New Doc Maps the Mob's Century-Long Grip on Hollywood
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- Hollywood Crime Story: The Mob Takes Over the Movies, a three-part documentary directed by Tom Patterson, premieres on Sundance Now and AMC+, charting organized crime's influence on Hollywood from the dawn of cinema through 1990's dual releases of The Godfather Part III and Goodfellas.
- Episode one profiles Johnny Roselli — dispatched west by Al Capone — who loaned Columbia Pictures co-founder Harry Cohn a half-million dollars to buy out his partners, giving the mob its first real stake in a major studio; the episode also covers Bugsy Siegel, Mickey Cohen (who began his criminal career at age nine by robbing a movie theater), and a mob hit placed on SAG president James Cagney that was called off after Scarface star Paul Muni personally appealed to Capone.
- Episode two spotlights the late-60s-to-early-80s 'Supermob' — super-agent Lew Wasserman (whose MCA agency rose with direct Capone backing) and lawyer Sidney Korshak — and traces their influence to Paramount president Robert Evans and the creation of The Godfather, which was secretly funded in part by Mafia-Vatican banker Michele Sindona and given an unofficial greenlight by Italian crime boss Joe Columbo.
- Episode three details Robert Evans's partnership with two Florida cocaine-cartel members to fund the 1984 film The Cotton Club, a deal that collapsed into a highly publicized murder trial destroying Evans's reputation, and profiles Louis 'Butchie' Peraino, who used porn profits to distribute legitimate films including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Enter the Dragon, and Dark Star.
- The series argues that the Supermob's squeezing of prestige filmmaking and transformation of studio economics 'may have unknowingly set the stage for the blockbuster age,' while Patterson closes the narrative at 1990 because, in his view, no truly great gangster film has emerged since Goodfellas.
- Patterson notes that organized crime's Hollywood footprint persists in new forms today — Ukrainian mobsters moving into streaming services and African gangs running piracy — but says concentrated power in a single geographic Hollywood no longer exists.
Why it matters: The documentary reframes iconic films like The Godfather not as fiction but as artifacts of actual mob-Hollywood collaboration, sourcing specific connections — Capone backing MCA, Mafia money funding The Cotton Club, Roselli's $500,000 loan to Columbia — that elevate the series beyond familiar gangster mythology for film historians and true-crime audiences.
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