Goodfellas at 30: The making of one of film’s greatest shots
Martin Scorsese’s mob movie is special for many reasons – not least its famous single-take nightclub scene. Hanna Flint delves into the creation of a piece of cinema history.
Thirty years ago, Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas was released and set a new benchmark for innovative storytelling and filmmaking. Adapted from the book Wiseguy by crime journalist Nicholas Pileggi, who also co-wrote the script, the film charts the rise and fall of real-life New York mobster Henry Hill in a powerfully funny, brutal, horrifying and kinetic way. Goodfellas has long been considered one of Scorsese’s greatest ever movies – as the late Roger Ebert had it, “no finer film has ever been made about organised crime” – and part of its greatness comes down to one scene: the Copa shot.
Affectionately named after The Copacabana nightclub, where the scene was executed, it is a one-take – a long, continuous shot by a single camera – of just under three minutes that takes its cues from one particular memory in Pileggi’s book offered up by Henry’s wife Karen: “On crowded nights, when people were lined up outside and couldn’t get in,” it reads. “the doormen used to let Henry and our party in through the kitchen, which was filled with Chinese cooks, and we’d go upstairs and sit down immediately.”
Scorsese managed to bring this line to life in seamless fashion but he couldn’t have done it without an exceptional cameraman, Larry McConkey, and the Steadicam, a revolutionary piece of tech that had been invented by cameraman and cinematographer Garrett Brown 15 years earlier. The recording equipment was designed to have the flexibility of a hand-held camera, the stability of a tripod and the fluidity of movement that a dolly (a camera wheeled along a track) provides all at once. Stanley Kubrick employed the Steadicam to achieve the scene in The Shining (1981) where Danny tricycles around the Overlook Hotel and it was also used to acclaim in Marathon Man (1976), Rocky (1976) and Bound for Glory (1976), which is how McConkey was introduced to it. “It blew me away, it was extraordinary,” he tells BBC Culture. “I thought somebody made something for me because I’d spent hours and hours trying to train myself how to walk more smoothly.”
McConkey was trained up by Brown himself. “Larry was my first ‘student’ in 1977 and his mastery of our ‘noble instrument’ remains intensely gratifying,” the inventor tells BBC Culture. The lessons took place at Brown’s own townhouse in Philadelphia where, according to McConkey, he told his student that if he hit any of the walls “his wife would kill them”. So he got his pupil to turn the camera’s monitor off and manoeuvre the equipment blind. This would allow him to focus on where he wanted the shot to be and move the camera through space accordingly to frame it. McConkey says, “that one week [with Brown] was worth at least two years’ experience on your own,” and as the equipment grew increasingly popular, the cameraman quickly became the go-to person for shooting with the Steadicam.
How it came together
“This is going to be a disaster.”
Those were the words running through McConkey’s mind as Scorsese walked him through his idea for a night club scene on the New York set of Goodfellas. It was a late afternoon during the summer of 1989 and production was in full swing. The director had called McConkey a day or two earlier. The cameraman had impressed Scorsese with his Steadicam skill on his previous movie, 1985’s After Hours, and wanted to hire him for a few days. But it wasn’t until McConkey arrived on set that he had any clue of what Scorsese wanted him to do.
The filmmaker met the cameraman near to The Copacabana where the scene – which would later become known as the Copa shot – was to take place. Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco, the actors playing Henry and his then wife-to-be Karen, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, McConkey, an assistant director and the script supervisor were gathered before Scorsese, who explained his vision. He wanted to shoot a continuous take that would follow Henry and Karen from the moment they arrived at the club to the moment they were seated inside, capturing every step of their journey in between. “The rehearsal began when he showed us he wanted to start on a close-up of a tip being handed to the guy parking Henry’s car,” McConkey recalls. “There were no storyboards, just him talking.”
I’ve always maintained that the Steadicam should have been called the ‘smooth cam’ because it’s anything but steady – Larry McConkey
The group followed Scorsese across the road and into the club. They listened to him explain how the camera would follow Henry and Karen as they navigated their way through the backstage of the venue. The director tried to lead them past the kitchen but Ballhaus demanded they walked through it. “He said, ‘we’ve got to go into the kitchen because the light is a different colour’,” McConkey recalls. “For contrast!” So Scorsese adjusted his route and soon they arrived in the main ballroom where “very colourful choreography had been worked out” to get the couple to their final seated position.