Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  Jimmy—clean shaven shiny on the forehead

  Green suit

  Snake skin belt

  Black shoes

  Watch on left hand

  Black silk socks

  Brown silver tie

  No ring

  V neck T-shirt

  Chinos

  No dungarees

  Sneaker [incomprehensible; De Niro’s handwriting tends to the scrawl] shoes

  Also makes me look younger!

  #52

  Jimmy

  1965

  Summer

  Tattoos, hair back, clean shave

  White shirt with red stripe pants

  Also in De Niro’s files are pages from a reference book called Fashions in Hair, with illustrations depicting styles from year to year. There are plenty of photos of the actual Jimmy Burke at various ages, various newspaper clippings of stories recounting Burke’s criminal trials, some of them moving past the point at which Goodfellas ends: for instance, the New York Daily News, September 5, 1984, headline: “Tampering Fear Sequesters Jury in Burke’s Trial.”

  De Niro also had Jimmy Burke’s Federal Bureau of Prisons Program terminal report from 1979. One passage therein reads: “Although Mr. Burke did not avail himself to any of the self-improvement programs during his prolonged imprisonment, he nevertheless received outstanding performance ratings for his work in the Food Service Dept. and Ground Maint. Dept. His overall adjustment was above average and he was receiving earned good time and meritorious pay for his efforts.”

  In the margins of the scripts, De Niro gives himself not-quite stage directions, but instructions on small, specific gestures, or pauses. In the scene in which Jimmy is trying to decide whether or not to kill Morrie, a note in the margin reads: “long look + pause then ‘What am I gonna do with you.’” For when Jimmy leads Morrie into the car where Morrie will die, the note is: “with head angle put arm around him.”

  His dialogue notes are mostly indicating emphasis, as in his spelling out of Jimmy’s words to young Henry after he leaves the courtroom following his first “pinch”: “NEVER rat on your friends and ALWAYS keep your fucking mouth shut.”

  De Niro would call on Henry Hill throughout the shoot. He also told me that early on he conferred with Jimmy Burke’s daughter Catherine Burke (“The idea of meeting Jimmy Burke was complicated, as he was incarcerated,” De Niro said), but that Burke cut off contact without explanation at a certain point. Apparently she tried to strong-arm the production into giving her $100,000 to use the Burke name. Rather than do that, almost all the names of the real-life characters in the picture were changed. These changes are listed on a script for the film dated January 12, 1989, but may have been appended at a later date to that extant script. In any event, it can be inferred that from the point of that refusal, Burke was no longer a friend to the production. (As we’ll see later, Hill was irritated but not surprised by her actions.)

  The first day of principal photography, May 1, 1989, De Niro was on the call sheet, that is, scheduled to do a scene. It was of his chat with Karen after Henry’s arrest by the Nassau County narcs, where Jimmy gives Karen a wad of cash and instructs her to check out some dresses in a storefront up the way—the one in which Karen gets spooked, runs to her car, and drives off, thinking Jimmy was about to have her killed. (She’s not wrong!)

  First assistant director Joseph Reidy remembers that it was difficult to get De Niro out of his trailer. “So when we first started with De Niro, we started with the storefront, with Lorraine. I do remember that being the first day because he yelled at me in the trailer. Because he had not yet gotten his look right.” Here he was playing Jimmy as an older man. “And because he had signed on to the movie so late, we had not been able to do tests with him the same way as we had with the other cast members. It was kind of unfair to him. And he hadn’t finished his makeup, hadn’t finished establishing his look. But we were running out of light, and it was the first day of shooting. So someone had to go in and move it along.” I told Reidy about how vividly De Niro recollected his problems with respect to hair color and Reidy responded, “Yes, that’s exactly the sort of thing he would get upset about.”

  * * *

  Before she worked with Martin Scorsese, Barbara De Fina, after having been employed by comedian Alan King’s production company, was a unit manager on Sidney Lumet’s 1981 The Prince of the City. She did other uncredited jobs with the man who, before Scorsese took the unofficial title, was the quintessential New York movie director. “I worked with Sidney a lot, and he and Marty were similar in the way that they were both incredibly prepared when they would come on the set. Sidney maybe a little more so, to the point that he would know—in preproduction he would decide what lenses he was going to use. And Marty wasn’t quite that, but he did make little storyboards for every scene. And I suppose he figured out a lot of the lenses he wanted, and more than that, camera movements, which were so important to him. I think he moved the camera much more than Sidney.

  “Sidney, I think, was a little more—I don’t want to use the word assured, but much more comfortable, I think. I think Marty, at the point I began working with him, thought he had a lot more to prove.”

  Joseph Reidy had worked on several films with Scorsese before getting to work with Lumet, on the 2006 Find Me Guilty. He agrees with De Fina’s assessment of the two directors being unusually well-prepared. “In the time I worked with Marty, his preparation changed over time. But there’s always one period, though, that’s consistent, that he always did, and that is, he took time to himself, he cloistered himself for a few days and composed the film in his head, and put it down on paper, in the script. He told me what he really needed was just solitude and music, and maybe he would have reference films or something for him to look at—but he already had the reference films in his head. There was a period when I would prep with him, and he would disappear for a few days. Like eight weeks out into preproduction or something, at some point he would do that. For three or four days, and sometimes he would go to a hotel room, he’d be away from his office, away from distractions. And he would come back with a meticulously notated script that represented his ‘composed’ film.” It always had to do with what he saw, and what he wanted to see. If there was a deviation from it on the locations they worked with—if a door was in a different position than what he had envisioned, for instance, he could roll with it, or adjust, but he was usually able to convey to the production designer, Kristi Zea, and the location staff, managed by De Fina and production manager Bruce Pustin, what he wanted with specificity.

  Lumet, on the other hand, rehearsed almost as if for a theatrical production. “It’s a two-to three-week rehearsal period, and traditionally he would be down at the Ukrainian National Home on Second Avenue, and then order sandwiches in from the Second Avenue Deli, he always had a habit of doing all these things, as he describes in his own book.” The book is Making Movies, an indispensable volume for critic, filmmaker, and enthusiast. “And there would be, already, a set plan, but he would maybe alter the sets in this imaginary workspace, everything would be taped out on the floor and so on.” Paul Newman worked with Lumet, who, like the star, had also spent time at New York’s Actors Studio, on The Verdict a couple of years before doing The Color of Money with Scorsese. And Newman’s Lumet-like approach to rehearsing threw Scorsese for a loop. “We did it the way he suggested, which was to take two complete weeks and just work it out with the actors in a loft. I was really nervous, because it was like the theater, which I’d never done before,” Scorsese told Ian Christie and David Thompson. “So when [Newman] said, ‘What you do is take a tape and mark out an area for a chair; then you tape out an area for a bed,’ I could foresee those terrible theater things when people pretend a door is there, which I hate. I said, ‘What if we use a real chair?’ ‘A chair is good,’ he said, to my relief. So we used a chair, then we had a hospital bed broug
ht in, and so on.

  “Rehearsals are always aggravating. You are afraid that you are going to say ridiculous things, and the actors feel that way, too.” In preparing with the actors for Goodfellas, Scorsese worked in personal spaces with small groups of actors, or one-on-one.

  “He tended to meet with actors individually and in group,” Reidy says. “That could be in his office or at his or their places. We did go to a few locations with some of the cast. They wouldn’t be costumed, they wouldn’t have everything together, and he would spend time with them, and that was important. After he had done the composition of the shots, and made notes, done location scouting and finding the places and continuing to cast, he’d work with the actors, and have Nick Pileggi come in for script revisions based on that.” It was in one of these private meeting that Scorsese extracted the real-life “How am I funny?” anecdote from Joe Pesci.

  * * *

  “The shoot took sixty-eight days. And I predicted it was going to take sixty-eight days,” Joseph Reidy recalls. “Marty was really good with me about this, because the schedule mattered to him at that point. I do not think it does as much to him these days, but it did matter on this movie. And I think he was given a budget of fifty-five days initially. But as we looked at what we had to do, I did a schedule that was around sixty-eight. It was toward the end of preproduction, and we were still aiming for a shorter schedule. And I still said, ‘This is gonna be the number.’ While budgeted for fifty-five, we went over that. But we went over to exactly where Marty and I thought it was going to be. To sixty-eight days.”

  I asked Reidy to explain to the layman what a first assistant director does: “An assistant director is really there to help the director, in any way they can, to achieve their vision. At the same time, they serve the producer’s company in terms of moving the film along and trying to keep on schedule. But at least keep the production company running. So, stage management during the day, while maintaining a view, overall, of trying to accomplish the film within its scheduled time. How is the stage management done? I’m running this set, I’m orchestrating the day’s work, working with the director of photography, and all of the crew members, to make things happen. And directing the background action. It encompasses, usually, much more. And with Marty I had a different relationship than with some other directors, in that he would have me sometimes orchestrate more extras, things like that. I often got a little more responsibility in terms of working with minor players, bringing them in and positioning them, giving them an idea of what is going on in the scene. I always had enough of an understanding that I could sketch out a scene for them. Especially when there were a lot of people in the scene—a lot of these wiseguys who are, you know, Number 28 on the call sheet, or something along those lines; Marty does not need to individually address all of them, and it takes up time that Marty needs to address the principals, so that would fall to me at times, too.”

  * * *

  Scorsese was a crucial component of Reidy’s early cinephilia, so working with the director became something of a dream job for Reidy. “I loved movies when I was a child and in high school. My mother would take me to films at Oberlin College, or I’d go into Cleveland to colleges or the art houses. Film school education was not widely known about then, particularly in Middle America. But I was reading film journals and books; I read about Coppola and people like that, and about little other things that were coming out by new directors. And I made my own short films. When I was a senior in high school I made my first trip to New York. There weren’t college tours as such in those days, at least not that I knew about, but the idea of going to NYU had occurred to me. It’s kind of shocking to think that I came to New York on my own at that time, but I went to the New York Film Festival during my visit. And Mean Streets was there. So I was thinking I should go into movies. My parents didn’t quite understand that whole thing, ’cause it was not a common occupation, certainly no one they knew did it. I got into NYU, on a scholarship, and made movies there, and learned about living in New York and became a little more sophisticated than when I came in. I wanted to go on and write and direct myself, but when I got out of school, I realized I was broke! I had loans, I needed to do something, and I applied for jobs as a camera assistant, editor assistant, anything. And I took a test for the Directors Guild training program, and I had been working as a PA, a little bit of commercials and such. My first film job actually was working for a psychiatrist at Downstate Medical Center, shooting video of group therapy sessions. I got into the training program, and that put me on this track as assistant director. Two-year training program, became a second AD, I accelerated through that, and as soon as I got my experience as a second, it only took me a few years, I started working as a first. So I was twenty-nine when I started working as a first AD, and went a little slowly. It was a matter of time before I met Marty, and I met Marty twice, once for After Hours, because I’d worked with another producer, Robert Colesberry, and he brought me in to meet him for After Hours. I didn’t get the job. But next was Color of Money. In the interim, I had worked on a television pilot for a TV series, The Equalizer. And Barbara De Fina was the line producer. So she had me meet Marty for Color of Money, I got the job, and I... I, like, fell in love with him. Working with someone I had admired for that long was really something.” The relationship continued for twenty years, with Reidy acting as first assistant director on almost every Scorsese feature through 2010’s Shutter Island.

  * * *

  After Hours, the picture that Reidy had not gotten a job on, was Scorsese’s first with the German-born cinematographer Michael Ballhaus. Had Ballhaus, who died in 2017 at the age of eighty-one, never met Scorsese he would still count as one of cinema’s towering figures by dint of his work with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Between 1971 and 1981 he shot thirteen features for the prolific, volatile German director, all of them great or near-great; the best-known of them are Beware of a Holy Whore, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and The Marriage of Maria Braun. In addition to the ability to work quickly, Ballhaus was also able to do the seemingly impossible, and without seeming to break a sweat. There’s one scene in Fassbinder’s 1976 Chinese Roulette in which no matter where the camera turns, there’s a reflective surface, but the camera manages to itself elude reflection, always.

  Ballhaus began working in the US in the early ’80s. His first English-language film, Dear Mr. Wonderful, directed by the German Peter Lilienthal, starred Joe Pesci—it’s only the second film Pesci made after 1980’s Raging Bull. And in it Pesci plays a particularly resonant role, that of a bowling alley lounge singer, something Pesci actually had been. (In 2019, writing about Pesci’s return to acting after a long hiatus, for Scorsese’s The Irishman, the critic Violet Lucca speaks of Pesci’s underplaying in this picture: “He expresses [...] defeat without words or movements, without slouching or beating back tears. Instead, it all emanates from the haunted, crushed look in his eyes.”) In 1983 Ballhaus shot Baby It’s You for director John Sayles; the film’s producers, Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson, went on to produce After Hours, and in the process they put Ballhaus together with Scorsese.

  In Scorsese on Scorsese, the director recalls: “The producers introduced me to a new cameraman, Michael Ballhaus, who had done many of Fassbinder’s pictures. Michael is a gentleman. He smiles on the set, he is very pleasant and he’s Max Ophüls’ nephew. He also moves quickly.” Years later, in a stage interview with Roger Ebert at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio, Scorsese would detail just how quickly he could move, on The Last Temptation of Christ: “In the case of the crucifixion [...] we shot in two days, from sunup to sundown, and we did seventy-five setups [individual shots].” Ebert says, “A typical day of shooting on average by another director might get four.” (It’s worth noting here that they were shooting on film; digital technology has discombobulated production notions concerning setups, shooting duration, and a whole lot more.) Scorsese responds, “Six to ten. Ten’s a good day [...] Mi
chael Ballhaus, because he worked with Fassbinder, and he did a film with Fassbinder called Beware of a Holy Whore, which after three days of shooting, he needed another four days to finish. But [Fassbinder] didn’t like the actor; he canceled the actor, he put himself in the part. He said they were going to reshoot everything in one day. So he did it this way. He said, Okay, at 7:52, we shoot by the window. At 8:01, we’re up... And they literally did it that way. That’s the way we did this crucifixion scene.”

  Barbara De Fina says of Ballhaus, “He was always friendly and happy; he was one of the happiest people I’ve ever met. And he had a great crew, so it worked really well.” (Ballhaus’s son, Florian, now a cinematographer himself, was the first assistant camera on Goodfellas.)

  Reidy says, “Michael was very good at interpreting Marty’s ideas, improving on them sometimes, in the shots, how the shots would be composed, how they would move. And he was very good with camera movement and, you know, would suggest things that maybe Marty hadn’t thought of, to add to it. They worked very well together, because part of it was his personality; he was a gentleman”—Scorsese’s word again—“and he had brought with him connections to European film history. Max Ophüls was an uncle of his, and he would talk about visiting the set of Ophüls’ great film Lola Montès.”

  Max Ophüls’ remarkable filmography includes both European and American masterpieces, and his work overall is known for elegant, complicated camera movements that influenced Stanley Kubrick and Scorsese, and more recently Paul Thomas Anderson. (James Mason, who starred in two of Ophüls’ greats, 1949’s Caught and The Reckless Moment from the same year, and who had great affection for the man, wrote this poem about Ophüls’ cinematic practice: “A shot that does not call for tracks/Is agony for poor old Max,/Who, separated from his dolly,/Is wrapped in deepest melancholy./Once, when they took away his crane,/I thought he’d never smile again.”)