#The godfather font maker movie#

It was a film in Hollywood made by Italians about Italians. It made Italians seem like more fully realized people and not stereotypes. The film changed Hollywood because it finally changed the way Italians were depicted on film.

How would you define the “Godfather effect”?

#The godfather font maker movie#

So it became not just a movie I loved as a movie lover, but a very personal depiction of the American journey for me. At age 13, I was in a private school running around wearing my uniform and school tie, so removed from his experience. That image brought home to me my grandfather’s journey and how brave, at age 13, he was arriving here alone. When I saw The Godfather: Part II, and when ten minutes into the film there is the image of the young Vito on board the ship coming to America and passing by the Statue of Liberty, all of a sudden the light bulb went off. There was a pull, because I had a very Italian name growing up in a very Anglo world. I started thinking about my own life, and I thought, I want to make this, in part, a memoir because I am half-Italian and half-English. That made me start thinking about the journey that immigrants had made coming to America, the whys behind the journey and really the history of the mob. And, then, as I started writing about the films, I realized that I also wanted to write about other films depicting Italian-Americans and how horrible the stereotypes were. Like millions of other people around the world, I have been obsessed by The Godfather trilogy. How did the idea for this book-part memoir, part study of The Godfather films-form? In his new book, The Godfather Effect, Santopietro looks at how the film saga portrays Italian-Americans and what that has meant for him, the film industry and the country. But it was seeing The Godfather trilogy that ultimately awakened Santopietro to his Italian roots and the immigrant experience. His grandparents Orazio Santopietro and Maria Victoria Valleta immigrated to the United States from southern Italy in the early 1900s. Santopietro’s mother, Nancy Edge Parker, was of English descent, and, his father, Olindo Oreste Santopietro, was Italian. “I have this very distinct memory of my father and I being wrapped up in it, and my mother leaning over and asking me, ‘How much longer is this?’”

“I saw the movie for the first time with my parents,” recalls the author. Tom Santopietro was 18 years old in 1972, when he saw the movie The Godfather in a theater in his hometown of Waterbury, Connecticut.