Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  Scorsese and Burstyn met in Calley’s office. If everything worked out, this would be Marty’s first studio picture, and he was nervous, trembling like a leaf. He said, “I don’t know anything about women.” Sandy, pushing him into it, piped up, “Women are just people.” She and Marty both felt that Bogdanovich had made a brilliant choice in following The Last Picture Show with What’s Up, Doc? They were afraid that unless Marty took Alice, the studios would typecast him as a director of Italian gangster pictures. Marty accepted the assignment, went into preproduction. Soon thereafter, Burstyn ran into Peter at the studio, and told him about Alice. He said, “Great, who’d you get to direct it?”

  “Marty Scorsese.”

  “Tell him not to move his camera so much.”

  Recalls Burstyn, “I did not relay that to Marty.” (Bogdanovich and George Cukor signed his card so he could get into the Directors Guild.)

  Burstyn was excited; as Alice went through a series of rewrites, it was fast becoming a very un-Hollywood film about a blue-collar woman whose loutish husband dies, allowing her to take her kid and follow her dream to become a singer. At the end, she meets a prosperous rancher (Kris Kristofferson), who falls in love with her. Burstyn was awash in the feminist tide of the early ’70s. “I wanted her to leave the Kristofferson character and go on to Monterey, where she had a singing gig,” she recalls. “Calley said, ‘No, she has to end up with a man.’”

  Burstyn argued with Calley, but he would not budge on the ending. Scorsese hired a lot of women to work on the picture. Toby Rafelson, who had only worked on her husband’s movies, was the production designer. Her daughter’s death was still an open wound, and she thought the work might distract her. “Toby took care of the aesthetics in Bob’s movies, as Polly did on Peter’s,” says Burstyn. “They both had an incredible eye for detail, from the right doorknob on the door to the clothes. They were the eyes.” Marcia Lucas was hired to edit. “We knew her, and we liked her, and she was in the union,” recalls Sandy. “It was good for her to get away from George and his house. Here she was, a wonderful editor working on her husband’s films. I don’t think she got taken seriously.” Recalls Marcia, “Marty called, and asked if I would do his first studio feature. He was terrified of the studio executives, that Warners was going to give him some old fuddy-duddy editor or a spy—the studios were known for having spies on projects. Marty liked to edit, and I felt like I was being hired to cut a movie so I wouldn’t cut it, so I’d let the director cut it. But I thought, If I’m ever going to get any real credit, I’m going to have to cut a movie for somebody besides George. ‘Cause if I’m cutting for my husband, they’re going to think, George lets his wife play around in the cutting room. George agreed with that.” Ultimately, Marcia gained Marty’s confidence, and he let her cut the movie.

  Scorsese was touchy around Burstyn. Although she didn’t take anything but acting credit, it was her project, she had hired him. “I know I stepped on his toes a few times, and he said ouch. Kris wasn’t experienced as an actor, was having trouble. I made a couple of suggestions to him. The next day, Marty said, ‘I didn’t know you were giving him directions between shots. We’re gonna reshoot that whole scene.’”

  One day, De Niro visited the set. He gave Marty a book he liked by Peter Savage and Joseph Carter called Raging Bull. It was the ghosted autobiography of a middleweight fighter, Jake La Motta. He thought there might be a movie in it, but Scorsese had more immediate things on his mind. The ending of Alice was still a problem. Was Alice going to settle down with Kristofferson and be a housewife, as Calley insisted, or was she going to have a career, a theme that Scorsese had struggled with in his own life and would examine again in New York, New York. “Warners was concerned about the fact that for a lot of the young directors, every ending had to be unhappy, because it was fashionable,” recalls Scorsese. “‘I’m an artist—I’m gonna have an unhappy ending.’” Marty was upset, but he rationalized away his anger. He told himself, It’s not Antonioni, it’s not Red Desert. Just try to keep it true to its nature.” Finally, they reached a compromise. Alice says, “I wanna go to Monterey, I wanna be a singer,” and Kristofferson’s character replies, “Come on, I’ll take you to Monterey, I don’t give a damn about the ranch or anything else. Whatever you want.” The two ride away happily into the sunset. Then Marty changed his mind, tore it up. Recalls Weintraub, “He had a tremendous fear that he was never going to make a financial success, but that the critics loved him, so it became increasingly important to him to satisfy the critics. He was about to show it to Jay Cocks, and he was afraid that Jay was going to laugh at the soapy ending, so he chopped it all up. He almost ruined his movie because of his fear that the critics wouldn’t like it. Marcia and I said, ‘You’ve got to put it back.’”

  But Scorsese had his own way of dealing with it. Says Burstyn, “Marty wanted the people in the café to applaud when Kris made his offer, because he always felt the ending was theatrical, not real, and the applause would underline that. He felt we should admit it. Then when it was all put together, the studio wanted to take off the opening section of Alice as a little girl. They felt it was artsy. Marty said if they did, he’d have to take his name off the picture. ‘That’s why I did the film, to do that, blah, blah.’ They backed off.”

  Scorsese showed Burstyn a cut. He was nervous about the picture, touchy and quick to take offense. She recalls, “I didn’t praise the film first and then tell him what I objected to, I just went right to my objections. And he said, ‘I will never allow an actor in my editing room again.’”

  No matter how Alice did, Mean Streets had moved Scorsese’s career a giant step forward. Schrader had seen a rough cut and had changed his mind about Scorsese directing Taxi Driver. The Phillipses, too, went to a screening, and by the third reel they made their decision—on the condition he could deliver De Niro as well. No slouch in the paranoia department himself, Scorsese got angry when he heard there were strings attached. Keitel was his leading man, not De Niro. “All I could think of is how was I gonna trust her and Michael too, you know? But there was something about Julia that was tenacious. I knew she was gonna fight like I was gonna fight.”

  Nine:

  The Revenge of the Nerd

  1975

  • How Steven Spielberg’s Jaws made the world safe for blockbusters, BBS enjoyed its last hurrah, while Bogdanovich’s bubble burst, and Paramount and Warners turned over, slamming the door on the New Hollywood.

  “Jaws was devastating to making artistic, smaller films. They forgot how to do it. They’re no longer interested.”

  —PETER BOGDANOVICH

  Steven Spielberg had taken his friends Scorsese, Lucas, and Milius to see the shark in the hangar in North Hollywood where it was being built. When he agreed to do Jaws, Spielberg thought he could just hire a shark wrangler to make a great white do a few pirouettes in the water, like a dolphin jumping through hoops. That proved to be wishful thinking, to say the least, and the result was in front of them, dubbed “Bruce,” after Spielberg’s lawyer, Bruce Ramer. There was nobody around. The polyethylene cast was half done, unpainted, just a gray, submarine-sized phallic thing with patches on the side, about twenty-five feet long. It was so large that Milius said, “They’re overdoing it.” Steven replied, “No, they aren’t, the ichthyologist said this is exactly what it would look like.” Milius got excited, said Steven was making the ultimate aquatic samurai film. Lucas regarded the storyboard, looked up at the big shark, and said to Spielberg, “If you can get half of this on film you’re gonna have the biggest hit of all time.” Spielberg, meanwhile, grabbed the controls, made the enormous mouth open and shut with a grinding noise, like an outsized bear trap. Lucas climbed the ladder, waited for the jaws to part, and stuck his head inside to see how it worked. Spielberg closed it on him. Milius thought, My God, we’re like human tacos compared to that thing. Spielberg tried to open the mouth, but it was stuck, a premonition of things to come. After Lucas managed to extricate himself, the f
ilmmakers jumped into the car and split. They knew they had broken something that had cost a lot of money.

  STEVEN SPIELBERG WAS BORN in Cincinnati, on December 18, 1946, which was the year of birth on his driver’s license. But there were rumors he had shaved two or three years off his real age in an effort to burnish his reputation as a wunderkind, and in interviews he created the impression he was younger than he actually was. Coppola had been twenty-six when he directed You’re a Big Boy Now. Spielberg’s ambition was to direct his first feature before he was twenty-one, but he didn’t get The Sugarland Express until he was likewise twenty-six.

  Spielberg had three younger sisters. His father, Arnold, worked in electronics for RCA, Burroughs, and IBM. His mother, Leah, was a frustrated concert pianist, now a housewife. The family moved to New Jersey, then to Phoenix in 1955. Like so many of the movie brats, Spielberg was a nerd. He referred to his childhood as the “wimpy years,” described himself as “the weird, skinny kid with acne.” He had a crew cut and large ears that stood out on either side of his head, like Dumbo. “I was a loner and very lonely. I was the only Jewish kid in school, and I was very shy and uncertain,” he said. “I had friends who were all like me.” Skinny wrists and glasses. We were all just trying to make it through the year without getting our faces pushed into the drinking fountain.” Doubtless reflecting his parents’ anxieties at the time (Leah started calling herself Lee), he wanted to be gentile. He experienced his family as “bohemian,” and he desperately wanted to be “normal,” to pass.

  Spielberg even had a mild speech defect, a lateral lisp, and, like Schrader and Scorsese, lots of phobias, fears of elevators, roller coasters, airplanes, and so on. If anyone looked at him sideways, he got a nosebleed. You name it, he was afraid of it. His personal connection to some of the films for which he became famous, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (CE3K) and E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial, is obvious. His childhood was a time when he must have felt like an “alien” from planet Israel, plopped down among the earthlings, the middle-American population of Phoenix.

  Spielberg’s father buried himself in his work, and was usually absent. He clashed with Steven over his son’s indifferent performance in school. Steven was an underachiever. He hated reading, watched TV instead, became, along with Lucas, one of the first directors of the TV generation. His great love was movies, and he occupied himself making elaborate productions in Super-8—sci-fi and World War II pictures—using his classmates and contriving elaborate and resourceful do-it-yourself special effects.

  In 1963, Spielberg persuaded his parents to let him spend the summer with an uncle in Canoga Park, outside of L.A. The following year, his parents moved from Phoenix to Saratoga, California, and divorced. He was classified 1A, and had to choose between Vietnam and college. The choice was obvious, but with his mediocre grades, the best he could do was California State at Long Beach. In 1968, he ran into Dennis Hoffman, a young man who owned an optical house but wanted to produce, and better, was willing to part with some money to do so. Hoffman lent him $10,000. He used it to make a 35mm featurette called Amblin’, the story of two hitchhikers who meet, fall in love, and separate. He showed it around, and in December of that year, Sid Sheinberg, head of Universal television, saw it. The next day, Sheinberg called him. “You should be a director,” he said. Spielberg replied, “I think so too.” Sheinberg offered him a seven-year contract. Spielberg was uncertain. He hadn’t yet finished college. Sheinberg asked him, “Do you want to graduate college, or do you want to be a film director?” A week later, Spielberg signed the contract.

  The first show he directed was the middle segment of a three-part pilot for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, starring Joan Crawford. He went over to her apartment to meet her. She was cordial, but didn’t want to be seen in public with him. As reported later in People, he was two months shy of twenty-one (he was actually a few months shy of twenty-two), and she was afraid that people would think he was her son.

  The Night Gallery segment did not do much for Spielberg’s career. “I didn’t work for almost a year and a half after that,” he says. “I was a pariah in Hollywood because it got bad reviews, even though it got good ratings. They thought I was a white elephant, and I couldn’t get a TV show, I couldn’t get a feature, I couldn’t even get a meeting. I sat around for a long time in my little apartment waiting for the phone to ring. I would have been much better advised not to have done that show and to have gone out on my own and made little films like Scorsese and gotten my start that way.”

  Spielberg found a psychiatrist who got him out of the draft, whereupon he lost whatever concern he had over the Vietnam War. He had no interest in anything but movies, not art, books, music, politics. Kit Carson ran into him at a party in the fall of 1968 right after the Democratic convention. “Everybody was up, the revolution was about to happen—burn it all down—that sort of thing,” he remembers. “All Steve was interested in was trying to figure a way to throw a camera off a building and rig it with gyroscopes so that it wouldn’t spin out of control as it went down, so it could give you some kind of a coherent picture, and then as it hit the ground, have a spring in it that would burst the film out so it would be safely contained. I said, ‘This kid’s like, fucked. He’s completely lost in the ozone, talking about the Twilight Zone.’”

  Spielberg spent several years directing TV: Marcus Welby, M.D., The Name of the Game, Columbo. Russell Metty, a curmudgeonly Hollywood veteran in his sixties and the DP on his Columho segment, gave him a hard time, because he was so young, complained, “He’s a kid. Does he get a milk and cookie break? Is the diaper truck going to interfere with my generator?” But Spielberg was more like Metty than he was his contemporaries. “When I first heard about him he was already a Hollywood guy, absolutely part of the system without even a second thought, not a drop of rebellion in him,” says Robbins, who became a close friend. “The sensibility of the work was always the most conservative. One of the things he made was a rip-off of THX, all these people running around in white pajamas in tunnels through a long lens. George Lucas used to grump about the fact that some Hollywood slickie had ripped him off for a TV show. We were all appalled. Who could it be? It was Steven! Who had this low-grade history at Long Beach State, wasn’t even one of the guys.”

  When Spielberg finally got some money, he got a car, an Arizona teenager’s idea of a cool car, an orange Pontiac Trans Am. It took him about two months to realize that everybody on the lot owned a BMW or Mercedes, so he got rid of it and acquired a green Mercedes convertible, but that brought with it its own baggage. “There was gossip about that Mercedes,” continues Robbins. “How could anybody our age, in their twenties, drive a Mercedes! It was unthinkable. He had even decided he wanted to have a charity he would give to, like his parents would have instructed him. It was like he was walking around in daddy’s shoes, scuffing around the carpet. But when I finally met Steven, it was like an instant click, in spite of all that.”

  Spielberg fell in with the USC crowd, Milius and company. He sat in on a course taught by Jerry Lewis. Spielberg had been introduced to Lucas in 1967, and a few years later, during the THX period, Lucas took him over to Coppola’s office at Warners. Spielberg traveled up to Zoetrope, showed Amblin’. “I saw in Francis’s eyes somebody who did not distinguish between old and young, simply between talented and not,” Spielberg recalls. “He was producing for George, and to be in his circle meant a chance to direct a movie. You thought, Maybe here’s somebody who’s going to open it up for all of us. But he only opened it up for George. I wasn’t really in Francis’s circle, I was an outsider, I was the establishment, I was being raised and nurtured at Universal Studios, a very conservative company, and in his eyes, and also in George’s eyes, I was working inside the system.”

  Spielberg directed Duel, a movie of the week for Barry Diller at ABC, in which a driver is stalked by a malevolent truck. It aired November 13, 1971. Duel got a lot of notice, and was released as a feature in Europe and Japan. Spielbe
rg became a darling of the French critics. Recalls Simpson, “The media were saying all these things about this kid who made Duel, and then Marty and Brian would say, ‘Well, what he did wasn’t so extraordinary.’ There was a little bit of envy.”

  Then Spielberg started The Sugarland Express, with Goldie Hawn. It was based on a news item Spielberg had clipped out of the paper about a convict fresh out of prison, on his way to see his kids, who abducted a cop and was followed through the back roads of Texas by a caravan of highway patrolmen. Lew Wasserman was skeptical, thought the Easy Rider days were over, but allowed Zanuck and Brown, who were the producers, to go ahead anyway. Spielberg enlisted Robbins and Hal Barwood to write the script. Goldie Hawn plays the con’s wife and partner in crime. It was shot in the winter and spring of 1973, when Friedkin was shooting The Exorcist, Coppola The Conversation, and Bogdanovich Paper Moon. Instead of the producer pressuring the director to make the movie more commercial, with Spielberg, it was the other way around. He thought Sugarland might do better if the couple survived. He had to be restrained by Zanuck, who urged him to stick to the original concept.

  After Duel, Michael Phillips, who was on the lot doing The Sting, invited him out to Nicholas Beach. “I worked really hard during the week and looked forward to those weekends,” he recalls. “Sometimes everybody slept in sleeping bags on the floor, or on the beach on warm nights. It was as if a kind of movie brat wave was starting to amass out at sea. One day I got there late, walked onto the beach, and everybody was buried in the sand, just these heads sticking out. It was like they had become future lobby cards, head shots.”