1.
Originally, I started writing this as a book. I
was working on Goodfellas at the time. Once that was pretty much out of the
way, [Scorsese] knew I was doing this book on casino Business, and I would just
tell him these bizarre stories. The scheme, and explained a lot of the stuff,
too. He knew some of it, and he’d always been interested in casino world. Because
if you think in [Scorsese]’s case, it’s like a trilogy, I think. Mean Streets,
just kids, really street punks. Selling jap adapters, you can’t be lower than that. And
then we go to Goodfellas, but Goodfellas came along quite a few years later,
and [Scorsese] was interested in kids from Mean Streets growing up. This was
who they were, he knew them better than anyone. He understood that they lived
big and they could go to the Copacabana, it was still not, it was all coming
down and it all crashed, and that was the second level, the middle-class mob.
But he was also fascinated by the top of the mobworld, and that of course is
the casinos. Where is the mob better situated in
those days than Las Vegas and the casinos, because they through their connexions actually
owned the casinos. Their names couldn’t be on them, because they were
crooked. But they owned the casinos, and skipped them millions and millions of
dollars.
2.
They were given a full Las Vegas casinos to run,
and all these casinos do is to churn out millions of dollars a day. And they
screwed it up, because these guys are always going to screw it up. They are so
willfull and so in need of a immediate gratification and so blind to the
consequences of their Actions, that in the end they screw it up. I guess you
could call it Biblical or you could call it Darwinian. But whatever it is, it
makes the great Drama, I think. And I think [Scorsese] agrees that it makes a
good Drama, and it makes pretty good movies, if you get it right.
3.
Never again will wiseguys
be able to control the casino in Las Vegas. To this day. Now they no longer do.
That ended it for them, and the only reason that ended by the way is that as a
result of that trial and that case. The Teamsters Pension Fund was taken over
by the Federal Government, and the mob could no longer control where Pension
Fund lent money. That’s the way they controlled the casinos. They controlled
the members of the trustees, the trustees of the central States Pension Fund,
they were all controlled by mob guys. Six out of
eight, or four out of six, I can’t remember, but the majority, and therefore
they were able to lend 62 million dollars to [Rosenthal]’s friends, who then
bought the casino and prop the guy up there as a legitimate owner, and brought
[Rosenthal] in to run it, because that guided that casino. Ace didn’t
even want to do it, he didn’t want to go, but he wound up going, because you
don’t say No to those guys that often. But if you wind up just covering the financial
manipulations of the Teamster Pensions Fund and the scheme and all that stuff done
abstractly like a business reporting, there’s no way there’s a movie there,
there’s hardly a book. It becomes basically a treatise, something you might
read in a Business school. “Why didn’t this work? Well, it didn’t work,
because.” Once you can humanise the people, because all of this was being
done by people. It may be numbers, but the numbers being written by people,
being accumulated by people. Once you see the people who were involved, and
then you find they have unbelievable soap-opera lives, and that it’s the
soap-opera lives, it’s the insanity that brings down a hundred, two hundred
million dollars apparatus. It’s just fascinating. It’s the story, the
narrative, the human story that gets you into the big story. It makes the
boringness of actuarial numbers and Business stuff, it makes that stuff
fascinating. That’s the key. You’ve got to get in with the real story and the
real people. I talked to these guys. I’ve got their
Language. I’ve got them on tape. I have the way they sound, and you can’t
write that, you know, in Film school in Malibu at the side of the mountain, no
matter how many hallucinogens you take. [Acurate.] You can’t write the way a guy out of the Chicago gangs talk
or a gambler in New York. When you’ve got that body of dialogue, which
it is, just all that Language, how can you not use it? Because he is telling
you the story. It’s priceless. Then put it in all trumped-up dialogue, and try
to make it fit, there’s no reason to do that. It’s not me, I didn’t write that.
I re-typed it, I cleaned it up, I abridged stuff, I took out the stuff about
his mother-in-law. But I made it, and [Scorsese] made it, so that it was a part
of the narrative. You’re hearing those guys talk, when they talk, you may have
never met a gangster, but when you hear Henry Hill talk, when you hear
[Rosenthal] talk, when you hear [Spilotro] talk, that’s the way they talk.
4.
We’d meet at the old Drake Hotel, and we had a
suite, and I had my computer there, and we had a printer there. We’d just move
all the stuff in. And sometimes [Scorsese]’s dog. That was basically it. I had
already outlined a book to some degree. [Scorsese] had gone over the outline. We
did this for Goodfellas as well, Wiseguy the Book. We tried to say what is the
narrative storyline? And I’ll come up with a version, and he’ll come up with a
version, and we kind of move it around until we have the [right] structure. I
think the structure in Casino was not my book structure, it was a movie
structure. And the structure in the movie, I would say, was 95% [Scorsese]’s. I
mean, he just had a vision.
5.
The part by Frank Vincent is actually the guy
we’re using as the technical advisor. His real name is Frank Culotta. And he
had testifed and gone into the [WitSec]. But I knew him, and he had been really
smart and very knowledgeable, and changed his life. I got unbelievable stuff
from him. He was like that with [Spilotro]. I’ve got a lot of the early
[Spilotro] stuff from him. What [Spilotro] said here, what [Spilotro] said
there, I got that from the early Frank stuff. But then, [Rosenthal] started
talking. And I wound up with [tape recordings], long [tape recordings] of
[Spilotro] talking, FBI stuff that came out in court. And people who really
knew [Spilotro] started explaining to me what he said and when. So you begin to
build the original early draft, we used the voiceover of the guy I had, but as
I’ve got more voices as these people began to open up a little bit. Then I was
able to go to different voice-overs. In the end, we had one voice-over, then we
realised we had a couple. And we had used a couple of voice-overs in
Goodfellas. A lot of people say, You can only have one voice-over. In
Goodfellas, you have Henry, and then you also have his wife. Because I’ve got Henry’s wife, Karen, to tell us everything.
She said that he gave me the gun, it was heavy, and it turned me on. You can’t
make that up. That was Karen. That was actually the key to their relationship. The fact
that he was a gangster, that he’d beaten up this guy, that he’d brutalise
[someone], and he gave her the gun to put in a milkbox. [Uma Thurman, Samantha
Power, Scott Thorson, Scarlett Johansson, Teresa Palmer. Hillary Clinton.] I could never think that somebody would give gun to a
girl [from Long Island], and she’s going to put it in the milkbox, and get
turned on by it. Who could think that up? The point is, If you do the
Journalism and get these people who are the subjects of your narrative, get
them to open up and tell you what’s in their hearts and they’re really
thinking, what turned them on, how can you not put that in their voice in the
movie? So revealing. They sometimes tell you these things, and they don’t know
how revealing it is. Sometimes you’re taking notes, and you don’t know how
revealing it is until you address it all in the screenplay, in the scenes,
because the scenes are all talks, people revealing themselves. And I’d been
working on the book, but hadn’t finished it. It was only when we decided to work
on the movie, [Scorsese] had a window, we could work on the movie, and suddenly
[De Niro] was interested in it. That’s the thing that made the book work, because
that’s what opened up all these people distant, not at all forthcoming as I
needed them to be. I would have probably had to spend another two years, and I
still don’t think I would have gotten what I got in this book, whether it is
good or bad or what. But I wouldn’t have gotten the access to people that I got once it
was announced that it was a movie, and that Robert De Niro was in the movie.
It’s idiotic. Who gets the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism, Robert De Niro? I
don’t know. It’s ludicrous. But that is where we are today in Society. And
the Reality was, When the movie was announced, suddenly it became easier to get
information for the book. Everybody was interested. In meeting [] De Niro, [Scorsese],
Sharon Stone, oh my God. And people would slam doors in my faces, wouldn’t talk
to me, hung up, have their lawyers threaten me, all of a sudden they were
calling me up to meet Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, Joe Pesci, Martin Scorsese.
I’m the writer, all of a sudden, it opened up, so I immediately started doing
all the material we had for the book to put it in the movie. The minute that I
finished working on the movie, I immediately went back to the book, and typing
every minute. And my editor, Michael Korda, unbelievably helpful, because he was really.
Because I tried to get the book out before the movie, it’s hard. They’re
already shooting the movie in Las Vegas. Actually, I was typing the book in Las
Vegas. The publisher wanted the book to come out a year
before the movie, so that they can get a nice ride with the book. What happens
when you bring out a book at the same time as the movie, People pay ten
dollars, twenty dollars, they go see the movie, it’s Casino with Robert De
Niro, it’s written by the same guy who wrote the book, what are you going to
spend 30 dollars for the book for? They already saw. Am I in the Business of
giving Nicholas Pileggi the Money? I go see the movie. So the publisher is
sitting there with hundreds of thousands of copy of the book, they know that
people are not going to duplicate. The movies sell millions of dollars worth of
tickets, nobody’s going to buy. So that’s why they’d like you to read the
book first, so bored, nobody’s there, they’ve rung America’s pockets dry, then
the paperback comes out with the movie, then you get the second kick with the
paperback. Then you have the picture instead of just a normal book cover. Now
you have the movie star on the cover on the paperback. Lawyers work all that
out in advance that helps sell the paperback.
6.
The only thing he ever did that was illegal when he was
in Illinois was Gamble. He was a bookmaker, and
he was a gambler, and he was an oddsmaker, he did all the stuff. And Gambling
is illegal in Illinois. But it is legal in Las Vegas, in Nevada. So the minute he
steps over the border into the State of Nevada, he’s a perfectly legitimate
[homo sapiens]. He did everything he’d done
in Illinois. In Nevada, he’s totally legitimate. And that gave him such Freedom,
that made him feel so good, it was a great benefit to him, just in his heart. And that, I think, that sense of Freedom and release was the
part of the thing that made him think that he could actually live a [mainstream
honky] life, and find a beautiful girl to marry and have children and live
these kind of [unclear] life, which was a dream beyond any chance of being
fulfilled.
7.
So he is in madly in love with her, but he
understand who she is. This is not Donna Reed coming with Robin Young. Working
girl. She’s made money. She’s making a million dollars a year maybe, with her
boyfriend. He’s got to make up for that to her. What he’s going to do is, He
wants her exclusive to himself. He’s going to say, Whatever you want, you want
a million dollars, I’ll give it to you. My sense is, Once we begin to live
together as a husband and wife, and maybe we’ll have kids, we’ll go on with our
lives, we’ll fall in love. I’m already in love, but you aren’t. But believe me,
I’ll make you fall in love with me, which is probably what he felt. She’s a
street girl. She’s not. She’s very sophisticated, I even hate using the word,
street girl. She’s a knockaround girl, and she knew her way around in Las
Vegas. This is an exclusive kind of person in Las Vegas, who is by the way in
that kind of Community, all the Respect and the Reputation of legitimate people,
even though that’s who she was. In the end, he could
never get her to fall in love with him, and I think part of the problem was, She
was always in love with the one guy whom she couldn’t control and [] who was
really bad to her. All these other guys just gave her money, one guy who was to
take it from her, and she let him take it. And I think we see that
pretty clearly in the movie, and of course, no one better for that than James
Woods.
8.
I know it’s hard to believe sometimes, but
they’re all humans. I don’t care how Bad they are or what we think of is Bad or
the Society thinks of is Bad. They’re all murderers, they’re killers, they’re brutal, it’s horrible,
brutal killer life, and you can get killed just as quickly as you can kill
somebody. But that is their life, they know that, at the same time. They
are quite often terrific daddys, great mommys, they’re great with their
children, they can be very generous, they’re human on million other levels. Except
there’s this one trigger, and all of a sudden, you’re dealing with a crocodile
or an aligator, and they’ll destroy. But that’s what that world is. That’s
one of the things you want to show. You think this is interesting? You think
you want to be the Godfather, you want to play in that world? This is what that
world is really about, because in the end, these guys are really brutal. They
can be good fathers, but they’re brutal. They just
don’t feel your pain, as some politicians would say. They just don’t. They’d
take your hand, and slame it shut on the automobile door. They feel their
pain. They get a splinter, Oh my God, they go to doctor’s. [Fred Fleitz.] They
don’t feel any pain of another [homo sapiens]. They can laugh, they can eat,
while they’re killing you.
9.
In the kind of Violence we don’t make up. We’re
simply telling the story, just the way you tell the story [Rosenthal] fell in
love with [Geri McGee], she had a boyfriend on the side. Just as you tell the
story she drives her car on their lawn and steps all over the pattunias. You
have to tell the violent part, and in the violent part, [Spilotro] literally
put a guy’s head in the vice. That’s the way they tried to get this guy to
talk. They were in a workshop, and the fastest way they thought they could do
it was to put the guy’s head in the vice. And finally the guy, the guy was just
a stubborn man, he would not talk. He should have looked at the vice and gave
[Spilotro] whatever he wanted. [Spilotro] didn’t even want to, “I don’t want to
put your head in the box. Don’t make me do this.” Don’t make me do this. Can you
imagine saying that to somebody? [Spilotro] was blaming the guy whom he’s
killing for forcing him. That’s the kind of mentality you’re dealing with.
[Mark Boal. Ridley Scott. Fred Fleitz. Henry Kissinger. John McCain. Dick
Cheney. Hillary Clinton.] But
he did do that, and it’s a horrible scene. It actually happened. It so
identifies the [Spilotro] character, just by saying something like Don’t make
me do this, you know who he is. Why leave that out? Don’t make the movie if
you leave that out. That’s what you’re making the movie about. People might be
offended by it. It’s horrible. Don’t go see the movie. I don’t care. If you’re
going to do it, you might as well do it right.
10.
I’m sure there could
have been an another woman, and there are millions of them out there, whose
husbands are just as obssessive about Money and the accounting. Where is this? He’s
neat, he’s clean, he’s neat. Those fifty suit jackets upstairs are all in
perfect hangers in a beautiful closet, his house is immaculate, I’ve been to
it, everything is. He just lives a clean, rather enviable life. There are women
who would find that very appealing, who would find great comfort in it. [Geri McGee]
never had to worry about a penny in her life. She didn’t have to worry about
anything. [Rosenthal] would have handed her everything. She could have just
played tennis, and taken care of the kids, taken them to school, helped them
with their homework, cook once in a while, or go out wherever she wanted, he
would do it for her. But she was an independent woman.
She had been making money and earning money on her own, and was resisting
anything he’d tried to impose. So that was the problem they had. Had she
been a different woman, I’m sure [the marriage] could have gone on today. Of
course, he wasn’t interested. There were many other women he could have
married, but [Geri McGee] was the one he wanted. He really loved that woman,
the woman he married, truly loved her. They had terrific kids, and yet it
couldn’t work. He looks back now with great sadness, what happened. Maybe he
would have done it differently, she would have done it differently. But It
didn’t work. She was obviously a
sick woman, she was addicted to pills, alcohol, and he could never get her out
of that. That was the heart of the story,
more important to me, and maybe to [Scorsese], than the skimming and the
mobster.
11.
That den scene is a critical scene, because everybody is in
that room, and you see it falling apart. [Geri
McGee]’s drunk, it’s morning, [Geri McGee]’s already loaded in her tennis
outfit, and [Rosenthal] grabs her arm and forces her down the stairs, Get out
of here. And Sharon Stone’s resistances to his helping her down the stairs is
so perfect, it’s such a brilliant piece of acting on her part, because the way
she resists his arm is the way she has resisted him throughout the entire
drama. That’s when he, [Rosenthal] goes to help [Geri McGee], she holds
back. If you see in that scene, if Sharon were in front of a truck, and a truck
is coming, and [Rosenthal] would push her out of the way of the truck, she
would resist. She would rather get hit by a truck than have this son-of-a-bitch husband
of hers save her life. That’s how angry she is. [Accurate.] All of the
tension, the whole of the movie has been building in a sense to that scene,
where all of the players are playing it out. It was a brilliant scene by Bob
and Joe at the end, but equally brilliant by Sharon. Just watch her resist his arms,
it’s just great.
12.
I was staying at the Sands Hotel, and I got a
call that said that Joe Pesci was coming to the set, and he wanted to see me. I
was waiting, he knew where I was. There was a knock on the door, and I opened
the door, it wasn’t Joe, but it was [Spilotro], the real guy. I’ve seen, I’ve
seen picture of him. He had the little moustache, he had everything, the hair, the
style, the dress, the swagger, the style. Because [Spilotro] had been
photographed for years in not only surveillance picture, but newsreel. Because
he’d wander around and he’d go to the court with his lawyer, Oscar Goodman, who is now
the Mayor of Las Vegas, who was unbelievably helpful in the movie and a
terrific man. And that was [Spilotro], who was at that time one of the most
terrifying person in Las Vegas. Everyone’s afraid of him. And he’d come, and pit
bosses would come and look at him, because everybody knew he was dead, but you’re never quite sure
with those guys, and they saw Joe dressed like him, looked like him, and
made up like him, and there were guys who were almost fainting behind the
gambling [table], thinking he’d come back. But of course, everybody knew it was
Joe Pesci. Brilliant, brilliant make-up.
13.
The original version we wrote, he asked about so
much money, and that was it. [De Niro], No, no, no, no, no, he’s not going to
just ask her once or twice, he’s going to stay after her. He’s going to say,
What did you do with? Well, I gave him 3,000 for his watch. 3,000, okay, that
leaves you with 47,000. What happened to the rest? It was [De Niro]’s insight
into the character, this is an accountant, this is a gambler, this is the guy
who knew the odds to everything. He was an oddsmaker, he set the odds, he set
the odds for all the football games played on Sundays for the mob. He set the
odds for the country. He’s not going let somebody get away with 40,000 dollars
this way. So [De Niro] kept after [Scorsese] and me in the room. Then he’s
going to say this, he’s going to say this. 60,000 for suit? How many suits can
a guy buy? He would keep after it, and he just exhausted us. That’s exactly
what he does in that scene. He really loves her, he doesn’t want to chase her
away, but he is compelled to be one way. He is programmed, it’s in his DNA to
get it down for the last five cents, and it drives everybody nuts and chases
away the one person he really loves. It’s just fascinating. But [De Niro]
spotted it, and made the scene much deeper.
14.
[Geri McGee] getting so angry at her husband for
all these other stuff, for getting stoned, getting smashed, so she then starts
coming onto [Spilotro]. [Spilotro] because he was so angry at [Rosenthal] is
going to screw his wife just to get even at [Rosenthal]. I don’t know, that was
not a passionate relationship, that was a get-even relationship. At that point
in [Spilotro]’s career, I think [Spilotro] would have loved to put a bullet in
[Rosenthal]’s head. He got so angry at him. [Spilotro] was that volatile, he could
have done it. He would have been sorry in the morning, he would never tell you.
So the next best thing to killing a guy is to cuckholding him in [Spilotro]’s
world. So that’s what Nickey does. She’s also angry at [Rosenthal], and the
best thing she can do is to betray [Rosenthal] with his best friend. How do you
walk away from a soap-opera like that? We should have shown this movie at 9
o’clock in the morning in soaps. It’s classic. It’s classic stuff.
15.
I was in Las Vegas all during the shoot, but I
never went to the set. I was within walking distance of the set for three or
four months, I never went, because I just feel that I’d get in the way. You’re
not performing any service if you’re “just the writer”. There’s so much
technical stuff going on, and if you do get there, people come over to say
hello, haven’t seen you, that sort of stuff, it just interrupts the rhythm, I
feel. And I don’t particularly get a kick out of it to begin with, because it’s
all so technical shoot, thirty seconds or a minute or a minute a half, and they
change all the lights, and it takes another half an hour, if you’re just
watching it, it’s not [something] I would care to do, so I don’t. I don’t
bother going to the dailies or do any of that stuff. So when I was in New
York, they had a rough cut of the movie. [Scorsese] said, I want you see. I
said, Okay. And he’d tell me when he wants me to see it, because he’s really
got to lay out in sequence. He’d have other people see it first, he’d have me
see it first, because he’s curious about what my reaction would be to something
else. Sometimes he tells me where to sit. Don’t go sit there. Way down. I want
you to sit there, and I want to watch you, that kind of thing. He said, I want
you to see the rough cut. I said, Okay. [Rosenthal] and I went to a small
theater, just the two of us in the theater, watching it for the first time, and
it was just unbelievable to see. You wrote it, but you can’t put it all
together, you can’t put the vast title, you can’t put that St. Matthew’s
Passion. When you’re writing, you don’t have the orchestra, you don’t have the
colour, you don’t have all of that stuff laid out. When you’re typing, He gets
upt from his desk and walks to the closet without his pants. You don’t have the
colour turquoise socks, that’s your custume person, that’s your set design,
that’s [Scorsese]’s vision for how it goes. So you see it for the first time, it
sort of explodes. The movies explodes to you if you’re a writer. It also
exploded for [Rosenthal]. He just got up. You would never do anything like hug
[Rosenthal], but we came as close to doing it as you can, because I think he
was really pleased, he was all that angst and all that memory of that nightmare
that he lived through. He felt happy that he helped. The final results was more
than I could have dreamed of. It’s such a big movie. It’s so grand. It’s
complicated, but it tells a simple story. But it’s complicated in a good way. I
think it’s rich, it’s very rich in what it shows of that period. I’m not
talking about the writing part. I’m just talking about what [Scorsese] did with
it, the combination. I gave him the structure from the book, and we wrote a
screenply, but that screenply was so enhanced as screenplays are, the camera
angles, the mood, and the colour, and the Music is always so important to [Scorsese].
It’s never failed him. Right back in Boxcar Bertha, he just had it, he just
knew that part of it.
16.
They were so angry at him, and they felt that,
whatever it [was], they decided he was not going to live, he was not going to die
simply. They said they were going to meet him in an Indian cornfield, where
they beat him to death with baseball bats, and buried them half-alive in a
grave, and nobody would ever see them again. There was no way anyone was going
to see them again. It was a great cornfield. And I think [a year later] or a
month later, I can’t remember the dates of it, but there was a farmer out there
doing his crop, crop was coming up, corn was coming up, he said there was no
corn, couldn’t understand what that was, so he called State Game Preserve
people, because they’re not supposed to shoot dears there, and they suspected
somebody shot some deers and buried the bodies there. So the Game Preserve guy
comes up, he starts digging, the first thing he finds is underwear. A deer
don’t wear underwear. He calls up the FBI, the FBI,
they dig up, and they find the bodies of not only [Spilotro] but his brother.
And when they do the autopsy, they realise that these guys had been beaten to
death with baseball bats. CSI stuff, I guess. And because some of the sand was in their throats, they realised that they had
been still breathing while they were buried, so it was really brutal death. And
[Rosenthal], no one really knows who blew him up, the suspicion is now, It was
not the powers that be, or he would have been killed again. It was some,
probably they feel that it might have been somebody doing it for [Spilotro],
because they were so bitter and angry at each other again. The thing about this
Cadillac was because there had been a balancing problem, they had put a metal
under the seat of the driver, and the bomb had been placed under the passenger
seat, and when the bomb went off, the impact of the bomb was deflected by that metal
plate. The power of the bomb was going to go where it has the least resistance,
so had resistance under his seat, and he was able to get the door open and roll
off on the street. He was injured. He went to the hospital, he was banged up
badly, but got away just in time, and there was the secondary explosion, but he was out of the car
by then. Nobody knew there was that steel plate, and it was only there because
of the technical problem they had.
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