Martin Scorsese can make anybody cooler.

Whenever word gets out that a film adaptation is being planned for a book the response is usually something to the tune of, "time for Hollywood to ruin another book." While it's true that there have been some heinously godawful book-to-movie adaptations over the years I don't think it's fair to label Hollywood as the ruiner of all things good from the realm of literature. Let's face it, occasionally a filmmaker will put together an adaptation of a book that ends up being so good it borders on perfect.

But I'm  not talking about the time that filmmaker from New Zealand directed that little hobbits and elves trilogy that generated the tiniest amount of buzz when it was released earlier this decade. Not that those movies weren't decent or anything, it's just that they don't have a whole lot to do with journalism - although I'm sure you could find somebody who'd argue that they do.

No, in this case I'm talking about a book called Wiseguy written in the mid 80s by New York crime journalist Nicolas Pileggi. In 1990 this Hollywood guy called Martin Scorsese came along and had the nerve to adapt it into one of the most spectacularly entertaining movies of all time.

Like Francis Ford Coppola had done before him with The Godfather, Scorsese had taken this story of life in the New York mafia and given it a perfect cinematic representation. In the case of both films they represent an almost sublime synergy of direction, performances, cinematography, editing and music. Where they differ though, is in their realism and tone. The Godfather is far more theatrical and operatic whereas Goodfellas is far more lifelike and more akin to a punk rock record.

But one thing I've had on my mind since watching Goodfellas again last week is whether or not Scorsese's vision of Pileggi's book distorts the images of the people Pileggi was originally trying to portray. While Scorsese's direction hasn't exactly painted the characters as honorable or misunderstood, the sheer density of cinematic cool he's injected into the film through its cinematography, editing and soundtrack has given the criminals something of a rockstar quality.

In one scene for instance, you've got Robert DeNiro silently plotting the murder of another character while the camera slowly pushes in on his face and Cream's Sunshine of Your Love plays over the top of the scene. It's one of the many examples of this cool mood and atmosphere that Pileggi wouldn't have been able to create in the book.

So again, although Scorsese isn't exactly aggrandising these characters, he has, to an extent, given them more charm than they might have had in the pages of Pileggi's text. Which makes me wonder what sort of implications this has (if any) from a journalistic perspective. After all, Pileggi's Wiseguy remains a highly acclaimed piece of literary journalism, but how does its film adaptation compare to say, the 1967 film of In Cold Blood starring Robert Blake? A film that, by all accounts, was far less stylised than Goodfellas and far more reflective of its source material.

Granted, the film industry is all about entertainment and it's a filmmaker's responsibility to use all of the tools in his repertoire to the best of his ability in order to, hopefully, create the best film he can. Scorsese did that with Goodfellas. But what sort of responsibilities does Hollywood have when it comes to adapting books that were based on true events? At what point does a filmmaker risk making martyrs out of murderers?