Simply put, Scorsese knew how to tell the story of guys like Henry Hill and Paulie Cicero because, well, he grew up with guys exactly like them.įortunately, he turned to a life of winning Oscars instead of organized crime. He told me once that if he were a big guy, like his friend, 'I probably would have been one of them'" ( source). He went home and watched movies on television, hours and hours. "When he was a kid, he had asthma, so he couldn't go on the streets. "Marty grew up in Little Italy, and his best friend was the son of the Mafia boss there," Goodfellas' director of photography Michael Ballhaus told GQ magazine. Scorsese's own upbringing in New York made him the perfect director to bring Pileggi's reporting to life on the big screen. You might say exiled mobsters was the Ephron-Pileggi family business. Ephron herself wrote and directed her own string of hit films, like When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and the mafia comedy My Blue Heaven, which, just like Goodfellas, tells the tale of a former mobster navigating life in the Witness Protection Program. They say that behind every good man is a good woman sometimes that good woman tells you to call Martin Scorsese back, pronto.
So, Scorsese went around Pileggi to Ephron, and the rest is history. You can see why Pileggi thought he was being punked. By the time Wiseguy hit his nightstand, the director had already established himself as a movie-making titan with films like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull. It's not every day that you get a call from Martin Scorsese. So, he called Pileggi-and Pileggi thought it was a joke.
Scorsese loved Wiseguy like a mafia don loves favors, and he knew he had to turn it into a movie. Without Pileggi's wife, author Nora Ephron, Goodfellas would never have been made. That non-fiction opus would become the backbone of the Goodfellas' script, which Pileggi penned with the film's director, Martin Scorsese. The New York-born journalist spent 30 years profiling the goings-on in gangland before his breakout book-appropriately titled Wiseguy-hit shelves in 1986.
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