This week marks the 25th anniversary of what many consider to be Martin Scorsese’s best film and the best mob movie ever made — Goodfellas. Based on Nicholas Pileggi’s true-crime book, Wiseguy, an account of real-life Lucchese crime-family associate Henry Hill. The film has become a pop-culture mainstay, inspiring everything from The Sopranos to The Simpsons.
But while you may have seen Goodfellas a dozen times and know every line of the famous “shinebox scene,” do you know the story of Michael Imperioli’s trip to the ER or Paul Sorvino’s Ray Liotta slap? Dice up some garlic and put on the red sauce. We’re digging up some wiseguy-worthy bits of trivia about one of the greatest mob movies ever made.
A number of actors were considered for the starring role of Henry Hill.
Goodfellas gave Ray Liotta his biggest role, but the part wasn’t just handed to him. Scorsese and his producers batted around a number of names before deciding on Liotta after nearly a year of deliberation. Those considered included better-known actors like Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin, and even Tom Cruise. Baldwin later admitted to Howard Stern that he felt Liotta did a much better job than he could have done.
Joe Pesci’s famous “Funny how?” scene was inspired by an actual mob encounter.
While talking with The Today Show for the film’s 25th anniversary, the cast remembered how Scorsese incorporated the scene of Tommy asking “Am I like a clown?” after Pesci described a similar experience. Pesci had been working in a restaurant as a young man when some tough guys came in, Pesci made a quip that one of the men was a funny guy and was then put on the spot by the man asking what made him so funny. Pesci never mentioned if the encounter ended with anybody having a bottle broken over their head.
Paul Sorvino almost bailed on the film because of his character.
While speaking at the Tribeca Film Festival, actor Paul Sorvino revealed how he nearly quit the film four weeks before shooting because he was creeped out by the guy’s double life.
“I called my manager and said, ‘Let me out of this, I can’t do this. At home, they’re family people. When they’re out, they’re shooting people, they’re killing people. That really is so far from me … When I was trying to find this, I was really at a loss. So I called them up and said, ‘Get me out.’”
Sorvino said that it was only while adjusting his tie in the mirror and saw Paulie starring back at him that he felt he could do the role. The actor said it scared the hell out of him, but it was an “Oh, that’s the guy” moment.
Ray Liotta wasn’t expecting a slap from Paul Sorvino.
For many of the scenes in Goodfellas, the actors took the liberty to improvise when it felt right. For Paul Sorvino this meant slapping Ray Liotta without him knowing. When Paulie pulls Henry aside to talk about Jimmy after Henry’s release from prison and slaps him, Liotta has a look of shock on his face. This is because there was no slap in the script and Sorvino had not rehearsed the moment with him beforehand.
Martin Scorsese put his parents to work on the set.
Martin Scorsese’ parents were no strangers to a movie set when he cast them in Goodfellas, as he’d used them before in Mean Streets and The King of Comedy). Catherine Scorsese plays Tommy’s mother and his father plays an inmate cooking sauce in the prison dinner scene. (The tomato sauce that Henry is cooking towards the end of the film was made by Scorsese’s parents as well.)
Tommy’s mom had no idea her son was about to murder a man.
Catherine Scorsese had no idea while filming that the reason Tommy was asking to borrow her butcher knife was because he had Billy locked in the car trunk. Scorsese later revealed that the scene only had about two lines of dialogue and the rest was improvised by the actors. Martin, the director, told his mother before filming that her character was simply having the boys over for dinner. The part about their kidnapping was left out to capture what a natural dinner conversation at one of their houses would have been like.
Henry Hill did enough gangster stuff to probably make a second film.
There’s plenty of illegal gangster activity crammed into Goodfellas’ two-and-half hour running time, but there could have been more. Henry Hill’s rap sheet was simply too large to fit every crime he was involved with into the movie. For example, there’s the time he reportedly robbed cosmetics magnate Estee Lauder of $1 million in goods and then offered to take her out for coffee.
There’s also of course, the infamous Boston College point-shaving scandal of 1978. Covered by ESPN’s 30 for 30 series in the episode “Playing for the Mob,” the episode chronicles a scheme in which Hill and Jimmy Burke (the inspiration for De Niro’s Jimmy Conway in the film) paid off several players to manipulate the point spread.
Henry Hill had planned to scam the publisher of Wiseguy.
Nicholas Pileggi, recalled in an interview how Hill had planned to con publisher Simon & Schuster, but then began to look forward to their chats.
“He sold his story to Simon & Schuster but they didn’t have a writer. Henry never really intended doing the book. He was going to scam the publisher for the advance and forget about it. He began to look forward to meeting me, to get the gossip and the news. He also began giving me personal details, using me as an unofficial shrink. It became clear that he took a lot of pleasure recalling the old days.”
Ray Liotta wasn’t allowed to speak to the man who inspired his character.
While Martin Scorsese kept Hill around as a resource for material while making the film, he made sure to keep the real-life mobster far away from his star. Liotta would listen to tapes of Henry speaking on his drive to the set to nail down Hill’s manner of speaking, but said that the director wanted to keep them apart because he had never directed the actor before and didn’t want Hill interfering.
After filming had finished Hill and Liotta did finally meet at a bowling alley. According to Liotta, Hill said “Thanks for not making me look like a scumbag.” Liotta’s response: “Did you see the movie?”
ER doctors attempted to treat Michael Imperioli’s fake bullet wounds.
Michael Imperioli’s time on the Goodfellas’ set was short—just two days—but it was long enough for the actor to walk away with a great story. Imperioli had cut himself on set with a piece of broken glass and gone to the hospital to get stitched up. Upon arriving at the hospital, nurses saw Imperioli covered in both real and fake blood with three bullet holes in his chest, despite his efforts to tell them that he had just come from a movie set they began to treat him for gunshot wounds. It was only after removing his shirt and seeing the blood packets that they stopped and sent him back out to the waiting room.
