PaulLieberman

I found him to be very nice, unaffected and serious about his acting. Though this was an action film, in which a lot of the action is over-the-top, and not meant to be realistic, he even would question whether little bits seemed plausible...like how Josh Brolin slides him a Tommy gun clip in the final big shootout. They actually changed the bit after Ryan questioned it.

My position is I'm for it.

Goslir did meet the two sons of the real Jerry Wooters and was eager to hear about their "old man". In fact they told him how the real Jerry Wooters would flick the ashes from his cigarette into his pants cuffs--so Ryan started doing that during the filming. I'm not sure it ever made it onto the screen. As for Penn, he definitely played the character of Mickey Cohen his way...very BIG, as critics have noted, like a Batman or James Bond villain. The real Mickey was not like that--he was a showman--but Penn's portrayal more was a riff on the tradition of Gangster Films. This one is set in 1949, the year Warner Bros released "White Heat" in which Jimmy Cagney winds up atop an oil refinery shouting, "Made it, Ma, Top of the World." real big, in other words. That film was based loosely on the Ma Barker gang, by the way....but no Barker ever bought it that way!

I re-read Gatsby every year or two just to earn the right to again read the final two pages, which leave me in awe every time, and totally humbled.

Right, that still was the era of White Men Rule. As I write in the book version of Gangster Squad, blacks back then weren't part of the club, they got the club. But the real O'Mara really did have a friendly rivalry with the pioneering black officer Tom Bradley, who went on to become L.A.'s mayor. They used to race each other from Police Academy days on. O'Mara thought he was fast but Bradley was faster, a former college track star, in fact.