The Mad Ones Movie

According to a The Movie Insider 'The Mad Ones, a story about the Gallo Brothers, is going to be released in 2010.

According to Vanity Fair :



"a couple of blocks away from where Crazy Joe Gallo filled his gut with Little Italy spaghetti before a hit man pumped it with lead 37 years ago, a cross-section of New York’s intelligentsia gathered at the new J. Crew Men’s Store to hear the Gallo brothers’ story. There, Matthew Modine and Steve Buscemi read from The Mad Ones, Tom Folsom’s new gangster chronicle of the lives of Joe, Kid Blast, and Larry Gallo, during a party hosted by Harvey Weinstein and the Accompanied Literary Society. The room was thick with powder-blue button-downs (where were the season’s ubiquitous checks?), skinny ties, slim pants, and lots of nonprescription glasses. (Well, we peered through Folsom’s frames as we stood behind him, just to make sure his bespectacled cutie-pie look was genuine. It was.) The only thing separating the men from the mannequins were the Grey Goose cocktails, champagne, and conversation (the mannequins were busy being headless, obvi!).

Modine gave good read, and an extremely charming Buscemi followed suit (pun intended), employing Red Hook accents and witty asides as he undertook a passage about lifting suits from a store. "

I initially enjoyed this book, although I have to admit, the second time I read it I found it a LOT more obnoxious.

It was filled with innaccuracies, but I kept seeing it as comic film noir as I read it. Maybe that's where I went off the track, because I now admit that it wasn't a very good book. My bad. I hope I didn't cost anyone the $20 for the book due to my recommendation .

I do think if properly casted it will make a better movie than a book. I can see a killer Scorsese type soundtrack, with a Richard Price type screenplay. Time will tell.

I felt the same way about the book. Initially when I first started to read it, I found it enjoyable. But then as I got deeper into the book, I began to question Folsom regarding the supposed conversations that he quotes and claims took place between certain people. Had he paraphrased, I could have accepted it. But his writing style made it appear as though what he was writing were ACCURATE quotes of conversations that took place.

I am not knocking Folsom's writing style. I happen to enjoy the way that he writes and once again enjoyed many parts of the book. But I do question his sources and how he could actually quote conversations that took place between people that were no longer around when the book was written. I do believe that he referenced several other books that were written years before with stories about Crazy Joe and his crew.

Being pretty famailar with the areas that were written about in the book, I didn't appreciate the innacuracies regarding neighborhoods, the location of events and even the location of certain clubs on President street.

I do think that if made with care, the movie can be a winner because Joe Gallo and his crew were certainly a bunch of interesting people with a lot of content and characteristics to portray in a movie.

Possibly Steve Buscemi as Crazy Joe?

It works for me.

I liked this book a lot and reviewed it a few months back.

http://temporaryknucksline.blogspot.com/2009/05/flower-bed-she-told-me-so-great-white.html