Word: pileggi
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...film is based on material Nicholas Pileggi gathered for a nonfiction book that has just been published, and the screenplay he wrote with director Martin Scorsese is at its best in its reportorial passages. If you want to know just how the Mafia skimmed the profits from its Las Vegas operation, or how not-so-wise-guys tried to scam it, Casino is instructive in an almost documentary way. But Scorsese, one of the cinema's great stylists, has evolved a manner for his film--a compound of mini-dissolves, jump cuts, freeze frames and optical effects--that is anything...
What Scorsese and Pileggi have not evolved is an attitude toward their material that is equally riveting. Mostly they romanticize the Vegas that was, before the corporations moved in to Disneyfy and democratize gambling. In the good old days, they say in their voice-over narration (of which there is far too much), the place was to wiseguys what "Lourdes was to hunchbacks and cripples," a holy ground where organized crime was free to practice its amoral rites and where that miracle cure for the terminally outcast--sudden, improbable wealth--was always a real possibility. There's something a little...
This is more obvious in Pileggi's case, since he wrote the book Wiseguy, about the federal witness-protection program, as well as the Martin Scorsese movie based on it, GoodFellas. Nora, meanwhile, did two comic riffs on the same theme -- screenplays for Cookie (with a Bobby Kennedy imitator as prosecutor) and My Blue Heaven (in which constricted FBI men learn from expansive Italian mobsters how to live). Ephron herself is critical of these movies, which ran into casting and directing troubles; but they are typical of her unexpected blindside tackles of ideology: How many movies have you seen...
...York, where her hospitalized father kept an apartment, and began to put her life back together, writing screenplays (the thing she had sworn never to do) for some fast money, and -- in three annual work periods -- telling her story her way in the novel Heartburn. "It saved her life," Pileggi says of the book. How so? "Well, for one thing, she was broke." But there is more to it than that. The humiliation described in the novel is that she, the witty observer of other people's lives, was unaware of what was going on in her own. The book...
...Pileggi says she had total control of the process, down to what food was being served by the commissary. "It's all like one big typewriter for her." He sees a pattern in the way Nora circled back, almost despite herself, to the life she had fled. "She certainly had no grand career plan to do this. Her grand career plan is usually how to get all the ingredients together for next Thursday's dinner party...