Are you one of the many who consider Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas the greatest movie ever made? If so, proceed directly to GQ’s oral history of the making of the film, which will make you fall in love all over again. It’ll probably also require you to watch the movie again ASAP, which is what I did last night. Despite being horrifically violent and casting Robert De Niro as as Irishman, it will be amazing forever.
Eternal favorite quotes, both from Lorraine Bracco’s Karen:
I know there are women, like my best friends, who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn’t. I got to admit the truth. It turned me on.
Please stop feeding the dog from the table from the plate on top of it!
Also, both Debi Mazar and Catherine Scorsese RULE. Read the GQ piece here.
I watched about a half hour of it dubbed in Spanish the other night. Awesome.
Noticed this news on the interwebs this morning:
Since Martin Scorsese’s “Boardwalk Empire” HBO series was renewed after its first episode for another season, WB TV let it be known that they are looking at a series based on the “Goodfellas” property.
“Goodfellas” writer Nicholas Pileggi is said to be writing at least the series pilot, with Irwin Winkler is on board to produce. Whether Martin Scorsese is involved is unknown so far.
Agree with Fnarf. I can start watching it from any point in the movie and/or in any language. It’s a classic.
That’s a fucking magnificent GQ piece – thank you SO MUCH!
Hmm. At 35 I still haven’t watched Goodfellas – haven’t been avoiding it, it just never makes it to the front of my watch list. Should I bump it forward?
@ 4 – seconded. What a great article.
@ 5 – I say “yes.”
So glad we finally got Donovan on the record.
DeNiro is half Irish. I love you, I’m just sayin.
My father didn’t want to see this movie, because when he had a small business in New Jersey, a couple of wiseguys tried to muscle him into hiding stolen goods there.
My father was, at one point, literally, a rocket scientist: but he and his partner played dumb so smart they wore the wiseguys out so that they left the business alone.
But it was a dreadful experience, may father knew who those people were and what they did and that his life could be in danger to cross them.
So Dad didn’t want to see any movie that would glamorous those murderous bullies.
However, when it became apparent as the movie went on that the goodfellas created their own purgatory and their own hells for themselves — this was no glamorization, my father was admiring of Scorcese’s relentlessly realistic vision of that world.
I’ll never, ever forget the scene of the Mafia Wives having a makeup party. I love Goodfella, loveitloveitloveit.
“I like this one…One dog goes one way, the other dog goes the other way, and this guy’s sayin’, ‘Whadda ya want from me?'”
Dammit, now I have to watch it tonight.
I can’t even count how many times I’ve seen “Goodfellas.” It is probably my all-time favorite flick, and the music supervision still makes me swoon. Thanks for the heads up, Schmader. Super awesome.
Oh, and, Catherine Scorsese’s cameo is brilliant.
“When we were kids,the compares used to visit each other. There was this man. He would never talk. He’d just sit there all night. They say to him, “What’s the matter? Don’t you say anything?”
He says, “What am I going to say, that my wife two-times me?”
So she says, “Shut up! You’re always talking!”
But in ltalian, it sounds much nicer.”
5: Yes, you should watch it ASAP, it’s as good a movie as has ever been made. That said, it’s got some fucking gruesome violence, and before I knew the movie well enough to know when to avert my eyes, watching it was exquisite torture. (The first couple minutes are so gruesome that for years I started the DVD on chapter 2, the beginning of young Henry’s flashback.) But after reading about the credits in the GQ article, I had to see them again, and suffered through from the beginning. (Plus, by now I seriously know every frame of that movie, and know exactly when to look away.)
9: My dad is in the same boat as your dad. He lacks direct bad experiences with mob folk, but has lived a careful life of following the rules and behaving in a morally correct fashion, and can’t stand glamorizing people who shit on that.
They were thrown together in cheap, a lot of pantsuits and double knits.
The moment when Henry Hill is on the witness stand and stretches his finger out to indicate Paul Cicero… still sends chills up my spine.
The sequence where the Hill home is being raided and it cuts to that split-second scene of Karen Hill hiding the gun in her panties, that’s the hottest thing ever put to film ever.