Warner Bros.' GoodFellas (1990) is director Martin Scorsese's stylistic masterpiece - a follow-up film to
his own Mean Streets (1973), released in the year of Francis Ford Coppola's third installment of his
gangster epic - The Godfather, Part III (1990). It is a nitty-gritty, unflinching treatment of a true
mobster story about three violent "wiseguys" [Mafia slang for 'gangsters], enhanced by the
Italian-American director's own experience of his upbringing in Little Italy.

The film's factual, semi-documentary account was adapted from both Nicholas Pileggi's and Martin Scorsese's
screenplay - based upon Pileggi's 1985 non-fictional book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family. Film posters
were subtitled: "Three Decades of Life in the Mafia." The real-life story concerned a low-level,
marginalized gangster of mixed ethnic roots (half-Irish, half-Sicilian) - Henry Hill, who ultimately broke
the gangster's code of 'never ratting on your friends', and turned informant for the FBI and entered the
Federal Witness Protection Program to save his life by disappearing from view.

The violent, carefully-built film was given six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best
Supporting Actor (Joe Pesci), Best Supporting Actress (Lorraine Bracco), Best Director, Best Adapted
Screenplay, and Best Editing (Thelma Schoonmaker) - and only Pesci won the Oscar. [Pesci's specialty was
playing gangster-related roles, as in Death Collector (1976) (aka Family Enforcer), A Bronx Tale (1993),
and in Scorsese's Casino (1995).