He grew up with those people - he knows the culture better than any other movie director out there," says Pileggi. "Marty knows it, Marty grew up with it, Marty lived it. I had the same experience - I knew those people, so there was an intimacy with that material that gave Marty tremendous freedom."

GoodFellas' is an amazing tale, and a wonderful evocation of a bygone era but is one of those rare occasions where the film is all you really need. Warners’ first original feature of the Warner Bros. Discovery era is here … and it’s a period mobster drama fronted by two Hollywood veterans. The book is based on the true story of the mobster Henry Hill. It is the book that Goodfellas was made after, in fact Nicholas Pileggi co-wrote the script and the version I listened to had an introduction by Martin Scorsese. I had not realized how closely Goodfellas was based on true events so the book had the added benefit of making me appreciate the movie even more. The book and movie are thus very much alike, with the book just going deeper into characters and events, the epilogue was also very interesting. At the age of twelve my ambition was to become a gangster. To be a wiseguy. Being a wiseguy was better than being President of the United States. To be a wiseguy was to own the world." -- Henry Hill So what sort of man was Henry Hill? "He was a hustler. He wasn’t a mean man, he wasn’t a violent man – not that he wouldn’t commit violence – but he was hyperactive, and always into mischief." He was also very clever, with a genius for thinking up moneymaking scams.That’s why the really tough guys went along with him – he was always looking to make money for them." What made Wiseguy such a thrilling read was Hill’s incredible memory. He was a natural storyteller, with a novelistic eye for detail. Returning to the genre that made him a household name, Robert De Niro will star in Wise Guys, a feature intended for theatrical distribution that will be directed by Barry Levinson, the filmmaker known for movies such as Oscar best picture winner Rain Man and Wag the Dog.

I waited for this book for a long time. Watched my favorite movie "Goodfellas" based on this book several times. So when I got the hard copy of the book, I could not resist myself finishing it at once. It is As good as the movie. But if someone watches the movie, the book is waste of time in my opinion. The movie is a total honest representation of the book. But my case is different. I love to read about Mafia. :) Whilst reading it, it is soon very obvious why Martin Scorsese was so attracted to this story, indeed I can almost imagine his excitement, as he works out how to structure key scenes and who to cast.

PDF / EPUB File Name: Wiseguy__The_25th_Anniversary_Edition_-_Nicholas_Pileggi.pdf, Wiseguy__The_25th_Anniversary_Edition_-_Nicholas_Pileggi.epub Hill was no Godfather, but he’d spent his whole life in the Mafia. For Pileggi, this was a big attraction. "I thought, 'It’d be great to do a story from the point of view of a middle level guy, or even a low level guy.’" urn:lcp:wiseguy00nich_aso:epub:1228e7a8-2712-43a3-bf07-6eadd713a8d9 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier wiseguy00nich_aso Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t1kh2tv9r Invoice 11 Isbn 0671447343 And when you finally get to the end, and see how Hill escapes a bullet in the head (that was issued to everyone else who knew of the Lufthansa heist) to become a Federal employee, you wonder... is this all okay and correct that this should happen? People are killed en route to this, millions of dollars of property and cash are redistributed among wiseguys, and yet the prime mover becomes another man in lieu of the one he never was. I am not sure. When Henry finally accepts that his old friends are after him, he agrees to cooperate with law enforcement. Henry and his family enter the federal witness protection program. Henry's detailed inside knowledge is a dream come true for law enforcement, which has long sought evidence against the elusive Paul Vario. Henry's testimony sends both Paulie and Jimmy to jail, along with a host of other less prominent figures in the criminal underworld. This is Henry's greatest scheme. By turning on his old pals and siding with the government, Henry ensures his immunity to every crime he has ever committed, or may commit in the future.

So, if like me, you’ve seen the film multiple times, is it worth reading the book? Probably not. It’s good but the overwhelming sense of familiarity makes it all feel very recognisable. That said, if you really love the film then you will inevitably still get quite a lot out of reading the book including quite a lot of interesting detail about what the authorities did leading up to Henry Hill's arrest, and the aftermath of his entry into the Federal Witness Program. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-12-12 17:36:29 Boxid IA120121212-IA1 Boxid_2 CH114201 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York, NY Donor Hill died in 2012. He never read Pileggi’s book. "I don’t have to read it," he told Pileggi. "I told you everything that’s in it – what am I going to read it for?" Hill didn’t feel sorry about the crimes he’d committed, so much as the high life he’d left behind. "He was grieving for the life he’d lost – he loved being a gangster," says Pileggi. "He loved being with those guys. They were his family." This was his main source of regret. "He felt awful because he had to give up the life he really wanted to live. He could no longer be a gangster."

My Book Notes

Pileggi co-wrote the pilot of the CBS television series Vegas, which first aired in September 2012. [2] Personal life [ edit ]

Nicholas Pileggi ( / p ɪ ˈ l ɛ dʒ i/, Italian: [piˈleddʒi]; born February 22, 1933) is an American author, producer and screenwriter. He wrote the non-fiction book Wiseguy and co-wrote the screenplay for Goodfellas, its 1990 film adaptation, for which he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Lccn 85022047 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL7660706M Openlibrary_edition

Part of me wishes that I had read this book, which directly inspired Goodfellas, without having seen or even having any knowledge of the movie. There’s so much about Goodfellas that seems outrageous and over-the-top and made up, so it was almost weird to learn that Henry Hill was a real person, and that everything he describes in his memoir actually happened. Having seen the movie created this weird mental disconnect where even though I knew I was reading a memoir, it still felt kind of like a novel. (It also doesn’t help that the narration in Goodfellas is practically lifted word-for-word from the text of Hill’s memoir, to the point where I hope he got a screenwriter’s credit for the movie) So I would actually be more likely to recommend this to someone who’s never seen Goodfellas, who can appreciate the sheer outlandishness of this memoir. Henry Hill, in collaboration with Nicholas Pileggi, wrote this book after he’d been placed in witness protection after ratting out the other members of his New York mafia family – so at that point, he’d already burned all his bridges and had nobody left to protect and nothing much left to lose. This means that he shares everything in this memoir, detailing the murders, the robberies, the drugs, the affairs, the betrayals…it’s all here, and it’s all just on the safe side of completely unbelievable. The project is centered on Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, two Italian-American crime bosses that ran their respective families in the middle of the 20th century. In 1957, Genovese attempted to assassinate Costello but failed, although he was wounded and decided to retire, as much as one can retire from the Mafia. When he was arrested for a range of offences, including drug-dealing (which his Mob bosses had told him to stay away from), he agreed to testify against his fellow ‘wiseguys’ and was given a new identity, under the US government’s Witness Protection Program. This was where Pileggi came in. Martin Scorsese turned the biography of a New York hoodlum, Henry Hill, into a cinematic masterpiece