It is common enough for the lives of actors to be dramatised. Even directors get the biographical treatment on occasion. Producers not so much. One exception is Albert S Ruddy, who has died aged 94. His initiative and perseverance in shepherding to the screen the magisterial crime drama The Godfather was documented in the 10-part mini-series The Offer (2022), starring Miles Teller as Ruddy.
Its title was a reference to the threat famously issued in the film by the mafia boss Don Corleone, played by Marlon Brando: “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” Ruddy dealt directly with the criminal bosses who tried to muscle in on the movie.
In The Godfather Book, Peter Cowie describes Ruddy producing The Godfather “with a commitment that by the later stages of shooting resembled gallantry”. Ruddy’s employer, Paramount, part of the conglomerate Gulf and Western, had acquired the rights to Mario Puzo’s hit novel but expressed no special enthusiasm for turning it into a film.
“I do believe they would not have been unhappy if the book had dropped off the bestseller list,” Ruddy told Peter Biskind in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. “But it wouldn’t go away.” When Universal offered to buy the option for $1m, Paramount, with its dynamic new studio head Robert Evans, jumped into action.
Ruddy, who was described by the journalist Nicholas Pileggi as “tall, thin [and] nervously enthusiastic”, adopted a frugal approach in all areas of his life. To save his studio per diem allowance, he lived above a delicatessen with his mother, who slept in the same room. He won the respect of Paramount for bringing in the Robert Redford dirt-bike racing drama Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970) significantly under budget.
This made him an attractive proposition in an era when the studio was reeling from losses on bloated star vehicles such as Paint Your Wagon and Darling Lili. Asked by Charles Bluhdorn, the head of Gulf and Western, what he would do with The Godfather if he were appointed producer, Ruddy said: “Make an ice-blue, terrifying movie about people you love.”
The curveball idea of hiring as director the relative novice Francis Ford Coppola (who had made three films but found his greatest success as the screenwriter of the 1970 war drama Patton) came from his fellow producer Peter Bart after every director approached by Ruddy – including Arthur Penn, Elia Kazan and Otto Preminger – had declined.
Ruddy sat in a car with Coppola before his meeting with Bluhdorn, coaching him on what to say. “But once we were inside, Francis showed him what a brilliant salesman he was. He could have sold me the Brooklyn Bridge that day.”
Puzo warned Ruddy that the mafia would want to meddle, and advised him to keep them at arm’s length. Ruddy took to keeping a gun in his desk drawer after being inundated with abusive phone calls. “I didn’t know whether the calls were coming from the mafia or not. But they were threatening my life. It was disconcerting. I told the local police, and they also informed me that I was being followed by unknown persons.”
Opposition to the project was widespread, with an anti-Godfather campaign raising hundreds of thousands of dollars. After the studio received a letter from the Italian-American Civil Rights League objecting to the as-yet-unmade film’s potentially defamatory nature, Ruddy met with the league’s founder, Joseph Colombo Sr, one of the heads of New York’s five mafia families. He invited him to the studio lot to read the script, and to see for himself that this was an indictment of specific fictional characters rather than an attack on race.
“So he duly arrived with a couple of his guys. Now the script was over 150 pages long, and neither Colombo nor his companions seemed inclined to settle down and read it from cover to cover.” Colombo relented: “All right,” he said. “I trust you, I believe what you’re telling us.”
When a report of the press conference announcing the league’s approval found its way into the New York Times, Ruddy was briefly sacked by Bluhdorn, then reinstated. Getting the mob on side, including casting some of them as extras, turned out to be an essential part of shooting in New York City. “There would have been pickets, breakdowns, labour problems, cut cables, all kinds of things … the picture simply could not have been made without their approval,” said Ruddy.
His other achievements included persuading Puzo to co-write the screenplay, which ended up winning an Oscar for him and Coppola. It was Ruddy who accepted the best picture award. His speech – in which he said “the American dream … is there for everybody if we wanna work, dream, and try to get it” – was dismissed by Variety as “one of those Horatio Alger speeches about how anyone can make it in America if they work at it”. The award was presented to Ruddy by Clint Eastwood. Three decades later, Eastwood directed and starred in Ruddy’s second best picture Oscar-winner, the boxing tearjerker Million Dollar Baby (2004), also starring Hilary Swank.
He was born in Montreal, the son of Hyman Stotland, who made uniforms, and Ruth (nee Rudnikoff), a clothing designer. His parents divorced when he was six, and he moved with his mother and two siblings to New York. Ruth adopted Ruddy as their new surname.
He was educated at the City College of New York, then studied architecture at the University of Southern California. After working at a construction company, he drifted into producing. Among his first credits was The Connection, a play about a documentary maker hanging out with jazz musicians and drug addicts, which was later filmed by Shirley Clarke.
In 1965, he and Bernard Fein co-created the hit US sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, set in a German PoW camp. The chairman of the CBS network told him: “I find the idea of Nazis as comic characters to be reprehensible.” But Ruddy’s powers of persuasion (Pileggi said he had “always been able to talk his way through obstacles”) led to the network snapping up the series, which ran for the next six years.
Soon he was a multimillionaire, thanks to his combined success on Hogan’s Heroes, The Godfather – from which he took an impressive 7.5% of the net receipts – and on the Burt Reynolds prison football movie The Longest Yard (1974).
He enjoyed other hits, including the cross-country car-race comedy The Cannonball Run (1981) and its sequel, both starring Reynolds, as well as his share of flops, such as the third-time-unlucky Cannonball Fever (1989) and the Rodney Dangerfield soccer-coach vehicle Ladybugs (1992). Ruddy was also behind two further long-running TV series: How the West Was Won (1976-79), adapted from the 1962 film, and Walker, Texas Ranger (1993-2001), which he created.
His last film, Cry Macho (2021), reunited him with Eastwood when both men were aged 91. Addressing the mystery of why he went on working, he once said: “Well, your next movie is like your next love affair …”
He is survived by his third wife, Wanda McDaniel, a sales executive for Giorgio Armani, and their children Alexandra and John. His first marriage, to the producer Françoise Wizenberg Glaser, ended in divorce, as did his second, to the actor Kaye Farrington.
• Albert Stotland Ruddy, film producer, born 28 March 1930; died 25 May 2024
