differences between goodfellas and casino

The Goodfellas we now all know and love features Billy Batts living (and dying) to regret his “shine box” remark to Tommy right around the movie’s halfway mark, with just a teaser of Batts getting finished off in a trunk at the beginning. In the Goodfellas shooting script, Billy Batts was whacked in the very first scene. Pacca, who had created his own ultra low-budget ads for his replacement window company, to write and direct the Morrie’s Wigs ad. To get the feel of the commercial right, Scorsese contacted Stephen R. For Goodfellas, the scene that broke shooting ground was the intentionally low-budget Morrie’s Wigs commercial, which plays just before Henry and Jimmy hassle Morrie about a debt near the beginning of the film. The first scene shot for Goodfellas wasn’t directed by Martin Scorsese.Īs you might know, the business of filming is rarely chronological directors tend to jump scenes for cost, scheduling, and efficiency reasons. In the ESPN documentary Playing for the Mob, which chronicles the history of the scandal, Hill claims he mentioned the operation to federal investigators in passing after flipping on his mob associates in 1980 without knowing that point-shaving was illegal.Īlso absent is the time Hill reportedly took cosmetics magnate Estée Lauder out for a drink as his buddies lifted more than $1 million worth of goods from her swanky New York pad. The scam was born when Jimmy Burke (De Niro’s Jimmy Conway in the movie) and Hill recruited Boston College players Rick Kuhn, Jim Sweeney, and Ernie Cobb to manipulate scores to cover point spreads.

In fact, Scorsese even left out a Hill crime that eventually became a national sports controversy: Boston College's 1978-1979 point-shaving scandal. The real-life Henry Hill’s crime resume is way too long to fit into a single movie-even one with a meaty 148-minute runtime. Some of Henry Hill’s most famous criminal escapades had to be left out of Goodfellas.

It's also owing to Pileggi's background as a journalist and Scorsese's obsessive focus on details and realism that the movie stands out as a rare peak into the underworld.

While the violence is shocking, the bulk of the film is about the characters's lifestyle, interpersonal relationships, who owes whom what, and the grand pursuit of materialism. Author of the original book and co-writer of the film, Nicholas Pileggi described Goodfellas as a 'mob home movie' to The New York Times, selling the film alongside Scorsese as being about the pursuit of money and the particular way this group of people chose to make it.

Differences between goodfellas and casino