THE NEW HOLLYWOOD was a small town where everyone knew everyone, and eventually Schrader met Scorsese. But in those days, Scorsese hadn’t yet made it, and Schrader, with his career always at the front of his mind, gravitated to the more successful members of the group. He had been introduced to De Palma by the ubiquitous Jay Cocks at the Fox screening room in New York, a magnificent CinemaScope theater called the Scheherazade, way over on the West Side. Schrader had recently given a favorable review to De Palma’s film Sisters, featuring Kidder and Salt, in LA. Later, De Palma brought Schrader home to the Salt-Kidder house where he was living with Kidder. “This odd little character arrived at ten in the morning, banging on the door, and woke us up with a large bottle of scotch, which he slammed on the table, and then proceeded to follow Brian around like a lapdog,” she remembers. “I thought he was pretty weird. I couldn’t stand having him around, hated him. I wanted to be with Brian and there would be Schrader, smitten. He was someone who didn’t like women. Brian was the guy all the guys wanted to be.”
Schrader understood immediately that he was in his element. He says, “I’m basically depressive, cynical, prone to intellectualization. Therefore I got along with Marty and Brian perfectly.” He was drawn to those like himself: displaced New Yorkers, crazies, artists. As producer Howard Rosenman puts it, “Paul was never a friend of the ordinary. He was attracted to neurotic, guilt-ridden Catholics, Jews—and Japanese.” Schrader had written an impenetrable book about Ozu, Dreyer, and Bresson (later he would get a vanity license plate that said “OZU”), and was regarded, along with De Palma, as the intellectual of the group.
Schrader also attached himself to John Milius, who was the most successful of the regulars at the beach. After Apocalypse Now, he had written Jeremiah Johnson, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, and a draft of Dirty Harry. He had also done a creditable job directing his first feature, Dillinger, although the picture had flopped. He valiantly flaunted his right-wing credentials, and did what he could to épater les movie brats. Milius, like Schrader, was a guys’ guy; women found him hard to take. “It was impossible to relate to John, because he was this enormous blowhard,” says Gloria Katz. “So unless you were gonna sit there and be enthralled by him for hours and hours on end, it was incredibly boring.”
Says Rosenman, “Schrader was attracted to that male energy, Hemingwayesque thing of Milius’s, as well as that self-destructive, killing himself, writer thing.” Adds Kit Carson, “Schrader was in love with Milius, no two ways about it. He imitated Milius’s behavior, the idea being, if you acted crazy, it scared people and they would respect you.”
Women didn’t like Schrader, didn’t appreciate his finer points. He had a crush on Kidder. One night, the two of them were driving along Sunset in his car to meet Brian at a screening. “Kiss me! Kiss me!” he implored, out of the blue. She pulled away, said, “I’m not going to kiss you, are you crazy?” Paul was crushed, felt like he must display the mark of Cain. She slept with everything in pants—except him. He slammed on the brakes and put the car into a 360 spin. “He scared the wits out of me,” says Kidder. “I pecked him on the cheek, he pulled the car out of the spin and drove to the screening.”
Like Kidder, Sandy Weintraub couldn’t stand Schrader: “Paul was a very messed up human being. When he left his apartment, he went to a bar and sat there and drank all night.”
The feeling was mutual. “I didn’t see what Marty saw in her,” says Schrader. “She wasn’t really attractive, and she wasn’t funny, and she couldn’t keep up with the conversation when the film references started flying back and forth. Those were my criteria for having someone around. But Marty was a man who needed a woman, and he would rather be with someone he was in trouble with, or not getting along with, than be alone. So he was always going immediately on to the next.”
MEAN STREETS, which Scorsese’s agent, Harry Ufland, was still shopping around (eventually, it would go through something like twenty-seven drafts), was still called Season of the Witch. Cocks renamed it, borrowing a phrase from Raymond Chandler. Corman offered Scorsese $150,000 toward shooting Mean Streets, but only if he agreed to rewrite the script for a black cast, so the picture could exploit the popularity of Shaft and its spin-offs. Scorsese refused. Cocks’s wife, Verna Bloom, an actress who was featured in The Hired Hand and Wexler’s Medium Cool, had introduced Scorsese to Taplin, an ex-road manager for Bob Dylan and the Band. Taplin wanted to get into films and told Scorsese he could raise the money to produce Mean Streets. The script had two meaty roles, Charlie, the Marty surrogate, written for Keitel, and Johnny Boy, the loudmouth pal with the loose screws.
Marty had also met Robert De Niro through Bloom, who had acted with her in a Jack Gelber play. Both men were invited to a dinner party at Jay and Verna’s home on East 70th Street, decorated with a collection of Indian baskets from the Southwest that Bloom had collected during the shoot of The Hired Hand. Scorsese and De Niro had grown up within a few blocks of each other, but they were barely acquainted, probably because De Niro, the son of an artist, was raised in a middle-class, bohemian home. Although De Niro and Scorsese were poles apart, each wanted what the other had, and they hit it off immediately. Says Cocks, “Bob’s way of rebelling was by getting into this heavy street thing, and Marty couldn’t believe the kind of life Bob was raised in that put such an emphasis on creativity—it was like paradise, like liberation.”
De Niro was very serious about acting, didn’t hang out, didn’t make small talk. In fact, he didn’t talk at all. He was so shy he was next door to autistic, which made it hard for him to get work. “You couldn’t get De Niro arrested,” recalls casting director Nessa Hyams. “We schlepped him into every reading for every director we could, and he wouldn’t talk, and we’d go, ‘But he’s so talented,’ and the director would go, ‘Thank you, next!’” Says Sandy Weintraub, “Communicating with Bob involved a lot of gestures and touching, very few words. He used to sit on a couch at parties and fall asleep.”
De Niro read the script, turned down the role of Johnny Boy, the out-of-control, “funny in the head” neighborhood nut. He said he wanted to play Charlie, torn between the church and the mob. (The backers wanted a star—Jon Voight—for the role, but Voight wasn’t interested.) Scorsese held fast to Keitel. De Niro changed his mind, agreed to do Johnny Boy.
The budget for Mean Streets was in the neighborhood of $600,000. Most of the movie—the interiors—were shot in L.A. in the fall of 1972. “In order to get the picture made I had to learn how to make a movie,” says Scorsese. “I didn’t learn how to make a movie in film school. What you learned in film school was to express yourself with pictures and sound. But learning to make a movie is totally different. That’s the people with the production board, the schedule. That means you gotta get up at five in order to be there, you gotta feed the people.”
Before going to L.A., Scorsese shot six days and nights in New York, the exteriors and some of the key interiors, the staircases in the tenements of Little Italy, the cemetery at Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral that could not be replicated in L.A. There was virtually no money. Scorsese raised a crew of NYU students. “The kids were quite young,” he continues. “The scene with the two gay guys in the car, two whole setups were lost, including Bob’s close-up, because one of the assistant cameramen just forgot where he had put the film. Then he left. ‘Forget it, I’m too tired. I want to go home.’ I had to piece the whole thing together. Bobby fires a gun off the roof toward the Empire State Building, but the window that the bullet hits was in Los Angeles.” Scorsese was so tense he wore white gloves throughout the shoot to stop himself from biting his nails.
Scorsese did not get much help from people in the old neighborhood. “It was easier for Francis to come into my neighborhood and shoot than it was for me. They were very paranoid. ‘Who does he think he is? He’s one of us. We don’t want cameras here.’ It was a very, very closed society. You had to make deals with everybody. By the end of it, when my father heard about it, he
came to me and said, ‘You should have talked to me. I could have spoken to so-and-so and so-and-so. And then he would have talked to so-and-so’s father. And we could have made a deal with such-and-such.’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t want to get you involved with it.’ When they sent the bill, it was $5,000. So I asked Francis, and he gave me the $5,000. As soon as the picture was picked up, I paid Francis back.”
After a screening of the rough cut of Mean Streets, Weintraub, Scorsese, De Niro, and a few others repaired to a restaurant for what Weintraub assumed would be a group dissection of the film, except that De Niro and Scorsese disappeared into the men’s room for two and a half hours and hashed it out between themselves. Says Weintraub, “What Marty and Bob did together, they did in private. Definitely no women allowed.”
Helping one another was a deeply ingrained habit among the New Hollywood filmmakers. Nevertheless, the flames of competitiveness burned hot and deep, if not always visibly. As Scorsese puts it, “There was always a fine line, where maybe one person was getting more attention than the other. But if the person who’s getting less attention sees your rough cut, he could steer you in a negative way on purpose. Without evening realizing it. Because of the jealousy. It was very difficult.” Adds George Litto, who produced for De Palma later in the decade, “Brian never believed he was as successful as Marty, Francis, or George. That made him very uncomfortable.” De Palma advised him to get rid of one of the best scenes in the movie, the improv between De Niro and Keitel in the back room of the club that would get Calley’s attention. He said, “It’s just wasting time. Take it out.” Scorsese did, but luckily Cocks told him to put it back, and he did that too. “Brian was more in the mainstream,” adds Scorsese. “He was the one who talked very often about what would work in the marketplace. And like fools we thought Mean Streets would work in the marketplace. But we were making a different kind of film. We just didn’t know that.”
GRAFFITI PREVIEWED IN Lucas territory, at the Northpoint Theater in San Francisco on January 28, 1973. Tanen flew in on a commercial airline, the same flight as Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, and Jeff Berg. He was in one of his black moods. “Ned wouldn’t sit with us on the airplane and he wouldn’t share a cab to the theater,” said Robbins. “He was furious before he even saw the movie.”
It was a dream screening. Recalls Marcia, “The movie started, and the minute “Rock Around the Clock” came on, people just started whooping and hollering, and when Charlie Martin Smith drives in on a Vespa and bangs into the wall, the audience laughed! They were with the film all the way, and at the end, they were on their feet and applauded. Francis and George and I were all euphoric. We were in the back row, and suddenly this man stood up and said, very loudly and very clearly, ‘This film is unreleasable.’ I was in a state of shock.”
Tanen discounted the audience response, thought to himself, This place is filled with George’s friends. He cornered producer Gary Kurtz in the lobby: “This is in no shape to show to an audience. You should have shown it to us first. I went to bat for you, and you let me down.” Wheeling around to face Coppola, who had just parted the sea of people surrounding him and Kurtz, he continued, angrily, “I’m very disturbed, we really have to get together, we have a lot to do.” Coppola looked at George, thought, He’s cowering on the side, sort of hiding. Scared. It’s up to me.
“What are you talking about?” Coppola demanded, his voice shaking with anger. “You were just in the theater for the last two hours, didn’t you just see and hear what we all just saw and heard? What about the laughter?”
“I’ve got notes. We’ll have to see if we can release it.”
“You’ll see if you can release it?” roared Coppola, apoplectic. “You should go down on your knees and thank George for saving your job. This kid has killed himself to make this movie for you. He brought it in on time and on schedule. The least you can do is thank him for that.” Francis whipped out a checkbook, and offered to buy the picture from Universal on the spot, saying, “If you hate it that much, let it go, we’ll set it up someplace else, and get you all your money back.” Tanen abruptly dashed to his limo and left for the airport. He thought Coppola was grandstanding. “Francis, who would have rather not even been involved with the movie, suddenly decided to become the godfather,” he says. Tanen and Coppola didn’t speak again for twenty years.
After it was all over, George called Willard and Gloria, devastated. He said, “I don’t know what to do, this picture—people are responding off the wall, and they keep telling me they’re going to put it on television.” But he was pleased with Francis. He says now, “Francis really stood up to Ned. I had given him a bad time when the Warners thing came down over THX, I really held that against him—‘You’re gonna let them cut it, you’re not gonna go down there and stop ’em?’ and when Graffiti came along, I said, ‘Here we go again,’ but Francis did what he was supposed to do. I was pretty proud of him.”
ONE DAY, while Paul Schrader was playing chess with De Palma, he casually mentioned that he had written a script called Taxi Driver. It follows the nocturnal wanderings of a cabbie—a violent, alienated Vietnam vet—through Times Square as he encounters a variety of human offal and routinely cleans the blood and come off his back seat. He gets a crush on a blond campaign worker, and his attention wanders between her and Iris, a twelve-year-old hooker. The story climaxes in a bloodbath, as he blows away Iris’s pimp and Johns in an attempt to redeem her.
“I read the whole thing out loud to Jennifer and Jill Clayburgh one morning on Trancas beach,” says De Palma. “I thought it was unbelievable, great writing, a great fucking script, but I couldn’t see how to direct it. I said, ‘Who is ever going to go see this? This is so crazy.’”
De Palma passed the Taxi Driver script to producer Michael Phillips, who lived with his wife, Julia, in a big, sprawling four-bedroom house on the bluff just down the beach from Margot and Jennifer. They, along with Tony Bill, had just finished Steelyard Blues, produced by Richard Zanuck and David Brown for Warners, and were prepping The Sting, also produced by Zanuck and Brown, now at Universal. Both films were written by David Ward.
People drifted over from the Salt-Kidder house enveloped in a haze of marijuana smoke. Julia’s office wardrobe was much the same as her beach wardrobe: jeans and a T-shirt. She wore her hair cropped short, making her look all of seventeen. But when she opened her mouth it was a different story. She swore like a stevedore. Director John Landis, who had just come to Hollywood and was in his early twenties, remembers her working the phone: “It was like, ‘Tell him I’ll rip his cock off and shove it up his fucking ass, you motherfucker,’ language that was just Satanic in its profanity.” Says Salt, “Julia had a real eye for spotting talent, and she would throw herself bodily upon it. In truth, though, I was a little bit contemptuous of Julia, because she was on the other side: to me, she was a business lady, she was management. I didn’t understand why anybody was so intrigued by numbers and deals and phone calls, it was Redford this, and Begelman that. I was sort of a ’60s queen, and she liked people that I couldn’t fathom, people that to me were the sleaziest of sleaze.”
Adds Kidder, “In those days, of course, agents were people that you looked down on and you didn’t have anything to do with. Once Janet Margolin brought Freddie Fields up to the house. He arrived in a Rolls-Royce with a driver. We were just disgusted at this overt display of nouveau riche capitalism. He saw our bottles of Almaden and Red Mountain and promptly announced that he would send his driver back for some better wine. We were just horrified. We ostracized the poor girl and made fun of her for weeks. There was a code of what you did and didn’t do. And you certainly didn’t date an agent. And you didn’t flash wealth, you didn’t care about it, you didn’t do things for money. You did things because you felt artistically compelled to do them.
“The secret that we all held in our hearts that no one revealed to each other was how ragingly ambitious we all were. That was the sense of recognition, like when dogs sniff each
other out, recognition of a fellow traveler, someone who was going down the path toward success, not ruthlessly, the way these young, poof-dried agents did, but with some integrity, but still determined to get there. So for any of us to have posed, which we did, as hippies, political activists, or all-the-way spiritual beings seeking Babarambooboo or whatever, a higher life, was nonsensical.”
Salt was right about Julia. She was ruthless, knew what she wanted, and let nothing stand in her way. One time she went to New York with Don Simpson to supervise the trailer for Steelyard Blues. Both were staying at the Sherry Netherland. “Julia ‘Yes, I am a genius’ Phillips blackmailed me,” says Simpson. “We were at the hotel, in the elevator. She said, ‘If you don’t come to my room and fuck me, I will get on the phone tomorrow and get you fired.’ I thought, No, I’m not. A) I don’t want to fuck you. B) You’re married to a man I really like, Michael Phillips. I said, ‘I don’t do that.’ Homey don’t play that. I went to my room and she called me. Called me, called me, called me. Finally I went upstairs. She was smoking a huge joint. I saw my opportunity, figured maybe if I could get high with her, it’d take her mind off it. So I did a couple of hits. Boom, boom. I managed to eat pussy rather than fuck her, much to my credit, and got her off. I gave my body for my career. Thank you, Anita Hill.”
Says Julia, “It’s not true. I would never have fired anyone over sexual favors. I didn’t care enough about sex.”
Michael Phillips loved Taxi Driver, and passed it along to Julia and Tony Bill. They optioned it for $1,000. (Later, they would reward De Palma with a point, as a finder’s fee.) But within a few months, Bill and the Phillipses came to a parting of the ways. “The partnership foundered on what I later discovered to be Julia’s drug use,” says Bill. “She was very bright and could verbally wrestle to the ground anyone who she felt was standing in her way. She would yell, ride roughshod over people. I couldn’t stand to be partners with someone for whom I had to apologize so often to so many people.” They divided up their projects. Taxi Driver stayed with the Phillipses.
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 36
