The story is fascinating. Joe Connelly - a 35 year old paramedic from Jackson Heights, New York - drove an ambulance through the harrowing streets of Hell's Kitchen in NYC. For ten years he worked the graveyard shift. Each morning, overdosed on blood and despair, he came home and recorded his experiences, compiling them into a novel based on his life as a paramedic.

In February 1998, Bringing Out the Dead, was published by Alfred Knopf and landed in the lap of Martin Scorsese.

"Driving an ambulance through Manhattan for ten years," Connelly once told me, "prepared me for the numbing, bloody, heartbreaking, gut-wrenching tension of working on a movie set. I went from one mad world to another."

Bringing Out the Dead is the incredible story of Frank Pierce, Connelly’s alter ego – an emotionally and physically exhausted, alcoholic ambulance driver on a downward spiral. A man who turns to self-destructive measures to suppress the awareness that comes with his work: that death and pain are always around the corner.

Though most of us have that knowledge safely tucked away, for paramedics prowling the alleys of one of New York’s worst neighborhoods, there is simply no place to hide it. Death, blood, agony, addiction, murder, and abuse are as commonplace to a paramedic as a copy machine is to a secretary.

In between gunshot wounds and administering CPR, Connelly found time to attend a writing class at Columbia. His excerpts from the novel impressed his teacher so much, he recommended Connelly to a literary agent.

"In January 1996 My agent returned the first draft with a letter on consistency of tone. Thirteen months later I was sitting atop a movie producer's tower in midtown."

So Joe Connelly, regular guy from N.Y., became one of the top 1 percent of people who have an answer to the ubiquitous question: Who would play you in the movie of your life?

Answer: Nicolas Cage.

"I was nodding my head and saying things like, ‘Yes, Tom Cruise would be perfect for the lead role. Sean Penn? He could absolutely do it. Johnny Depp? Of course. Nick? Well Nick is just right.

"I quit the paramedic job a week after that meeting" he says. "The hospital chief was named Rich. In my resignation letter I wrote, 'There comes a time, Rich, and I'm rich, and that's the time.' It became difficult for me to walk down the street without stopping suddenly, uncontrollably, and breaking into feverish laughter."

"In July, Marty and I went for a ride to look for locations," says Connelly, recalling the dreamlike way it all came together. "In ten years as a paramedic in Hell's Kitchen, I saw many extraordinary things. Sitting in a car, discussing movies with Martin Scorsese, was no stranger than the conversation I had with a man who'd been cut in half."

Connelly’s life had suddenly become this weird dream, and he didn’t know what to make of it. Not only was he working with Cage and Scorsese, but also John Goodman, Tom Sizemore, Ving Rhames, and Patricia Arquette. He looked on as they filmed his life.

"They started filming about a year and a half after I quit my job," Connelly told me over a beer in a bar near the filming site. "I watched Nicholas Cage become Frank Pierce every night, and fell right back in. Only now, I was on the outside, watching . . . It was strange."

In front of Connelly’s eyes Frank Pierce and Nicolas Cage merged, until they were nearly indistinguishable.

"Watching him charge into an apartment," says Connelly, "or look at the ghost of the girl he'd helped to kill, made me feel closer to myself than I ever did writing the book."

Last December, I joined Joe on the closed-off Gansevoort Street, where Scorsese’s crew filmed the movie. Gansevoort Street is in the meat packing district of Manhattan. The giant bovine corpses that hung from hooks were a perfect backdrop for the movie’s pivotal scene and eerily symbolic of the slaughterhouse that is Hell’s Kitchen.

In that scene, Frank botches a save and kills a young woman named Rose. He repeatedly calls her, "The girl he helped kill." Her death and visage haunts him while he's negotiating the minefield of a city at war.

The "Death of Rose" scene featured Cage and John Goodman. It was filmed backward and then run forward in the film’s final version, to give it a dreamlike effect. The actors did everything in reverse. They approached the girl backwards, spoke backwards, and tried to save her life backwards. The snow was coming down from the snow machines, and when you see the scene in the theater, the snow is falling up.

"About halfway through writing this book," Joe said, as Goodman and Cage knelt down backwards beside the young girl laying on the sidewalk near the carcasses hanging on hooks, "a teenage girl died in the back of the ambulance. I put her in the book as a flag bearer for all the others I watched go."

The other scene they filmed that day was from inside the ambulance. Frank (Cage) was berating a man that had tried to commit suicide. In the screenplay, that man is called Slit Wrists.

Angry that this man had the nerve to try suicide, while he expended himself saving lives, Frank held out a knife and demanded that he try again. Watching Cage act was intense, like watching a virtuoso violinist. I saw Joe staring at the scene, mesmerized, and wondered what emotions were swirling inside.

"I kept trying to catch him being me," he said. "We’re the same age and we look alike. That's why I felt bad when shooting began. He wasn't Nicholas Cage anymore; he wasn't me; he was Frank Pierce and I wouldn't wish Frank on my worst enemies. He’s a literary figure, half paramedic, half Orpheus, following the young girl he's killed into Hell."

We stood in the cold beside the slit-open ambulance and listened to Nicolas Cage ranting at Slit Wrists. Cage was frightening - shocking. Scorsese was inside a white van watching on a monitor. When he cut, Scorsese emerged from the van, like a lord stepping down from his throne; his assistants and security guards began yelling, "Clear the way, clear the way!" We scampered like children.

Martin Scorsese is a short man, with an assertive posture, and stolid demeanor. Maybe it’s the Napoleon Complex, maybe it’s that you simply cannot direct a movie without being unflinchingly in command; either way, it felt as though we were always under the scrutiny of a domineering father.

"Follow me," Connelly said, after Scorsese wrapped up the ‘Death of Rose,’ scene. "I want a cigarette."

"Can’t you smoke it here? We’re on a city street." I responded.

"Marty’s opposed to smoking," he said. We found a corridor out of Marty’s sight and kept an eye out, as if we were smoking in the boys room.

"I'd hoped writing the book would exorcise the demons," Connelly said exhaling a cloud of smoke into the chilly New York air. "But it only exercised them . . . It wasn't until I sold the movie rights, and had the means to quit the job, that I was able to put some distance between the job and me. After a few months I stopped shaking every time I heard a siren."

Reading Connelly’s novel is a tumultuous affair. With graphic scenes from the beat, he tugs – sometimes yanks - at every reader’s common denominator: the fear and tragedy and comedy of death. To read Bringing Out the Dead is to overload the senses. And that’s just reading the book. What about living it? When does this kind of gruesome saturation result in sensory overload?

"It’s the smells I can't talk about," Joe says. "Every once in a while I'll get a visual flashback - especially in the subway waiting for the train, looking down at the tracks. I used to hate crawling under trains. After about six months away from the job, I asked myself, 'How do those guys do that job?' How did I ever do it?"

Connelly created Frank because he had shut himself down, just like when a victim goes into shock.

"I needed to see the bad calls fresh, through someone else; a guy on the front lines of mortality, without any armor."

Which makes one wonder why. Why would anyone subject themselves to that life, especially knowing its effects, both physical and mental?

"I was attracted to the ambulance thing because I always liked the idea of living some life before you sit down to write," Joe says. "And because it still had some of that pre-modern honor to it . . . Go in there and save lives."

How’s this for a string of coincidences? Connelly’s parents met in Saint Clare hospital in Manhattan. Saint Clare is the hospital Joe would later work for as a paramedic. Joe’s mother was a nurse, his father was a bus driver. And Joe is their son: A bus driving nurse.

"How could I not end up a paramedic, working in the hospital where so many Connelly’s were born and died?"

Joe Connelly’s rise is not the slow, arduous climb to the top. Joe’s is that other American fairy-tale. The story of a man who charged into life (and death), and who wrote one novel - the siren still ringing in his ears - and saw that novel reach the pinnacle: a movie deal with the King of Movies.

"The movie gave me the money to quit and write full time. There's been so much to celebrate; the celebrating has been killing me. I couldn't even write during the shooting; I drank too much. But when it was over, it was like I could finally close the movie on the book and I charged into writing the next one."

"The next one" promises to be every bit as extraordinary as the first. With the experiences Connelly is stacking up, the reputation he has earned from Bringing Out the Dead, his shocking poetic prose, and his quirky idea for the upcoming novel, entitled Crumbtown, Connelly should have another winner on his hands.