Goodfellas - The Story of the Real Wiseguys

"As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster." 

Perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised that this statement by Henry Hill, real life gangster-turned- informer, made the right connections for Martin Scorsese.  They both grew up with that peculiarly American desire never to be a disappointment to themselves.  For Scorsese, the adolescent vortex sent him flying towards the vocation of priesthood, but the altarpiece gave way to the cinema screen.  Hill was not so high minded.  Respect, easy money and never having to stand in a queue were the prerequisites of a desirable life.  

'On Tuesday, May 22, 1980, a man named Henry Hill did what seemed to him the only sensible thing to do: he decided to cease to exist.'  So begins Nick Pileggi's Wiseguy, a bestseller in 1985 that exploded several myths in its worm's eye view of the New York Mafia at play.  This story of sustained robbery, corruption and casual murder was far from the patrician world of darkened Long Island mansion living rooms found in the Godfather.  Wiseguy was mainly the first-person testimony of a half-italian, half-irish kid.  In 1955, at the age of eleven, he wandered into a Brooklyn cabstand looking for a part-time, after-school job.  His efficiency in running errands led to his being accepted into the family of Paul Vario, and within a few years he was stealing cars, running up expensive tabs and dabbling in occasional urban violence.  He married, had children, set himself up with a girlfriend, and in 1972 was sentenced to 20 years for extortion.  He walked out of prison in 1978, by now well trained in drug trafficking.  After helping put together the famous Lufthansa raid, in which 6 million dollars were lifted from Kennedy Airport, Henry watched his mob friends be murdered one buy one as a web of paranoia enveloped them all.  When he was finally caught red-handed by narcotics officers, Henry was passed over to Assistant US Attorney Edward McDonald and made to realize that a severe prison sentence for drugs conspiracy would almost certainly lead to death behind bars at the hands of his 'friends'.  With his old crew wanting him out of the way, Henry accepted McDonald's offer of going into the Federal Witness Program, and named names.  He took on a new identity in a new town, and will live the rest of his life, in his own words, as a 'schnook'.

Henry may not be known to his new neighbors, but he made sure he was known to the rest of the world.  To pay off his legal fees, he signed up with the publishers Simon & Schuster to deliver his life story.  A highly respected writer on New York magazine, Nick Pileggi was the obvious choice as his scribe.  He also grew up in the Italian-American community of New York.  Since the mid fifties, Pileggi had covered crime and the workings of the mob as a reporter.  He got to know some of the big shots by hanging out at their favorite restaurants.  But for Pileggi, Henry was a kind of different Mafia man.  He was smart, he was articulate, and he had a sense of perspective on his life that very few mobsters in the past had displayed when telling their stories.  In addition Henry had told the truth.

After reading Wiseguy, Martin Scorsese contacted Pileggi to say that he had been looking for this book for years; here was a set of characters close to those who fill all his greatest movies, men caught in the grip of devilish obsession that only a criminal life can sustain (assuming you are denied artistic talent or a religious vocation).  These were the type of stories that Scorsese himself heard as a child in Little Italy - stories people still talk about, hence the necessity for some significant changes in names when the book was made into the movie.  And in Henry Hill, Scorsese found a hero untainted by any of the fake grandiosity brought to gangsters in the standard Hollywood biopics.  Those seeking the great arc of abasement  endured by Jake La Motta will find Henry unrepentant to the end, bemoaning the cold turkey of the law-abiding life.  Scorsese's movie begins with gross act of killing, and closes with Tommy Devito firing at the camera surrounded by a hellish glow.  In Goodfellas (a substitute title was necessary because of the appropriation of 'wise guy' by the television and Brian De Palma) the gangsters are hooked on the drug of criminal ecstasy, and unlike its closest predecessor, Howard Hawks's Scarface, there are no moralizing inserts to warn us of the stuff.  Scorsese even dares to end the movie with the song 'My Way' in the version of Sid Vicious, a spit in the face of every good, clean citizen who dares to object.  

Scorsese and Pileggi workd together in an exceptionally close collaboration.  They decided separately what they felt to be the important events in Henry's rise and fall, then came together and found their preferences matched perfectly.  Then it was a case of paring away and building up certain visual ideas, meeting for regular discussion, which led to eleven drafts being produced in five months.  The insistent narration was there from the beginning, a burning memory of Scorese's excitement on watching the opening few minutes of Truffaut's Jules and Jim.  The speed and exhilaration of the early nouvelle vague was also to be recreated in the freeze frames and jump-cutting.  The final shooting script is extraordinarily close to the finished film.  Only one structural alteration is significant: the film was to have opened with Billy Batts holding court at the Suite, followed by the car sequence, with a reprise of only the latter segment in the proper chronology of events.  By placing it more centrally, the sequence now gives greater weight to the sense of Paulie Cicero losing control over his family.  But essentially the movie before us is much as Scorsese and Pileggi laid it out on paper, without a single discarded scene.  Only the characteristic improvisations and the incessant repetitions (familiar from the authentic verbal crisscross in Mean Streets and Raging Bull) have filled what were relatively sparse dialogue exchanges.  But, as Paul Schrader observed in Scorsese's treatment of his script in Taxi Driver, the words may be different but the meaning remains the same.

While the published script may be close to what is actually said in the film, no amount of detail on paper can convey the energy rush that Scorsese's camera moves give to the movie.  Seductive crane shots re-create the young Henry's adulation of the cabstand fraternity.  A four minute steadicam take glides us along with Henry and Karen into the Copacabana, spelling out the sexual allure of the criminal's omnipotence.  When Henry snorts cocaine on his last day of freedom, wild cuts and one staggering zoom combine with a whiplash use of rock tracks to draw the audience into a high of near-chaotic abandon.  Music is used throughout with the faultless sense of the unexpected familiar from the juke box delirium of Mean Streets.  If The Color of Money's delight in visual tropes over the meat and sauce of human interest, in Goodfellas, we find Scorsese caught again in the fever of life and death games, but with an even greater confidence in technique.  The fluency of Michael Ballhause's cinematography, and the sheer speed with which he works (something the audience doesn't necessarily know) have paid rich dividends.  Even the simplest shots belie the craft at hand, such as Jimmy Conway gripping his cigarette at the bar, thinking about murder with an air of satanic majesty - an effect created by running the camera at thirty-six frames per second rather than the standard twenty-four.  With Sorcese's regular editor Thelma Schoonmaker on the splicer, not a shot seems misplaced nor a cut mis-timed.

And of course there are the performances.  It is almost a cliché now, but when was there a bad performance in a Scorsese film?  Ray Liotta as a lean and hungry Henry confidently displays the character's charm as well as his frazzled wariness.  Both he and his character are up against stiff competition.  Joe Pesci's psychotically insecure Tommy is a man who couldn't be closer to the edge, while Robert De Niro as Jimmy takes on his first secondary role in a Scorsese movie, and nowhere unbalances the triumvirate.  De Niro is as watchful as ever in his pressure-cooker manner, and his angry little boy act on hearing of the death of Tommy, even has a touching helplessness.  Both Paul Sorvino's brutish impassiveness in the role of Paulie Cicero (note Scorsese's discreet placing of a bulldog by his feet) and Lorraine Bracco's exciting and excitable Karen fall naturally into place in this gallery of unconscionable rogues.  Many of the supporting cast were found among the clientele of a Bronx restaurant run by Frank Pellegrino, who wound up playing Johnny Dio as well as helping Scorsese's parents prepare the vast Italian dishes served with ritualistic zeal throughout the film.  

Goodfellas started quite a few rumbles with the ratings board in the USA, and it upset censors everywhere.  The reason is not a specific act of violence, but the fact that nowhere does Scorsese supply any special moral pleading.  Some of his on-screen crew enjoy killing, others regard it as merely buisiness.  Gangsters are gangsters because they want to be, the film tells us, and if they can have a high old time of it too, so much the better.  In the three decades the film spans, no one seems to be touched by any changes in politics, and fashions are only embraced in the tackiest of ways.  It is a self-enclosed world, but the dynamics speak much wider.  And that special mixture of comedy and terror that Scorsese has made his own is here in extra portions.  There is no excess of sentiment awash with blood; or, to put it in another way, there aren't too many onions in the tomato sauce.   

A Family Courtesy - Mario Puzo

Santino, never let anyone outside the family know what you are thinking.

-Don Corleone to Sonny Corleone, The Godfather.  

Mario Puzo was born into an Italian immigrant family in New York City in the area known as "Hell's Kitchen". Both of his parents, Antonio, and Maria Le Conti Puzo were illiterate immigrants from Avellino, a town outside Naples.  

When Puzo was in his early teens, his father deserted the family and they moved to a housing project in the Bronx.  The discovery of public libraries and the world of literature led Puzo in the direction of writing.  

After graduating from Commerce High School, Puzo worked as a switchboard attendant for the railroad. During World War II he served in the US Air Force stationed in East Asia and Germany.  After the war, he stayed in Germany as a civilian public relations man for the Air Force. Puzo then studied at the New School for Social Research, New York, and at Columbia University. During this period, he took classes in literature and creative writing.  

His first published story, 'The Last Christmas', appeared in American Vanguard in 1950.  In 1946 he married Erika Lina Broske, whom he had met in Germany; they had three sons and two daughters. After Erika's death in 1978, her nurse, Carol Gino, became Puzo's companion.  

At the age of 35, Puzo published his first book, Dark Arena (1955). The novel dealt with the relationship between Walter Mosca, a tough and embittered ex-GI, and Hella, a German native, his mistress. Hella dies of an infection, denied the drugs that would have saved her, and Mosca avenges her. 

From 1963 on Puzo worked as a freelance journalist and writer.  His second novel, Fortunate Pilgrim (1965) followed one family of Italian immigrants from the late 1920s through World War II. 

Neither of Puzo's first two books gained financial success though both received good reviews.  Puzo's fourth work, The Runaway Summer of David Shaw (1966), was a children's book. 

After an expensive medical emergency – a gallbladder attack – Puzo decided to write a novel that would also be a commercial success. While working in pulp journalism, he had heard Mafia anecdotes and began to collect material on the East Coast branches of the Cosa Nostra.  

The Mafia, also known as Cosa Nostra (meaning our thing), is a criminal syndicate that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in Sicily, Italy.  It is a loose association of criminal groups that share a common organizational structure and code of conduct, and whose common enterprise is protection racketeering.  Each group, known as "family", "clan", or "cosca", claims sovereignty over a territory in which it operates its rackets - usually a town or village or a neighborhood of a larger city.  Its members call themselves "men of honor", although the public often refer to them as "mafiosi".  

The themes of love, crime, family bondage, Old World morals – including the concept of individual honor – were further developed in The Godfather (1969), Puzo's international breakthrough novel. Whenever the Godfather opened his mouth," Puzo said years later, "in my own mind I heard the voice of my mother."  The central character, Don Vito Corleone, is a sentimental bandit, individualist and ruthless scourged inside a tightly structured crime syndicate. His values are at the same anti-social and those of a bourgeois person; he is a conservative fundamentalist and his illicit activities spread corruption and violence. Puzo describes Don Corleone's struggle among the underworld bosses for power, and how family values are transferred from one generation to the next and how they change under social pressure.  

Marlon Brando in The Godfather (1972) directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Mario Puzo may have written a half-dozen other novels and several screenplays, but his 1969 novel “The Godfather” and its film adaptation, which he co-wrote with Francis Ford Coppola, are the works for which he will be long remembered. After initial publication and for many years afterward, “The Godfather’s” familiar black cover with its depiction of a puppeteer’s hand was ubiquitous — the novel sold 21 million copies before the film version appeared. The film, too, was an unprecedented success — it broke box-office records and won several Academy Awards

Mario Puzo invented the term that Mafia dons now use to describe themselves.  He wrote so convincingly about Italian-American crime families that people frequently assumed he was somehow "connected" himself.  Puzo who also received screenplay credit for his work on Earthquake, The Cotton Club, and the first two Superman movies, died of heart failure in 1999, at the age of seventy-eight.  

Three Years before his death, Terry Gross, the voice of Fresh Air, had a perfect opportunity to ask fascinating questions to the author about the most famous Mafia character Don Vito Corleone and his Godfather saga.

Terry Gross: How did the Mafia become the theme of so much of your work?

Puzo: In my second novel The Fortunate Pilgrim, I had a minor character that was a mafia leader.  Everybody said, "Gee, you should have had more of that character."  It's really just telling stories about people in the neighborhood.  It was Hell's Kitchen in New York.

TG: Who did you hear stories from?

Puzo: Oh, members of the family.  Like the rig stealing scene and keeping of the guns from the police.  That happened in the family.

TG: Tell the story the way it was told to you.

Puzo: Well, this guy threw his guns across the airshaft, you know, the space between apartments.  My mother took the guns and held them for him.  When he came and got his guns, he said, "Would you like a rug?"  She sent my brother, who's older than me, over to get the rug.  But my brother did not realize the guy was stealing the rug until he took out his gun when the cop came.  That story is almost entirely in tho book and in the movie.   

TG:  How did your mother feel about protecting this guys guns?

Puzo: Oh, in those days when I was a very little kid, that was thought of as nothing.  He was a neighbor and he wanted you to do it, and you did it because you were afraid of him; because you hoped that he would help you out.

TG: Do you think that your mother looked at the mob figures in your neighborhood as people who could protect your family, or as people who were more likely to harm your family?

Puzo: No, protect.  For instance, the business about the dog being committed to stay in the apartment-- that happened in my family.  My mother didn't want to get rid of the dog, so she went to the local guy of respect.  I don't think they even think of them as criminals.  They were people who had influence.

TG:  So tell the dog story.

Puzo: Like it happened in the movie: the landlord wanted my mother to get rid of the dog, and she didn't want to get rid of the dog.  he was going to kick her out and the local whatever he was, I never really understood what he was, told the landlord not to do it.

TG: Did she owe anything in return?

Puzo: No, she was the cousin, or the niece of somebody, who knew the Mafia guy.  You know, one of those family things.  A family courtesy.

TG: Did she do anything to pay respect to the local organized crime figures who controlled the neighborhood?

Puzo: Well, you have to remember that those figures are usually related by blood and were members of a family, so you gave them presents.  If you had a family member who was powerful, you made sure that you gave them a present at Christmas or a special occasion.  Which was not regarded as a payoff in any way.

Author Mario Puzo at his typewriter

   For Instance, my parents grew up in Italy, and since they were mostly illiterate when they had a letter that had to be read they would go to the local priest to have the priest read it for them.  But they would automatically bring a gift.  They would bring three or four eggs, a chicken, or something like that.  It's a whole different relationship.

   It wasn't a bribe; it's a mark of respect.  It's not like  they said, "You got to give me a piece f chicken", or "You got to give me an egg, and I'll read it for you."  It was understood.

TG: How did you envision your character Don Corleone when you first created him?

Puzo: He was like a brother who was much older than you, who would always protect you, who would always stick up for you.  He was somebody who was a protector.    

TG: When Marlon Brando was cast in the film, and you saw Marlon Brando inhabit the character, did your idea of Don Corleone change?

Puzo:  No. No, I'm the guy who picked Brando.

TG:  You picked Brando?

Puzo:  Oh sure.  I wrote him a letter, and he called me up, and we had a chat.  Then I tried to get Paramount to take him and they refused.  When the director, Francis Ford Coppola, came on the picture, he managed to talk Paramount into letting Brando play the role.  But it was my idea to cast Brando, which caused me a lot of trouble before it got done.  

TG:  What did you say in your letter to Marlon Brando when you were inviting him to play the part?

Puzo:  It was something like, "Help, they're going to kill me.  I think they're going to cast Danny Thomas as the Godfather!"

TG:  Danny Thomas?  Wow!

Puzo:  Yeah.  Well, Danny Thomas was very rich off television, and I read an item that he was going to buy Paramount Pictures so he could play the Godfather.  That scared me so much I wrote a letter to Brando.  He gave me very good advice.  He said, "No studio will hire me.  Wait until you get a director and then talk to the director."  And he was quite right.  When I talked to the studio they swore they would never hire Brando.

TG:  Why were they so opposed to the idea?

Puzo:  Well, Brando had built up what to them was a terrible reputation for being a troublemaker on his Mutiny on the Bounty, where he cost them a lot of money.  He was a rebel.  And his movies has been flops.  

TG:  Did he cause any trouble for you on the set?

Puzo:  I was never on the set, but they tell me he was perfect.  Every actor just loved the idea of working with Brando; he was their idol.

TG:  What were the difficulties of adapting your first Godfather novel into a screenplay?

Puzo:  It was a cinch.

TG:  Yeah?

Puzo:  Yeah.  I mean it was a cinch because it was the first time I had ever written a screenplay, so I didn't know what I was doing.  And it came out right.  The story I tell is that after having won two Academy Awards for the first two Godfathers, I went out and bought a book on screenwriting because I figured I'd better learn what it's about.  The first chapter of the book said, "Study Godfather I as the model of a screenplay."  So I was stuck with the book.  

TG:  It's interesting to me that the characters wield power are very euphemistic in their language.  They could be giving you the message that they're going to kill you unless you follow their orders, but they say it in the nicest way; killing would never be mentioned.  Everything is between the lines, beneath the surface.  What made you write the dialogue for these powerful, violent people in that coded way?

Puzo:  Well, it does come from the way the Sicilian Mafia operated.  In fact, there was a funny story that an Englishman came to live in Sicily and he got a kidnapping note, because they liked to collect the money for kidnapping you before they kidnapped you-- so they didn't have to the bother of kidnapping you.  That was the way they operated.  But the Sicilian Mafia wrote this Englishman such a flowery note that he really didn't understand what they were saying.  He had to get an interpreter.  He thought they were paying him some sort of compliment.  He didn't realize they wanted something like fifty grand off him before they kidnapped him.  So it saved everybody the trouble of going thru the kidnapping.  But it was very flowery: "Your eminence, we love you.  We'll do anything.  If you're having trouble give us a call."  You know, and meanwhile, "Just send us fifty grand and you'll never have any trouble with anybody."

   But that is how they talked.  That's where I got it from, you know.  That horse's head thing was strictly from Sicilian folklore, only they nailed the head of your favorite dog to your door as their first warning if you didn't pay the money.  They were great believers in collecting the money before doing the job.  

TG:  The most famous line you came up with was about making "an offer you can't refuse."  Does that line have its roots in mob lore?

Puzo:  No, I made it up.  I wrote memos on how we could plant that line because I was sure it would become a famous line.  I recognized that it would become one of those lines that people would always be using.  That was carefully constructed.  

TG:  Did you come up with the expression "Godfather"?

Puzo:  Yeah.  That was an accident.  Of course, before I used it no Mafia man ever used the word "Godfather" in that sense.  Nobody used it.  In Italian and for the most part Latin family culture, when you're a little kid, you call the friends of your family "godfather" and "godmother" the way in American culture you call family friends "aunt" and "uncle," even though they're not your aunt and uncle.  That was the only way in which it was used, except in a religious sense.  So I remembered it, and the more I used it in the book, the more it became what it was.  Now the Mafia uses it.  Everybody uses it.  

TG:  You said that your parents were nearly illiterate.  How did you become a reader and a writer?  Were your parents rpud of you for being able to read and write?

Puzo:  No.  I wrote a line somewhere where my mother regarded my library card with the same horror that present-day mothers look at their son's heroin needles.  Reading didn't help you make a living, you know.

TG:  What did your mother think you should be doing instead of reading?  

Puzo:  Oh, you know, a good clerical job indoors.  If you could avoid hard labor, that was the big thing.

TG:  How did you react to criticism from those Italians who complain that Italians are always depicted as mob figures in American popular culture?  And how do you respond to people who criticize the Godfather movies for being so violent, and for having increased the amount of violence in American popular culture?

Puzo:  It sounds like some of my relatives.  But to me it's a completely irrelevant thing.  For one thing, there was a time when Italians ran crime in America.  So I'm not maligning them in any way.  In fact, I present them as very lovable people that have to make a living-- unfortunately, in a way that society doesn't approve.  But also, I know that most Italians that I grew with were so law- abiding that getting a traffic ticket was terrible.  

TG:  Your novels and the Godfather movies have had a huge impact on American popular culture.  What do you think it is about the stories that make people connect with them in such a powerful way?

Puzo:  Well, it's a story with a warm personal family feeling, and I think it's everybody's wish to have somebody they could go to who would correct all their injustices without the problems of going to court, hiring a lawyer.  You know, somebody fixing up your world for you.

TG:  And if you crossed them, you'd be dead.

Puzo:  But that's okay, because why would you want to cross them if they did everything for you?

TG:  Of course, but there is always a bloodbath.

Puzo:  People are not perfect.

Terry Gross Interviewed Mario Puzo on July 25, 1996