10 Movie Biopics That Were Far Too Easy On Their Subjects

Goodfellas was almost immediately in the running for one of the best movies of the Nineties. And the decade had just begun.

What's particularly amazing about Goodfellas is how little of the source material needed to be streamlined. Nicolas Pileggi's Wiseguy was an oral history of life in the mob, that of State's Evidence witness Henry Hill. Beyond a few minor changes, the atmosphere and dialogue in the film are taken almost verbatim from Hill and his wife.

Goodfellas never set out to glamourize mafia life, but the seductive nature of working off the books makes it impossible: it just looks better. If it shortchanges audiences as all, it's when Hill (Ray Liotta) and mob boss Paulie (Paul Sorvino) go behind bars. Up until then, Hill had been loyal, but he turns to drugs and running numbers outside of the city.

This is where the book and film differ, as prison is not quite the paradise the film portrays. Nor is Hill as clean-cut and shrewd as he likes to seem. He's a criminal, sure, but in terms of movie-bad, he's relatively harmless.

In reality, he shaved points off basketball games to finance his coke habit and was illiterate until prison. In general, book-Hill comes off a lot less intelligent and more ruthless. His lack of education is not really discussed in the film, but it would have been a handicap. While he was nowhere near Pesci-violent, the good guy mafioso is as much a myth as the sly hitman.