Behind every great story is…usually another great story. For the past half-century, The Godfather has stood as one of the most acclaimed films ever made, and the making of the Oscar-winning mafia saga is now as legendary as it was fraught.

Many aspects of the harrowing production are well-known—director Francis Ford Coppola’s near firing by the studio, the real-life mob’s fury at the project—but at the center of that maelstrom was producer Albert S. Ruddy, trying desperately to hold it all together.