by Glenn Kenny
Production designer Kristi Zea recalls that, with their kitschy approximations of Polynesian and Hawaiian design motifs and tropes, the Hawaii Kai interiors did not need much dressing. “Going and finding locations is one of the things I love to do most,” she says. “You’ll find things you’ll never be able to dream on any planet. I’ll go to homes. Sometimes people just do their thing and you get hit over the head by it. In the Hawaii Kai, we added a few bits and pieces, but essentially it was as it was.”
One of the things it was was going out of business. The restaurant was operational at the time of the shoot but would close later in 1989. A sign of its increasing decrepitude was, according to some, its flea infestation. Illeana Douglas recalls showing up at the site: “It was ancient, and inside everything was made of straw and glass. Marty said, ‘Careful, this place has fleas’—and let me tell you, it did.”
“Yes, I do remember the fleas,” Kristi Zea says. Producer Barbara De Fina does not, but says, “Because we started setting up early in the morning I remember it, when all the lights were on, looking dingy and dirty and smelling of last night’s booze.”
“I don’t remember fleas,” Joseph Reidy says, “and had there been fleas I definitely would have been bitten. I do remember after seeing it with all the houselights on I did think I would never in a million years eat there.”
* * *
Liotta’s voice-over accompanies an involved Steadicam shot. There’s an overtly theatrical feel somehow, as if a lighting designer is pointing spotlights to introduce characters. The point of view is meant to be Henry’s, and the characters he names in voice-over look at the camera and say a greeting. It’s a showy piece of work, with the “look what I can do” vibe common in the 1940s films made by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Powell, in his later years, became a great friend of Scorsese’s, and married Thelma Schoonmaker. Goodfellas was a movie he particularly wanted to see made.
“There was Jimmy...and Tommy and me...” The lighting is deep red, as in the 1960s Italian horror movies Scorsese admired. “And there was...”
In the real-life world of cops, criminals, and “neighborhood” business owners plumbed by Pileggi, in the realm of real-world “consultants” who would give actors and directors tips on how to achieve authenticity for their projects, there’s a lot of inter-and intradisciplinary give and take. Ex-mobsters and the guys who once busted them can meet up months or even years later working on some book or show business project. As we’ve seen, Frank DiLeo was not an actor, and his music industry connections were hardly free of mob associations, as indeed the entire American music industry of his day was largely “mobbed up.” (Frederic Dannen’s 1990 book Hit Men is both an exemplary primer on the topic and the tip of the iceberg.) In a 2010 oral history of Goodfellas complied by GQ magazine, Nick Pileggi says of the casting of the smaller mobster roles: “We’d put the word out [to the mob guys]: ‘Anybody who wants to be in the movie, come.’ He must have hired, like, half a dozen guys, maybe more, out of the joint.”
The Bamboo Lounge crew was a mix of authentic guys and actors whose backgrounds gave them a veneer of authenticity. In the shot you can’t tell the difference. “Jimmy...and Tommy and me...” and Anthony Stabile. He’s the first “how you doin’?” and he’s played by Frank Adonis. Who looks exactly like an Italian American guy born in Brooklyn in 1935, as he was. Adonis started doing bit parts in the early ’70s, providing urban color for The French Connection, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, and other gritty fare. He appeared in an early biopic (heavily fictionalized) of the frantic mobster Joey Gallo, 1974’s Crazy Joe. He is in Scorsese’s 1980 Raging Bull, as Patsy, one of the mobbed-up crew of boxer Jake LaMotta’s brother Joey. In a scene early in the movie, he comes with Salvy, played by Frank Vincent, who plays Billy Batts in this film, to watch Joe Pesci’s Joey spar with Robert De Niro’s Jake. Jake is enraged by their presence; we’re not quite sure why. Eventually we can infer that he doesn’t want these men, who represent mob interests that fix fights—and also can make careers—involved with him at all; he’s going to do things his way. “You told them to come up here?” Jake demands. “Yeah, why, can’t I have my friends up here?”
“Don’t ever bring him up here again, you hear me?” Near the ring, Salvy and Patsy and Guido whisper disparagingly. “He looks mad.”
“I’d hit his fucking head with a pipe.”
“They look like two f-gs up there.” To make a point, Jake pummels Joey for real. The three wiseguys, hair slicked back and smirking, leave the gym.
Back at the Bamboo Lounge, to the left of Stabile is Frankie Carbone, his amused face almost a caricature of an elastic-jawed, prominent-proboscis Italian American; the jet-black oversize Brillo pad atop his head is delightfully garish. He jabbers at Henry in Italian. Actually, in French, with an Italian accent. Or something. He says, “Como sava,” which falls somewhere between the French “comment ça va” and the Italian “come va,” that is, “How’s it going?” The actor is Frank Sivero, who played the wingman of De Niro’s Jimmy Doyle in Scorsese’s 1977 New York, New York. Sivero also had a small role in The Godfather Part II in 1974, and after New York, New York did considerable character work, including a 1989 bit on the sitcom Mr. Belvedere.
After these established pros, we have roles filled by some semipros. The camera moves up to an alcove to present “Moe Black’s brother Fat Andy,” a hefty guy with a mustache who says “How you doin’, buddy?” to the camera/Henry. He is played by Louis Eppolito, a former NYPD detective who was still with the force during the shooting of the movie. He retired in the winter of 1989. And became a mob hit man.
Behind the placid mook mug seen in the movie was a remorseless killer. He was known as a “Mafia Cop” because he had relatives in the mob (something he did not, it happens, mention when applying to become a cop), and then worked in the organized crime unit. But not too long after Goodfellas was released, he and a former partner in the force, Stephen Caracappa, reputedly took out Lucchese crime family made man Patrick Testa. He was “discovered” for this picture, so to speak, by Joe Pesci, at a nightclub. And after Goodfellas he continued to act in bit parts. He’s in Woody Allen’s 1994 Bullets Over Broadway as a comedic tough. After the team of Louis and Stephen moved to Las Vegas, he was closer to Hollywood geographically, and took a role as yes, a hood, in David Lynch’s 1997 Lost Highway. He was plotting a New York comeback, not as an actor, but as a murderer; he was involved in a plot to take out Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, the Mafia soldier who sang on John Gotti. He also had the nerve to write and publish Mafia Cop: The Story of an Honest Cop Whose Family Was Mob. It is reputed that a relative of one of his victims saw him on TV promoting the book and contacted authorities, leading to his arrest. Eppolito died in November of 2019 while serving a sentence of life plus one hundred years, having been convicted in 2006 on eight counts of murder, as well as obstruction of justice, racketeering, and more.
Next to Fat Andy is Frankie the Wop, a noticeably older or at least more grizzled guy, who asks Henry, “Stayin’ out of trouble?” The actor, Tony Vallelonga, played a nightclub patron in Raging Bull under the name Tony Lip. Nicknamed “Lip” as a kid for his ability to persuade his pals to participate in mischief, Vallelonga was a well-known bouncer-around-town who had played burly character extras in The Godfather and Dog Day Afternoon. His son Nick decided to follow in the old man’s show-business footsteps, and for several frustrating years tried to make a movie of his father’s experiences in the early 1960s chauffeuring a black pianist through the Deep South. Yes, that film was Green Book and the character played by Viggo Mortensen is the guy saying, “Stayin’ out of trouble?” Tony died in 2010 and hence never saw the fruits of his son’s efforts. In accepting a Best Picture Oscar for the movie, Nick said, “Dad, we did it.”
Freddie No Nose’s nickname is given no explanation, and it wants one, as the character, who’s sitting at the bar behind the alcove, has an entir
e nose. This is Mikey Black’s only film credit, so one can infer that this may be one of the performers who, as Nick Pileggi relates in the GQ oral history, got a little tongue-tied when asked to provide his Social Security number to the movie’s casting director.
The camera swerves up and over the bar to say hey to “Pete the Killer, who was Sally Balls’ brother.” By this time the viewer is sufficiently caught up in the shot that they don’t notice the camera is making moves that Henry can’t, but this underscores, at least subliminally, the ornamentally beautiful unreality of the shot. Pete the Killer delivers one of the more memorable bits of wiseguy banter: “I took care of that thing for ya,” a line that insinuates quite a lot in this context. Peter Cicale is the performer, and he’s another one who did Goodfellas and disappeared from movies.
The camera makes a sharp right turn and swoops over the bar again, to a sharp-dressed guy with a lean jaw and dark-tinted glasses with a bored-looking young woman. This is Nickey Eyes—so named perhaps because you can’t see those eyes—and he puts a finger up to Henry and says, “What’s up, guy?” John Manca would write his own book about being a crooked cop and then trying to become a “half wiseguy,” called Tin for Sale, a little after working on this picture. He would go on to act in and serve as a consultant on Scorsese’s 1995 Casino, also based on a Nick Pileggi true-crime book. (He can be glimpsed briefly in that film, too, playing a wiseguy.) Manca got the role because of his acquaintance with Pileggi. He’d been destitute, living in the Flushing YMCA, and in heavy debt to a mob guy. The work on Goodfellas as both an actor and consultant lifted him out of the gutter, but he was still scraping together money because he knew he’d be found. “Word got around that I was working on the picture, and it’s not that hard to find a film crew shooting in New York, so one day I got a visit,” he says in the book. He met the mobster, handed him twenty grand, and got a nod and a “No hard feelings, right?” in return. Of his life as of 1990, he wrote, “I get by. I do odd jobs, strictly legit. Thanks to the movie, I got a Screen Actors Guild card, and I look for roles in films and TV shows where they need a wiseguy.”
With his slick-backed hair and intensely set eyes, Joseph Bono looks practically unchanged since playing Guido, the third guy in Salvy’s crew in the sparring scene in Raging Bull. Here he plays Mikey Franzese, who shares a name with a real mob guy but doesn’t do much more in this film than say, “I saw that guy, yeah, I wanna see him,” during this shot, which takes the greeting/banter into the realm of non sequitur.
Finally there’s “Jimmy Two Times, who got that nickname because he said everything twice, like—” And here Anthony Powers stands up, ostentatiously straightens his tie (it’s a marvel he can actually find it, given it’s covered by his freakishly long shirt collars, which look like giant fangs), and says, “I’m gonna go get the papers get the papers.” Steadicam operator Larry McConkey recalls this shot as particularly fun, with the director by his side cueing all the gang members.
* * *
The shot continues into the back room of the place, as Henry pushes a rack of winter coats past the lounge’s owner, Sonny Bunz, played by Tony Darrow. (The other actor pushing the coatrack is Vincent Pastore, later to play Big Pussy in The Sopranos.) “This is the middle of fuckin’ summer, what am I gonna do with fur coats?”
“Ah, you don’t want furs, I’ll take ’em away.”
“No, no, no, no, don’t take ’em away, I want ’em. You know what we do, we’ll hang ’em up, we’ll hang ’em in the freezer, how’s that?”
Taking up the apologia for the gangster ethos from his prior explanation of Paulie Cicero’s function in the neighborhood, Henry waxes rhapsodic: “For us to live any other way was nuts. To us those goody-goody people who worked shit jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day and worried about bills were dead. They were suckers. They had no balls.” It never occurs to Henry that he may have traded a leash for a noose.
“If we wanted something we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad believe me they never complained again.”
But what we saw just moments ago depicts the absurdity at the core of this venality. Presented with a rack full of women’s fur coats, Sonny, the owner, bitches and moans about the uselessness of these stolen goods; being the middle of summer, they’ll prove hard to move. Henry says he’ll take them back. (To the truck from which they were stolen? Not likely.) No, no, no, no. Sonny still wants the goods. Anything they can grab, snatch, lay hands on, they will take. Even if it ends up as useless overstock taking up space in a freezer that serves your “legitimate” business. This is bad practice, wholesale or retail or what have you. But the boys can’t help it.
* * *
An overhead shot of a crowded Bamboo Lounge table resolves on Henry looking at his watch; then Frenchy (Mike Starr, who bears a pronounced resemblance to character actor Danny Aiello, a Scorsese type who was forever irked to have never appeared in a Scorsese picture) shows up. The urgency is underscored when Henry summons Jimmy to the bar. The camera tracks in on Jimmy fast, and undercranking, to produce speeded-up motion, as Jimmy gets up from the table to join them. This is the wiseguy version of a staff meeting. “Too good to be true,” Frenchy says as he lays it out: dollars that tourists and servicemen changed overseas into foreign currency is coming home via Air France cargo, and it’s gonna be held until Tuesday on account of a Jewish holiday. What’s the security? “You’re looking at him!” Frenchy says with some hilarity. “I’m the midnight-to-eight man.”
HOW AM I FUNNY
This is one of the film’s most famous, most quoted scenes. And it defines the knife edge of comedy and mayhem (physical and/or moral) that much of the rest of the film balances on, almost always falling on the side of mayhem.
The Bamboo Lounge sequence kicks off as just another night with the boys. Scorsese and Schoonmaker make it bloom, so to speak, stretching it to advance the narrative (setting up the Air France heist) and to contain the movie’s first great “set piece,” one that defines Tommy, played now by Joe Pesci, as a human incendiary device.
After Frenchy says, “We’re on,” to Henry and Jimmy, the picture cuts to a table where Tommy holds court, flanked on the left side of the frame by Franzese; Henry and Nickey Eyes are to his right, in profile. The sequence was shot with two cameras, not a common occurrence in this picture, but since the comic timing needed to work as overt performance, having to stop and start to capture different angles would not be productive.
Tommy’s story begins with him saying, “What’s really funny is...” and he follows with his comedic “I thought I told you to go fuck your mother” tale of standing up to police interrogation.
“You’re a pisser. Really funny,” Henry says. Tommy then asks, approximately fifteen times, including the variations “Am I a clown?” and “Do I amuse you?” just how he is funny, or how the fuck he is funny. As his rage increases, his breath becomes shorter, until when he says, “What the fuck is so funny about me? Tell me. Tell me what’s funny,” he seems barely able to get the words out. Then, quiet. Almost endless quiet, it seems.
Henry breaks the deafening silence by saying, “Get the fuck out of here,” raising his palm. The table erupts in laughter, varied repetitions of the opinion that Tommy is “funny,” and more. “Sometimes I worry about you, Henry,” Tommy jokes back. “You may fold under questioning.” Tommy won’t live to see that.
The conflict lasts for less than a minute, but seems a lifetime, and the relief that it does not end in gunfire is physically palpable, a release. The lifting of a potential curse. So much so that the impact of the violence that follows is ostensibly blunted.
In the hilarity’s wake, Sonny, the owner of the lounge, mistakenly sees an opportunity. In a bowing and scraping posture, he leans into Tommy and entreats him to pay what he owes on his tab. Which is $7,000. Tommy breaks a glass over his head, threatens the waiter who brought up the subject in the firs
t place, comments that just the week before Sonny had asked Tommy to christen his son, says his fee would have been $7,000, then the table breaks into “you’re a funny guy” again, and Tommy fake-jumps on someone.
In his exchange with Henry, Tommy is arguably more fearsome than he is when he’s actually in the act of killing. In two of four subsequent homicides he’s shown committing, he’s crassly efficient; in the other two, he’s shown as blustery but also weak, in one instance practically sniveling, which of course reflects what’s truly underneath all his psychotic bravado.
The scene was created by Pesci himself. Scorsese recalls, in the GQ oral history, that the actor was hesitant about taking the role, but interested in exploring what life he could bring to it, out of his own observations and experiences. “We went up to my apartment,” Scorsese recalled, “and [Pesci] said, ‘Let me tell you a couple of stories. If you could find a place for this sort of thing, then I think we could make it special.’ [...] Joe acted it out. Then we did a rehearsal with Ray and Joe and put it on audiotape, and I constructed the scene from the transcripts and gave it to them to hit those levels, the different levels of questioning and how the tone changes. It was never in the script.”
Joe Pesci, born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1943, was already a show business veteran when Robert De Niro saw him in the 1976 low-budget crime picture The Death Collector and recommended that Scorsese check it out. Pesci was about ten years behind fellow Essex County products Tommy DeVito and Frankie Valli, founding members of the Four Seasons. But because Joe had a robust voice, including an impressive falsetto, and because his father wanted Joe to pursue the performing arts, Pesci ran in their circles. He introduced his friend and contemporary Bob Gaudio to DeVito and Valli. Gaudio’s songwriting and arranging skills helped get the Seasons their hits. The association is commemorated in both the Broadway show Jersey Boys and its film adaptation, directed by Clint Eastwood. Both the book of the show and the film script were cowritten by Marshall Brickman, the waggish onetime Woody Allen collaborator; the interpolation of the line “funny how?” into the character Pesci’s mouth in the Eastwood movie seems a Brickman touch.
