The only reason to see Casino is to watch the struggle in Scorsese’s soul as to whether he most wants to be Pesci or De Niro, the unbridled Kong mobster or Mr Cool, who fusses over every detail of his business and likes to sit in his plush office with his pants hanging folded in the closet so as not to lose their hard crease.18 APPEARANCES ARE EVERYTHINGLos Angeles is best thought of as a set. Michael Corleone has been the guiding light of style and stealth in Hollywood for the last 25 years – withdrawn, austere, shy, a dandy, indifferent to the flesh, a beetle on the dung of money, whispering orders for destruction or elimination, all for the sake of the business. The opportunity to wear slick clothes while talking filthy, to exude the sang-froid of men of the world while having your enemies killed, to be the epitome of cool with dames on your arm while being a Hitler – ever since pictures began, the guys in charge of the business have aspired to the manner of GQ mobsters It was The Godfather that locked the image down. Most of the time, there’s no such thing as “budgetary control”. It’s possible that, once upon a time, several grim-faced accountants went around the studios keeping score. Now, when $40 million is going out of style as an average cost, who counts? And you, the fannies in the dark, are right when you suspect that as budgets get bigger, movies get stupider.

Because, of course, there are scumbags skimming the system if they can find spoons big enough. The bigger the budget, the more leaks out in the way of technical adjustments, per diems, overtime, expenses, petty cash and what is this $555 doing in my pocket? And so, the budget is going to be what it’s going to be. The budget is simply what everything adds up to at the end, plus or minus.17 GANGSTER MOVIES GET MADE BECAUSE MOGULS WANT TO BE GANGSTERSRemember the way Warren Beatty in Bugsy is always practising his elocution so he might have a shot at being in pictures? A nice touch, but it would have been sweeter still if we’d seen some movie executives studying the Bug to get their own gangster acts down. In the end, everyone just lets the script breathe, so it can be amorphous and organic. The only people who actually read scripts are Writers’ Guild arbitration committee members, and those are some pretty sad people.16 BUDGETS ARE FOR SIMPSLike the script, the budget is there, but no one ever quite looks at it. Actors read only their own lines; they want to retain their creative space. And they will want to talk to the writer themselves, slip in some lines they like – it’s amazing how often those lines come back on paper.

It has to happen.” At studios and agencies, no one with real power has the time or patience to read anything but contracts and deal memos They buy coverage. Once a movie is in pre-production, a producer gets so many versions of the script there’s no sense reading any of them because there will be a new draft by the time they’re finished. They stay loose and pick up the “story” of the picture, its mood. They don’t worry if there’s no ending yet – if there were one, it would just change. They write the scenes out of order and seldom need to scan the whole thing through except to check for page numbers.