Made Men
Page 6
“Marty and Michael could talk about cinema,” Reidy says. “Marty is moody, and you’ve heard this from people, I’m sure; he’s had his tantrums and can be difficult at times. And Michael had a way of dealing with him that took a lot of patience. He would listen to Marty and he would calm Marty if Marty would be upset. And this held, even if Marty was agitated about nothing that we were doing at the time, but anything else that was bothering him. And Michael had a way of smoothing it over so that Marty would get pleasure out of the work. Michael had brought joy to all of it, and together they would share the joy of the filmmaking. They really took pleasure in it. And that’s what made that relationship really special.”
I mentioned to Joseph Reidy that Barbara De Fina had talked about how reassuring Michael Ballhaus could be. “Reassuring is exactly the word. If Marty was insecure about something, really worried that something was not gonna work, and if Michael believed that something would work in that shot, he would take the time to make Marty understand that it would. He had a way with his language, his demeanor, while being entirely honest with Marty. With a shot that was difficult, that maybe would not be possible within Marty’s idea of it, Michael could create an idea that would help, like something simple in restaging, like ‘Can we just move the actors over here to this window?’ They would discuss things at length, and sometimes Marty would not want to go along, because he was thinking about shot order, or considering whether the suggestion lined up with what he thought the character would do. And I think on Goodfellas, Marty would come away feeling satisfied. I don’t think he was ever disappointed. On some movies, you’d think, Oh God, that’s not working, but then, he’s living with it. But on Goodfellas Michael and he were able to get what Marty wanted, almost always.” (As it happens, though, Ballhaus was not able to see the entire film through. He was contracted to shoot the Frank Oz comedy What About Bob? and had to leave the production a little before its completion. Taking his place was Barry Sonnenfeld, the future director who had lensed several films for the Coen brothers. In a 1999 interview with the Guardian it’s said that Sonnenfeld was on the shoot for a week; Barbara De Fina recollects it being more like two. As the picture went almost two weeks over its budgeted schedule, the latter seems likely. Another source remembers Sonnenfeld lensing all of the sequences featuring the teen Henry Hill. Sonnenfeld’s recent memoir does not clear any of this up, but features an amusing anecdote in which the then-very-youthful-looking Sonnenfeld is razzed by Scorsese and De Niro for appearing to be twelve years old.)
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As such, the high drama on the set was kept to a minimum. The authenticity of some of the actors became a minor concern for Reidy. Scorsese and Nick Pileggi, when dining at the legendary Harlem restaurant Rao’s—a very exclusive joint in which mobsters would mingle with the landed gentry—would spot these memorable faces, many of which could provide perfect authentic atmosphere for the cinematic world of criminals they were building. With casting director Ellen Lewis, Reidy made sure to keep them under close watch, not just because several were active criminals or convicted felons themselves, but because they did not know how being an extra worked—factors as elemental as showing up on time and keeping quiet on the set. “They were different levels of extras from different eras and affiliations. Paulie would have a crew, but that would change, you know, there’d be, like, key guys—when you look at the movie, you’ll see in a number of scenes in a given era, a lot of the same faces, then it would change for another era. I told the casting director, Ellen Lewis, ‘We have to hire these people as principals, they can’t be extras, we have to know who they are, we have to control them, because they all have to get dressed, they have to have lots of costumes, we have to know how to get ahold of them, we—you know, we have to deal with them like principals.”
Property master Bob Griffon had a lot of fake money made for the Air France heist, but for the scene in which Jimmy “the Gent” is introduced, De Niro insisted on real money to throw around. Griffon withdrew $2,000 from his own savings and remembers gathering it back up quickly after each take, because there was a very real possibility one of these on-set characters would walk off with the uninsured cash. Keeping track of these guys became a project in and of itself. “Ellen and Marty took all these pictures of all these guys, and she’d remind him who this guy was and who this guy was, and she made a chart, and a board, and they put the photographs of this group, and then that group, and I would remind the members of each group of certain things, I’d say, ‘We’re gonna need them to do this next,’ or ‘They need to be around for this long,’ and so on.”
Despite the large number of locations and scenes to shoot, the principal photography was for the most part drama free, albeit labor intensive. Bob Griffon remembers spending a day at Long Island’s Catalina Beach Club, shooting the scene in which Henry is introduced, briefly, to Karen’s upper-middle-class world, where he tries to pay for an al fresco meal with cash and is told by Karen that here you “sign” for things. The shooting of Stacks Edwards was also on that day’s shot list. The apartment where that would be shot was in Manhattan, well over an hour’s drive from the beach club, and once there, Scorsese had decided to restage the murder, having Stacks propelled from his chair and bouncing off a bed, where the blood spatter from his shooting would end up. (He was originally to go up against a wall.) The sequence took six hours to restage and shoot.
Of the budget they worked with, De Fina says, “Well, we were comfortable. I mean, it’s funny, budgets today are often smaller than some of the budgets were at that point. It was comfortable. We didn’t have a lot of extra money, but it wasn’t the kind of movie that needed a lot of expensive things. With so much of the dressing, for instance, there was a lot of just found material.”
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I asked Reidy if he was aware, at the time, of how singular a film Goodfellas would be. “I had a fantastic time on it,” he said. “Every day was special in some way, either with acting, or we’re doing some interesting shots, or we did great things with extras, or—you know, things like that, so it was, bit by bit, coming together. I thought: ‘This could be pretty great.’ And you know what, I had the benefit of this: I could sort of see where Marty was going, that he was making something really special, that was dear to him, that was close to him, and that really had his mark on it. You know, when he talked about his own upbringing, and what it was like living in Little Italy and seeing guys on the street—when he would relate that to young Henry looking out the window and seeing the guys...it’s like that kind of thing he did, except that while Henry wanted to be like them, Marty was an observer of the action. He had to be, because he had asthma, was sickly, he would just be seeing these things. So there was his sense of what it was like for the real wiseguys, bringing to this story what he knew of it personally, that helped make it special. And he was bringing out great performances, that’s something you couldn’t deny. Joe Pesci or De Niro or Lorraine Bracco. Or how Paul Sorvino was in that, he has some really good scenes, but a lot of it was just his presence, and how he would sit and look and be, which came out of how Marty worked with him. So yes. I felt we were making something really special. And different.”
Four
A MARTIN SCORSESE PICTURE, SCENE BY SCENE
CREDITS BY SAUL AND ELAINE BASS
The disquieting opening scene is punctuated by two brief sets of credits, the white block type rolling like lane marks down a highway, horizontal rather than vertical (as they would be from the perspective of a driver). They’ve already been described a bit in a prior chapter. The first set announces “An Irwin Winkler Production” and “A Martin Scorsese Picture” (despite being a director whose films bear the distinct stamps of his personality and aesthetic, Scorsese does not use the more blatant possessory credit “A Film By”). Then the principal cast, Robert De Niro first.
In the second set of credits, after Henry closes the trunk, the film’s title is revealed—in red-on-black type rat
her than white-on-black type. As if the blood of the murdered man in the trunk had seeped into the fabric of the film itself. The remaining credits, for executive producer Barbara De Fina, Wiseguy author Pileggi, screenwriters Pileggi and Scorsese, producer Winkler and director Scorsese, are in white.
Saul Bass was a graphic designer with a particular distinction: he was spectacularly good at designing specifically for film. And his images, in opening credits and on posters, always bolstered a film’s theme: the hinged Capitol Dome in Advise and Consent, the trifurcated, shifting main title of Psycho. (Bass also storyboarded that film’s infamous shower-murder scene.) From the mid-1950s on he collaborated closely with his wife, Elaine, and they began sharing credit on film work in 1960, beginning with Spartacus. It is no coincidence that the above-named films were made by directors of distinction: Otto Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stanley Kubrick.
Goodfellas was the first Scorsese film for which the Basses concocted the credits. One might wonder why, given Scorsese’s taste. As it happened, Scorsese had believed that the Basses were dead, or no longer working.
In the book Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design, Scorsese recalls: “I had a placement for the credit but I didn’t have the right lettering. I had the right music cue but something wasn’t right. I just didn’t know what to do with it. I was watching a movie called Big and I see the end credits—Elaine and Saul Bass. I said, ‘My God, this is great! They are working—they are still around. This is fantastic.’ I said to my producer, ‘Do you think we should venture to call and see if they would do it?’”
Bass is subsequently quoted as saying: “Were we interested in working with Martin Scorsese? You bet your ass we were.” And in the same book Nicholas Pileggi reacts to their work: “You write a book of 300 to 400 pages and then you boil it down to a script of maybe 100 to 150 pages. Eventually you have the pleasure of seeing that the Basses have knocked you right out of the ballpark. They have boiled it down to four minutes flat.”
The Basses maintained their relationship with Scorsese for several years, doing the titles for the films Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, and Casino. Saul died in 1996. Elaine did not carry on solo; Casino was the last picture they worked on.
YOUNG HENRY HILL
Like Holden Caulfield, Goodfellas doesn’t want to bore you with any “David Copperfield kind of crap.” Its account of Henry Hill’s boyhood, while crucial, is also brisk. It takes up less than thirteen minutes of the movie’s 145-minute run time. And it’s more than just a warm reminiscence of a “glorious” misspent youth. It’s a minitutorial on the Italian American gangster environment in New York neighborhoods in the 1950s.
Over the song “Rags to Riches,” the medium close-up of a having-some-kind-of-second-thoughts adult Henry Hill cuts to the credit titles, and then to an extreme close-up of a green eye, transfixed. That’s thirteen-year-old Henry, played by Christopher Serrone, and his eye is fixed on the cabstand across the street from his East New York house, and the sharp-dressed gangsters who roost there. “To me, being a gangster was better than being president of the United States.” Young Henry is seen though the slats of his bedroom window; down below on the streets, wiseguys in sharp clothes driving big cars horse around. In voice-over Henry lists some of the things he saw them getting away with. “In the summer when they played cards all night, nobody ever called the cops.”
The movie homes in on a portly man with slicked-back, receding black hair. Henry names him. “Tuddy Cicero.” He pauses, and says the first name again, wistfully: “Tuddy.” Because it’s so early in the movie, one doesn’t notice the anomaly. But this one-word evocation is perhaps the only moment of genuine tenderness in the entire movie. A yearning invocation of an entire world that’s now lost to Henry, a recollection of affection and loyalty that at the time felt real. By the end of the movie, as the betrayals among thieves mount up, Tuddy is largely absent, except in one crucial scene in which he’s easy to miss despite the fact that he’s pulling the trigger on the gun that kills one of the central characters. (Vito “Tuddy” Vario, the real-life model for this gangster, was indeed present and active in his brother’s real-life operations to the end; he died in 1988, the same year his brother Paul died in prison.)
Tuddy is played by Frank DiLeo, a music industry executive who at the time of the movie’s shooting was severing ties with Michael Jackson, whom he had been managing since 1984. Scorsese had directed a short film that served as a music video for the song “Bad,” the leadoff single for the Jackson album of the same name. (Scorsese’s cameo in that picture is his face on a “Wanted” poster in the subway, citing his crime as “Sacrilege.”) It was during the making of the short that Scorsese became acquainted with DiLeo.
A year later the peculiar Michael Jackson feature film Moonwalker was released. One segment, showcasing the song “Smooth Criminal” from the 1984 album Thriller, featured Jackson protecting three homeless children, played by Kellie Parker, Brandon Quintin Adams, and Sean Ono Lennon, from the drug kingpin known as “Mr. Big,” whose “real name” is Frank Lideo (the last name is a not-at-all-obvious anagram for DiLeo) and who is played with arguably overelaborate relish by Joe Pesci. Jackson chose to portray his manager as a supervillain before there was an actual falling-out between them. Such winking inside jokes were not entirely uncommon in a music industry that had been “mobbed up” since shortly after jukeboxes had been invented; they weren’t commonly made in public, though. According to DiLeo, he and Jackson intended to resume their business relationship with the 2009 “This Is It” concert tour, but Jackson died during rehearsals for the shows.
In his portrayal of Tuddy, DiLeo plays down the larger-than-life profile he cultivated as Jackson’s manager. Tuddy is not soft-spoken as such—listen to him berate Henry after the youngster tries to help out a shooting victim, clearly one of the guys, who makes the mistake of wandering over to the pizza place while bleeding profusely—but he knows his place. Which is subordinate to Tuddy’s older brother Paulie Cicero, played by Paul Sorvino, who is soft-spoken when he speaks at all. Paulie is first seen breaking up some cabstand horseplay so mild it barely registers as such; the second his potbellied profile is seen, the guys break it up; after Paulie recedes they bicker about who “started it,” whatever it even was.
Henry’s narration describes Paulie’s slow, deliberate, track-covering way of doing things, alternating with his home and school life. “I couldn’t see over the wheel and I’m parking Cadillacs,” he exults. As the frame freezes to show Henry’s enraged father raising a belt to the kid, Liotta’s voice-over notes that “Everybody takes a beating sometime.” The wiseguys torment a mailman who had been imprudent enough to deliver a truant notice to Hill’s house. After witnessing this thug justice, Hill asks, “How could I go to school after that and pledge allegiance to the flag and sit through good government bullshit?” Henry’s education in how things work is brutal but not, obviously, an entirely inaccurate one.
He speaks of the robbers giving Paulie “tribute just like in the old country.” The proximate causes of monetary crime, at least those not related to ephemeral notions of “human nature,” often have to do with economic oppression/suppression. Italian Americans from Sicilian and Neapolitan backgrounds didn’t just hew to the ways of their own country out of a perverse defiance of assimilation. Italian Americans were targets of bigoted scorn, denied opportunities in the land of opportunity. Their insulation was a form of self-governance and self-protection.
“That’s what the FBI could never understand,” Henry says. “What Paulie and the organization does is offer protection for people who can’t go to the cops... They’re like the police department for wiseguys.” This of course is a skewed perspective on things, and mob-affiliated Italian Americans were not met with wholesale approval in Italian American neighborhoods. They were seen with disdain and scorn by many of what you’d call “law-abiding citizens,” and the disapprobation was often bitter.
For Hill, the mid-’50s represents the most unsullied of Edens. Over shots of him setting the parking lot of a rival taxi company on fire, he details the joys of his status as one of the boys: “I didn’t have to wait in line at the bakery. Our neighbors didn’t park in our driveway anymore, even though we didn’t have a car.” He tells of some neighborhood strangers carrying his mother’s groceries for her: “It was outta respect.” At this point the whole lot explodes as he runs away and the frame freezes. The implication could not be more direct, at least when described on the page: he earns respect by being a destroyer. But the image of flames is a beautiful one, the look on Henry’s face beatific. The ins and outs of this way of life do not represent anything quite so simple as a double-edged sword.
“It was a glorious time. The wiseguys were all over the place. It was before Apalachin and before Crazy Joe decided to take on a boss and start a war.” The names “Apalachin” and “Crazy Joe” drop quickly, and there are no footnotes. Scorsese and company realize they won’t necessarily register with a large percentage of the viewership. For those who come to the movie conversant with mob history, they’re added value. Apalachin, as I mentioned, was the burg in Upstate New York where, in 1957, mob boss Joseph Barbara, who owned a substantial estate there, convened a mob summit intended to quell internecine feuding that had been rising and falling since the early ’50s. The meeting was raided by state police before it had even begun and over fifty mobsters were arrested. This was the beginning of sustained public scrutiny of what would be called “the Mafia.” Prior to that it was practically a genuine secret society.