Just Kids From the Bronx (24 page)

CHAZZ PALMINTERI

Actor, writer, director

(1952– )

In my neighborhood, the Little Italy of the Bronx, I saw things. I saw a murder when I was a young boy. It’s what I wrote about in
A Bronx Tale
. People always say to me
, “
Oh, my God, you must’ve been traumatized and horrified,” but I really don’t have an answer for them because I wasn’t at all. I was young, almost eleven, and I just kind of stared at it. I had seen some violence before, like punches and fights. Kid stuff. But I never saw anything like that. I was sitting on my stoop holding my head in my hands, and all of a sudden I saw one car trying to back in and another car going forward. I thought they were fighting over a parking space, but they weren’t. This guy who was backing in was after the other guy for something—something which my father never told me and my mother still to this day won’t tell me after over fifty years. So this guy just pulled up, jumped out, and
bam
! Blood!
Bam-bam!
And then he kind of turned and looked at me. And I looked at him. But I wasn’t scared. It’s hard to describe because I was just kind of staring and looking at him. The next minute I knew, I was being dragged upstairs by my father. He had run downstairs. My mother had said, “Oh my God. Go down and get him.” So he ran down and dragged me up.

That’s when I got scared—when my mother started crying.
Mom! Mom! Are you all right? Why are you crying?
She was like,
Was the kid hit?
In the movie and in the play, the cops come up and knock on the door, and I go down with them because I was a witness. What really happened was that the cops did come up, but I didn’t go down. My father wouldn’t let me go down. He said, “He’s not going. He’s a kid. He didn’t see anything. You’re not talking to my son. He doesn’t know anything. He’s a kid.” And that was it.

But the interesting thing is that the only time the murder would be vivid in my head was when I would sit somewhere, like at a table, and put my head in my hands. If I re-created the position I was in, it would come to mind. I never even had nightmares. But you know what? I told a shrink about it once and he said, “It did affect you.” And I said, “How?” He said, “It was in your mind for a long time and you had to write about it. You wrote about it and you made it into art.” But at the time the killing actually happened I wasn’t aware of its effect on me.

I became a writer because I was desperate for work. I had been working as a doorman in LA and when I got fired from that job I remembered the words that my father always said—I even had cards printed up with that saying—“The saddest thing in life is wasted talent.”
If they won’t give me a great part, I’ll write something myself. I’ll do a one-man show. I’ll play all the parts. They gotta notice me.
And I started to write.

I wrote a five-minute piece and then I performed it for my theater workshop. They loved it and each week I would write another ten or fifteen minutes, and after I performed it I would take six minutes from that and add it on. I literally workshopped it in front of a live audience for a year. By the time the year was over, I had ninety minutes of a very tight one-man show.
A Bronx Tale.
Then I did it and it was like a rocketship.

Now here’s a guy—me—who came out to LA who had decent theater credits, but all of a sudden I went from not even having an agent—I couldn’t get to William Morris, I couldn’t get to ICM—to everybody wanting me. Everybody!
Wait a minute! I’m the same actor. How can this be?
And then a week later I’m offered $250,000 because they wanted to make
A Bronx Tale
into a movie. I had two hundred dollars in the bank. But they didn’t want me to write the screenplay and they didn’t want me to play Sonny, the mobster, so I said no. Then they call again and offer $500,000. I still said no. They go to one million dollars. Everybody wanted to do the movie. I remember Pacino wanted to do it. Nicholson came to see the play. They all came to see it. And I was just like—no.

There was such a bidding war after the play was a success. Big-time directors got my phone number and called my house. I had producers—huge producers—calling me. Following me into the bathroom in restaurants.
Listen, you got to take this meeting with me. You got to!

The interesting thing is, the hardest offer to refuse was the first one, the $250,000. That was the hardest one because that came out of nowhere:
$250,000? What?
That’s the one that put me through trauma. When I called my parents they said, “Don’t worry, son. It’s okay.” My parents were behind me. They said, “You do what you want.” After I turned down the initial $250,000, the rest just became numbers to me. I couldn’t connect with them. I also do believe that I’m just a very lucky guy. I’ve always felt that way. I felt that there was some divine intervention. That God was there and put his hand on my shoulder.
It’s okay. You’re gonna be okay.
And I thought,
Yes. It’s gonna be okay.
De Niro saw me in the play and said to me that if I wanted to write the screenplay and also play Sonny, he would direct it, play my father, and on a handshake it was a deal.

When I went to Italy in 1998, I went to film a movie, about Giovanni Falcone, a famous anti-Mafia judge. Pretty amazing to be in Sicily in the towns where my family grew up. My great-grandfather was a poet and he would go to the town square and read his poetry to the people. So I was like,
Wow!
Because you know I was asking myself,
How did this writing come about to me? How did this happen?
Well, I found out that it’s in the family.

They used to say that Sicily is a land kissed by God and cursed by man because of the Mafia. I have very strong opinions about depicting the Mafia in films. About showing Italians as bad guys. A lot of people put down
The Godfather
and they put down
Goodfellas
and they put down
The Sopranos
. Well, this is America. This is art. This is
art
. You don’t have to like modern art, for instance. If you like traditional art, the Renaissance, that’s fine. This is art. That’s what gives us our freedom. I know that Marty Scorsese said that he made
Goodfellas
to depict how awful and bad these people are.
A Bronx Tale
is not about the Mafia. It’s about working people. It’s about my father—De Niro in the film. My father is a
working
man. He’s the one who wins at the end. The Mafia dies. But to show the light you have to show the darkness. Every good story is about good versus evil. Otherwise you don’t have a story. Are there some very bad Mafia movies where Italians are made to look like total idiots? And they and the movie don’t have any redeeming value? Yes! That’s the price you pay for having free speech. Tell that person you can’t make that? Absolutely not. You can make whatever you like and that’s why I live in this country. You don’t like it, shut it off. Don’t watch it. It’s okay.

This is not a knock on my mother’s brothers and sisters, but they all left the neighborhood where we grew up. They said to her, “If you don’t get out of this neighborhood, your children will all turn out to be bums.” They all left but my mother stayed. My mother said, “You worry about your kids. I’ll worry about mine.”

We stayed there until I was eighteen, nineteen years old. My two sisters and I, we’re all very successful. One sister married a vice president of a bank. Then she started a travel agency, had twenty-five of them and sold them, and they both retired. They live in Boca. My other sister is a teacher in Tampa. I think she became an associate professor. Does very well. All three of us did very well. In fact, better than all of my cousins who moved out of the neighborhood.

People say,
Chazz, I feel so bad for you—your neighborhood
. I go,
No, no, no, you don’t understand. It was great. I loved it
. It was a family neighborhood. We all loved it. My father said we might not have a lot of money but we have a lot of love. We have each other. What does a parent do? A parent can set examples for their children. They can say till they’re blue in the face,
Do this, do that
, but what they do is what you pick up. My father was always kind. My mother was always kind and generous and nice. I had a great upbringing. I believe that the problem in this country is that we try to say, especially in affluent areas, they say,
My kid’s gonna go to Harvard. You’re gonna do this. You’re gonna do that
. We’re not teaching them to be morally good people. If a child is morally a good person, he’ll be okay. He might not be affluent, but he’ll be successful as opposed to just being a winner at anybody’s expense. And that’s important.

It doesn’t matter where you’re from if you have good parents. I think that parents are very undervalued. I always tell people when you create a child, that’s not just a child. That’s a universe because that child will grow up and affect a lot of people, like ripples in water. And they’ll get married and his kids will affect even more people and they’ll affect even more people. So if you treat your children as this incredible special love the world will be better.

I go to juvenile prisons to talk to the kids there. It’s not a coincidence that the juveniles in these prisons all come from broken homes. Not one home with a mother and a father. What shot do these kids have? In Baltimore there was this young kid, in solitary. The kid was sixteen, in for a double homicide, a gang-related thing. I went in to see him. I said, “You can tell me right now to get the F out, and I’m good with that. But I’m here because I care. If you want me to stay, I’ll stay. If you want me to go, I’ll go.”
You could stay.
I said, “Fine.” We started talking and I said, “Did you ever have any aspirations to do something?” “Yeah, I wanted to be an artist.” “An artist?” I thought he was going to say a bricklayer, a mechanic—but an artist? “What do you mean artist
?
What kind of artist?” “Well, I like to draw.” Two weeks later I get this mail that this kid drew a horse’s head. A beautiful picture of a horse. He had put my card, “The saddest thing in life is wasted talent,” on his wall.

Here’s the problem with him in terms of follow-up. They can’t release him to anybody. There’s no one! His father’s dead, his mother’s a crack addict. Who wants him? That’s what they say to you.
Who wants him
? Some of these kids who want to get out, where are they gonna go? Are you going to throw them out on the street? They don’t know what to do with most of them. There’s nobody to take them. It’s a vicious cycle so I really do believe the parents are key.

I go back to the neighborhood once a month to go shopping. I buy my pasta there, my olive oil, my cheeses, my muzzarell. In each store I get something different. In one store, even if they have the muzzarell, I won’t buy it there. I’ll buy the cold cuts there, but I’ll buy muzzarell on 187th Street. The best muzzarell in the world. My cold cuts I’ll get in Mike’s deli, and my olive oil I get at Teitel Brothers. For my pizza I’ll go to Zero Otto Nove. Every time I go back, I go to a different restaurant and they’re all good. There’s Roberto’s, there’s Rigoletto’s, there’s Zero Otto Nove, there’s Mario’s, so I go to each one of them. I want them to know that,
Hey, it’s not just one I like. I’m here to support all of you
. The neighborhood is a wonderful place. It makes me feel at home. It brings back great memories, ’cause I used to roam these streets when I was a young boy. It’s such a strong feeling in me that I almost can’t explain. Those are my roots. I grew up there.

DANIEL (“DANNY”) HAUBEN

Artist, educator

(1956– )

I moved into this building when I was nine. I was very quiet and shy, so my mother accosted every kid that looked like he was my age, saying, “I have a son your age. You have to come visit him.” So there was this kid who lived down the hall, David Schwartz, and the two of us connected. The apartment building we lived in was newly built, and since we were the first tenants we had all of these empty packing boxes and cartons. David and I built forts out of the boxes. Then we drew a street map on a big piece of cardboard and colored it in with Magic Markers. My father brought home gears from the company he worked for and we’d stick them together with clay and make little vehicles that drove on the roads we created. We decided that the cars needed drivers, so we purchased small plastic Wishniks and Rat Finks from vending machines. My mother would even make outfits for them. Eventually these became the inhabitants of a town that evolved over the course of the next six years. We called the town Edge City, and it became more and more elaborate. We wrote laws and wrote about the adventures we had with the town. We had lights and we eventually even had water running to it. We created these elaborate organic dwellings, with Plexiglas windows, that emerged out of the countryside. My friend Karl built a balsa wood outhouse as his contribution, so David and I assessed it and decided that Karl could also be in on our adventures. The only time my mother got upset with me was when we started hauling in bags of cement and plaster and then started drilling, sending clouds of dust billowing through the apartment. The town kept developing until we were into our midteens, at which time it was up on a coffee table that took up most of my bedroom.