“I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse”

It reads like a who’s who of Hollywood heavyweights. Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford were all apparently offered the role of Michael Corleone. None of them wanted the job. Perhaps they were offended by the material, perhaps they didn’t think the project would go anywhere, but considering the success and the impact of the film, perhaps they were just plain dumb. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and I’m sure everyone has two or three things in their past that had they known the ultimate outcome, they would have gone through with whatever it was. When you’re famous though, these decisions can come back to bite you in the most public and embarrassing of ways.

So, when is the last time you woke up in a pool of blood? Perhaps your neighbour visited you in the wee hours of the morning and exacted revenge on your pet Whiskers for his constant generosity of ‘presents’ left on his lawn. Maybe you had a disagreement with a dangerous Mafioso and woke up to find your beloved horsey in bed with you, with a lot less body than head.

Sometimes it takes the severed head of your pet to teach you a valuable lesson.

Of course, when you’re an actor and you have to film the ‘I just woke up with a dead horse’s head’ scene, reality is everything. The horse’s head in the scene wasn’t a trick of the lens or some manufactured puppet. It was a real horse’s severed head, that had been picked up in a New Jersey rendering plant and shipped to the set.

The words “You couldn’t pay me enough” come to mind.


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