Joanne de Simone is an author, dramatist, and film historian. Her Judy's Dead took first prize in last year's Writer's Digest Stage Play competition, and The Suicide Angel is currently in feature film pre-production. Joanne's film review column appeared in the Fire Island News (1998-2004). In progress is a nonfiction novel, Songs from Under the El: Memories of Life in the Dark. She invites major animated film studios to consider a screen adaptation of her children's book The Metro Cats: Life in the Core of the Big Apple. See her website, The Writing Desk. 
“Together with his unobstructed panorama of those mean streets, and his long relationship with religion, Scorsese’s character was shaped. It infused in him just the right amount of guilt to develop stories about the struggle between good and evil and that dangerous place in between — not bad enough for hell, not good enough for heaven.”
