Every writer, director, studio head kept seeing it. I said great but naïve as I was, I said, "I want to play Sonny and write the screenplay." They said, "Oh God no." I was kind of disappointed but I went back to doing the show. Everybody was coming to see it and they offered me $250,000 for the rights to make a movie. What were you thinking?Īfter the play came out, boom, the reviews were over the top. I started writing about that and my relationship with my father and the wise guys.Īs a struggling actor, you turned down a million dollar offer to sell and walk away from A Bronx Tale. I went to the drug store with five pads of yellow paper, and said I'll write about this killing I saw when I was a kid. I went home and was really frustrated and I didn't know what to do and said, "You know what, if they won't give me a great part, I'll write one myself." That man happened to be Swifty Lazar who was the biggest agent in the world at that time. One day I didn't let this one man in the building because he was very rude to me. I was an actor in L.A., and I ran out of money, and I was working as a doorman. Then one day, this whole incident happened. There was something inside my body that said I could do this and I realized I was good at it. I was a drama major in college, and I started studying with Lee Strasberg at the Actor's Studio. When I was 10 or 11 years old, my mother would take me to a lot of movies and I just looked at the screen and said I want to do that. New Times: What first inspired you to become an actor?Ĭhazz Palminteri: It's something I always wanted to do. But the play is where his heart really is.ĭuring an interview with Palminteri, he spoke about why he started writing, the challenges of putting on a one man production, and how he turned down a million dollars to let someone else act in and write the movie version. He also just recently finished writing a book for a musical version of the play. He's performed it in Los Angeles, on Broadway, and won show of the year in Las Vegas. But A Bronx Tale keeps pulling him back in. Palminteri has written several other screen and stage plays as well as starred in classic films like The Usual Suspects and Bullets Over Broadway. Robert DeNiro then directed the 1993 movie adaptation which featured Palminteri as Sonny the wiseguy who seduces the working class teenage protagonist into the world of the mafia. He originally started performing the stage version of in 1990. There's a very visual feeling to the show." Chazz Palminteri explained about his one man play A Bronx Tale coming to Seminole Casino Coconut Creek on February 26. "If you love the movie, you'll love the show even more.
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