bearister said:
Goodfellas is on my list of movies I can watch over and over again like The Godfather films, Casino, The Departed, Point Break, The Town, The Accountant, Saving Private Ryan, The Quiet Man, Munich, Taken and No Country for Old Men (to name a few).
Although I like Taxi Driver and Goodfellas is good, I'm not much of a Scorsese person. I watched the boxing movie once, but couldn't get through it again in recent years. Same for the comedian movie and the New York City street early 70s movie.
I've seen the two good Godfather movies a bunch of times, though I couldn't get into the "in order" cut.I've listened to the commentary track a couple times. I could tell you a lot of random trivia* about The Godfather films -- such as that a lot of the greatest movies (Vertigo, Citizen Kane, The Graduate, The Godfather I and 2 were all filmed on what is now the Paramount Studios lot.)
*Random trivia/history lesson:
So you know how in the movie you see Tom Hagen visit Woltz Studios in Hollywood?
On the left in the picture below is Stage 29 of Paramount Studios, which is located on Gower Street.
Stage 29 was also used in The Godfather, Part 2.
From 1989 to 1994, Stage 29 was where The Arsenio Hall Show was filmed.
So this famous political moment happened on the other side of those walls.
Since 2002, Stage 29 has been home to The Dr. Phil Show.
This is how Stage 29 and that gate pictured above look today:
And here's some more Hollywood-political trivia:
The land that Stage 29 sits on was once owned by John F. Kennedy's dad.
In 1926, Joseph P. Kennedy entered the movie business by buying Film Booking Offices of America, which is where the land that Stage 29 sits on was located.
He moved to Hollywood, leaving his family behind back East, and established an office on the studio lot just South of where Stage 29 is today. Meanwhile, he carried on an affair with silent film star Gloria Swanson (of Sunset Blvd fame).
Kennedy's specialty was that he was considered "exceedingly American" ... or "not Jewish," unlike most Hollywood moguls.
In 1928, Kennedy's studio was acquired and it was merged to form RKO Pictures.
RKO Pictures constructed Stage 29 in 1930, then known as Stage 7.
RKO Studios is where King Kong was made, also all those Ginger Rogers/Fred Astaire movies and, most famously, Citizen Kane.
In 1948, Howard Hughes bought RKO Studios and ran it into the ground through the mid-1950s.
In 1955, a tire company took control of the studio.
In 1957, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz purchased the studio, thanks to their I Love Lucy profits. They renamed it "Desilu." In 1960, Ball and Arnaz divorced and Ball became CEO and president of Desilu.
Under Lucille Ball's leadership, she greenlighted The Andy Griffith Show, Mission Impossible and a show called Star Trek (the latter two franchises that are still going strong today).
In 1967, she sold Desilu, which was neighbors with Paramount Studios, to Paramount's new owner, Gulf & Western. That's how Mission Impossible and Star Trek became Paramount franchises.
Everything left of the red line was RKO Studios, everything right of it was Paramount. Gulf & Western combined the two lots into one big lot.
Four years later, in 1971, Paramount Studios used its lot and its the RKO/Desilu studios lot it acquired to film The Godfather Part 1. (The movie was, obviously, also shot in the New York area -- but the indoor scenes and the Marlon Brando assassination scene were all shot at Paramount.)
Sorry for going on a tangential history lesson. Now back to Trump!
