Q&A with Chazz Palminteri on ‘A Bronx Tale’

On Wednesday at the University of Arkansas-Pulaski Tech Center for Humanities and Arts, Academy Award-nominated actor Chazz Palminteri will perform his one-man show, “A Bronx Tale.” (Tickets range from $25 to $65 and can be bought via uaptc.universitytickets.com.)

You might recognize Palminteri from a plethora of gangster films as the prototypical New York Italian mafioso, with his slicked back, black hair, his custom tailored suits, and his use of the phrases like “fuggedaboutit” and “bada bing” and “wiseguy.” He has appeared in movies such as Woody Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway” — for which he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Cheech, a mob henchman with a natural panache for playwriting — and the hit film “The Usual Suspects,” as the lead detective trying to hunt down the nefarious Keyser Soze. Palminteri’s crowning achievement, though, is the creation of “A Bronx Tale,” which has iterations as a one man show, a movie, and a Broadway musical.

The plot involves a young Italian American kid, Calogero, living in 1960s New York. One afternoon, while sitting on the stoop of his apartment building, he witnesses a shooting as Sonny — the top gangster in the neighborhood — guns down a man in cold blood. Young Calogero is questioned by the police the next day, but doesn’t squeal on the mob boss. This strikes up a very complicated friendship between a child and a gangster — a relationship of which Calogero’s father doesn’t approve. As Calogero grows older in a racially tense area of New York, he is torn between two worlds: the romanticized violent world of the mob, or that of the hard-working honest man.

I talked with Palminteri earlier this week.

Chazz Palminteri: I am Calogero, that’s my real name. I’m the little boy.

AT: How much of the movie would you say is autobiographical?

CP: I’d say probably 95%. That’s how the movie started, right when I saw that killing, right in front of me. And I became friends with some of these guys and I started my journey growing up. The movie takes me from 1 years old ’till I’m 18. The first 18 years of my life right there.

AT: One of my favorite lines from the movie is when De Niro’s character tells his son, “The saddest thing in life is wasted talent.”

CP: Yeah, that’s my father’s line. He used to say that all the time. He wrote it on a little card and put it in my bedroom when I was like 9 or 10 years old.

AT: And do you think that you lived up to your father’s expectations, have you wasted any of your talent? I mean, you’ve been on TV, the movies, Broadway, video games, you’re a restaurateur, you have your own talk show …

CP: Well things have worked out pretty good for me. Have I wasted any of my talent? Well, I always keep thinking that I can do better, so I keep on trying. I do as much as I can cause, you know, this is it. There’s no dress rehearsal. Do as much as you can and, hopefully, by the end of your life you have no regrets.

AT: How did you get out of that world of gangsters and end up in Hollywood?

CP: I always wanted to be an actor, from about the age of 10. Growing up in the neighborhood, I used to write poetry. I was kinda like this artist guy amongst all this insanity. And I knew that there was something more to life. I wanted to be an actor and a writer. And the arts always fascinated me. And I tried, until I had some success. I got on some TV shows, guest starred on a few things. But I still wasn’t busting out really big, and I said “Well, if they won’t give me a great part then I’ll write one myself.” Then I sat down one day and started writing about this killing I saw when I was 5 years old. And that’s how it started. And after a year, I had an 85-minute one-man show.

AT: And that’s how “A Bronx Tale’’ was born?

CP: Yeah, I had this idea of doing a movie on stage, where I played all the parts. Something that’s never been done before and hasn’t been done since. And, my God, my career exploded and changed everything for me, ya know.

AT: How did it go from being this performance piece to being a full-fledged feature film?

CP: People saw it. And at the time I had $ 200 in the bank. And studios came and offered me $250,000 for the rights. And I said no, because they wouldn’t let me play the role of Sonny, and they wouldn’t let me write the script. They offered me $500,000, and I said no. And then they offered me a million dollars. Again, I said no.

People ask me, “how could I do that?” And maybe I was so young and just so brazen that I just said no. You know, I didn’t have any money, so … it meant nothing to me. It was just numbers, ya know. And finally, I did the show one night again, and I go back stage and they say, “Robert De Niro is here, he just saw the show.” I walked into the dressing room and there was Bob, and he told me he loved the show. And he said, “Look, I think you should play Sonny, and I think you’d be great at writing it, since it’s your life. And I’ll play your father. And I’ll direct it.”

AT: One of the more fascinating aspects of the movie is how racially divided the Bronx was. There’s a lot of parallels you can draw to Arkansas around that same time period.

CP: That was important to me, to have that, because it was part of the Bronx, growing up. And part of the area where there was integration. They weren’t in the neighborhood, they used to go through the neighborhood. And that’s where all the fighting started. It was a racially tense area. And I thought it was important to talk about that, how each family and kids dealt with it differently. It was 1968, and here’s this white Italian kid dating this black girl from school. It was just insane. The same year that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Robert Kennedy got assassinated. It was just a horrific time.

AT: So you started the one man show in ’88, and then you took it on tour a second time in the mid 2000s, and now it’s 35 years later. Has anything changed since you first performed it?

CP: My approach is a little different. When I first did it, I wasn’t married and didn’t have children. So I used to relate more to the boy, and now that I have a son, I started relating to the father. And over time, my characters became richer. I play young Calogero, and it takes on a special meaning when you see me do it. I am the boy. It’s very emotional. People are standing up, cheering and crying at the end. I do the movie on stage by myself. You’ve never seen anything like it before. It’s a night at the theater you’ll remember forever, trust me.

“A Bronx Tale’’ starring Chazz Palminteri plays Wednesday night at the University of Arkansas-Pulaski Tech Center for Humanities and Arts.

Venerable writer- actor Chazz Palminteri brings his one-man show “A Bronx Tale” to Pulaski Tech on Wednesday night. When he first mounted the show in 1988, he says he had only $200 in his bank account. Soon he was turning down million dollar offers for the film rights.