Made Men is an encyclopedic treatment of the making of the movie. They co-authored the screenplay, which tracked the events of the book closely. Pileggi and Scorsese met, and their similar backgrounds growing up in New York, also seeing what Henry Hill saw, made them eager to work together on a film version. As his opening line states, “s far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” Starting with small errands, he worked his way into the mafia in New York, even though he could never be a full member because he was not Italian.ĭirector Martin Scorsese read Pileggi’s book, and immediately expressed interest in making it into a movie. Henry Hill grew up in New York City and was fascinated by the flashy cars, clothes, and jewelry, and how people deferred to local hoodlums out of respect or fear. The book appeared on the 30 th anniversary of the movie’s release. The movie debuted in 1990, based on a 1985 book, Wiseguy, by Nicholas Pileggi, recounting the life of Henry Hill.

This is a book about a movie, Goodfellas, which might be the best movie ever made about organized crime.

Fans of the film might also be interested in this map assembled by Eater that shows many of the restaurants used in the filming of Goodfellas.Publisher: Toronto: Hanover Square Press, 2020. I made a Google map of locations mentioned in Wiseguy.

Though much of the action takes place in Brooklyn and Queens, Manhattan and Staten Island make some appearances as well (for example, Jimmy Burke did time as a teenager at Mount Loretto Reformatory on the South Shore of Staten Island-the same Mount Loretto that Francis Ford Coppola used for exterior shots from the baptism scene at the end of The Godfather). And as a student of New York City history, I immediately downloaded Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family, the Nicholas Pileggi book on which Martin Scorsese based his 1990 film.Ī former crime reporter with the Associated Press and New York magazine (and husband of the late Nora Ephron), Pileggi made it easy for me to pinpoint many of the book’s locations, from the taxi stand in East New York, Brooklyn, where, at the age of 12, Henry Hill began his work with Paul Vario, to Hill’s home in Rockville Centre, where he was arrested in 1980. Though I had seen Goodfellas as a teenager, it was only this month that I watched the movie as a New Yorker.

Wiseguys book goodfellas