Long before “The Godfather” became one of the most celebrated films in American cinema, Francis Ford Coppola was working out its opening scenes in a small cottage in Mill Valley.
Now that property, at 8 Laurel St. on a prominent corner at Throckmorton Avenue near downtown Mill Valley, is on the market for $6.75 million.
In a 2016 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Coppola said he was “working on the screenplay in a little cottage, one-room cottage, in Mill Valley” when he reconsidered the film’s opening. He had first begun with the wedding sequence, then rewrote it into the now-famous scene that slowly reveals Bonasera pleading his case before Don Corleone in the darkness.
Coppola also worked on the 1972 film in other Bay Area settings, including San Francisco’s Caffe Trieste in North Beach, which has long been associated with the screenplay’s development…