Chazz Palminteri does his one-man version of 'A Bronx Tale' at the Garde

November 07, 2021 12:01 am • Last Updated: November 07, 2021 12:05 am

By Kristina Dorsey
Features Editor

Chazz Palminteri (Yolanda Perez Photography LLC)

If it weren’t true, the story of how actor Chazz Palminteri got the show he wrote, “A Bronx Tale,” made as a film would seem like a Hollywood fable.

In the mid-1980s, Palminteri was acting but not getting the kind of roles he wanted. Taking his fate into his own hands, he penned a one-man play inspired by his childhood and the Bronx neighborhood where he grew up.

“A Bronx Tale” proved to be a huge success. Crowds flocked to see it, including stars Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino and Burt Reynolds.

Palminteri wanted to make a movie of “A Bronx Tale,” but he had conditions: he had to play the role of gangster Sonny and he had to be the lead writer of the screenplay “because it’s my life,” he recalls now.

Hollywood balked. Execs said a star needed to play Sonny. They wanted to throw money at Palminteri to change his mind, with offers of $250,000 ratcheting up to $500,000, and eventually reaching $1 million.

Palminteri — despite having only $200 in his bank account, living in a small apartment in North Hollywood and driving a rundown car — stood firm.

Then a guardian angel arrived … in the form of Robert De Niro. He saw Palminteri do “A Bronx Tale” in the theater and stopped backstage to see him afterward.

“So I walk into the dressing room, and there’s Bob siting there,” Palminteri recalls in a Wednesday phone interview with The Day. “He said, ‘That’s the greatest one-man show I ever saw.’ He goes, ‘I never seen anything like that — that’s a movie you do onstage by yourself.’’’

De Niro said he wanted to direct the film version — with Palminteri playing Sonny and handling the screenplay. In addition to directing, De Niro would also take the smaller role of the salt-of-the-earth character based on Palminteri’s father.

They shook hands, and that was it.

The 1993 feature film was a hit, and it opened doors for Palminteri. He went on to star in “The Usual Suspects” and give an Oscar-nominated turn in “Bullets Over Broadway.”

He began directing as well, on an episode of “Oz” and the feature film “Noel,” among other projects.

More recently, he has guested on TV shows, popping up several times on “Modern Family” as Jay’s pal Shorty and on “Rizzoli & Isles” as Frank Rizzoli Sr.

Now, he’s revisiting the one-man version of “A Bronx Tale” and is performing it at theaters around the country, including Friday at the Garde Arts Center.

He figures this will be his 904th performance of the piece onstage.

Palminteri, 69, says being back onstage after the pandemic “is great. It was like 18 months, whatever, 19 months I couldn’t perform. I mean, I was doing movies and TV shows, but I always enjoy a live audience. I started in theater, and I love theater.”

“A Bronx Tale” follows an Italian-American boy named Calogero (Palminteri’s real first name) growing up in the Bronx in the late 1950s and ‘60s. He is drawn to the wiseguys who hang out in his neighborhood, particularly the charismatic Sonny. Calogero sees a violent fight over a parking spot lead to Sonny shooting and killing a man. But he denies to the cops that he witnessed Sonny pulling the trigger. Sonny appreciates that, and they develop a familial sort of bond. Calogero (nicknamed C) feels torn between the worlds of his hard-working bus-driver father and the flashy, moneyed existence of mobsters. Later, as a teenager, C falls for a girl who is Black, as racial conflicts boil over in the neighborhood.

Asked about “A Bronx Tale” enduring for more than three decades, Palminteri says, “It’s hard for me to talk about because I wrote it, but it’s so well constructed. It’s a great story. The archetypes of the father, the boy, Sonny, and the racism in it — it’s as relevant as it was in ‘68 (when one part of the story is set) as it is right now.”

He thinks that what also makes the story unique is “this is not about black and white — it’s about gray and gray. It’s about how to decide who was bad and who was good, and sometimes good people are bad and bad people are good.”

‘Saddest thing in life’

Palminteri was interested in writing even in his youth, when he created some poetry and short stories.

“I grew up in this very tough neighborhood, and I was one of the guys. But there was always a side of me that was an artist. … I used to hide that, but as I got older, I said, ‘Hey, this is what I want to do — I want to be an actor, I want to write,’” he says.

His parents were behind him 100 percent, he says. His father wrote on a card “The saddest thing in life is wasted talent” and put it up in Chazz’s room. That mantra remained a source of inspiration and drive for him throughout the years — especially when Palminteri was fired from a job as a bouncer in L.A.

Here’s what happened: Palmintieri had spent the money he had earned doing guest star roles on TV and needed work. Once a boxer, he had been a bouncer in New York years earlier and so got a job as a bouncer at a swanky L.A. club. A guy trying to enter the club was being abusive to Palminteri, so he turned the guy away — not knowing that the person was legendary Hollywood agent Swifty Lazar. Lazar was so mad, he had Palminteri fired.

Back at his apartment after that, Palminteri saw the card he had stuck on the refrigerator with his father’s line: “The saddest thing in life is wasted talent.”

“I said, ‘Well, if they won’t give me a great part, I’ll write one for myself.’ So I went to Thrifty drug store, got five tablets of yellow paper, I came back to my apartment. I said, ‘Well, what am I going to write about?’ I thought about this killing I saw (as a kid) and my relationship with these wiseguys, especially one of them,” he recalls.

Palminteri wrote five minutes of material and performed it for his theater workshop. Everyone loved it.

Encouraged, he kept working. He would write all week and then, on Monday nights, he’d perform what he had by that time.

That process continued for about a year, at which point Palminteri had 90 minutes of what became “A Bronx Tale.” A friend gave him some money to stage the piece, and Palminteri’s rise in Hollywood began.

Making it to Broadway

The fact that “A Bronx Tale” was turned into a movie hasn’t limited its life onstage.

Palminteri took his one-man play version of it to Broadway in 2007.

Less than a decade later, a musical adaptation of “A Bronx Tale” hit Broadway. Palminteri worked with an A-team of artists on that, with De Niro directing alongside Broadway icon Jerry Zaks. Songs were by Alan Menken (whose long list of credits range from “Beauty and the Beast” to “Little Shop of Horrors”) and Glenn Slater. Legendary music executive Tommy Mottola was the lead producer.

‘I AM the guy’

Despite all its iterations, Palminteri says, “People say the one-man show is better than the movie because I AM the guy .. It’s my life. So I’m telling you what happened in my life at that age, and I’m doing all the characters onstage, so it just makes it unique and people just connect with it. Alfred Hitchcock used to say there’s only three things you can do to an audience, and if you do two out of three, you’ve got a great piece. He said you can make them laugh, you can make them cry or you can scare them. That’s it. And I do all three in ‘A Bronx Tale.’ If you see the one-man show, you really see that.”