I swear to God . . .” “God doesn’t come to this part of the house, so swear to me.” -Liam C
If you look at my acting career, I never played a role that was similar to anything my brother played. I was always cast as the bad guy or a gangster, because my brother didn't do those kind of roles.
When this ugly gangster told Joe Glaser that he must take the name of Armstrong down, off of the marquee, and it was an 'order from Al Capone,' Mr. Glaser looked this cat straight in the face and told him these words: 'I think that Louis Armstrong is the world's greatest, and this is my place, and I defy anybody to take his name down from there.'
Roles constantly have to be redefined in any form of entertainment. Look back at the gangster pics of the 1930s and 1940s and the way James Cagney or Humphrey Bogart would play the part. These roles were redefined in the 1970s by Al Pacino and Rober DeNiro. And again in the 1990s by Gary Oldman and Anthony Hopkins.
I think American audiences like gangster movies. You know, it's part of the culture.
Old Americana vintage gangster stuff has a fantastical feel; it feels less dirty in a way. It feels like the opera of crime.
The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny each other's existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal.
In my world, of course, it don't matter. You could be a gangster with a dress, you could be a gangster with baggy pants.
Melissa Barak, an ex-City Ballet dancer and sometime choreographer, has put together an unspeakably dopey and incompetent mess called 'Call Me Ben,' combining ultra-generic dance, terrible dialogue and disastrous storytelling, about the founding of Las Vegas by the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who insists, violently, on being addressed as 'Ben.'
'The Sopranos' gets praised as novelistic, but it follows the most banal of life patterns, showing the sheer tedium of being a mobster. It has dead spots, boring plotlines, weak episodes. Characters develop slowly, or don't. Like viewers, a gangster might get bored, fade out of the action, then come back to find none of his debts forgotten.
Celebrated in the Bob Dylan ballad 'Joey,' Crazy Joe Gallo was a charismatic beatnik gangster whose forays into Greenwich Village in the 1960s inspired his bloody revolution against the Mafia.
Homeboy Industries is a healing center for broken children. I was a broken child, and they showed me how to put all those pieces back together. It's not about being a gangster. It's about being a man or a woman trying to recover and live better.
I don't only like rap music. There's everything from R&B to crazy gangster rap, hip hop... everything! But it all blends together nicely. It's like a magical music rainbow.
If you are black on television, you are probably going to be some kind of thug, gangster, or portrayed in a negative light. If you are some type of Muslim, you are going to be blowing stuff up. If you are Hispanic, you are going to be some type of gangbanger. I've felt like this for years.
I was raised in Chicago and I guess that was one of the special breeding grounds for gangsters of all colors. That was the Detroit of the gangster world. The car industry was thugs.
I'm not a gangster, bro.
We had an apartment on west side of Central Park. The rent was very reasonable. We found out later that it belonged to a gangster called Legs Diamond and it was a front to his headquarters. It was fine.
People want to classify and say, 'OK, this is a gangster film.' 'This is a Western.' 'This is a... ' You know? It's easy to classify and it makes people feel comfortable, but it doesn't matter, it doesn't really matter.
The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.
Attitude is attitude, whether you're a West Coast gangster or East Coast gangster, you know?
