by Glenn Kenny
“These mob guys, most of them, had lived a life of not telling stories. They had dedicated their lives to being monosyllabic. Henry was the opposite. He was the Irishman.
“He was playing to the crowd. He would dance. And the wiseguys liked him for that. The fully Italian guys didn’t hold anything against him, because he was not one of them.
“He was like the court jester.”
That vivid voice spoke to Pileggi, and so, too, to Scorsese. When Scorsese tried to contact Pileggi about getting the rights to the book and adapting it, Pileggi was skeptical. Not about Wiseguy’s potential as a movie, but as to whether the calls he was getting were actually from Scorsese.
“I had seen all of his movies, down to his great documentary about his parents, Italianamerican. So doing a movie with him was a kind of dream I didn’t think could necessarily come true. He first called from Chicago, while he was in the middle of directing The Color of Money.”
Pileggi wasn’t at his New York magazine office when the first call came; the receptionist gave him a pink slip with the message when he came in. “I got this message to call Marty Scorsese.” Pileggi laughs at the memory. “I knew that it was bullshit, I knew it was David Denby, my friend who at the time was the movie critic for the magazine. The son of a bitch. He knew how much I loved Marty’s movies because we had seen a bunch of them together. So I figured if I called the number I’d just get Denby, and Denby was gonna bust my balls, so I didn’t call.
“And then, next day, there was the same message, and again I didn’t call.”
Pileggi and the writer Nora Ephron had been romantically involved for some time by the mid-’80s, and Ephron’s career in film as a screenwriter, and later director, was well on its way. They married in 1987. “I think the only reason she even talked to me and got married to me was that she was fascinated by this world of mobsters that I wrote about, because it was the opposite of hers,” Pileggi says of Ephron, fondly and kiddingly.
“The day I didn’t return the call for the second time, I got home that night, and Nora was home, and she says to me, ‘Are you crazy?’ And I said, ‘What do you mean, am I crazy?’ She said, ‘Why won’t you call Marty Scorsese?’ And I said, ‘That’s not Marty, that’s Denby busting my balls.’”
Ephron informed him no, it was Marty—a crew member on Money who had worked with Ephron had called her to ask what was up. Chastened, Pileggi called Scorsese immediately.
“I couldn’t think of anybody I’d rather have make a movie out of this book. And once we spoke, that was it.”
This despite the fact that at the time, Scorsese could offer Pileggi nothing beyond his desire to make the book into a movie. “He said, ‘I can’t do it right away,’ because there was no deal, and he had to finish Money, and then he really needed to get The Last Temptation of Christ squared away. But I didn’t care. We made a handshake deal over the telephone, so to speak.”
Once the book was out of galleys and in bookstores in the early spring of 1986, offers intensified. “The book was huge, and a lot of people were coming at me. I threw them all out. I told my agent, we’re not selling it. A whole slew of directors wanted to do it, and would have done it instantly. Including Brian De Palma, and I like Brian, and I like his movies. But I just knew this was Marty’s material, that this was where he was from, in a way that Brian wasn’t.”
* * *
Pileggi held faith that Scorsese was the filmmaker to do justice to Wiseguy, and he was proven more than correct. But because Pileggi waited, a different movie about Henry Hill made it into theaters before Goodfellas.
My Blue Heaven, directed by Herbert Ross and produced and distributed by Warner Brothers, the same studio that put together Goodfellas (this despite Scorsese already having a production deal with Touchstone in place), opened in theaters on August 17, 1990, a full month before the Scorsese/Pileggi collaboration. It stars Steve Martin as Vincent “Vinnie” Antonelli, a New York mobster enrolled in the witness protection program; Rick Moranis plays Barney Coopersmith, his neat-as-a-pin, by-the-book, tenderhearted FBI keeper.
This broad comedy relocated its mobster to California rather than the Midwest. Made well before fusion cuisine and such hit the West Coast, it finds Vinnie perplexed on a visit to a supermarket where not only can he not find arugula, but where no one has heard of it. “Arugula! I haven’t had arugula in SIX WEEKS,” he cries. Shades of the lament of the exiled Hill at the end of Goodfellas: “Can’t even get decent food. Right after I got here I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce and I got egg noodles with ketchup.”
The screenwriter of My Blue Heaven is Nora Ephron.
“She was the daughter of playwrights, screenwriters,” says Pileggi. “It was a very refined world. So I just brought her along. And everybody she met [from Pileggi’s world], and I tell you, she met major people, they loved her. So she wound up being included in lots of—well, I wouldn’t say mob meetings, but dinners. Like the ninetieth birthday of a mob boss from Las Vegas, in Staten Island, we’d get in the car. She loved meeting these people, and as they got to know her movies, the wives really connected to her.” Prior to writing Heaven, Ephron based her screenplay for 1989’s Cookie, a comedy about the feisty daughter of a mob boss, on Nina Galante. Nina was the daughter of mobster Carmine Galante, and in the 1970s she served as her dad’s chauffeur. (“She was the best wheel man in the city,” Pileggi insists.)
Pileggi stayed close to Henry Hill after the publication of Wiseguy, indeed, up to the end of Hill’s life. Hill kept up with the showbiz trades and became very animated when word about a possible movie based on Wiseguy came up. “A lot of the conversations were ‘how’s the book doing, where’s the movie now, when am I going to get a paycheck,’ that sort of thing.”
Sometimes in the early days of their association, when Hill called, one of Ephron’s boys from her marriage to Carl Bernstein, then in their preteens, would answer the phone, and the caller would announce himself as Henry. That was the name by which they knew Ephron’s father, Henry Ephron. So they’d say hello, and hand the phone to their mom.
“And they would spend a lot of time on the phone,” Pileggi says. “She was fascinated, because, like anybody else, you want to know, how do you live in the witness protection program? He got a little more far-fetched with her than he did with me. I think because it was clear to him that she found it so entertaining, he made some things up.”
Heaven is a broad, amiable farce, which ends with its mobster character turning local hero by dedicating the proceeds of a new criminal scam to a youth baseball construction project—an ending probably more inspired by the exigencies of Hollywood narrative than Hill’s own yarn-spinning.
* * *
When it came down to writing a screenplay for the movie whose title Scorsese and Pileggi changed to Goodfellas, because a mob-themed television series called Wiseguy had started airing in 1987, the collaborators began by concentrating on what they could subtract from Henry Hill’s story. “Marty said, ‘You go with the book, and I’ll go over the book again, and let’s each pick out the movie from the book. Where is the movie in this book?’ I said okay. So I went and I made up my breakdown of scenes. And he made his, and when we compared them, they were identical. We left out Henry’s stint in the army for instance. For the writer and the director to come out with the identical same vision for what the movie is in the book, I don’t know whether that happens every day.”
Some portions of the process nevertheless mystified Pileggi, who manned the typewriter during the writing sessions. “You know, in the script somewhere, you’re gonna see, typed on the side, the word cream in a parentheses. And the author had no idea what Marty was talking about, because he was not following rock music. I was too busy following Frank Sinatra stuff.” It would be a few years before Pileggi would know what Scorsese meant.
Two
PLAYERS
In his 1994 autobiography The Kid
Stays in the Picture, the eccentric film producer and Hollywood executive Robert Evans coined, or probably revived, this adage: “There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.”
One component of this story is indisputable. That a lengthy excerpt from Wiseguy appeared, illustrated by vivid paintings by Larry Gerber (some seeming to anticipate specific shots in the movie version), in the January 26, 1986, edition of New York magazine.
At the time, Scorsese was in Chicago, shooting The Color of Money, as was the film’s producer, Barbara De Fina, who was married to Scorsese. “I was getting my mail sent to me, and I subscribed to that magazine,” De Fina says. “So I was going through my mail...and Marty didn’t read New York magazine, he didn’t like it. I found the Wiseguy article, and read it, and I put a little yellow Post-it on it. I said to him, ‘This looks like fun, this looks interesting.’ I didn’t hear anything for a while, and only found out later that he and his assistant were frantically trying to reach Nick. He never told me what was going on. Because I would have just called the book publisher and said, ‘So who’s repping the book?’”
This dovetails with Pileggi’s story of not answering phone calls reputed to be from Martin Scorsese and, it turns out, actually were from Martin Scorsese. In Pileggi’s telling the next step was an agreement to collaborate on the screenplay and then defer the making of the film by a couple of years after Scorsese was given the opportunity to finally make The Last Temptation of Christ.
In January of 1986 the film producer Irwin Winkler, who’d worked with Scorsese on New York, New York and Raging Bull, was living in Paris. Winkler was producing Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight, in which Martin Scorsese had an acting role, playing an avid but ruthless jazz nightclub owner in the film’s New York–set-and-shot sequences. Winkler writes, in his book A Life in Movies, “My ritual was to visit the English-language bookstore WH Smith on the rue de Rivoli every Monday afternoon. There I could get the Sunday New York Times, the New Yorker, and New York magazine. One week when I picked up New York magazine I devoured the excerpt from Nick Pileggi’s book Wiseguy while standing in the aisle. I knew Nick from the 1960s, and when I called him in New York, he said his book hadn’t been sold and that the agent handling the film rights was Bob Bookman at CAA in Los Angeles. When I reached Bookman, he said he had several interested buyers and was preparing to auction the book. I called Bookman’s boss, Michael Ovitz, then the most powerful man in Hollywood (according to the cover story of Time magazine). Ovitz told Bookman to sell Wiseguy to me and then quietly asked me to help him sign Martin Scorsese as a client.
“When I had a celebratory call with Pileggi, he told me he’d heard that Marty Scorsese was interested in the book. I hadn’t worked with Marty since The Last Temptation of Christ”—Winkler here refers to the abortive 1982 attempt to get the film made—“and when we connected, he told me that yes, he wanted not only to direct the film but also to write the script with Pileggi. Scorsese and Nick Pileggi started working up an outline for the film, and I gave them my notes as they moved toward a script. Marty, however, got the go-ahead on the long-delayed Last Temptation, so we put aside Wiseguy for a year and a half until he finished that film.”
When I interviewed Irwin Winkler for the first time in 2019, he told more or less the same story with some additions.
“We’d get all the magazines and newspapers from New York, and...I picked up New York magazine, and I read the excerpt of Nick’s book, and I thought, This is a movie. I called his agent, a guy named Sterling Lord, who I think is still around, he’s like ninety-six years old or something.” As of this writing, Sterling Lord is still around, and one hundred years old.
“I knew Sterling from my relationship with Jimmy Breslin, who was a client of his back in the day. And he told me that he was selling it in conjunction with CAA, but basically CAA was really handling it day to day. So I called Bob Bookman, who was a CAA literary agent. Bookman told me that they had a lot of offers and a lot of interest in Pileggi, and then I called Mike Ovitz, and Mike said, ‘Okay, we’ll sell it to you.’ At the same time the chairman of Warner Brothers, Ted Ashley, had read the same excerpt and told [Warner executive] Terry Semel to go after it. After I bought the rights, Terry Semel, boy, he jumped right in, and wanted to develop it.”
In a November 1990 Rolling Stone interview, which author Anthony DeCurtis notes took place in “the apartment [...] where [Scorsese] lives with Barbara De Fina, his fourth wife” (no mention that she is the credited executive producer of the film he and Scorsese will discuss), Scorsese said, “I read a review of Wiseguy when I was directing The Color of Money, and it said something about this character Henry Hill having access to many different levels of organized crime because he was somewhat of an outsider.”
Scorsese told Richard Schickel in the book Conversations with Scorsese, “When I was doing The Color of Money in Chicago, I was reading the New York Review of Books and saw a review of a book by Nick Pileggi called Wiseguy.” Murray Kempton’s laudatory essay on Wiseguy, titled “Hood’s Progress!” appeared in the May 8, 1986, edition of the New York Review of Books. “It seemed like Nick was taking us through the different levels of purgatory and hell in the underworld, like Virgil or like Dante. Irwin Winkler said, ‘Are you interested in that?’ I said yes and he bought it for me.”
* * *
Less frequently quoted than the front end of Robert Evans’ maxim is its continuation: “And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each differently.”
Who found the material, who pursued the material and how, who bought the material, whose account is true or accurate: these might not seem consequential questions now. But they have definite implications on the other side of the film’s making and marketing, and in the wake of relationships that sustained, and relationships that broke, in the years after.
* * *
Winkler’s tidbit about Michael Ovitz’s request to bring Scorsese to the talent agency CAA (Creative Artists Agency), which Ovitz headed at the time, ties in interestingly with Scorsese’s own recollections of Ovitz. Speaking with Schickel about the 1986 The Color of Money, he said, “Michael Ovitz at that time was representing Cruise. He called me and said, ‘Why don’t you use Tom Cruise?’ Cruise had been in Michael Chapman’s film All the Right Moves”—Chapman was Scorsese’s very inspired and trusted cinematographer on Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and a friend; Moves was his directorial debut—“And I thought he was very good. I said, ‘Sure, let’s put him in as the young pool player.’”
Money had been developed by Scorsese’s then-agent Harry Ufland, in conjunction with Ovitz. In conversation with Ovitz, he asked Scorsese, “What do you want done most?” The answer was The Last Temptation of Christ, which had been set up at Paramount in 1982 until Barry Diller pulled the plug on it in preproduction. Scorsese recounted the conversation with Ovitz to Schickel: “And he smiled. Mike was a genius at what he did, and a person who likes a challenge. He said, ‘I’ll get it made for you.’ I didn’t think he would. I didn’t think he could.”
But Ovitz could, and did. He set the film up at Universal as a one-off deal. (Albeit one that would require, at some point, Scorsese to make another picture with the studio in the future; that would become Cape Fear.) Tom Pollock, always an adventurous producer, then in a power position at that studio, took it on and it got made more or less as Scorsese had wished. It’s one of the director’s greatest pictures. It did poorly at the box office, and was met with vociferous, persistent, and largely ill-informed protests on release. It did not, however, result in another term in what industry wags call “movie jail” for Scorsese, as the troubled box-office failure, 1982’s The King of Comedy, had. By bringing in The Color of Money on budget, and that film having been a minor hit, Scorsese had proved that he could function within the system. He was not a persistent Problem Filmmaker. In addition, his development deal with Touchstone could not be affected by Last Temptation. But, as the vario
us players converged around Pileggi’s book, the chips fell so that Wiseguy ended up with Warner Brothers rather than Touchstone. Not inapt, given Warner’s gangster movie pedigree—they were the studio behind such classics as Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and White Heat, to name but a few.
Speaking of players, and chips, Harry Ufland, the aforementioned Scorsese agent, who had been an executive producer on Temptation, called Winkler about Goodfellas at one point. “He said, ‘You know, I gotta be a producer,’ and I said, ‘I don’t want any partners,’” Winkler says. “And he backed off.”
* * *
Joe Pesci was one of the first to be cast. He was reluctant when first approached. Scorsese visited Pesci at his home, and in conversation Pesci—who made a huge impression as Jake LaMotta’s brother Joey in Raging Bull and was from a milieu not dissimilar to Scorsese’s own—worked out ways to make the character of Tommy his own. An anecdote from his own life fueled what was to become one of the movie’s most quoted scenes.
Looking at Something Wild you can understand why Ray Liotta wanted to play Henry Hill so bad. In that 1986 film directed by Jonathan Demme, Liotta played a character named Ray Sinclair. Sinclair is the ex-boyfriend of Melanie Griffith’s Audrey, and he’s got a wicked grin and a terrible temper that explodes in shocking violence at the movie’s climax. The role garnered critical plaudits and a Golden Globe nomination for Liotta, then in his early thirties.
Looking at Goodfellas you cannot imagine anyone else playing Henry Hill. Scorsese wanted him. Winkler wasn’t convinced. “I didn’t think he had the charm to capture the audience after all the drugs, stealing, and womanizing that Henry practiced,” Winkler writes, “but Marty kept insisting, and I kept putting it off, and one night Margo”—Margo Winkler, the producer’s wife, herself an actor—“and I were having dinner at a restaurant in Santa Monica with my friend Dick Zanuck when Ray Liotta came over to our table and asked to speak to me. In a ten-minute conversation he (with charm and confidence) sold me on why he should play Henry Hill. Marty was right.”
