Impostor Syndrome is the internal experience of believing you are not as competent as others perceive you to be. This is a reality that many people I know, including myself, have experienced. Sometimes it can be the feeling of failing at a particular goal or past time, or not having broadened one’s horizons enough in a specific subject.

I am an aspiring writer, so I write. I’m an aspiring filmmaker, so I shoot videos for Youtube. I would also consider myself I Cinephile, or even a Film-Nerd… but it is there that lies my so-called, dirty secret.

I have never seen “The Godfather”.

I know… it is difficult to believe someone claiming to love film and be a film nerd could have missed what many call a masterpiece of cinema. The truth is that I really do not have any reasonable explanation as to why I’ve never seen it. I suppose retracing some of my background can at least lay the path to where I am today.

It is difficult to pin down the first time I’d seen or heard a reference to the Coppola film, though I’d hazard a guess it was sometime before the year 2000. Pop-Culture has a way of embedding itself in the psyche of young children.

When I was younger, I came into possession of a multi-DVD collection of short films by the director Steve Oedekerk. He’s the one behind films like “Kung-Pow,” “Jimmy Neutron,” and also you may know him as the guy that beats Joey on “Star Search” in that episode of “Full House”. Oedekerk is known for his very creative methods of comedy, most notably some very… unique special effects. One set of projects that he worked on involved the use of a particular part of the human anatomy… Thumbs

This so-called “Thumb Collection” included such hits as “Thumb Wars,” “Thumbtanic,” “Frankenthumb,” and even “Batthumb.” The last film was a parody of our subject today, “The Godthumb.”

To date, aside from a few clips, I mostly know what I do about “The Godfather” through the multiple viewings of Godthumb over the course of a decade-plus. I don’t exactly remember much, and that must be the source of this stagnation.

To be quite frank, “The Godthumb” was not at all my cup of tea as a child. Obviously, the source material wouldn’t be intended for children, but the rest of the films in the collection were more relatable and I was able to understand far more. Unfortunately, this led to a subconscious negative connotation with the film. This held true even through my many changes in taste in the last 20 or so years. (There was actually a time when I could not stop laughing at the film “Epic Movie”.)

When opportunities would present themselves, I’d change the channel, or choose something else to watch. I could hear how much love and praise the film would garner, but I never got around to it.

Think of it this way… Imagine there is a show or a film, maybe even an album that is beloved by millions… Everyone and their brother is raving about it, but you hate being a “bandwagon” fan. I spent many years avoiding many “mainstream” films and shows because I wanted to not be just another part of a fad, I wanted to be different. In the end, I had my head where the sun didn’t shine. Case and point… I think “The Dark Knight” is overrated, and I have not seen “The Dark Knight Rises” nor do I plan to change that… okay maybe I will just because I do enjoy Tom Hardy. On the bright side, I do actually like The Beatles, unlike what I would have said in Highschool.

Enter my freshmen year of college. I went to my local community college, and purely on a lark, I decided to take “Film History and Appreciation” as one of my Fall elective courses… To say it changed my life would be selling it short.

Each week we learned something new from the Lumiere Brothers to Ed Wood and Plan 9, even up to what became one of my top 3 films of all time, “Blade Runner: Final Cut” (For so many reasons!) Suddenly a whole world opened up to me, learning about the history of how films were made on both sides of the camera, and the artistry of film itself. In this class, I began watching things that I never in a million years had expected to see. I broadened those horizons.

I began to pay attention to directors, producers, and companies, and started to take in some more of the films that I felt were “too popular”. Some included “Casablanca,” “Pulp Fiction,” and even very obscure films like “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” (I’m a sucker for a Jeff Bridges film). I came away loving Bogey, and Tarantino is one of my top 5 favorite directors. But even after all of that… I just never felt like “The Godfather” was something I wanted to watch.

A few years later, after switching Majors and Schools, I ended up filling a slot at my University with a Film Critique course. I spent years with my new perspective of what film is and could be, and I watched a wide number of films domestic and international (Kurosawa is excellent!) I found myself in a course that really felt like we were taking film and breaking it down into its most distilled elements. My professor was a really cool guy, taking what is often referred to as “Prestige Television”, and treating it as film. In many ways I absolutely agree, considering production costs and even runtimes. (Seriously, is a nigh 3-hour season finale of Stranger Things “just another television episode”?) My professor, Jeffrey Chown, actually started one of the first University-Level courses analyzing “Game of Thrones” back in 2015. (Interview with Fox Business News)

As a part of critiquing a film, you need to watch it. With its one-day-a-week schedule, we were left with a 3 and a half hour class period which allowed for viewing entire films with time to discuss. So one week was a completely silent showing of “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari,” (a truly remarkable film), another was two episodes of “Game of Thrones” (still the only two I’ve seen because my ex didn’t want me to watch it), but more importantly “College”, the season 1 episode of “The Sopranos.”

One show I heard about non-stop was The Sopranos. Again, references up the wazoo, and plenty of folks considered it the greatest thing since sliced Capocolo. After watching the episode, I found myself instantly drawn to checking it out… though it would not occur until one year ago (nearly to the day) when I would finally sit down to watch it. Sure enough, a show about a mafia family would of course… bring up “The Godfather.”

It was inescapable, no matter where I went, the movie would pop up. Then to increase the pressure, a limited series would be produced on Paramount +, where I would see constant ads each time I sat down to watch Star Trek! (For the love of God check out Strange New Worlds it is the best Star Trek since DS9!

So here I am… This morning I made a decision, to go boldly where I had not gone before. I decided to begin my Paramount Pilgrimage to Casa de Coppola. I started the Paramount + Series “The Offer,” a 10-episode drama about the creation of the film told from the real-world perspective. This point of view is what really sold me on trying it; instead of the film itself that I may not be invested in, I can get invested in Mario Puzo as a writer, and Ruddy as the producer working in the studio system. It takes my interests and centers them around the film “The Godfather” without being the film itself. The end result now will be my need to see the “endproduct” so to speak, rather than sitting down to randomly see the film.

I’ll end up sharing my thoughts once I reach that point, but I can honestly say “The Offer” is fantastic television even for someone who has not seen “The Godfather” yet.