Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  Scorsese wanted to direct Taxi Driver, but when he showed Boxcar Bertha to Schrader, Paul just rolled his eyes. “Paul was never really gracious to me at all, he was abrasive,” recalls Scorsese. Marty had wanted to direct The Yakuza as well, a script Paul had just sold, but Schrader scoffed, insisted he wanted a “Tiffany” director. Says Schrader, “I was blind to the value around me. I took people for granted. I don’t think I was as impressed by Marty as I was by Brian, ‘cause Brian was more outgoing. Marty is extraordinarily secretive about his true feelings.” Scorsese was hurt, furious.

  Michael and Julia were no more impressed with Scorsese than Schrader was. But he hung in, reminding Julia, “Don’t forget, I want to do Taxi Driver.” She replied, “Come back when you’ve done something besides Boxcar Bertha.” Not that it made much difference. It was still impossible to get a studio to commit to this dark, violent, uncommercial script. None of the principals had enough clout. Michael and Julia had nothing to show for themselves. Steelyard Blues flopped without honor, failing even to generate reviews. The Sting had yet to open. The Taxi Driver script scared everyone. “It hung in limbo for two, three years,” Paul remembers. “Every studio said, ‘This is a great script, and somebody should make it—but not us.’”

  AFTER MEAN STREETS was completed, Marty got on a plane and went up to San Francisco and showed Coppola the print in his screening room. “That’s when Francis first saw De Niro,” he recalls. “And immediately, he put him in Godfather II.” Marty found Francis enveloped in a cloud of sycophants who were fiercely jealous of outsiders. One, says Weintraub, particularly attentive, would follow him into the bathroom two steps behind him. “I don’t think Francis could fart without him catching it.” On one occasion, he slammed the door of Francis’s limo in Marty’s face. “He treated us like dirt,” says Weintraub. “When all of a sudden Marty’s career was on the rise, he became Mr. Wonderful.” Marty and Sandy slept in the attic of Coppola’s Victorian. Recalls Scorsese, “Francis woke us up in the morning, blowing a trumpet, with his robe open.”

  Scorsese and Taplin took Mean Streets to Cannes in May. “Marty, Bobby, and I were introduced to Fellini,” recalls Taplin. “When his distributor came into the room to pay homage to the maestro, Fellini said, ‘Ah, you should buy his film, it’s the greatest American film in the last ten years.’ He hadn’t even seen it.”

  With a foreign sale, Taplin was in an expansive mood. He invited everyone for lunch to Le Moulin de Mougins, a four-star restaurant in the hills above Cannes. De Niro was there with his female companion of the moment. “Bobby always had girlfriend trouble,” says Taplin. “He picked these incredibly strong girls, top chicks, always black, and then he’d fight with them all the time. They would always be in tears the next morning, and he would buy them some perfume.”

  Marty, Sandy, De Niro, and the others were in the middle of an extraordinary meal when a bee the size of a small hummingbird buzzed the table. Sandy tried to ignore it, but it was making her nervous, and finally she called the waiter over, said, “This bee is bothering me,” asked him to do something about it. The waiter took his towel off his arm and flicked it at the bee, which dropped stone dead into De Niro’s girlfriend’s water glass. She became hysterical, exclaiming loudly, “He killed the bee! A living thing! I can’t believe this guy killed the bee!”

  “Will you can it?” said De Niro, annoyed.

  “What do you mean? You’re gonna just let him kill this bee?”

  “It’s just a fucking bee!” They were starting to attract the attention of the other guests. De Niro was getting angrier, said loudly, “Will you shut the fuck up?”

  “Why are you talking to me like that?”

  They started screaming at each other, until De Niro said, “Why don’t you take a fucking hike?”

  “Goddamn right I will!” She stormed out of the restaurant.

  Le Moulin de Mougins is twenty miles from nowhere. De Niro turned to Marty and the others and said, “Ahh, let her fucking walk, she’ll come back.” They finished their meal, called a cab, and sure enough, about five miles down the road, there she was, walking back to Cannes. De Niro said to her, “Get in.” They sulked all the way back. The next morning he bought her a big bottle of perfume.

  Mean Streets premiered at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 1973. “We were broke, beyond broke, really busted,” remembers Sandy. “Harry Ufland gave me his credit card so I could buy one dress for the interviews, and I had to wash it every night, iron it on the floor. The night it opened was one of the most exciting events of my life. They laughed where they were supposed to laugh, gasped where they were supposed to gasp. At the end of the movie, they shined a light on the box. Marty got a standing ovation. The New York Times gave it a rave. When we got back to the hotel, there was a stack of messages a foot high from people wanting Marty to direct their pictures.”

  A few nights later, they were at a Critics Award dinner at the Ginger Man, down the street from Lincoln Center. De Niro brought Diahnne Abbott, whom he had been seeing for some time. “Diahnne was in a conversation with François Truffaut,” recalls Sandy. “Bobby was very jealous. He saw them talking and put a chair down behind Truffaut and straddled it. Truffaut finally realized that there was somebody behind him, and got up and said, ‘Excuse me’ and left. Bobby jumped up and said, ‘What did he want? What did he want?’ I was thinking, That was Truffaut. Who cares what he wanted? We’re just punk kids here. You should be very happy.”

  SISTERS HAD BEEN PRODUCED by Ed Pressman. Extremely close to his mother, Pressman was using money from the family toy business to produce. He was short and socially maladroit. Stories about his faux pas abounded. One night, at a party, he was holding a glass of scotch in his hand when actor John Lithgow asked him the time. He instantly turned his wrist, dumping the scotch into his lap. It was easy not to take Ed seriously, and most people didn’t. Says Salt, “Ed was totally spaced out, it appeared he had no idea what he was doing. We all felt the boys brought him along for the ride because he was a rich boy and his mother would bail them out of any trouble that they got into, so they played movies.” Brian used to call him “Sparky” behind his back. Pressman was extremely tight with money, and when Brian had to sue him for dollars owed on Sisters, he stopped calling him “Sparky,” and started referring to him as “the weasel.” Sisters generally got good reviews, and it made its money back on the TV sale alone. Brian was on his way.

  Jake Brackman introduced Pressman to Terry Malick, his dear friend and classmate at Harvard. A burly young man, barrel-chested and bearded, Malick looked a little like Peter Boyle with hair. He was shy and introverted, said very little. Malick came from Texas. His father was an executive with Phillips Petroleum, and he had two younger brothers, Chris and Larry. Larry went to Spain to study guitar with Segovia, a taskmaster of legendary proportions. In the summer of 1968, Terry learned that his brother had broken his own hands, apparently distraught over his studies. Terry’s father asked him to go over to Spain to help Larry. Terry refused. The father went himself, and returned with Larry’s body. He had apparently committed suicide. Terry, as the eldest son, had inherited the birthright. He was the one who went to Harvard and became the Rhodes Scholar, and now when his youngest brother needed him most, he hadn’t been there. He always bore a heavy burden of guilt.

  Malick had written a script called Badlands. He wanted Pressman to finance it. Brian had studied Pressman with the intensity of a zoologist, and gave Malick some advice. Pressman’s unprepossessing manner seemed to invite cudgeling from the boys in the upper form, as it were, and De Palma suggested alternating flattery with abuse. Malick, who was twice Pressman’s size, was reputed to have once pulled himself out of a chair by grabbing Pressman’s ear and hauling himself up with it.

  Malick persuaded Pressman to finance Badlands, based on the story of the 1958 Midwest killing-spree of Charlie Starkweather, and his girlfriend, fourteen-year-old Caril Ann Fugate, starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. It was shot
on a shoestring, $350,000 in out-of-pocket costs in Colorado. They didn’t even have enough money to see dailies. This was Malick’s first time out as a director, but he was determined to do it his way. One time, he said to a crew member, “I’ll put [the actor] in front of the window so when it gets dark you can continue shooting, you’ll have more light.”

  “Terry, you can put him wherever you want, we’ll light it.”

  “Don’t tell me, I’ve made two 8mm films.”

  In the script, the couple burns the girl’s parents’ home to the ground. The crew guy spread highly flammable glue all over the set, which may not have been properly ventilated, allowing fumes to accumulate. An assistant lit the match too soon, creating an inferno. The crew guy ran through the flames across the set to get out as the small-town fire department watched the flames, mesmerized, instead of starting the pumper engine. Hiring a Learjet with a doctor and nurse to fly him to a burn center in Southern California cost around $3,000. Jill Jakes, Malick’s wife, allegedly refused to sign a check, ostensibly saying, “We’re way over budget. We don’t have money for that.” Lou Stroller, the production manager, said to her, “If you were a fucking man, I’d put you right through that plate glass window.” He paid for the plane out of his own money. (Jakes’s recollection of the event is not clear, but she says, “I would never have said, ‘No, that man is not going on a plane to a hospital.’ “)

  Malick was obsessed with the movie. Eventually running out of money, he continued shooting pickup scenes himself with the help of a couple of locals.

  When it was finished, Pressman auctioned the film. It cost about $450,000, excluding $500,000 or so in deferred salaries. Brackman introduced Malick to Bert Schneider, who made some key calls, coached them on how to proceed. He felt they could have gotten more: “They didn’t listen, didn’t have the courage to walk out of the office.” Calley bought it for $1.1 million, which just about covered the budget.

  •

  TAPLIN, buoyed by the reception of Mean Streets at the New York Film Festival, wanted to open it right away, in twenty-five cities, the same release pattern as Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show, which had also been launched by the festival. He went to Bert for advice. Bert said, “Do it, because there’s nothing opening in October except The Way We Were, and that isn’t going to make a cent.” Luckily, Taplin ignored him, but it didn’t make much difference. It was released in late fall to critical raves. Kael was enthusiastic in The New Yorker, which instantly established Scorsese as a major talent. “Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking,” she wrote, and later called it “the best American movie of 1973.”

  Recalls Taplin, “She’d never written a review like that in her life. It was amazing. There were lines around the Cinema I the next day. Kael made Mean Streets, made Marty, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Studio executives liked to get their hip card punched too, so if Pauline said that this was great, it was great for them as well. They could take that around, because in those days they weren’t having dick-measuring contests with the box office numbers on Monday mornings; they were more into like, Who’s got the hot film? Who’s got the film that everybody’s talking about?”

  In fact, Mean Streets was one of a kind, a bravura directorial performance. Nothing quite like it had ever been seen before. Scorsese had taken Manoogian’s admonishments to heart. From the opening home movie credit sequence to the shaky handheld camera scenes of Charlie in bed to the wild “This guy is a fuckin’ mook” brawl in the club done in one, long, breathtaking shot, Scorsese recorded life as he knew it. Mean Streets veers between a sense of raw documentary authenticity and a hallucinatory feverishness. If Bogdanovich gave us a coming-of-age story as John Ford might have done it, Scorsese gave us one as the Maysles brothers might have done it, and Sam Fuller—lurid and violent. If Mean Streets is a gangster film, a genre film, it is so in name only. Altman overturned genres by mocking and ironizing them; Scorsese did it by injecting them with so much intensity that the traditional conventions are split asunder, revealed for what they were: artificial formulas with little claim on our attention. If Bogdanovich and Platt thought they were introducing a new realism to their coming-of-age story—and they were—Mean Streets put Picture Show in a new light, no lesser for it, but different, making Bogdanovich’s film look more stylized and elegiac. Just consider how Picture Show sentimentalizes the relationship between Sonny and the simple-minded Billy to score easy points for Sonny, while Mean Streets has no illusions about Johnny Boy, particularly in the extraordinary scene where he cruelly asks Charlie, “What happens when she comes?”—because his girlfriend is an epileptic—as Charlie beats his head against a wall.

  The redemptive quality of mercy is all the more powerful in Scorsese’s film because Johnny Boy is undeserving. The bloody climax makes the bittersweet conclusion of Picture Show comforting by comparison. Whereas Sonny leaves town, then comes back to face the woman he injured, finding solace and a measure of maturity in her forgiveness, Charlie flees the neighborhood to save Johnny Boy, but is wounded too, dragged down with him, and fails to escape, to transcend the limitations of his condition.

  Johnny Boy, wearing his porkpie hat, liver-colored fake leather jacket, with an idiot’s grin plastered on his face, the holy fool, is the free spirit that Charlie denies within himself, a sketch for Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, who is a darker, more sinister version of the same character. De Niro allowed Scorsese to express his dark side. As Spielberg perceptively put it, Marty “lets Bobby go over the top and lose control so that Marty can remain in control. I think Bobby is just wonderful as a sort of extension of what Marty might have been if he hadn’t been a filmmaker.” Indeed, in Mean Streets, Scorsese plays the hit man in the back seat of the car who takes out Johnny Boy, just as he plays a man with a gun in the back seat of Bickle’s cab in Taxi Driver. It is a fantasy of the director—the man in the shadows pulling the strings—as killer. “I was raised with them, the gangsters and the priests,” as Scorsese himself put it. “And now, as an artist, in a way, I’m both a gangster and a priest.”

  Ironically, Scorsese’s homage to his childhood, his neighborhood, cut him off from his past. A lot of the people in Little Italy didn’t like Mean Streets. “It’s pretty tough stuff, real life,” he says. “It’s not like some movie where everybody’s singing and dancing and drinking bottles of Chianti.” He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, go home again. Several years later, on the night of the premiere of New York, New York, there was a lavish party at Studio 54. Scorsese’s brother, Frank, showed up. “He started an argument with Marty,” recalls Mardik Martin. “It really got nasty. He was a little drunk too, so we had to take him outside. He was yelling at Marty, ‘You don’t do nuthin’ for me, you’re selfish...’ Marty shouted back, ‘What the hell am I gonna do for you?’ His brother was jealous, no question about it.” Scorsese rarely talked about him. He said only, “He’s a different person. We don’t see things the same way.” Schrader, for one, never knew Scorsese had a brother. But Scorsese remained close to his parents, whom he moved out of the neighborhood and installed in a high rise near Gramercy Park in 1977.

  Despite the glowing reviews, Mean Streets didn’t exactly burn up the box office. Instead of bumping up against The Way We Were, they were run over by The Exorcist, from the same studio. “We thought the New York Film Festival meant something in L.A.,” says Scorsese. “But nobody even knew about the picture.” Adds Taplin, “At Warners, we were competing with Deliverance, Clockwork Orange, and The Exorcist. The Exorcist came out the week before or after Mean Streets, and it changed everything for us, because their attention went right to The Exorcist, and we were the poor cousin. Warners did a terrible job distributing Mean Streets. They didn’t know what to do, sold it as a gangster movie. We made bubkes.”

  ON DECEMBER 23, three days before the release of The Exorcist, the Phillipses’ world turned upside down. The Sting opened at 220 theaters. It was a huge hit, taki
ng in $78 million in rentals. The Phillipses had a New Year’s Eve party at their house, invited the gang. Milius fired his shotgun off the deck out over the water to welcome in the new year.

  When the Oscar nominations were announced, The Sting was nominated for ten, including Best Picture. The Exorcist got ten, also including Best Picture, along with American Graffiti, Cries and Whispers, and A Touch of Class. Last Tango in Paris, Serpico, and The Last Detail, among others, were passed over. Ellen Burstyn was nominated for Best Actress. On April 2, 1974, The Sting won seven Oscars, among them Best Picture, making Julia Phillips the first (and only) woman to win an Oscar for producing. Cybill Shepherd was a presenter. According to People magazine, she “coyly botched film titles to plug Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon, as well as their own Last Picture Show.” The Exorcist only won two Oscars (Sound and Best Adapted Screenplay). Friedkin believed he was the victim of a vocal campaign by George Cukor against the movie, which the older man felt did not reflect well on the Academy.

  Burstyn lost for Best Actress, but that made little difference to Calley, with whom she had become friendly. One day he called her, asked her to make another film at Warners. He sent her scripts. “In every one, the woman was either the victim, running from a pursuer, or she was a prostitute, and there just wasn’t anything that interested me,” she recalls. Finally, her agent found her a Robert Getchell script called Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. She sent it to Calley, who said, “Fine, let’s make it. Who do you want to direct it?” Burstyn replied, “I’d like somebody young and exciting and new, somebody who’s just coming up.” She called Coppola, who said, “Look at a movie called Mean Streets.” She did, and thought, “Yeah, that’s the guy. Whoever this director is, he knows how to allow actors to be real. That’s what I want for this movie, to have a sense of real life about it. What this script needs is the opposite of a polish. It needs roughing up. It was written like a Rock Hudson-Doris Day movie.”