Glenn Kenny - Made Men: the story of goodfellas

For the thirtieth anniversary of its premiere comes the vivid and immersive history behind Martin Scorseses signature film Goodfellas , hailed by critics as the greatest mob movie ever made.

When Goodfellas first hit the theaters in 1990, a classic was born. Few could anticipate the unparalleled influence it would have on pop culture, one that would inspire future filmmakers and redefine the gangster picture as we know it today. From the rush of grotesque violence in the opening scene to the iconic hilarity of Joe Pescis endlessly quoted Funny how? shtick, its little wonder the film is widely regarded as a mainstay in contemporary cinema.

In the first ever behind-the-scenes story of Goodfellas, film critic Glenn Kenny chronicles the making and afterlife of the film that introduced America to the real modern gangsterbrutal, ruthless, yet darkly appealing, the villain we cant get enough of. Featuring interviews with the films major players, including Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, Made Men shines a light on the lives and stories wrapped up in the Goodfellas universe, and why its enduring legacy is still essential to charting the trajectory of American culture thirty years later.

Praise for Made Men

We saw Goodfellas the night it opened, in a packed theater, when we were in our early twenties. No doubt it changed the direction of our lives. This is the first book weve read that explains how and why the movie has such a deep and lasting impact. Glenn Kenny is a scholar and a writer, and every bit the literary hit man that Tommy DeSimone was in real life.

Brian Koppelman and David Levien, screenwriters of Oceans Thirteen and cocreators of Billions

Insightful, gregarious, and encompassing, Made Men is not just the essential book on the making of Goodfellas , but also a wonderful mini-course in film and filmmaking. What a pleasure it is to go to the movies with Glenn Kenny!

Owen King, author of Double Feature

Glenn Kennys critical acumen and eye for revealing detail is in effervescent display on every page of Made Men , a book not just for Scorsese fans but for everyone who loves the lore of the movies as much as the films themselves.

Michelle Dean, author of Sharp

What an incredibly cool and rewarding piece of work. Smart, funny, perceptive, and replete with fascinating trivia (during the legendary one-take tracking shot in the Copa, Henry and Karen travel in a circle ), Made Men effectively rebuilds in prose the greatest gangster film ever made. Anyone who cares at all about the movies needs to read this. Glenn Kenny, salud .

Tom Bissell, author of Creative Types and coauthor of The Disaster Artist

Glenn Kenny is a film critic whose work appears in the New York Times and RogerEbert.com. He has also written for The Current , Rolling Stone, the Village Voice , the New York Daily News, Playboy, Film Comment and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Claire.

Also by Glenn Kenny

Anatomy of an Actor: Robert De Niro

A Galaxy Not So Far Away:
Writers and Artists on Twenty-Five Years of Star Wars (editor)

Made Men

The Story of Goodfellas

Glenn Kenny

To Claire, with all my love

Contents

Treachery is beautiful if it makes us sing.

Jean Genet, The Thiefs Journal

I ran into Paul Schrader in the hall the other day, hes finishing his movie. I said to him, It figures I see you here, were the only two guys who are gonna work through Christmas. Everyone else is clearing out.

Martin Scorsese was referring to the man who wrote the screenplay for his galvanizing 1976 movie Taxi Driver , with whom hed subsequently worked on Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ . Schrader himself started directing features in 1978, forging an idiosyncratic path with films that often mixed searching spirituality with sexuality and violence. But he never shook, or tried to shake, the association with Scorsese. The Raging Bull experience, which saw De Niro and Scorsese rewriting Schraders script almost from scratch, had bruised Schraders feelings somewhat, but the two men retained an affinity with, and an affection for, each other. More to the point, fifteen years after they first worked together, they were still as consumed by filmmaking as they had been then. Schrader was finishing his disturbing, Venice-set The Comfort of Strangers , written by Harold Pinter from a novel by Ian McEwan. Scorsese was caught up in assembling a picture called Goodfellas . (At this time, and for some time after its release, it was, as youll see, rendered in print as GoodFellas . This changed over the years. No one to this day, to my knowledge, can pinpoint when it changed or why.) Both pictures would see release in the fall of 1990.

Scorsese mentioned this run-in to me before we ourselves got to work. He had set aside a couple of hours so we could start on an essay to which he would attach his byline. In 1989 I was working at a magazine called Video Review , which would be celebrating its tenth year of publication in 1990. That it had survived for ten years as a consumer magazine was a testimony to a lot of things, and mainly to the fact that home video and home theater in the late 80s was a sufficiently hot topic to sustain a regular readership of a few hundred thousand.

For the 10th Anniversary Issue, we were soliciting the opinions of various ostensible luminaries and visionaries on how home video had affected life and culture, and what effect it would have in the future. I should emphasize again that this was 1989. Home video meant VHS, and maybe a little bit of laser disc; the DVD, video streaming, oversize flat-screen TVs, critically acclaimed original programming on cable, the whole is TV better than movies debate: all of this was in the future. What seemed to me, and to everybody else, the distant future. Most of the predictions we would run were in the form of sound bites solicited in phone interviews (J. G. Ballard: I look forward to the day when specialty video producersthe equivalent of Sun Records and the like in the music business twenty, thirty years ago, and the equivalent of small publishers in the book tradereally can begin to reach out to the public. Paula Abdul: The big movie musical will return to prominence in this decade, as recording artists take the video music concept one step further.). But for the keynote address, so to speak, I thought Martin Scorsese would be ideal. The filmmaker was also a well-known film lover , passionately concerned with film preservation, and a great proponent of home video as a medium, however initially imperfect, for movie appreciation.

So I got the number for his office and called. I was greeted by Julia Judge, his assistant at the time. I laid out what we wanted to do, and I also stipulated that if Scorsese had neither the time nor inclination to sit down and write such a piece himself, I would be delighted to come up to the office, interview him, and construct an as told to piece. Either way, I said, we would pay Scorsese three thousand dollars, for a thousand-word article.

Three thousand dollars? Judge responded, sounding impressed. I wasnt aware of it at the time, but the director was still trying to bounce back from personal financial crises dating from earlier in the decade.

His cinematic output continued, but the fieriness that distinguished his prior pictures frequently took a different and sometimes less volatile form. His critical profile seemed to have diminished ever so slightly during this time, as well. In 1985s After Hours he experimented with a form of proto-indie, guerrilla filmmaking. In 1986 The Color of Money was a sequel to The Hustler , and starred Paul Newman and a very up-and-coming Tom Cruisea solid film, with solid returns. He worked for his old friend Steven Spielberg directing an episode of the latters attempt to revive the Twilight Zone television series; he was sought out by megastar and future King of Pop Michael Jackson to make a music video; he contributed to the anthology film New York Stories with fellow graying eminences Francis Coppola and Woody Allen. (Scorsese was the youngest of the three.)