I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else

by Danny Aiello

  John is uncompromising in his choice of movies. He is a very selective director. He will not and cannot work just for money. He has got to love the specific project. For the most part, he also has to write it himself. John’s belief in his idiosyncratic personal vision has attracted A-list stars to his films.

  Check out his movies and you will see the amazing line-up of talent he has managed to cast in each one of them. At times he works with tight budgets and is able to offer only very little money. But the stars work with him anyway. Not too many directors enjoy the luxury of not having to pay seven- or eight-figure salaries.

  John was a demon in his control over the soundtracks for his films. The music is always his baby, and the results are spectacular. More than that, John has an unerring eye for fresh, undiscovered talent. On 1989’s The Preppie Murder, for example, he used a young artist by the name of Chris Isaak. John had discovered him, and Chris’s song “Wicked Game” on the Preppie Murder soundtrack was a hit. Herzfeld’s track record in this respect is amazing.

  In the present case, John wanted me to play a hit man named Dosmo Pizzo in a black comedy called 2 Days in the Valley. A lot of people compare this film to Pulp Fiction, but I think it’s even better, or at least funnier. Once again, John was able to put together a typical stellar cast, including James Spader, Charlize Theron, Eric Stoltz, Jeff Daniels, Teri Hatcher, Marsha Mason, and Glenne Headly.

  Also in the cast was my old friend from The Pickle, Paul Mazursky. In 2 Days, Paul was playing his own version of The Pickle’s Harry Stone, a formerly famous director on his way out. He was wonderful in the role of Teddy Peppers. I did the character in Paul’s movie, and he did the same character in John’s film.

  The beautiful Charlize Theron and I shared some scenes together, and we developed a sort of game comparing the softness of each other’s lips. Every day before a shoot we’d try out the game. We did it as a joke, and it worked to keep us both relaxed.

  My character was a very odd sort of hit man. He sported a toupee that was always giving him trouble. During the shoot, I wore a prosthetic pate to make me appear bald on top. One day it was so hot that the pate began shrinking. It almost gave me a face-lift. I felt my eyebrows forced up, inch by inch, toward my hairline. By the end of the scene I looked like a surprised nineteen-year-old. After my experience doing the film, I had to go around assuring reporters that my hair was my own and that I had no need personally to wear a rug.

  Glenne Headly and I used to break each other up all the time during the 2 Days in the Valley shoot. Doing publicity afterward on CNN, Glenne did a very funny take on my habit of always apologizing after cursing in front of women. She explained to the interviewer that she had been present when John Herzfeld had asked me to shave my head for the role.

  Glenne (doing John): Danny, please, if you could just shave this part up here. [Tapping the top of my head]

  Glenne (doing me): Give me a fucking break! [Pretending to apologize] Sweetheart, I’m sorry. You forgive me? I didn’t mean to curse in front of you. [Back on me ranting] Are you fucking serious? Why the fuck would I want to shave my head? [Apologizing again] I’m sorry, honey. [Ranting again] Are you fucking nuts?

  Glenne is one of the funniest women I have ever met. She used to make me hysterical whenever we went out to dinner during the shoot. I reminded John of our chemistry together recently.

  “We scored so big on 2 Days in the Valley, Glenne and I,” I told Herzfeld. “Why don’t you do a movie with us together as stars?”

  John had other plans for me, and more on that later. But I still think a project pairing Glenne Headly and Danny Aiello would be a great idea.

  * * *

  A lot of my preparation work is done in my car. That practice began back when Madonna previewed her Like a Prayer album for me in her garage in Malibu.

  Driving from my home in New Jersey five hours north to Toronto for a shoot on a CBS television miniseries called The Last Don, I was unsure how I would proceed with the character. I was under the gun. We would begin shooting in two days, and I still had not found the key to portraying the title character, Domenico Clericuzio.

  It was a difficult task. In the sprawling tale, Clericuzio transforms from being relatively young to being very old. I had no idea how I was going to play an eighty-five-year-old man. Should I change my voice? Should I use prosthetics? Desperate and out of ideas, I had the panicked thought of asking the producers to hire an older version of me as a double.

  Dizzy Gillespie was playing on the car radio. Inspiration can strike from any direction. Dizzy’s music was like a sign from heaven. Listening to him in my car with the Adirondack Mountains flashing by next to the highway, I recalled an interview I had heard with the great jazz trumpeter many years earlier.

  The interviewer asked Dizzy why he played with his famous bent horn, which has an end that crooks upward.

  “It sounds better,” Dizzy responded. “It’s vintage, and it’s bent. I busted one many years ago, and I dug how it sounded. It’s like now it has lived a life. It has something to say.”

  Bingo! I thought. Still driving in the car, I stiffened my back and bent my body just like Dizzy’s horn. When I spoke in this posture, I realized my voice sounded different, tired, old, and more interesting. I spent the rest of the trip to Toronto happy and energized. I had found the key that unlocked the Last Don’s character.

  Mario Puzo wrote The Last Don, and the series inevitably invites a contrast to the Godfather movies, which I think is comparing apples and oranges. They are entirely different animals. During my performance, I always reminded the director, Graeme Clifford, and my fellow cast members to stop me if I ever sounded as though I were riffing on Marlon Brando’s portrayal of Don Corleone. In the end, I think I successfully made Clericuzio my own.

  I wanted the Last Don to be a man who was preparing his people for a better life outside of the rackets. Even in regard to my costume for the role, I sought to look like a legitimate businessman. Personally, in real life, I’m a hugger. But Don Clericuzio was not capable of that. I had to portray an educated Italian-American who was not very warm.

  More than anything, I wanted to avoid the prejudiced movie clichés of Italian-Americans, who in films usually have an aspect of the coarse ginzo to them. I like to see characters with Italian heritage who don’t sound Italian but are Italian. They are thoroughly assimilated Americans.

  The producers made it possible for me to speak with Mario Puzo, who called me on the phone. I was beside myself. I had never met the author of one of the bestselling books of all time.

  “Mario, if you don’t mind, can I ask you a question?” I said. “It’s the single thing that I’m most interested in finding out from you.”

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “How the fuck do you pronounce these names?”

  Puzo laughed. Beginning with Clericuzio itself, weird names are all over The Last Don. Pippi De Lena. Dita Tommey. Virginio Ballazzo. Boz Skannet. Bobby Bantz. Luckily, I had the man himself, Mario Puzo, telling me how to pronounce them all.

  “Danny, you’re going to be great,” Mario said after he schooled me in pronunciation.

  “You’re not getting Brando,” I told him.

  “We don’t need Brando,” he said. “We need you and you’re going to be great.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Dellaventura

  The Last Don premiered to a fantastic response, becoming CBS’s highest-rated miniseries. I got a lot of personal love from viewers, including what amounts to a fan letter from a gentleman whose name you might recognize. It was hand-delivered to me at Carnegie Hall during a CBS affiliates meeting, where the stations would be told of the upcoming season’s schedule.

  Although we have never met, the letter read, I much appreciated watching you in most of the things you’ve done, beginning with Once Upon a Time in America. In any event, I saw all the episodes of The Last Don and I just thought that you gave an extraordinary performance and deserving of eve
ry bit of praise that comes your way. The make-up was a knockout. I wish I had enough sense to use prosthetics the way you did. Anyway done’s done and gone’s gone and my congratulations. It was wonderful watching you.

  The letter was signed, Warmest regards, Marlon Brando.

  From one don to another. I’ll never be as good as you were, Marlon. I feel sad that I never met the man. I think he and I would have liked each other.

  When you have a success of the magnitude of The Last Don, the network’s first thought will always be to repeat it, which CBS did with The Last Don II. That, too, got stratospheric numbers. I was essentially adopted by the network and by its long-serving president, Les Moonves. After the success of The Last Don, I think if I had suggested reading the phone book on national television they would have at least given me a pilot for it. It was nice to be wanted.

  In 1997 I found myself in Los Angeles sitting around a conference table the size of an aircraft carrier with Moonves, some of the other network brass, and a few of my own representatives. I definitely felt out of my league. I did very little talking. Mostly I listened, mostly to Les. He was saying what he had planned for me in television. He wanted me to do a TV series.

  Les Moonves is probably the greatest TV executive in the history of the medium. The proof is in the pudding. He’s lasted longer than anyone else in a job that usually is a revolving door for one executive after another. He’s guided the network through the most tumultuous years in media, witnessing the rise of cable and the dawn of the Internet. Under his leadership much of the time CBS has been on top.

  I was flattered, of course, when Les told me about a possible TV series centered around me as the main character. I was somewhat apprehensive at the same time, given my longtime ambivalence about acting on television. But I didn’t leave the room and I continued to listen. Les was very easy to listen to, and he knew the secret of all great communicators, which is the ability to make people believe you’re listening to them. He looked at me when he spoke, which I’ve found to be a rare practice among people whenever I am in Los Angeles.

  I decided that if I was going to be in television, then Les was my guy. I left that conference room with a warm, positive feeling. My agent and the producers I was working with later talked over the three properties that had been submitted to me that day.

  I chose Dellaventura, a private-eye series. I liked the lead character, based on the real-life Anthony Dellaventura, a former cop who was now a private detective, one whose specialty was helping people when the law had let them down.

  “I have one concern,” I told Les. “I don’t like to fly and I don’t want to be away from my family. I want Dellaventura to be shot in New York.”

  Without hesitation, Les said yes. This is the kind of executive decision that takes guts. Almost all TV series nowadays are based in Los Angeles. Shooting in New York would cost CBS a bundle. But having the show in my city, on my turf, gave the whole thing a level of reality that I could never get on a fake “New York” block on some Hollywood back lot.

  So we shot the exteriors on the familiar streets of the greatest city in the world. My favorite part of the show was a voice-over monologue that closed each episode, showing me walking the neighborhoods of New York. We filmed in real locations, real storefronts, real interiors. This was the best TV experience I could possibly imagine.

  Dellaventura drew approximately nine million viewers every week and was nominated for a People’s Choice Award for best new television series. But we were scheduled opposite shows that were drawing twenty million viewers.

  Any series that hits nine million viewers in today’s fragmented media landscape is guaranteed to run for another fifteen years. Dellaventura closed after sixteen episodes. Les tried to keep us going, but it just didn’t work.

  * * *

  Bob Giraldi is probably one of the greatest director-producers of commercials ever, and he’s expanded his career with films and music videos. He did some of Michael Jackson’s most famous music videos, including “Beat It,” and he was directing the infamous Pepsi commercial when Michael’s hair caught on fire.

  We met in 1978 when Bob gave me my first commercial, for Löwenbräu beer. The job made me and my family $25,000 and paid my rent for an entire year. I felt forever in debt to him. In later days, I did ads for Miller Lite beer and other commercials with Bob, and voice-overs as well.

  Bob grew to love the restaurant scene in New York City, backing a couple of joints on his own and frequenting others with a connoisseur’s eye. A good restaurant can be a kind of performance art. He became fascinated with the whole frantic experience of plating a hundred-plus dinners a night from a kitchen the size of a studio apartment. Out of Giraldi’s fascination came a film project, Dinner Rush, that would be shot in his own restaurant, Gigino Trattoria, on Greenwich Street in Tribeca.

  Bob would direct, and he wanted me to do the lead. He had a terrific script and I knew he would be great at the helm. The budget was small, but because Bob was involved, I would have done the movie for nothing.

  I played Louis Cropa, a restaurateur in business with his son, a chef who’s a pain in the ass but a great cook. The Mafia is trying to take over the business, and the gangsters fail in their attempt. The film was probably one of the best in its genre, the restaurant film. The critics loved the movie, but it was released in September 2001 and of course disappeared amid the 9/11 tragedy. No one saw it.

  A month before 9/11, right in the middle of publicizing the upcoming release of Dinner Rush, the office of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani contacted my agent John Planco of William Morris. The mayor wished to speak to me regarding a proposed movie studio to be built on Staten Island.

  I was quite surprised. The only time Mayor Giuliani and I had anything to do with each other was when he presented me with a Crystal Apple Award in 1997. The award recognizes citizens who perform some service to the city. It cited my work in making sure Dellaventura would shoot in New York. That brought more than $2 million a week into the local economy, more than $30 million over the course of its run.

  Now, in the fall of 2001, when Mayor Giuliani sought a working film actor to become involved in the movie studio project, he reached out to me. He simply wanted my advice during the process. I was an actor, and at times a producer, but was by no means an expert on what it took to create a movie studio.

  We met at Giuliani’s office in Gracie Mansion. I expected to see many Hollywood executives there, but not one was present. The mayor spelled out the scope of the project. If we could put all the pieces in place, he said, a massive studio would rise on thirty-nine acres of property at Staten Island’s decommissioned Stapleton Navy Homeport. At the end of the presentation, Mayor Giuliani officially tasked me with going out to the site in order to see if such a studio was feasible.

  Okay, I thought, I can do this. I might not know exactly what I’m doing, but I’ll do my due diligence and give him my opinion, for whatever it’s worth.

  I went to the Stapleton site. I’ve long known that Staten Island is the poor relation among the five New York City boroughs. Of course, sometimes it’s better to be ignored by government, but in this case, the neglect over the years has been criminal. Stapleton Studios represented a chance to give the Staten Island economy a gigantic boost.

  I reported back to Giuliani that I thought the proposed studio would be second only to some of the long-established Hollywood facilities. The site was fantastic, with plenty of room for soundstages, prop warehouses, and additional offices. I thought a studio hub such as Stapleton would be a shot in the arm for filmmaking in New York, which was rapidly losing ground to places like North Carolina and other right-to-work states.

  The mayor received my favorable report and set up a meeting for investors. The property was actually owned by the city and only leased to the U.S. Navy. I agreed to become involved for purely altruistic reasons. A small voice was telling me that working with bureaucrats might be maddening, but a louder voice drowned it out, reminding me t
hat I wanted to do a good deed.

  In a huge building on the Stapleton site that formerly housed Arnie’s Bagelicious Bakery, our group created a beautiful world-class soundstage. We had a film project, Max and Grace, scheduled as the facility’s first production, and we had entered into negotiations with Paramount about using the studio for its big-budget feature School of Rock.

  The tragedy of 9/11 intervened. In the wake of the terrorist attacks, all city projects such as Stapleton Studios were put on hold. In January 2002, the new administration under Michael Bloomberg came into office. From January on, our group had frequent meetings with the city’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC), but it soon became apparent to me that the Bloomberg administration had no intention of allowing the studio to happen.

  The team promoting Stapleton was dragged through the mud. We were made to look like gangsters, attempting to rip off the city of New York.

  If the project had been allowed to proceed, Staten Island would be a thriving mecca of the film business right now. Stapleton Studios would have been a good thing for New York City and a great thing for Staten Island. Our projections showed that it would have provided approximately ten thousand jobs and been a revenue windfall for the city of New York. The citizens of the Stapleton neighborhood were overwhelmingly in favor of the project. Instead, Staten Island, the always-a-bridesmaid-never-a-bride borough, was left at the altar once again.

  I felt as though I were reliving my part in the film City Hall. In the three years our group was involved, we asked Mayor Bloomberg to meet with us at the Stapleton property numerous times. We got together with officials of the Economic Development Corporation at their offices on William Street, only a short distance from City Hall, but the mayor did not once attend.

  I attempted one last time to have a meeting at City Hall with the mayor. A date was set. He canceled. Why? He had a lunch date with the cast of The Sopranos. So much for Hollywood-on-the-Hudson. The Stapleton Studios project was declared officially dead.