Half-Assed Internet Research
Real crooks and Gunsite training; Howard Johnson's booth; real burglary tools; water truck for wet streets; Green Mill's Capone booth; unused source book; Belushi's squibs; Tuesday Weld's Wikipedia
In the discussion (9)
Approx. transcript time · 01:05:14Read transcript
- The actors hung out with real crooks, and Mann took Caan to the Gunsite firearms academy in Arizona, which is why his house raid looks realistic.
- Per Alan Siegel's research, Mann took his future wife to that Howard Johnson's in 1971 and they talked all night in the booth used for the scene; they are still married 50 years later.
- The burglary tools were real, and the actors were trained to use them.
- A 60,000-gallon water truck kept the streets wet, a Mann staple he may have invented, though Scorsese did some of it in Taxi Driver.
- Mann tells an anecdote about driving around looking at bridges and water before he was a filmmaker; the urban landscape colliding with nature, rain and neon are his signatures, as in Collateral.
- The Green Mill jazz club in Uptown was an Al Capone hangout, and the scene was shot in Capone's booth, where he could see the whole club.
- The film is based on a book that was optioned, but Mann did not really use it.
- Belushi begged to do his own death scene and absorbed dozens of squib shots.
- Tuesday Weld's Wikipedia page is recommended: between marriages she dated Al Pacino, David Steinberg, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Omar Sharif, Richard Gere and Ryan O'Neal, and Baryshnikov's previous girlfriend Jessica Lange was her best friend.