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Actor revisits ‘A Bronx Tale’
Twenty years ago, struggling actor Chazz Palminteri made his way home after being fired from a job as a doorman at a club in Los Angeles for refusing entry to legendary Hollywood agent Swifty Lazar. Sitting on his bed at home, his eye caught a card his father had given him as a child: “The saddest thing in life is wasted talent.”
His father’s simple profundity motivated the native New Yorker, who had grown frustrated bouncing around playing small parts on serial television, to take the fate of his career into his own hands. He headed to the store, grabbed a legal pad and returned home to the solitary endeavor of writing.
“I remembered when I was 9, I saw a man kill a man right in front of me, and I didn’t rat on him,” Palminteri said last week during a break from rehearsal at the Long Center. “And I told my father, ‘I did a good thing, right, daddy?’ And he said, ‘You did a good thing for a bad man, son.’ My father always said, ‘Don’t admire those guys; I’m the tough guy because I get up and work for a living.’ I thought that dynamic between the father and (wise guy) Sonny and the boy in the middle would make a good story, and I started writing ‘A Bronx Tale.’ ”
The murder and its resulting moral dilemma served as the jumping-off point for a work of art that explored the complexities of a young man whose coming of age is confused by the push and pull of his relationships with two separate worlds.
“The main theme going in was that it wasn’t black versus white; it was kind of like gray and gray. The boy took the best of Sonny and his dad and became a man,” Palminteri said. “Of course, Sonny, as bad as he was, wasn’t all that bad. The father, as good as he was, wasn’t all that good. He (the boy) took the best of both people … I didn’t know I was writing all that. I just wanted to tell a great story, a story from my heart, from my soul.”
The play, which premiered in 1989 in Los Angeles, immediately garnered the unknown actor serious attention from Hollywood, with the script becoming one of the hottest commodities in town. But neither stardom nor riches would come immediately, as the broke Palminteri steadfastly refused offers of more than $1 million to sell the film rights unless he was allowed to write and star in the movie.
Eventually, Palminteri’s stubbornness paid off when Robert De Niro, after seeing the play in New York, offered to make “A Bronx Tale” his directorial debut, with Palminteri writing the script and playing the role of Sonny.
Two decades later and with dozens of acting roles to his credit, the Academy Award-nominated Palminteri, older and wiser, returned to the work that brought him fame. He opened a national run of “A Bronx Tale” on Wednesday at Austin’s Long Center following a revival on Broadway.
In the time since he wrote the play, Palminteri has gone from wandering bachelor to married father of two. With that maturity comes a shift in his relationship to this personal story and a deeper understanding of the role a father plays in guiding his son.
“My father used to say, ‘Don’t look at those guys (wise guys) because they only end up in two places, dead or in jail.’ And he was right. As I got older, they ended up dead or in jail. So sooner or later you have to pay the band. If you wanna dance, you have to pay the band. I always say that you have to do the right thing. And that’s what my dad always preached. … And look what it says in ‘A Bronx Tale’: ‘The choices you make will shape your life forever.’”
As it turns out, the bold choices Palminteri made in both striking out on his own and refusing to give in to Hollywood’s expectations have brought him fame and success, and eventually returned him to where it all began: one man and his vision on a stage, opening his heart to the world, just telling “another Bronx tale.”
‘A Bronx Tale’
The national tour of the successful Broadway revival of the show opens in Austin. 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday. Dell Hall, Long Center, 701 W. Riverside Drive. $40-$80. 474-5664. www.thelongcenter.org.
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