Chapter 1 – The Godfather
Autumn, 1960. Los Angeles still lavished sunlight, but none of it reached this cramped, junk-filled apartment on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Li Kai sat behind an aging SCM manual typewriter, fingers poised above the keys, his gaze drilling through the peeling plaster toward some distant time and place. He was a bona-fide graduate of USC's School of Cinematic Arts—yet the framed diploma felt like a cruel joke on reality.
The silent, ominous telephone in the corner and the stack of crimson-stamped FINAL NOTICE bills on the desk were the real script of his life. His father's failed business had left a mountain of debt, a cold noose slipped expertly around the neck of a son fresh out of the ivory tower. Director? Art? In the face of survival and debt they sounded absurd.
He drew a deep breath and forced down the thoughts that didn't belong to this era: vivid memories of a past life, the absurdity of fate's tricks. This was not the time to brood. He had a plan—audacious, perhaps, but maybe the only one that could turn the tables.
His fingers struck; the typewriter clacked sharp and steady like a war drum. Across the paper a title appeared:
The Godfather
by Kai Li
Yes, he was going to "write" The Godfather—more precisely, transplant that masterpiece etched in his mind from a future that hadn't happened yet.
Thanks to some inexplicable miracle, he possessed an eidetic memory; his previous life unfolded like an infinite film archive, every frame, every line of dialogue crystal-clear. Mario Puzo was probably still scratching his head over nonfiction pieces—this epic might as well be "authored" by Li Kai!
He chose the novel chiefly because it had been a juggernaut: weeks atop The New York Times bestseller list, and its film adaptation had earned 250 million dollars—astronomical for the day.
Releasing it a few years early wouldn't hurt; readers' tastes wouldn't change that quickly.
If he plagiarized something too far ahead of its time, it might flop.
As for who actually wrote it—readers rarely dig that deep.
Discriminated against as a Chinese? So what—should he bus tables instead of writing? Since fate dumped him here, he might as well make the best of it.
Writing offered a shot; refusing meant manual labor.
The famous Chinese-American computer tycoon Wang An had risen in the sixties and taken his company public a few years later; Li Kai saw no reason to quit.
The English edition of The Godfather ran about 210–220 thousand words; the screenplay would be roughly forty thousand.
The original owner of this body had been a director; Li Kai inherited everything, including that talent.
What stunned him even more was that the body carried not just a stranger's memories—
but an instinctive, almost terrifying gift for directing.
It wasn't craft ground out by study; it was innate—an instinct for images, rhythm, and control that ran in his veins.
It was as if he'd been born to stand on a set, born to sculpt time with a camera.
The original owner… had been a genuine genius buried by reality.
Sadly, his Chinese identity and youth left almost no room to prove himself in insular, conservative Hollywood.
Right now, countless ideas for shooting The Godfather surged through his mind—bold improvements and reinventions of the original film.
Yet cold reality said that even if he finished a perfect script, the big studios would never bankroll such a project.
The current market favored sweeping epics, fast-draw westerns, bubbly romantic comedies, dazzling musicals, and nerve-shredding horrors—not a morally murky, brooding crime saga about an Italian-American family.
And who would gamble on an unknown Chinese kid barely out of his teens?
Once he saw that, Li Kai pivoted: write the novel first.
If the book became a hit and built a readership, movie studios would come knocking for The Godfather soon enough.
He did a quiet mental tally: to film The Godfather with the weight and scale it deserved, the production budget would have to hit at least five million dollars.
In 2025 dollars, five million in 1960 works out to roughly fifty-three point six million—a dizzying gamble, but Li Kai believed it was worth it. His father, after all, had run a sizeable cinema in Los Angeles, the very reason the family was drowning in forty thousand dollars of debt. Li Kai had grown up in the projector's glow and the clatter of reels; movies were in his marrow, and he'd marched straight into film school without a second thought.
The sixties, however, belonged to television. Sets flew off shelves, living rooms became theatres, and audiences deserted the box office in droves. Cinemas folded like dominoes.
Right on cue, his father had borrowed big to refurbish a flagship theatre—charging head-first into the perfect storm.
Of course he went under.
To finish the manuscript and cash in, Li Kai became a shut-in for weeks, a merciless story engine hammering at his typewriter.
He didn't stop at plot; he summoned every razor-sharp detail, every crackling line of dialogue, every layered facet of character—Don Corleone's icy wisdom, Michael's lethal arc, Sonny's thunder, Tom Hagen's quiet loyalty. They stepped off the page fully formed.
"I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse."
When he reached that line, Li Kai paused, fingers hovering above the keys, tasting the words. It was more than a threat; it was the philosophy of power, the art of control.
"Damn," he muttered in Chinese, a crooked smile tugging at his lips—part admiration for the original author, part self-mockery at the absurdity of his own situation, part self-pep-talk.
Twenty days later, a five-hundred-page first draft was finished.
The antique mechanical typewriter was a nightmare—slow, unforgiving, every typo immortalised.
He typed like a bomb-disposal expert.
"Now for a publisher. Who the hell do I send it to?"
Li Kai rubbed his temples. Without the internet, tracking down publishers meant trudging to libraries and bookstores, copying names and addresses off copyright pages like a detective hunting clues.
The Godfather was raw, operatic, a crime saga that exploded every cliché and painted family, power and betrayal in charcoal greys. In 1960, most respectable houses would run a mile from anything so inflammatory. Scatter-shot submissions would only waste precious weeks.
Who memorises publishers? Do you?
Li Kai certainly hadn't. If he had, he could have marched straight to the house that would one day release the book and saved himself the headache.
Sunlight slanted through the windows as he rattled across town in a battered Ford and climbed the steps of the public library, ready to dig through card catalogues and stacks.
"Random House… big league, still going strong decades from now—worth a shot," he murmured, scribbling the name and a bold star in the margin.
Half an hour later, his notebook held a shortlist: Simon & Schuster, Fawcett, Scribner's—each annotated with pros, cons, and submission strategy. The picture was still patchy, but a path had begun to emerge.