As you know (because you read Cracked ), Hollywood loves taking liberties when turning real people's lives into movies. Why, they could take the same story and adapt it into a drama and a completely unrelated comedy. Or into a children's musical and a violent action flick. We know this they have in fact done that -- and more. Here are a bunch of wildly different movies you didn't know are based on the exact same people:

5 The Mob Informant From Goodfellas Had Previously Inspired A Wacky Steve Martin Comedy

GoodFellas is a brutal, violent, swear-filled Martin Scorsese kill-fest that's firmly cemented on the Mt. Rushmore of mob movies. Among its many accolades, it earned Joe Pesci an Academy Award for "Actor Most Likely to Murder a Member of the Academy If We Don't Give Him an Oscar." It's an all-time classic, in or outside the genre of Italian-Americans shooting people in the face.

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Less remembered is a movie that came out only a month earlier: My Blue Heaven, a comedy about Steve Martin as an eccentric New York mobster annoying the hell out of everyone in a quiet little town. It's pretty much the polar opposite of Goodfellas. Which is weird, because they're both based on the life of the same (wise) guy.

Warner Bros.

Warner Bros.

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Side note: How has Ray Liotta aged 700 years since this movie, while Steve Martin remains the same?

For those unaware, Goodfellas is based on the book Wiseguy, the detailed confessions of mobster turned FBI informant Henry Hill (the Liotta character). While co-author Nick Pileggi was working on the book, he was married to Nora Ephron, best known for writing movies about Meg Ryan hooking up with Tom Hanks via various methods of communication. Sometimes, when Hill called Pileggi for their interviews, Ephron would answer the phone and they'd shoot the shit about life in witness protection. Unbeknownst to Hill, Ephron wasn't just being friendly; she was researching My Blue Heaven. According to Hill, he didn't realize the stuff he was saying would end up being repeated by Steve Martin in a cheesy "New York Mafia guy" accent.

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"Don't worry, your secret habit of dancing the Merengue with men who look like Rick Moranis is safe with me."

So you could say that Scorsese's profane, ultra-violent murderpalooza is a prequel to this lighthearted little comedy. Goodfellas ends with Hill going into witness protection in a boring suburban town, which is the starting point of My Blue Heaven. Both movies even have scenes in which the protagonist finds out the local restaurants don't offer a decent marinara sauce. It's sort of an Antz / A Bug's Life situation, if Antz featured the Woody Allen ant pistol-whipping a guy to death and digging up his dismembered corpse, and A Bug's Life was A Bug's Life.