In Casino, a love triangle destroys the mob’s grip on Las Vegas. In Goodfellas, Henry Hill finds the only way out of the mob is to betray the only family he’s ever known. The tribulations in their lives reflect the downfalls of the world they belong to. Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito and Ray Liotta as Henry Hill in Goodfellasīoth Goodfellas and Casino exposed the truth behind the criminal underworld by focusing on a handful of central characters. Again, another natural for the big screen and another successful collaboration for Scorsese and Pileggi. Pileggi then wrote Casino which told the story of how the mob controlled gambling, how they eventually got their foothold into Vegas, and how they lost that power forever.

Goodfellas would go on to become one of the most influential films of the ‘90’s and the frame of reference for countless young directors. The finished film, Goodfellas, showed a mafia the movies have never shown.

When the script was finished, the late director Michael Powell called it “one of the best constructed scripts that I have ever read…it is not just a script on paper, it is very much alive.” Pileggi and Scorsese collaborated on a script that went through twelve drafts and as he told Scorsese biographer Mary Pat Kelley, “every one of those drafts was fun”. The resulting book, Wiseguy, became a best-seller that Mario Puzo himself called, “One of the few true pictures of the criminal life.” It also attracted the attention of Martin Scorsese who saw a movie in it’s pages.

Nicholas Pileggi barely knew who mobster Henry Hill was when he accepted the offer to write his story, but it turned out to be the best decision he ever made.

The real characters of the movie casino