All in the Timing

If you’ve seen director Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas,” it’s hard to forget a complex, four-minute sequence that shows Ray Liotta’s character literally descending into the depths and transient rewards of underworld life.

The seamless, fluid-like sequence--Scorsese’s idea--begins when Liotta hands his car keys to an attendant outside of the Copacabana nightclub, then escorts his date (Lorraine Bracco) through the club’s labyrinthine passageways and busy kitchen, greeting and pressing bills into the hands of the friendly staff along the way. Then into the crowded ballroom, where the maitre d’ seats the couple just in time to catch the opening of comedian Henny Youngman’s act (“Take my wife . . . please”).

Cited for special praise by critics, those few minutes of movie magic required more than 400 extras, half a dozen takes and many more rehearsals to pin down the precise timing, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus tells us.

Ballhaus shot the footage in one continuous take harnessed with a Steadicam, a special camera balanced in a way that eliminates bounce.

“The excitement is that you go through so many different moods in one, constantly flowing scene,” Ballhaus explains. “It’s like someone walks into a room and everything is happening at this moment.”

Ballhaus says it took several tries for the huge cast to get the cues and moves down--and that Youngman flubbed his opening lines a few times, causing the entire scene to be reshot.