Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  “He dictated his autobiography, I think both volumes, because he had macular degeneration. So he couldn’t read. I mean, that’s the thing about Thelma. She would spend all day with that nut in the cutting room, and she’d go home and she would type out what Michael had dictated, and then she would read it back into a recorder so he could listen to it and edit it and keep going. That’s Thelma.”

  I had asked Schoonmaker about sitting for an interview when I saw her in the summer of 2019, and she seemed willing. But after finishing work on The Irishman, and working with Scorsese on its promotion, she went to England, to once again perform an act of devotion to Michael Powell: she is editing his diaries.

  * * *

  Scorsese said this about Schoonmaker to Richard Schickel: “Thelma knows who I am, the best and the worst of it.”

  He described how she, at that time, tended to stay away from sets, because watching the activity there could conceivably predispose a way of looking at footage: “She doesn’t know that during a particular take somebody got sick, or somebody got angry. She simply writes down all the takes, in great detail, then types it all up. It’s a long process. She knows my preferred takes, second preferred, third preferred, the possibility of a whole other way to go. Come back to the fifth take and she’ll remember it. Then she edits it all together so that you just punch up the takes, they’re all there. That takes a little longer, but when we’re looking for something, she can always find it easily. And her comments are so helpful. She might say, ‘Look at his eyes here. We need some more emotional impact, we need some more warmth. There was another take where he seemed a little more that way.’ Things like that. And I’ll look at what she is referring to and maybe say, ‘I don’t know if that’s any different.’ She might look doubtful. And then I’ll say, ‘We’ll put it in. Let’s see.’ She’s very good with keeping the heart of the picture foremost, in terms of emotion.”

  He concluded: “Sometimes Thelma and I are laughing, sometimes we get depressed. I might say, ‘We lost the entire dramatic thread of this. They should shoot the director.’ That’s why I don’t want people to be there. It’s for me. I want to be able to say what I feel about the actors, what they’re doing in the frame, uninhibited by anybody. Thelma is the woman I trust.”

  Seven

  THE AFTERMATH

  To this day, some detractors of Goodfellas insist that it glamorizes violence and the mobster mode of living. One can credibly point out all of the ways that it doesn’t do this and still leave them unmoved.

  In a sense this can’t be helped. Scorsese himself has recounted his fascination, as a cinephile, with movie gangsters. What he did with Goodfellas was relatively unprecedented. As Michael Powell pointed out when praising its script, no other movie—no other American movie at least—had shown the gangster life with this kind of detail. In his groundbreaking 1948 essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” Robert Warshow, thinking, one infers, mostly of Howard Hawks’ Scarface, wrote: “The gangster’s activity is actually a form of rational enterprise, involving fairly definite goals and various techniques for achieving them. But this rationality is usually no more than a vague background; we know, perhaps, that the gangster sells liquor or that he operates a numbers racket; often we are not given even that much information. So his activity becomes a kind of pure criminality: he hurts people. Certainly our response to the gangster film is most consistently and most universally a response to sadism; we gain the double satisfaction of participating vicariously in the gangster’s sadism and then seeing it turned against the gangster itself.”

  Goodfellas gives us the “information” in detail: cigarette bootlegging, truck hijacking, airport cargo heists, restaurant mismanagement, and so on. This is the sort of thing that Michael Powell was talking about. These crimes, then, would be reenacted not by men who genuinely resembled the criminals they were portraying but by actors who were either well-established or just coming up in the Hollywood system. When Robert De Niro and Al Pacino were approaching mainstream stardom in the 1970s, much was made by some observers that these actors didn’t have “movie star looks,” but then again, Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, and James Cagney didn’t, either. By a more generous and sensible metric they did have movie star looks, and movie star charisma, and so does Ray Liotta.

  Henry Hill, Jimmy Burke, and Paul Vario—these were guys who really, really, really didn’t have movie star looks, and likely didn’t have movie star charisma, either. Which brings us to the other part of the problem, which was most vehemently articulated by Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson in “The Power and the Gory,” an essay on Taxi Driver that originally appeared in the May/June 1976 issue of Film Comment.

  “The character of the Loner, which dominates American films from Philip Marlowe to Will Penny to Dirty Harry Callahan, has seldom been given such a double-sell treatment,” they wrote. “The intense De Niro is sold as a misfit psychotic and, at the same time, a charismatic star who centers every shot and is given a prismatic detailing by a director who moves like crazy multiplying the effects of mythic glamour and down-to-earth feistiness in his star.”

  While future histories of ’70s Hollywood, most prominently Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, would depict Scorsese and other filmmakers in his circle as daringly anticommercial, Farber and Patterson, in their contemporary account of Taxi Driver, assumed mercenary motives as only natural: “Taxi Driver is always asserting the power of playing both sides of the box-office dollar: obeisance to the box-office provens, such as concluding on a ten-minute massacre, a sex motive, good-guys vs. bad-guys violence, and casting the obviously charismatic De Niro to play a psychotic, racist nobody.” They continued: “Many of the new demons in Hollywood are flourishing inside a Bastardism. They are still deep within the Industry and its Star-Genre hypocrisies, and at the same time they have been indelibly touched by the process-oriented innovations which began with Breathless.”

  This is a complicated issue, especially with regard to Scorsese. Irwin Winkler, the producer of Goodfellas and a continuing collaborator with the director, has called him a great independent filmmaker who’s never made a film independently. His combativeness with regard to the entity referred to as Hollywood continues to this day, as his unenthusiastic and controversial (to some at least) remarks about “Marvel Cinematic Universe” show.

  * * *

  I should clarify my point, or points, here. Goodfellas is a Hollywood film, a Hollywood studio film, and as such, and for other reasons I’ve touched on above, can be perceived as almost automatically or reflexively “glamorizing” gangsterism, even if a more careful study of the picture demonstrates that not to be the case. What I’m getting to is, that when the movie had its first previews in Redondo Beach and another outer–Los Angeles burg no one seems to remember, the unwitting audiences for the movie did not see a picture that glamorized gangsters. They saw a movie they found almost immediately repulsive in every respect.

  Editor Thelma Schoonmaker has often remarked that it’s important to play a movie before an audience to get a sense about how its rhythms work on viewers. But she’s talking about a select, sympathetic audience familiar with the work and with the aims of the filmmaker. Goodfellas was the first Scorsese picture that was “sneak previewed” for unwitting audiences. In this practice, a picture is sometimes advertised as a special screening, or the picture is tacked on to a feature that the audience has already paid to see. Neither preview site was exactly Scorsese territory, nor places that had a special affinity for New York–set gangster pictures.

  “The studio knew what the movie was, but nevertheless I think Warner’s was kind of shocked at what a bad reaction it got, and kept getting,” says Barbara De Fina. “After the first preview, it was pretty funny, you could accurately predict the point when all the women would get up and leave.”

  De Fina recalls one preview during which objections to the content were exacerbated by technical problems. “The
y had problems with the projector, the sound and image weren’t syncing, and this made the audience even more hostile. At a certain point we all got up and ran and hid in a bowling alley next door, because the audience was really, really angry. I always read the cards, you know, there were 300 cards, and there were cards where a viewer had either scrawled incoherently all over it or had written ‘fuck you’ in big letters all over it—they were real angry. It had really aroused some sort of, you know, reaction.”

  Irwin Winkler also remembers the Redondo Beach retreat to the bowling alley. “We were next door, and when we walked back into the theater after the repair had been made and the movie was in sync, and the film started again, some guy or some guys started yelling, ‘Get Scorsese!’ Well, how could you have a preview when people wanted to kill the director? I think it was Encino, where we had the next preview, and we had forty-two people walk out in the first scene, the killing of Billy Batts, with Joe stabbing him, and Bob shooting at him. People were running out of the theater like it was on fire, for Christ’s sake.

  “When it was over, and then Marty came out, and he wouldn’t talk with Warner Brothers people, he said to Margo and I, ‘I’ll be at the bar at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.’ I guess Barbara was there, I don’t remember, and we all met there and said, ‘What are we gonna do, because we know tomorrow they’re gonna kill us,’ and the next day we went to a postmortem at Bob Daly’s office. I don’t know if Semel was there, I know Bob Daly was, as were other executives. They were really, really upset, and wanted the film reshot, recut and everything else, and Marty was very calm. He listened to their suggestions. And then he did what Marty does. That is, what he wants.”

  While the director had not been promised final cut, the decision to allow Scorsese what he wanted was based on guarantees made when the original deal was struck. Some cuts were necessitated to mollify the MPAA ratings board. Back when he made Taxi Driver, Scorsese had desaturated the color in the climactic massacre scene to avoid an X rating. He had gotten cagier, more savvy on dealing with such concerns in subsequent years. In the scene in which Tommy is shot rather than made, he actually filmed an effect of Tommy’s forehead blowing off in an exit wound after Tuddy shoots him in the back of the neck. It’s likely he knew all along that this would not fly with the ratings board, and by putting it in, knowing they would ask for him to cut it, they’d probably overlook other instances of violence Scorsese considered more important for the film as a whole. He would go on to play a not-dissimilar game of bait and switch in Casino, showing an eyeball popping as a head is squeezed in a vise, fully aware the scene would have to undergo a trimming.

  Warner’s panic subsided once the movie began screening for audiences who were actually eager to see a new Scorsese picture, a new Scorsese picture set in a familiar milieu—and of course a new Scorsese picture that teamed him up with De Niro again, the unenthusiastic reception in many corners for The King of Comedy notwithstanding.

  The movie’s world premiere was in early September 1990 at the Venice Film Festival and netted it both the audience award and a jury Silver Lion to Scorsese for directing. (The jury was chaired by the writer Gore Vidal, a man skeptical of the theory of the Imperial Director ever since the time in the 1950s when he met Norman Taurog, a longtime and then still active Hollywood helmer who was in fact almost stone blind by the time he was introduced to Vidal. Other jurors included Argentine filmmaker Mariá Luisa Bemberg, longtime Cannes festival head Gilles Jacob, Russian filmmaker Kira Muratove, Lawrence of Arabia star Omar Sharif, and Italian director Alberto Lattuada, whose 1962 Mafioso was an antic black comedy about an Italian everyman recruited as an unwitting assassin who’s shipped in a crate to Hoboken to carry out his task.)

  De Fina, recalling the disastrous previews and their aftermath, notes, “The strange thing is that while it didn’t do well in previews, if you go back and look at all the reviews, it only got one bad review.”

  Todd McCarthy’s September 10 review from Venice, in the trade paper Variety, was not entirely a rave. He called it “simultaneously fascinating and repellent,” noting “sympathy is not the issue here, empathy is.” He praised Schoonmaker’s “masterful editing” but complained that while the film “is taut in the first half” it “rambles seriously after that, wearing out its interest at least half an hour before it’s over.” Warming up his point, the reviewer complained that “the second half [...] doesn’t develop the dramatic conflict between the character and the milieu that are hinted at earlier.” Yes, that second half, which features the aftermath of the Lufthansa heist and the macro-detail of Henry’s arrest day. In fairness to McCarthy, when you’re filing reviews from film festivals it’s generally on the day of the screening, and under that tight deadline pressure you might not have an entirely reliable assessment of certain aspects of a given picture.

  When Goodfellas opened in US theaters soon after Venice (September 19), reviews from Scorsese’s home turf of New York were enthusiastic indeed. In his September 20, 1999, review in the New York Times, Vincent Canby called the movie “breathless and brilliant.

  “Goodfellas looks and sounds as if it must be completely authentic,” he noted.

  In the September 20 Wall Street Journal Julie Salamon wrote, “There’s very little that’s really new in GoodFellas, Martin Scorsese’s latest film, which is what makes this gangster picture so astonishing. Like some half-mad visionary who finds new magic every time he paces the same street, Mr. Scorsese has made familiar territory seem thrilling and dangerous all over again.” She continued: “The film doesn’t glorify the gangsters or make their outbursts of violence seem anything less than shocking and horrible.” Her whole review is a kind of Manifesto for Scorsese, especially interesting thirty years on in a film culture where several factions loudly insist that the director makes movies not just about white men but only for them: “The fierce humor and originality of Goodfellas is especially impressive if you consider how tempting it is in these days of multimillion-dollar contracts for a successful director to play it safe. Though one could argue that all Scorsese films are the same, one could just as easily argue that no two are alike. Sometimes they’re almost too powerful to watch (Raging Bull) but they’re always amazing. Compare Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore with New York, New York and Taxi Driver or The Last Temptation of Christ. Then, if you think one person couldn’t stretch himself any further, rent the rest.”

  In the New York Post on September 19 David Edelstein astutely noted, “Scorsese has become so fluid a filmmaker that he creates his own syntax. Momentum is all, and he gets his effects quickly, without apparent wheezing. At times he accelerates the action, herky-jerkies it up. When Henry becomes a cokehead, the camera speeds up but the action crawls. No one in years has used a zoom lens as brilliantly as the in-and-out move on the helicopter tailing Henry.” He was also responsive to its themes: “The brilliance of Goodfellas is in how the dread seeps into Henry’s life without him realizing it—how the price of immediate gratification is immediate death.”

  In the same day’s New York Daily News, Kathleen Carroll wrote, “One remains detached from the characters, but Scorsese succeeds in smashing all the foolishly romantic myths about the mob with this shocking, vigorously honest portrait of a slick yuppie gangster who couldn’t stand being ‘an average nobody.’” Henry Hill was hardly a yuppie, but one can’t totally blame Carroll for the reach here. In a tandem “review,” Jerry Capeci, the paper’s crime reporter responsible for the engaging, popular “Gang Land” column, vouched for the movie’s authenticity: “It’s about real-life gangsters from Brooklyn and Queens whom we hate because they do anything for money and often kill for the fun of it.” He continues: “The central story [...] is a familiar New York story, but I don’t know of any movie that has told it as well. GoodFellas got the details right.”

  A notable dissent came from Andrew Sarris, the groundbreaking critic whose book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions championed
the Hollywood directors that Scorsese and other male “movie brats” of his generation would call touchstones as they began making their own pictures. Sarris and Scorsese may have shared reverence for John Ford and Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock but Sarris was an early Scorsese skeptic. His October 8 column in the New York Observer called Goodfellas “wildly overrated.” Sarris had an aesthetic/philosophical objection to the movie’s very concept: “Movie gangsters should be larger than life, as they are in Miller’s Crossing and King of New York, and not smaller than life, as they are in GoodFellas.” He went on: “I have encountered a few gangsters in my salad days, and I know almost as much as Jimmy Breslin does about Queens Boulevard, but I never felt the slightest twinge of involvement with the relentlessly mediocre hoods of GoodFellas. For the first time in his career, Martin Scorsese has fashioned a film utterly devoid of guilt, shame, redemption, and even low-grade romance. What he has made instead is a slyly derisive antigangster movie hobbled structurally by the lumpy details of Nicholas Pileggi’s bestselling Wiseguy. After all, where does the ‘plot’ of GoodFellas go after more than two hours? Nowhere except a hastily devised ratlike escape into the witness protection program without the slightest trace of regeneration or dawning self-knowledge.”

  Sarris’ subsequent mea culpa with respect to Scorsese’s earlier work is not particularly convincing: “I must confess that I have missed the boat on some of Mr. Scorsese’s previous hits, most notably with my thoughtful pans of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull. I have never doubted the director’s enormous talent, particularly with actors exploding in scenes as if they were intuitive splotches of paint in a Jackson Pollock painting. Yet the lack of the kind of moral trajectory that produces narrative fluidity still strikes me as a conspicuously Scorsesian shortcoming. Mr. Scorsese is essentially more a scene assembler than a storyteller. The parts are invariably better than the whole.”