Made Men Read online

  For the thirtieth anniversary of its premiere comes the vivid and immersive history behind Martin Scorsese’s signature film Goodfellas, hailed by critics as the greatest mob movie ever made.

  When Goodfellas first hit the theaters in 1990, a classic was born. Few could anticipate the unparalleled influence it would have on pop culture, one that would inspire future filmmakers and redefine the gangster picture as we know it today. From the rush of grotesque violence in the opening scene to the iconic hilarity of Joe Pesci’s endlessly quoted “Funny how?” shtick, it’s little wonder the film is widely regarded as a mainstay in contemporary cinema.

  In the first ever behind-the-scenes story of Goodfellas, film critic Glenn Kenny chronicles the making and afterlife of the film that introduced America to the real modern gangster—brutal, ruthless, yet darkly appealing, the villain we can’t get enough of. Featuring interviews with the film’s major players, including Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, Made Men shines a light on the lives and stories wrapped up in the Goodfellas universe, and why its enduring legacy is still essential to charting the trajectory of American culture thirty years later.

  Praise for Made Men

  “We saw Goodfellas the night it opened, in a packed theater, when we were in our early twenties. No doubt it changed the direction of our lives. This is the first book we’ve read that explains how and why the movie has such a deep and lasting impact. Glenn Kenny is a scholar and a writer, and every bit the literary hit man that Tommy DeSimone was in real life.”

  —Brian Koppelman and David Levien, screenwriters of Ocean’s Thirteen and cocreators of Billions

  “Insightful, gregarious, and encompassing, Made Men is not just the essential book on the making of Goodfellas, but also a wonderful mini-course in film and filmmaking. What a pleasure it is to go to the movies with Glenn Kenny!”

  —Owen King, author of Double Feature

  “Glenn Kenny’s critical acumen and eye for revealing detail is in effervescent display on every page of Made Men, a book not just for Scorsese fans but for everyone who loves the lore of the movies as much as the films themselves.”

  —Michelle Dean, author of Sharp

  “What an incredibly cool and rewarding piece of work. Smart, funny, perceptive, and replete with fascinating trivia (during the legendary one-take tracking shot in the Copa, Henry and Karen travel in a circle), Made Men effectively rebuilds in prose the greatest gangster film ever made. Anyone who cares at all about the movies needs to read this. Glenn Kenny, salud.”

  —Tom Bissell, author of Creative Types and coauthor of The Disaster Artist

  Glenn Kenny is a film critic whose work appears in the New York Times and RogerEbert.com. He has also written for The Current, Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, the New York Daily News, Playboy, Film Comment and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Claire.

  Also by Glenn Kenny

  Anatomy of an Actor: Robert De Niro

  A Galaxy Not So Far Away:

  Writers and Artists on Twenty-Five Years of Star Wars (editor)

  Made Men

  The Story of Goodfellas

  Glenn Kenny

  To Claire, with all my love

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Martin Scorsese, December 1989

  Chapter One: Nick, and Nora, and Others

  Chapter Two: Players

  Chapter Three: The Prep Work

  Chapter Four: A Martin Scorsese Picture, Scene by Scene

  Chapter Five: All the Songs

  Chapter Six: The Schoonmaker Treatment

  Chapter Seven: The Aftermath

  Chapter Eight: The Eventual Tragedy of Henry Hill

  Chapter Nine: Unofficial Narratives

  Chapter Ten: From Goodfellas to The Irishman

  Epilogue: Martin Scorsese, March 2020

  Postscript: A Goodfellas Library

  Appendix: A Goodfellas Timeline

  Notes/Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Photos

  “Treachery is beautiful if it makes us sing.”

  —Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal

  Prologue

  MARTIN SCORSESE,

  DECEMBER 1989

  “I ran into Paul Schrader in the hall the other day, he’s finishing his movie. I said to him, ‘It figures I see you here, we’re the only two guys who are gonna work through Christmas. Everyone else is clearing out.’”

  Martin Scorsese was referring to the man who wrote the screenplay for his galvanizing 1976 movie Taxi Driver, with whom he’d subsequently worked on Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ. Schrader himself started directing features in 1978, forging an idiosyncratic path with films that often mixed searching spirituality with sexuality and violence. But he never shook, or tried to shake, the association with Scorsese. The Raging Bull experience, which saw De Niro and Scorsese rewriting Schrader’s script almost from scratch, had bruised Schrader’s feelings somewhat, but the two men retained an affinity with, and an affection for, each other. More to the point, fifteen years after they first worked together, they were still as consumed by filmmaking as they had been then. Schrader was finishing his disturbing, Venice-set The Comfort of Strangers, written by Harold Pinter from a novel by Ian McEwan. Scorsese was caught up in assembling a picture called Goodfellas. (At this time, and for some time after its release, it was, as you’ll see, rendered in print as GoodFellas. This changed over the years. No one to this day, to my knowledge, can pinpoint when it changed or why.) Both pictures would see release in the fall of 1990.

  Scorsese mentioned this run-in to me before we ourselves got to work. He had set aside a couple of hours so we could start on an essay to which he would attach his byline. In 1989 I was working at a magazine called Video Review, which would be celebrating its tenth year of publication in 1990. That it had survived for ten years as a consumer magazine was a testimony to a lot of things, and mainly to the fact that home video and home theater in the late ’80s was a sufficiently hot topic to sustain a regular readership of a few hundred thousand.

  For the 10th Anniversary Issue, we were soliciting the opinions of various ostensible luminaries and visionaries on how home video had affected life and culture, and what effect it would have in the future. I should emphasize again that this was 1989. “Home video” meant VHS, and maybe a little bit of laser disc; the DVD, video streaming, oversize flat-screen TVs, critically acclaimed original programming on cable, the whole “is TV better than movies” debate: all of this was in the future. What seemed to me, and to everybody else, the distant future. Most of the predictions we would run were in the form of sound bites solicited in phone interviews (J. G. Ballard: “I look forward to the day when specialty video producers—the equivalent of Sun Records and the like in the music business twenty, thirty years ago, and the equivalent of small publishers in the book trade—really can begin to reach out to the public.” Paula Abdul: “The big movie musical will return to prominence in this decade, as recording artists take the video music concept one step further.”). But for the keynote address, so to speak, I thought Martin Scorsese would be ideal. The filmmaker was also a well-known film lover, passionately concerned with film preservation, and a great proponent of home video as a medium, however initially imperfect, for movie appreciation.

  So I got the number for his office and called. I was greeted by Julia Judge, his assistant at the time. I laid out what we wanted to do, and I also stipulated that if Scorsese had neither the time nor inclination to sit down and write such a piece himself, I would be delighted to come up to the office, interview hi
m, and construct an “as told to” piece. Either way, I said, we would pay Scorsese three thousand dollars, for a thousand-word article.

  “Three thousand dollars?” Judge responded, sounding impressed. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but the director was still trying to bounce back from personal financial crises dating from earlier in the decade.

  His cinematic output continued, but the fieriness that distinguished his prior pictures frequently took a different and sometimes less volatile form. His critical profile seemed to have diminished ever so slightly during this time, as well. In 1985’s After Hours he experimented with a form of proto-indie, guerrilla filmmaking. In 1986 The Color of Money was a sequel to The Hustler, and starred Paul Newman and a very up-and-coming Tom Cruise—a solid film, with solid returns. He worked for his old friend Steven Spielberg directing an episode of the latter’s attempt to revive the Twilight Zone television series; he was sought out by megastar and future King of Pop Michael Jackson to make a music video; he contributed to the anthology film New York Stories with fellow graying eminences Francis Coppola and Woody Allen. (Scorsese was the youngest of the three.)

  And he was also able to achieve, finally, his passion project for many years, an adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel The Last Temptation of Christ, which attracted the wrong kind of controversy at the wrong time, controversy of the sort—one would think—to make Scorsese look like a troublemaker in the eyes of the studio heads. To make matters worse, the controversy did not translate into box-office success by any metric.

  * * *

  I can’t say that Scorsese was feeling as if he was standing on shaky ground when I came along with the Video Review offer. But I’ll always remember being struck by the enthusiasm with which my offer was accepted. (Another well-known writer I was pursuing for the project was demanding five dollars a word and a free video camcorder, neither of which Video Review was willing, finally, to cough up for him.) Judge soon got back to me taking up the offer, and stipulating that Scorsese would indeed be too busy to sit down and write it himself. (Often when the director has a magazine article or op-ed piece with his byline attached, he’s done it with the assist of a writer; for many years the critic and director Kent Jones, who also worked for a period as Scorsese’s video archivist, filled that role.) We set a date for the third week of December.

  Scorsese’s office at the time was in the Brill Building, the legendary then-entertainment-industry cynosure on the outer edge of Manhattan’s Times Square. Its reputation was built around the fact that it once held the offices of song publishers, many of whose staff and freelance songwriters in the ’50s and ’60s would become superstars after doing time there (Carole King, Neil Diamond, etc.). The structure also housed offices for television and film producers, and various technical facilities, as well. Scorsese’s editing suites for Goodfellas were in the same building, which made the place ultraconvenient for the filmmaker. His office was not much to look at: it was a big open space with linoleum floors and pale green walls and a couple of square pillars; Judge sat at a desk in more or less the middle of the room. Scorsese himself had a small office built into the corner of the room, and after I was introduced to him that’s where we settled. I had a tape recorder and a legal pad. We didn’t spend too much time on small talk, merely observing the coming of the holiday and the fact that we were all still working, before getting down to business.

  The man immediately struck me as yes, intense, but also warm, friendly, considerate. I asked him a question: “When did you first hear about home video?” and off he went. He stood as he spoke, paced around a bit, and every now and then, after he had gone off on a long tangent, he would take a hit off an inhaler of asthma medication.

  Eventually we talked about the work in progress. There was a sense, almost palpable, of his delight that he was trying something really new, and also a slight sense of trepidation, as in “What are they gonna make of this?” And of course the postproduction work on this new film was consuming.

  Getting back to the subject of our essay, he revealed, not surprisingly, an enthusiasm for home video because of its ability to let the user create a library of films, and cross-reference it at his or her convenience. He told a charming story about watching the original Universal The Mummy, directed by Karl Freund, with one of his daughters, and then leapfrogging to James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein. He discussed issues that would continue to be hot buttons even into the age of DVDs and Blu-rays, e.g., how ultrawidescreen movies should be presented on home screens. He also bemoaned, as filmmakers did and do, what he called “the shorter attention span encouraged by television and video.” But he recognized that everything is, or can be, relative: “You realize sometimes as you’re making a film that today’s audience may not sit for a shot of a certain length. This may not change the way I’ll make a picture. Whatever the pace, if it’s right for the shot or scene, that’s the way it’s got to be—as in The Last Temptation of Christ, where a number of sequences take on the tone and mood of the desert. When I was in Morocco I got a real sense of timelessness, of everything moving at 120 frames per second—extreme slow motion, almost like a trance. That’s part of the effect that I wanted from the movie, and it’s part of the reason the movie is two hours and forty-six minutes long. I decided that certain elements of Temptation would be fast, fine. But in the desert, there’s a sense of mysticism you experience that often comes in a trancelike manner.” This led him, again, to the movie he was currently editing. “As for my new film, Goodfellas, even if it’s two and a half hours long, I’m hopeful it will be one of the fastest-paced pictures ever made, because it tells a story in a style heavily influenced by documentary TV reporting and these new tabloid shows.” After we were finished with the formal part of the interview, Scorsese continued to enthuse about the movie. “In a way, it’s the most like television I’ve ever done,” he said, sounding a little surprised with himself. “Not just The Untouchables—the late ’50s–early ’60s TV series, not Brian’s film,” he clarified, referring to the 1987 movie directed by his old friend Brian De Palma and featuring Robert De Niro in the role of Al Capone. “In terms of the narration, I love that staccato, rat-a-tat thing you get sometimes with Walter Winchell on the old series. And that continues, I think, into today’s true-crime and exposé television shows, a kind of tabloid approach. That’s definitely part of what’s informing the style of this movie.”

  At the end of our session, I handed the director my then-new hardcover copy of the book Scorsese on Scorsese, which he signed: “To Glenn Kenny/Thanks & appreciation/Martin Scorsese/1989.”

  * * *

  Despite his familiarity with the movie’s milieu, the scenario of Goodfellas did not have entirely the same kind of personal pull that such stories as Raging Bull, New York, New York, and yes, even Taxi Driver, had at the time for the filmmaker. There’s no real Scorsese surrogate in Goodfellas. But there’s a near-anthropological interest in the manners and rituals of the modern gangster’s world. Practically voyeuristic, you could say. And that perspective is shot through with a good deal of “memory-play” material, derived from Scorsese’s childhood and teen years. Two movies subsequent to Goodfellas, 1995’s Casino and 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street, cast a similar eye on the actual crimes that gangsters commit and how they commit them, to the extent that Wolf’s immersive depiction of the depraved Dionysian modes of its characters’ existences proved off-putting to some critics. Despite the squalor and tension and ultimate betrayals depicted in Goodfellas, there were similar worries at the time of its release that Scorsese did not emphasize sufficiently just how thoroughly corrupt his protagonists were. One reason the movie took so long to edit was because of the nuances of perspective that Scorsese and his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, tucked into the film’s overall structure.

  For all the excitement that Scorsese expressed about what he was doing, he was a little uncertain, sheepish even. He again mentioned that he wasn’t sure how th
e picture would be received. He certainly didn’t give the impression of knowing that he was redefining the gangster movie.

  Because that’s what Goodfellas would end up doing, despite its not making a megafortune at the box office (its returns were such that Warner Brothers considered it a modest success). The movie took gangsters off the wobbly pedestal popular culture erected in honor of The Godfather movies and made them into something like “regular” guys. Henry Hill begat Tony Soprano; Tony’s own creator pretty much admits as much. And the movie wound up, through exposure on cable and yes, home video, a cultural touchstone that’s still quoted to funny and/or horrifying effect to this day.

  And today, Scorsese’s offices are only about a dozen or so city blocks from the Brill Building. But in a sense they’re a world away, occupying a floor in a deluxe East Side building, complete with a temperature-controlled screening room and an extensive video library. It’s arguable that it is the office that Goodfellas built.

  One

  NICK, AND NORA, AND OTHERS

  There’s a way in which the entirety of Goodfellas is contained in its opening scene.

  The movie begins with a 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix seen from behind, driving fast down an otherwise empty road. The camera veers to the left and pulls past the car, as if it’s another vehicle trying to overtake this one. The next shot is a static title card: “New York, 1970.” Then a shot of the Pontiac’s inhabitants, seen in wide angle as if through the front windshield, over the steering wheel. Three actors play three tired characters. Ray Liotta drives; riding shotgun is Robert De Niro, who looks as if he’s napping; in the back seat, very still, sits Joe Pesci. It’s clear from their stances that these men are, if not brothers, “part of a crew” as it will be stated later. They’re comfortable together.