But he soon moved back East to manage a Bronx restaurant named Amici’s once his career stalled. He later formed a comedy with Frank Vincent, and move to Los Angeles with the hope of breaking into films. Earlier in his career, he played guitar for Joey Dee and the Starliters-and in 1968 released a collection of 1968 pop hits like The Beatles’ “ Got To Get You Into My Life” for his album Little Joe Sure Can Sing. Pesci himself was an unknown at the time. “We had another actor in mind who was much younger who should have played the younger brother because that is the way the story actually was with Jake La Motta and his brother Joe,” De Niro remembered.
But finding a person to play Joey, Jake’s younger brother, proved difficult. The casting appeared easy enough: they had De Niro after all. However, when Scorsese nearly died of an overdose, he came to identify with LaMotta and began production on the film. The director turned it down, famously disliking sports. He approached Scorsese about adapting the book into a movie as he filmed Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Three years prior, on the set of Godfather II, De Niro had read LaMotta’s autobiography. With a debilitating coke habit, the legendary director watched his 1977 film New York, New York bomb critically and financially. Production for Scorsese’s masterpiece began under the auspices of (what else?) cocaine. It demonstrated all the key factors of a great performance - larger-than-life moments and nuanced introspection - that would make the relatively unknown actor into a star. His path to the role, and the performance itself marks one of the great film partnerships: De Niro and Pesci. However, he first broke out in Scorsese’s pugilistic 1980 classic Raging Bull, playing the younger brother to Robert De Niro’s Jake LaMotta. He recently returned from a decade-long acting break to star in Martin Scrosese’s The Irishman. has led a sporadic yet incredible career. Joseph Frank Pesci: the diminutive movie tough guy with starring roles in Goodfellas, Casino, My Cousin Vinny, etc. This month, we’re celebrating the release of The Irishman with a retrospective on the work of Martin Scorsese. Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth - their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography.
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