Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
A Library Journal Best Book of the Year
A Sight and Sound Best Film Book Of 2020
One of the best books about a single movie ever written, Glenn Kenny's Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas is a combination behind-the-scenes history and critical study, guaranteed to regale readers with facts they haven't heard before no matter how obsessively they've rewatched and researched the film.
Kenny takes the reader through the production of Martin Scorsese's sprawling gangster drama, starting long before its inception; continuing through preproduction, production, editing, and commercial release, and folding that story within a larger narrative about Scorsese's evolution as a filmmaker and industry power player. The book shows how journalist Nick Pileggi's reportage was transformed into a multifaceted classic: a lurid gangster thriller; a study of a subculture; a coming-of-age picture; a detailed account of a courtship and marriage; an ironic yet nostalgic look back at a golden time in a man's life that just happened to involve drug dealing, loan sharking, and murder; and a quasi-documentary modeled on 1980s tabloid TV, meant to deglamorize a world that Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather films made majestic.
The book includes a detailed chapter on the film's needle-drop pop soundtrack; sections on the criminal careers of the real-life people that the crew was based on (including Henry Hill himself); a chapter on costar Robert DeNiro's preparation for the role of Jimmy Conway; and a section on the career and aesthetic of Scorsese's regular editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, whose cutting of Goodfellas was interrupted by the death of her husband, director Michael Powell, who was a hero and mentor to Scorsese. This is a classic book about a classic movie, nearly as much fun to read as Goodfellas is to watch.
All copies guaranteed pristine and signed by Glenn Kenny.
MZS.Press is the online arts bookstore founded by author, critic, and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz and directed by Judith Carter. It offers new, used, signed, collectible, and rare books on film, TV, music, photography, and the visual arts. The store was launched in 2019 on a different platform and has expanded to incorporate arts books published by MZSPress's private imprint: titles currently include Seitz's The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon and Dreams of Deadwood, about the HBO Western, and Walter Chaw's A Walter Hill Film.
Our deepest wish is to promote, encourage, and distribute work by small presses, academic presses, and individuals. Extraordinary work tends to get swallowed up on giant platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The store's inventory of nearly 1000 volumes is currently in the process of being reconstructed after its relocation from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Dallas, Texas. The titles featured here are personally selected by a group of curators and advisors, including Seitz, Carter, and an array of critics, artists, journalists, educators, publishers, and arts mavens who are known for their ability to suss out what Seitz's jazz musician dad liked to call "the good sh*t."
"I feel comfortable using legal jargon in everyday life... I object!" Alicia Silverstone as Cher Horowitz in Legally Blonde, 2001
Matt Zoller Seitz
Critic, Author, Filmmaker, MZS Press Creator
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large and film critic of RogerEbert.com; Features Writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, Contributing Writer for D Magazine and Texas Highways as well as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and TV has appeared in Sight and Sound, The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Rolling Stone. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine.
Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image, Salon.com and Vulture, among other outlets such as Texas Highways and AARP. His five-part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. This book and its follow-up, The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel were New York Times bestsellers.
Other Seitz books include the New York Times bestsellers The Sopranos Sessions and Mad Men Carousel; TV (The Book), The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, and The Wes Anderson Collection: The French Dispatch. He is also an interviewer, moderator, and film programmer who has curated and hosted film and TV presentations for the Museum of the Moving Image, IFC Center, San Francisco's Roxie Cinema, and other venues. He has launched a Dallas extension of his MZS Film Series at the historic Texas Theater. On October 3-6, 2024 he brought the legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone back to Dallas for a historic return to the city and the Texas Theatre!
Judith is quoted as saying "his hobbies include exotic dancing, moonwalking, and affixing masking tape labels to every food item in the refrigerator, including eggs. Oh and he has the attention span of a gnat." MZS agreed to it all except the moonwalking.