Chazz Palminteri Goes to Bed Hungry
By Alex Simon
Chazz Palminteri’s life is one of those classic show biz stories that, dare we say it, is the stuff from which movies are made. Born and raised in the Bronx, Palminteri toiled for years as a struggling stage, film and television actor before finally being plucked from obscurity by Robert De Niro, who saw his off-Broadway autobiographical play A Bronx Tale, a one-man show in which Palminteri played a host of colorful characters he grew up and around in his Bronx neighborhood during the 1950s and ‘60s, where his life was shaped by two mentors: his straight-laced working class father and a local mobster named Sonny.
The movie version of A Bronx Tale was a hit with audiences and critics alike upon its premiere in 1993 and Palminteri hasn’t stopped working since. His latest turn, in Debbie Goodstein’s autobiographical film Mighty Fine, casts Palminteri as a Jewish businessman in early ‘70s New Orleans who is struggling to keep his business and family life together. Co-starring Andie MacDowell, Rainey Qualley and Jodelle Ferland, the film opens May 25.
Were you partially drawn to Mighty Fine because it’s a memoir?
Chazz Palminteri: I guess a little bit. I was mostly drawn to it because it was written by a person who actually lived the story and knew the person that I was playing. I just like things that are more organic and real.
Tell us about the three ladies that you work with.
Andie, I’ve watched her work over many years, and I’ve always wanted to work with her. I thought we’d have great chemistry and we did. Her daughter Rainey and Jodelle are both two young actors and they’re just terrific.
I watch A Bronx Tale four times a year. It’s a touchstone for me. I also saw you do it here on stage, in L.A. I think any time one writer encounters another writer’s personal memoir, it hits us in a different way.
Thank you. I agree. I think that’s true.
When you were a kid growing up in the Bronx, did you always feel drawn to the arts?
Yeah, I felt something different. I knew I wanted to be an actor. I felt there was something different inside me, yeah.
Was there one movie or play or piece of music that really grabbed you, where you said “This is it”?
There were two movies that I really remember from that period. One was On the Waterfront, with Marlon Brando, the other was Around the World in Eighty Days.
Wow, those are two extremes.
Yeah, but I never forgot Around the World in Eighty Days because I’d never seen colors like that. That amazing Technicolor from the 1950s. It blew me away.
Did you study Budd Schulberg’s screenplay and other great works in preparation for writing A Bronx Tale?
No. A Bronx Tale just came out of me. I wrote the one-man show you saw then wrote the screenplay, which was easy for me since I’d already written the play. I did all the hard work there.
The hard work must’ve been playing all the parts yourself. That must’ve been exhausting.
It was, very exhausting. I just did it a couple months ago, in Vegas. I still do it in big venues. I love doing it.
Tell us what it was like working with Robert De Niro as an actor and as a director.
It was the highlight of my life. I was a struggling stage actor in New York and here comes Robert De Niro telling the story of my life, playing my real father. It was pretty astounding.
Your parents both lived to see it, right?
Yeah, my dad died a couple years ago. He was 90. My mother’s still alive. She’s 92. They both got to see my success, which meant a lot to me. Bob and I became great friends. We’ve done four things together now. It’s a dream come true because he’s so collaborative, a real artist.
Was it difficult giving up your baby, so to speak?
Not to him. I thought it would be in the beginning, but no. All you can do is write a great script, to feel like you’ve written a great script, which I thought I did. Then you give it to the director and he makes it real, makes it fly. That’s what Bob did. He made it fly.
The character of Sonny was an amalgam of three different people?
Two. So he was one guy, but then I used some aspects of this other guy to round him out more. He was a real mentor to me, a big wiseguy.
How much of what made it to the screen was fact?
A lot of it was. What was fictionalized was the fact that I squashed a lot of events into a short period of time. I saw this killing when I was a young kid, just like it’s shown in the movie. I had a relationship with the wiseguys in the neighborhood, threw dice with them. I dated a black girl. Sonny got killed. I didn’t see Sonny get killed, but in the movie I did, so that’s how you take liberties like that. But all those events were real. All those wiseguys were real. That’s the real Eddie Mush in the movie.
I remember reading that. He was terrific, a natural.
Frankie Coffee Cake. JoJo the Whale. They were guys, they were real guys. That’s what makes the movie so authentic. You can feel it. You can taste it.
I know that the mob has been romanticized in many movies over the years, but what came through in A Bronx Tale is that they had their own code of honor.
Yes, but let’s not put any halos on the mob, because the first one that comes to kill you, is your best friend.
If you’re a mobster.
Yes.
But there doesn’t seem to be a lot of moral ambiguity in that world and to have that kind of clarity in a world that, in my opinion, is becoming increasingly morally ambiguous is comforting in a certain sense. I think that’s why so many people like myself who didn’t grow up in that environment find a certain degree of nobility in these characters.
Yes, they’ve taken the place of a Western. High Noon. Shane. They’re men’s men. But in the end, they’re human and that rat on each other, too. Before the sixties, they were different. They were different types of guys. The drugs changed everything. When you were looking at loan sharking, prostitution, gambling, you’d get three years and you’d do a year and a half. Nobody used to rat. Once drugs got involved, once heroin got involved, and guys were facing forty years, people talked.
And that’s what Brando’s final speech at the end of The Godfather was about.
And that comes from reality. He said “These drugs will destroy us,” and he was right. They did.
You finally made it as an actor when you were in your early forties. Are you glad that it took you that long, when you had a sense of yourself?
Yes. I would have blown it probably if I’d been younger.
What do you think happened with Lillo Brancato? Too much too soon?
Yeah, he was sixteen when he did the movie. What do you think is gonna happen? I tried to help him. Bob tried to help him over the years. But he kept getting into trouble, kept doing drugs. I said to him ‘We’ve given you the opportunity of a lifetime, do you realize that? It’s like lightning hit you, twice.’ “Oh no, no, I’m gonna take care of it. Don’t worry.” Three weeks before it happened, when he finally went to jail, I ran into him and I said ‘Look at you. What the hell’s the matter with you?’ He said “Oh no, I promise. I promise…” Three weeks later I hear that he was involved with a robbery where the guy he was with killed a policeman. That was it. I tried.
I remember when I heard about it on the news, I thought of that great line from A Bronx Tale: “The most tragic thing is wasted talent.”
There he is, in the quintessential movie about not wasting your life, and that’s exactly what he does.
He became just like one of the clowns his character hung out with, the guys who burned to death in the car.
That’s exactly right. That’s why I don’t mind talking about it, because the way I use him now when I give a lecture at a college or a high school, I use him as a poster boy for what not to do. ‘Here’s an example of a guy, who was in a big movie, had the world as his oyster, and he didn’t make the right choices. We are the choices that we make. You make the wrong ones, this is what happens.’
For every person like Jodie Foster, it seems there are four or five like Lillo Brancato.
Oh, more. It’s very rare that you can have success that young and keep a head on your shoulders. And you know what, it’s hard, it’s very hard.
Let’s talk about writing. Can you tell us about your process?
I just wrote a new play for Broadway that got optioned, called Humans. I’m going to be in it. I think of events that mean something to me and it stays in my head for about two months, then I think of one event and say ‘How would it start?’ Then I’ve got my beginning. So I’ll write that down. Then I’ll ask myself how it ends. Then once I figure out what the ending is, even though it might change, I start to write.
You don’t outline or anything like that?
No. I get the beginning. I get the end. Then I write the middle. That’s how I do it. Now it changes. The ending could change, but at least I know where I think I’m going to end up. Everybody’s different, though. I don’t outline because if I start outlining, then I’m too locked into that. Writing comes from, for me, from another source. It’s a spiritual source. While I’m writing, I’m feeling ‘Who’s doing this?’
Did you see the "60 Minutes" interview with Bob Dylan a few years ago?
No.
I thought he put it beautifully. He said “Creative people just have different antennae.” He said “When I sat down to write ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ I was a twenty year old kid. Where the hell does a twenty year-old kid come up with that? I don’t know where I pulled it from. It’s just like I have different antennae.”
Different antennae. That’s a wonderful way of saying it. That’s the way it is with me. It’s always been that way. The antennae are, for me, these spiritual forces that just come inside you.
The collective unconscious.
Yes, exactly. If you’re writing something because you think “I’m going to write a hit right now,” it’s a piece of shit, probably. If you’re writing something because you think the agent’s going to buy it, same thing. But if you’re writing something that’s coming from another place, that’s coming organically, spiritually and you’re just sitting there and the words are just coming out, that’s something that’s universal, man.
I always equate it to going to the gym: doing it, it’s painful, it’s sweaty, but after you’re done, you feel great.
Yeah, it is like going to the gym. And the real key I got from a really well-known writer, I forget who, but at the time I would sit and write for six, seven hours, and just burn myself out. The next day I’d come back to it and feel like, ‘Where am I going with this?’ Don’t do that. Write for four hours, for two hours, then stop. That way, you know where you’re going tomorrow, and you can’t wait to get to the computer. I do that and now I can’t wait to get to the computer, because I know exactly what scene I’m going to write and where I’m going to go.
Go to bed hungry, so to speak.
Exactly, go to bed hungry.
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