Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  Hill tried to catch up with her when he embarked on the project with Russo. “My old girlfriend Linda died on February 28, 2003. The poor thing had cancer. I didn’t even know she was sick. I had started calling her again because I wanted her to say something for this book, and I kept getting the answering machine. She wasn’t picking up. I thought, ‘What the hell? Are you mad at me?’ She wasn’t calling back because she was in a big cancer hospital and didn’t want me to know. She had gotten married years ago, but it only lasted three months. I was blown away when I found out about her death. It was weirder because her phone was still on and you get her voice on the machine even though she’s dead.”

  TAMPA

  “Tampa Florida,/Two Days Later,” a dispassionate title card reads, and Jimmy slams the face of the Florida bookie into the front seat of the car they’re in, repeating, “You gonna pay it?” The man is pretty badly bloodied, and gurgling incoherently. The car is in gear, and some signage says “Tampa City Zoo.” Jimmy says to the guy, “We’re gonna throw you to the lions!” and one of the most amusing shots in the movie comes as they upend the guy to toss him into the lion’s enclosure headfirst: a tilt motion revealing an upside-down male lion. A female lion is also seen, seemingly free of gravity.

  “They must really feed each other to the lions down there because the guy gave the money right up,” Henry observes. Such, one supposes, is the perspective of the hardened criminal. For most law-abiding citizens, crying uncle while being held above a lion pit after having one’s nose broken through repeated contact with an immovable object does not exactly constitute “giving the money right up.”

  The Florida bookie is played by Peter Onorati, whose face is so bloodied up throughout most of his short scene that you can barely read it. A couple of years after this he’d be one of the leads in a network dramatic comedy, Civil Wars, along with Debi Mazar, who plays Sandy in this picture.

  The Tampa twist of fate is conveyed at an almost breakneck pace. “I couldn’t believe what happened.” Jimmy and Henry are “all over the newspapers” when they get home. In a carefully choreographed dolly shot, a sea of men in jackets, ties, and shirtsleeves parts as the camera moves in on a crying woman, the sister of the Florida bookie, an FBI typist whose concern for her brother reached fever pitch when she saw his busted nose. “She gave everybody up.” A series of five black-and-white stills—“Jimmy, me, even her brother”—show the criminals cuffed; on the last shot of the Florida bookie, her sobs are mixed higher on the soundtrack and she’s heard saying, “These friends of his.”

  When editing Goodfellas, Scorsese cited the fictional drama series The Untouchables and the television crime docudrama in general as influences. In the latter, still-photo imagery abounds. (But it also abounds in the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker, two early and persistent influences on Scorsese.) The use of imagery not in motion, both in freeze-frames that pause the action and still photos in montage that convey a series of visual beats or hits, is crucial to this picture. Scorsese frequently interpolated simulated “home movie” footage into his pictures. Mean Streets opens with an 8mm introduction to its milieu, and Raging Bull gets its own interlude of respite in 16mm amateur-style footage (in color, contrasting with the diegesis’ own black-and-white) of Jake and Vicky LaMotta’s wedding celebration.

  But the use of stills was relatively new to Scorsese, and from here on in it was integrated into his toolbox, a frequent vehicle for dramatic irony. In 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street, another fact-based crime story, it counters the glib narration of title character Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), as in a montage in which Belfort crassly recounts his interoffice sexual conquests. “One of our brokers, Ben Jenner, christened the elevator by getting a blow job from a sales assistant.” This is shown in motion and real time so to speak. “Her name was Pam, and to her credit, she did have this wild technique with this...wild twist and jerk motion. About a month later, Donnie and I decided to double team her on a Saturday afternoon while our wives were out shopping for Christmas dresses.” This, too, is in a quick cutting full motion montage, DiCaprio and costar Jonah Hill grinning like schoolboys and Carla Corvo’s Pam looking what they call “game.” Then come the stills, three in all, boxed inside the movie’s widescreen frame. “Eventually Ben married her, which was amazing considering she blew every single guy in the office.” This observation is a kind of record-scratch given the posed, “nicely” lit wedding pictures presented, with the couple (Ben is played by Dustin Kerns) smiling in a dignified fashion appropriate to the holy sacrament of marriage and all that. Pam’s bridal gown is sleeved, with a high scoop top. Ben’s tuxedo is similarly traditional. Jordan continues with an audible shrug: “Then he got depressed and killed himself three years later.” And here is the third still, in color but highly desaturated—like the massacre scene at the end of Taxi Driver—of a bathtub, seemingly filled with blood, with a man inside. You only see his arm from his elbow down, and the very top of his chest. The side of the bathtub is splattered in blood, the man’s wrist and hand are similarly splattered, and on the floor, bright red around the edges, is a large splotch of blood. Details such as these flew very high over the heads of critics who were determined to condemn Scorsese for somehow endorsing Belfort’s idea of the bacchanal.

  Discussing Goodfellas in Ian Christie and David Thompson’s Scorsese on Scorsese, the director expounds: “The real trick, of course, was the voice-over. I showed Nick the opening of Jules et Jim to explain what I was aiming for. So he understood when I started pulling lines out from here and there and mixing voice-over and using stills—really all the basic tricks of the New Wave from around 1961. What I loved about these Truffaut and Godard techniques from the early ’60s was that the narrative was not that important. You could stop the picture and say: ‘Listen, this is what we’re going to do right now—oh, by the way, that guy got killed—and we’ll see you later.’ Ernie Kovacs did the same kind of thing on TV in the early ’50s. He would stop and talk to the camera, doing crazy, surreal things. I learned a lot from watching him destroy what you were used to thinking was the form of the television comedy show.” (Arguably, the animated shorts directors Tex Avery and Frank Tashlin, the latter of whom would become a live-action filmmaker, and who corresponded with Jean-Luc Godard when Godard wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma, broke ground with similar anarchic disruptions of form.) This mode is present in Scorsese’s latest picture, The Irishman, which will pause in the middle of a random scene to freeze a character and insert a title card describing his usually grisly cause of death.

  * * *

  In the Tampa sequence the stills are there for speed: Henry has been riding high and now he has to go to jail before he even knows it. Here, too, is an example of the narrative compression Scorsese and Pileggi brought to bear on the story. “It always struck Henry as grossly unfair that after a lifetime of major crimes and petty punishments his longest stretch—a ten-year sentence in a federal penitentiary—came about because he got into a barroom brawl with a man whose sister was a typist for the FBI,” Pileggi recounts. As he sets it down, and as Hill himself elaborated in his subsequent book Gangsters and Goodfellas, a shakedown wasn’t even the purpose of the Tampa “vacation.”

  “In 1972 it was decided that I was going to become a union delegate—a business agent—for Disney World in Florida. Since I was the only one in the crew who didn’t have a felony conviction, I had the best chance of avoiding attention,” Hill wrote in Gangsters. A “Cuban wiseguy pal,” Casey Rosado, was to be Henry and Jimmy’s docent on the trip. It was he who had a money beef with the bookie, named here and in Wiseguy as John Ciaccio. The meet was initially to be a peaceful one, in a bar, despite Casey’s cousin handing Henry an “antique” .38 that “was bound to explode if you tried to use it” before they entered the establishment. Before Henry knew it, “I felt like I was in the middle of some hotheaded family feud.” Beatings were administered and Ciaccio’s sister took notice of her bro
ther’s condition and called in the authorities.

  This resulted in two trials, a state one in which all the parties were acquitted, and a federal one in which all were convicted—in Henry’s estimation on account of the key defense witness in the state trial dropping dead before the start of the federal. The movie’s voice-over line: “The judge gave us ten years like he was giving away candy.”

  * * *

  As recounted earlier, on the day the “How am I funny?” scene was shot, Warner Brothers chief operating officer Terry Semel was on the set, and he was incensed that Scorsese and company were, right before his eyes, burning up his budget shooting a scene that wasn’t even in the script. He would punish the production by withholding money for a scene that was in the script: the trip to Tampa, and the threat of throwing the Florida bookie to the lions.

  “Semel was not around the set that much, so we didn’t have any more confrontations like that,” recalls Barbara De Fina. De Fina is credited as executive producer on the picture, but it was she who drew up the initial budget for the picture, was on the set regularly, and handled problems such as this one as they emerged. Her relationship with Semel was less than ideal, but on this shoot she could largely shrug it off because of her cordial relationship with Semel’s boss. “Terry was difficult to some extent, and that was one example, but the Warner executives never really bothered us when we were shooting,” De Fina says. “And Bob Daly [Warner’s chairman and CEO; Semel was president and COO] was wonderful. Bob Daly was the greatest, he was like an Irish uncle. You know, he was terrific, and then Terry was, you know, the opposite. Terry was never nice to me, and he frequently spoke to me in a way he’d never speak to a male producer. But Bob was terrific. This helped.”

  Rejiggering the Tampa scene so it could be shot in New York required making up some signage for the “Tampa City Zoo” (inaccurate, as it happens—at the time of the events depicted, the zoo in Tampa was called the Lowry Park Zoo) and renting a palm tree or two for that Florida feel. And even if that could have been done, the fate of the Florida bookie could have been handled another way, because in fact the wiseguys never threatened or attempted to throw the guy to the lions. They fought in the bar, then took him away in a car, and beat him up around Busch Gardens. But the throwing-to-the-lions fabrication became such a part of the Henry Hill mythos that Hill at one point in the aftermath of this movie took to auctioning autographed tickets to the Tampa Zoo.

  * * *

  At the sentencing, Henry looks to his immediate right to Jimmy, who’s looking at nothing. Then he looks over his left shoulder to Karen, in the spectator section. She appears lost, and the attentive viewer will remember her plaints on how she would not be able to handle things if Henry went to prison, and Henry’s boast that he’s too well-organized to ever get caught. Prison will find Henry in a tightly knit mob unit, but also completely unmoored from his customary way of making his living.

  NOW TAKE ME TO JAIL

  Green liqueur is poured into three cordial glasses; daylight begins to pour into whatever bar this is. It’s Henry’s going-away party, and Morrie is pouring on the sentimentality: “Sweet Henry,” he calls him. “Good trip, Henry.” A view of Karen in tears implies that certain domestic issues have been forced, and quickly. In real life that was at least partially the case—unseen here is Henry’s side trip to the Empire State Building to break it off with Linda Rotondi. But it was actually almost two years between the beating of John Ciaccio and Hill’s time at Lewisburg. (During that time, Pileggi writes, Hill “hustled like he had never hustled before.” He did some time he owed on a Nassau County misdemeanor, did some trucking work, “borrowed money from loan sharks he never intended to pay back,” and, as his term got closer, “busted out The Suite.” He ransacked his own club and sold off its contents, down to the last ashtray, according to Pileggi.)

  “Now take me to jail,” Henry says, tired but arrogant, to an unseen driver after swallowing a handful of pills.

  The sense of an idyll is announced by the breezy Bobby Darin tune “Beyond the Sea” and the image of...a razor blade slicing a clove of garlic. The “cooking in prison” scene is another of Goodfellas’ most celebrated set pieces. Its sense of simultaneously exuberant and low-key bonhomie expands with the counterpoint of Henry’s voice-over and the spoken dialogue of the older wiseguys with whom Henry’s sharing his bunk. The guy quietly running things, and slicing the garlic, is Paulie Cicero, in on a contempt of court charge.

  “It was a very good system,” Henry says of Paulie’s thin-sliced garlic prep work. In other areas there is dissent. Charles Scorsese, the director’s father, as Vinnie, is “in charge of the meat” and he expounds on the three different types he uses for the meatballs. “Ya gotta have the pork,” an off-screen voice says, and Vinnie agrees: “That’s the flavor.” As for Vinnie’s sauce, though, Henry says, “I felt he used too many onions.” Cut to Paulie, who is still slicing. Without looking up, he says, “Vinnie. Don’t put too many onions in the sauce.” The audio ping-pong continues, with Johnny Dio’s aside on someone’s steak order: “Medium rare, hmm, an aristocrat.” (Johnny Dio, portrayed here by Frank Pellegrino, was not quite so amiable on the outside; he was long implicated in the 1950’s acid attack that permanently blinded the investigative journalist Victor Reisel. Pellegrino, on the other hand, was the universally beloved co-owner of Rao’s.)

  “We owned the joint,” Henry reflects on the wiseguys’ privileges. “Even the hacks we couldn’t bribe would never rat on the guys that we did,” he says as the camera pans across the room, where Paulie, now through with his prep, sits at a table by himself and pours a glass of whiskey from a bottle that has a cardboard sign hanging on it that reads “Paulie.” Okay, then.

  The real-life situation for Hill was even cozier for a while. For some time he, Paulie Vario, Johnny Dio, and a Connecticut boss, Joe Pine, were put up in an “honor dorm.” Hill told Pileggi: “The dorm was a separate three-story building outside the wall which looked more like a Holiday Inn than a prison.” The movie also elides all the rehabilitation options offered to the fellas. Hill considered getting an associate degree in hotel management. “Paulie and Johnny Dio used to push me to go to school,” Hill said. “They wanted me to become an ophthalmologist. I don’t know why but that’s what they invited me to be.”

  The ins and outs of Henry’s time—which in real life did include him taking classes, and at one point featured a cameo from Watergate supervillain G. Gordon Liddy—are compressed into a desperate survival-of-the-fittest scenario that sets the stage for Henry’s drug-dealing troubles on the outside. At the end of the dinner prep depiction, after Henry presents a new load of smuggled food, including a fresh bottle of Scotch for Paulie, and they all eat, he goes over to his bunk and quietly removes a stash of drugs from his gym bag.

  Drug dealing in the joint with the cooperation of guards and officials is shown as a down-low enterprise, something that needs to be kept from his old-school cellmates. After some deals are done, there’s a horizontal sweep of a row in the prison’s visiting room—seven seconds in hell, or something like it. A guy with a shaved head presumably receiving fellatio, another guy delivering what appears to be a pained apology, a woman changing a diaper, noise, chatter, noise. Upstairs, as Karen and the Hill daughters are waved ahead of the crowded line to come in, it’s not much more pleasant.

  While Henry is not a creature of jealousy, Karen is, as we’ve seen. Scorsese treats hers with the same acuity as he did Jake LaMotta’s, creating visual correlatives to the agonized pangs of obsession. Here it’s Karen’s discovery of Janice’s name in the prison’s visitor log. Twelve shots in eleven seconds. The first is a single overhead shot of the open log, turning on its revolving stand to face the visitor who is signing in. The camera, positioned above Karen and looking down so you can see the visitor’s room behind her, shows her holding a pen. There’s a quick close-up of the ledger, listing visitors between the times 7:04 and 7
:20. Three extreme close-ups of lists of names. The first, from Steven Shea to John Ford (very funny, although not the inside joke you’d immediately take it for; John Ford is also the name of one of the film’s assistant property masters). The second, from William Stratford to Georgia Riddle and including an all-caps Casey Ford. Three, from FT Long (also very funny, and this time actually a joke) to Henry Hill. There we go. In the next shot visitors and visitees are included. Mrs. Handel saw Mr. Handel, Mrs. Young saw Mr. Young, the Sabats sat together, as did the Fortunados.

  Property master Bob Griffon glommed very quickly on Scorsese’s tendencies. Faced with a scene featuring a document, he is likely to shoot that document in great detail, so it had better be ready to shoot. He explains: “Crew names are always technically cleared. You could use them, right? But the other thing was we wanted lots of different handwritings, you know, because that ledger book was just pages and pages. So it was literally us going around constantly to anybody who passed through the show and getting them to sign a name and a time as in and out in order to make the book look right. Because Marty, the thing about Marty is, you have to be prepared that almost anything can get inserted. He loves inserts and he will do them to death, so you have to be ready for all that.”

  In the middle of the list is Henry’s name, and who saw him? It’s Janice Rossi. Then a close-up, boxed in shadows, of Henry’s name. There’s a close-up of Karen’s eyes; like the ledger pages, they are marked by shadows of a gate that throw multiple X’s on them.