Palminteri, De Niro Keep It Real in A Bronx Tale

Hard to believe, but 15 years ago no one in the movie business wanted Chazz Palminteri. Well, they wanted his hit one-man stage show about his coming of age in the Bronx, but they didn't want him to write the screenplay or star in the picture. The numbers kept getting bigger—more than $1 million was on the table at one point—but Palminteri wasn't selling the rights to his intensely personal story to anyone who planned to shut him out once the check cleared. Then, one night, an actor who had been looking for just the right project for his directorial debut—fella by the name of Robert De Niro—came backstage. "He said, 'I know everybody wants it,'" remembered Palminteri, "'but if you make it with me, I'll do it right. If you shake my hand, that's the way it will be.' I shook his hand, and that's the way it was."

For some people—a lot, actually, as Saturday's exclusive Telling a Bronx Tale event at the Directors Guild Theater proved—A Bronx Tale is one of those movies that sticks with you. The characters are unforgettable, the dialogue instantly quotable, the themes resonant. "I did 50 movies, and I'm still the guy from Bronx Tale," beefed Palminteri as he and De Niro met onstage to talk about the film after its 15th anniversary screening. People have even written books on the metaphorical meaning of the film, Palminteri said. "I'm not that smart. I didn't know that when wrote it." he cracked in his charismatic, streetwise manner. "I wrote from the heart."

The authenticity of the film was the key to its success, they shared. De Niro had the idea to use not actors but "real people"—people who know what's what on the streets of the Bronx. To that end, many of the real-life wiseguys who inspired characters in Palminteri's play suddenly found themselves with acting gigs.

When casting degenerate gambler Eddie "Mush," for example, De Niro decided to go straight to the source and track down Mush himself. "I told him, 'If he's anywhere, he's in the old neighborhood by the OTB,'" Palminteri said. So they drove out to the Bronx and, sure enough, found Mush, but Palminteri had a hard time convincing him that Robert De Niro was in the car wanting to meet him. "You're full of shit. . . I'm not going near any car—I owe a lot of people money," Palminteri wheezed in his best Mush impression. Luckily, they eventually tapped him for the movie. "Who could do what he did? He was great," said De Niro.

Then there was Frankie "Coffee Cake." When De Niro told him to be on set at 1:00, Palminteri said, Frankie asked, "Can you make it 3:00? I gotta catch the double at Aqueduct."

So intent was De Niro on making everything in the movie feel real that he insisted they use real cash, not prop money, for a dice game. Five thousand dollars was in play, but when they wrapped the scene, Palminteri said, the stack was $800 light. "It was a trip," he said. "It was funny, but it was real."

One audience question led Palminteri away from the jokes and into the sentimental story behind A Bronx Tale's memorable maxim: "The saddest thing in life is wasted talent." After finding 20-year-old boxer Billy Bello dead of a drug overdose in a Bronx tenement, Palminteri's disheartened father wrote the saying on a note card and pinned it in young Chazz's room. Now his own son has it. "And he'll give it to his son," Palminteri said to the crowd's applause.