The Surprisingly Unremarkable Destinies of the Gang of Kids from “Once Upon A Time In America”
They worked hard, took upon themselves about one hour, the hardest, of the star-studded, controversial, Sergio Leone film — his first in 13 years, at that time.
The director’s 3 hours and 49 minutes box-office flop, which nearly led to the bankruptcy of its production studio, was shot in 1982–83, released in 1984, and it had the perfect recipe for being a hit: Robert De Niro, New York, Ennio Morricone’s music, and a great storyline.
I saw what I now know that it was Leone’s official European edit in my last year of high school, when it was already 3–4 years old but still new for communist Romania, and it left me forever longing to be, even just for a little while, part of such a close-knitted gang like the one the six Jewish boys from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, pictured in the film. I saw it by the ways of that time: on a bootlegged VHS tape, in the home of one of my high school colleagues whose parents happened to be among the few privileged VCR owners of the time, together with a bunch of other high school peeps, and I may have seen it once more, a few days later, with a different group.
I fell in love with the movie — characters, story, New York, everything — therefore, the almost surrealistic plot and over-stretched, nearly grotesque human behaviour pictured in “Once Upon A Time in America” went straight to my subconscious, fiction became unequivocal reality, common sense was killed by adrenaline and testosterone, and I was absolutely certain that I’ve been blessed to watch maybe the best movie I’ll ever see. Twenty years later, on my first visit to New York and the US, I even tried, and failed, to find around Lower Manhattan that exact view of the Brooklyn Bridge as framed in the film — I found out recently that it was not Manhattan, but Brooklyn and the Manhattan Bridge, instead of the Brooklyn one.
I empathised fully with the characters and the story, as I was too young and yet not perverted by knowing how films are made, an achievement acquired by working in advertising, which ruined many films for me, ever since.
As an innocent moviegoer, I may have sobbed when little Dominic was shot by rival gangster Bugsy. Was surely touched when Patsy could not help himself and ate the cake he was going to exchange for his first sexual encounter with plumpy Peggy, the big-hearted whore of the borough. I envied Noodles’ Rocky-like cockiness, and crooked my eye a bit, the next day after the movie, at school, like Cockeye used to do. I trembled a bit seeing the naked behind of Jennifer Connelly’s body double— most likely, as she was underage — and enjoyed the adrenaline boost from the many of the movie’s violent scenes.
True friendship, love, sex, blood, booze, jazz, money, power, adventure, America — that film not only had everything I did not have at that time, and I might have never had, as the end of communism was anywhere near, but it was a 219 minute forbidden, virtual reality experience I wish I could live over and over again.
Today I found the movie on Amazon Prime Video, a collection which does not cease to surprise me, as I keep discovering more and more actually pretty good movies there — this, while, around one year ago, I was horrified by its appalling quality. I still don’t understand whether they keep adding them or was it a problem of Amazon’s terrible search algorithms that I could not find the good stuff.
Well, seeing it again 30 years later, and being a nostalgic by nature, I suddenly wanted to know how had the careers of the lovable bunch of teenagers in the movie evolved. The Amazon X-Ray function came in handy, and, with a little help from Google, I could read, through lines of search and some IMDB, their rather disappointing life stories.
Young Noodles — Robert De Niro, later on — was played by 12 years old Scott Schutzman Tiler, who is now credited for having played himself more often than all his other roles together — he was in three feature films, all of them within a few years around “Once Upon A Time…”, ending up as an acting teacher, apparently.
Young Max — James Woods, later on — was played by 16 years old Rusty Jacobs, and it is his only role ever. He has, since then, produced two obscure documentaries, so stayed somehow connected to the world of cinema, while currently making a living as an assistant district attorney.
Young Cockeye — William Forsythe, as an adult — was played by Adrian Curran, who has barely got a one-liner on his IMDB page and shows up in almost no online search results.
Young Fat Moe — as an adult, Larry Rapp — was played by Mike Monetti, an IMDB one-liner, as well. And that is about everything that shows up on him online.
Young Patsy — James Hayden — was played by 13 years old (yes, Patsy is older than Noodles, in spite of being around some 8" shorter) Brian Bloom, who’s looks landed him a few roles of various sizes in several above-average rated TV series of the 90s. He is the luckier one of the gang, becoming a quite successful voice-over artist for the gaming industry — Call of Duty, Starcraft, Wolfenstein, God of War are some of his hits — which is what he’s doing, almost exclusively, since 2006.
Last, but not least, Dominic, the youngest of the gang, whose death triggers Noodles’ killing spree that would put him behind bars for more than a decade, was played by a kid named Noah Moazezi, who was cast in two other movies around the same period, and then nothing else.
Out of all of these seemingly cursed to become anonymous people, who once raised to touch the stars but did end up with a handful of dirt, there’s one doing just fine, and she is the only one who’s missing from the group photo above: Jennifer Connelly, playing Deborah — Fat Moe’s ballet dancing, prodigy sister. My 18 years old self deeply and honestly regretted that a time machine could not be used to hyper-loop the 13 years old Jenniffer 10 years into the future, so to see her above-legal-age self in the rest of the film after Noodles gets out of jail, instead of Elizabeth McGovern.
How could something with such high-quality ingredients turn some participants’ careers into gold while dooming others? What made this bunch of kids have such different destinies? It’s hard to blame it on talent, as they all deliver strong performances. Could it have been the whims of a few Hollywood casting agents or key decisions made by their parents? Was it the way they grew up and the never-ending lookism and ageism of Hollywood? Was it the movie’s poor reception in the US, most likely due to the re-edit, which chopped the director’s European version by 40%, also destroying one of its key features, the non-linear story editing, with really strong temporal transition points and overlappings, by rearranging it, so to respect the story’s chronology?
And is one — otherwise debatable — hit enough for a lifetime or does one need a lifetime of hits to prove their worth?
I guess the answer lies within each and every one of them and of ourselves, while the only possible morale is that, more often than not, we are not as much in control of our lives as we would like to.
