.

Ordinarily I’m happy to fly in the face of popular opinion – hello, Top Gun: Maverick; thank you very much, Elvis – but in this instance I’m with the mob. The Offer may be corny and hackneyed, and leading man Miles Teller may have all the screen presence of a plank of wood, but this 10-part drama about the making of The Godfather is an absolutely rollicking ride.

The 10-part series about the making of The Godfather has been savaged by critics. Could that be because it attacks the very language they speak?Credit:Marija Ercegovac

You’ve got Frank Sinatra (Frank John Hughes) trying to shut the movie down because he thinks the Mob-connected singer in Mario Puzo’s book is modelled on him. You’ve got the Mafia trying to shut it down because they insist there’s no such thing as the Mafia. You’ve got the studio trying to shut it down because it’s running over budget, over time, and nobody wants to see a gangster movie in 1972 anyway. You’ve got rampant egos, real-world violence mirroring the fictional bloodshed, beautiful people behaving appallingly, and appalling people very occasionally doing decent things.

The naysayers seem to think we know all this already. It’s a “Wikipedia article come to life”, claimed The Guardian; a “dramatisation of a Wikipedia page” that should end with “references and external links”, opined Empire; “an illustrated Wikipedia entry”, according to The Hollywood Reporter (anyone spot a theme here?).

The thing is, while the cine-nerds may have spent their every waking moment poring over Godfather lore, and maybe even posting snarky edits on those Wikipedia pages, regular folk might be encountering these stories and these characters for the first time, or at least the first time in a long while.

Miles Teller (seated, left) as Al Ruddy and Dan Fogler (seated, front) as Francis Ford Coppola in The Offer.Credit:Nicole Wilder/Paramount+

The show has been criticised for its parade of impressions, but I’m not too proud to say I really enjoyed Dan Fogler’s take on Coppola (smart, selfish, stubborn, demanding), Patrick Gallo’s easily distracted Puzo, Anthony Ippolito’s Al Pacino (needy, insecure) and Justin Chambers’ mercurial Marlon Brando.

Above all, I loved Matthew Goode as Bob Evans, the Paramount Studios boss who swans around in impeccably cut three-piece suits, ruling the roost at his favourite restaurant, calling everyone “Bubbi” and elevating schmooze to the finest of arts. He runs hot and cold, laying on both the charm and the bullying with a trowel, but when he collapses in a heap of self-loathing after his wife Ali McGraw (Meredith Garretson) dumps him you can’t help but will him back to his supremely cocky best.

What’s really got up the critics’ noses – and no, it’s not Evans’ prodigious cocaine use – is right up front in that “based on Albert S. Ruddy’s experience of making The Godfather” credit. Yes, it’s bizarre, and it strikes right at the heart of whose story this is to tell.

Ruddy was the producer of the film, and co-creator Michael Tolkin (The Player) based his story on 10 hours of interviews with him at the suggestion of Paramount, the studio that made the series to mark the 50th anniversary of the film, which it also made.

For the naysayers, that makes it little more than a promotional video. Worse still, it makes it a self-promotional video for Ruddy. How very dare he. After all, it is, as everyone knows, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather.

And this really is the nub of the matter. At its core, The Offer is a corrective to the auteurist view of filmmaking that dominates the way movies are typically written about and discussed. It reminds us that movie-making is an industrial process, that there’s a lot of business behind the show, that no matter how compelling the vision of the director or writer or how astounding the talents of the actors, none of it happens without the people who greenlight the project, who raise the finance, who keep the production on the rails.

The Offer is, in short, a tribute to producing, a tallying of the hundreds of little decisions along the way that make a film what it is, taken by lots of people besides the director (the suggestion by some critics that Ruddy is, in this telling, the sole engine that gets this masterpiece made is pure nonsense). It’s an acknowledgement of all the obstacles that stand in the way of a movie being made at all, and the mix of quick thinking, determination and moral, ahem, “flexibility” that is necessary to get it over the line.

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Early on, with the (fictional) studio bean counter Barry Lapidus (Colin Hanks) doing his best to trash the project, Evans offers his protege Ruddy some advice. “You want to be a great producer? You do whatever it takes to get your movie made the way you wanna do it,” he says. “Beg, borrow, I don’t give a f—, steal. You do whatever it takes.”

Not vision, not genius, not unique talent. Just whatever it takes. That’s what The Offer is about, and that’s why, for all its many flaws, I reckon it’s pretty great.

Email the author at [email protected], or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin

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