Malkin got his first credits as a full editor on The Patty Duke Show (TV) and on the "Z movie" The Fat Spy (1966).

The Godfather was extremely successful artistically and at the box office; among other distinctions, it won the Academy Award for Best Picture for 1972.

[9] Coppola subsequently asked Malkin to edit The Godfather Saga (1977), a television miniseries, that was based on the two films.

[11] Stephen Prince has written of the contrast between them: "the difference an editor makes on a director's films is evident by comparing his more linear approach to Dede Allen's fractured and off-center cutting".

He was joined by his former mentor Robert Q. Lovett for The Cotton Club (1984), which garnered the two editors a nomination for the Academy Award.

By the end of the decade Coppola had agreed to make The Godfather Part III (1990), and brought in Malkin, Lisa Fruchtman, and Walter Murch to edit.

[14] A 1993 review in Time reads, "This trilogy has a novelistic density, a rueful, unhurried lyricism and a depth that, singly, the films could not achieve.

[9] He and Robert Q. Lovett were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for The Cotton Club (directed by Francis Ford Coppola-1984).