Then he perked up, asking Pileggi (who also wrote GoodFellas) if he could arrange a meeting with De Niro. Rosenthal didn't actively oppose the project, but he had no interest in helping, either-until he found out that Martin Scorsese planned to make Pileggi's eventual book into a movie, and that Robert De Niro would probably be the star. The main character, Sam 'Ace' Rothstein, is based on Frank 'Lefty' Rosenthal, who was retired and living in Florida when writer Nicholas Pileggi came around wanting to write a book about his career.

I T ONLY EXISTS BECAUSE THE REAL GUY IT'S BASED ON WAS A BIG DE NIRO FAN. Here's an overflowing stack of information about the violent, funny, Vegas-scented Casino. And let's be honest: many filmmakers would be lucky if their best work were as good as one of Scorsese's 'mediocre' films. Yet it has a strong following.Īmong IMDb users, only four Scorsese films rank above it. Rotten Tomatoes scores for Scorsese films range from 45 to 100 percent Casino sits at 80 percent. It earned just one Oscar nomination (for Sharon Stone), but several other Scorsese movies have received zero. In terms of box office, it's the director's 10th highest grossing film out of more than two dozen features.

Most people who love it don't love it more than, say, GoodFellas, and plenty of people don't love it at all. If you were to rank all of Martin Scorsese's movies, no matter what criteria you used, Casino would probably be somewhere in the middle.

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