How they shot The Godfather, Daily Mail (UK). The headline doesn't really seem to go with the story, which is Mario Puzo's account of writing The Godfather and of others trying to cast the movie, excerpted from 1972's The Godfather Papers. (Sinatra thought it was about him.)

The missing link is that this essay by Puzo, who died in 1999, is from a new, 456-page limited-edition, signed book,The Godfather Family Album ($700 list price). More than 400 of photographer Steve Schapiro's stills of the filming of all three movies are in it, as well as interviews, assembled by editor Paul Duncan, with Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and Francis Ford Coppola, and a piece written by Coppola.

At the German publisher Taschen's page about the book, linked on the book title above, you can leaf through all 447 pages.

Puzo is a good writer reporting the facts for his memoirs. He begins,

The reason I wrote The Godfather was to make money. My first novel, The Dark Arena (1955), received very good reviews and netted me $3,500, so I thought I was going to be rich and famous.

But when my second novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, came out ten years later and netted me just $3,000, I was going downhill fast...

But Steve Schapiro himself is a great story. As a freelance photographer he photographed most of the memorable figures of the '60s and assembled them in 2000 in a collection called American Edge. (Schapiro's Heroes, published last December, continues the theme. NPR interviewed Schapiro in February about it, and published a transcript and audio of the conversation with Tavis Smiley, and the photo at left.)

Migrant workers in Arkansas, 1961. George Wallace blocking the doorway of the University of Alabama in 1963. President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline, 1963. Playwright Samuel Beckett, pictured at right, 1964. Martin Luther King's hotel room hours after he was shot in Memphis in 1968. Little Anthony at the Apollo in 1963. Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, 1965. Painter Rene Magritte, MOMA, New York, 1965. Bobby Kennedy campaigning, 1968. The poster for Midnight Cowboy in 1969. All Schapiro.

In 2005, The Digital Journalist put together a special section on American Edge -- a photo gallery that includes 37 photos, video clips of an interview with Schapiro, and an intro by Dirck Halstead, editor and publisher of The Digital Journalist, that begins,

As a young UPI photographer, working out of New York during the 1960s, covering the mass cultural transformation sweeping the country, I was constantly running into another photographer about my age. We'd bump into each other at places like Andy Warhol's Factory, or on a college campus during one form of civil disturbance or another. He was a LIFE photographer, and his name was Steve Schapiro.

Steve Schapiro and Chevy Chase launch The Godfather Family Album tomorrow at the Audi showroom on Park Avenue in New York at 7 p.m.