Manhattan Rare Book Company

An extensive archive of casting and production material from the files of Fred Roos, casting director and Academy Award-winning producer, spanning more than six decades of American filmmaking, 1960s to 2023.

Few people shaped New Hollywood as directly as Fred Roos. As a casting director and later as Francis Ford Coppola’s longtime producing partner, he helped identify the actors who would define American cinema from the late 1960s onward. His producing credits include The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, and he shared the Academy Award for Best Picture for The Godfather Part II.

This archive, drawn from his working papers, comprises over 4,750 pages and roughly 1,450 discrete objects in six banker boxes. We know of no more complete collection of his casting files. Major files cover The Godfather Trilogy, American Graffiti, Apocalypse Now, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, alongside Five Easy Pieces, Zabriskie Point, Harold and Maude, and television work including The Andy Griffith Show and That Girl.

The archive’s great strength is how much it preserves of what never happened. A January 1971 page of Godfather casting notes, written less than two months before filming, lists Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Martin Sheen, and James Caan for Michael; Gene Hackman and Bruce Dern for Tom Hagen; and Anne Bancroft for Mama Corleone. A 1968 list for the minor role of “Boy” in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point includes Harrison Ford, Al Pacino, Sam Elliott, Peter Fonda, and Nicholson. An early Harold and Maude list includes Richard Dreyfuss and Rob Reiner.

The Godfather Part II files make up about a quarter of the archive. They go well beyond casting to include production memoranda, logistical planning, and Roos’s notes to Coppola on story structure, character motivation, and narrative coherence.

Among the most remarkable material in these files is Roos’s running commentary on the editing of The Godfather Part II. It opens with several pages headed “Fred Roos – Notes – on ‘GF II’ first cut (July 13, ‘74).” The notes are numbered and direct: “I don’t quite believe that the young Vito escapes from Don Francesco’s the way it is now cut”; “I worry that the audience will not clearly see that there are dead bodies (throats cut) in the stream after the machine-gunning.” From there, ten further pages of notes follow the film through successive screenings between July 27 and October 4, 1974, as it was recut ahead of its December 1974 release. Most are headed with the date and place of a screening (“Screening @ FFC Hs – Aug. 22, ‘74 – Run time 3:45 ‘sh”), and many are addressed directly to Coppola and the film’s editors.

Read in order, they show the film’s central problems being worked out one cut at a time. Some problems run through all of it. In July, Roos asks for the first shot of Fanucci to be lengthened (“We must clearly get a fix on his face”); in September he is still asking. The intercutting of the Vito and Michael stories, which became the film’s defining structure, is still being tested: an August 1 page is headed “New linear structure Old–New,” and a July 30 note worries that audiences will take the Sicilian killings for flashbacks. Fredo’s betrayal is not yet landing either: “I agree with people at screening who don’t know what Fredo had done & why Michael says ‘you’ve broken my heart’ – Important that it be very clear that it was that Fredo had set up Michael for machine gunning.” By October 4 the instruction is to “Examine ‘Broke my Heart’ cutting – for most wrenchingly effective moment – FFC try cutting it.” Another note is simply: “I want to see Neri kill Fredo.” In the finished film, Fredo is killed by Al Neri. Other notes propose an intermission “after shootout & before Havana,” ask for “Xmas music B. Crosby” under a scene, and record preview audiences’ reactions to the young Vito sequences.

Running through it all are Roos’s brief handwritten first impressions of actors, often a few words jotted as a performer first came into view. Harrison Ford in 1968: “very interesting – blond – strong handsome face.” Julia Roberts in The Godfather Part III files: “very sexy – red hair – sister of Eric Roberts.” A 1989 letter to Coppola tracks Roberts’s schedule on a film then titled 3000, released the following year as Pretty Woman. Notes from 2017 for Fairyland evaluate a young Sabrina Carpenter. Similar notes appear on George Clooney, Reese Witherspoon, Keanu Reeves, Jim Carrey, Natalie Portman, and Jennifer Lawrence, and on many other stars and supporting actors. Just as many of the names on these lists never broke through or had only brief careers. Their presence is part of the record, showing the full field of actors in contention for a part before anyone knew which of them would last.

Casting lists sit alongside script notes, budgets, schedules, and correspondence, annotated and reused across projects. Together they form a primary-source record of how films were actually assembled, from the late studio era through New Hollywood and into the contemporary industry.

The archive comprises over 4,750 pages and approximately 1,450 discrete
objects, preserved in six banker boxes.

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Full description available upon request.

Price: $145,000 .