Barry Diller and Sid Sheinberg had seen a cut of Sorcerer and knew they were in trouble, particularly since Friedkin was openly contemptuous of executives, particularly Sheinberg, who he thought was a moron. Sorcerer was filled with European actors like Francisco Rabal, Amidou, and Bruno Cremer. Sheinberg told him, “You know, a problem is, this picture, it seems like a foreign film because it’s got all these foreign names in it.”
“Well, I don’t see where that’s a problem. Let’s just get these guys to change their names.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“Well, like Francisco Rabal, could be Frank Roberts or something. And Amidou, he could be Joe Smith. And I’ll change my name if you want, I don’t care.”
They asked for a meeting with the director, a lunch in the private dining room at Universal. Friedkin recalls, “At that time I thought I was invincible, and I thought that any notes that were gonna come from Sheinberg and Diller were not gonna be of any value.” Friedkin asked Smith and Green to accompany him to the lunch, insisting that Green, who had been working on a house, wear bib overalls splattered with paint. He explained, “I want to show utter disrespect to these people.” Billy himself was dressed liked a gas station attendant, in workman’s coveralls. He told his pals, “These guys operate through intimidation. They talk and you listen, and they expect you to nod your head at what they say. I want you guys to remember one thing: no matter what they say, even if you like the suggestions you hear, do not nod your head. Don’t look them in the eye, just stare at their ears. And if they say, ‘Can such and such be done?’ we’re gonna say, ‘Yeah sure, but we’re gonna have to gear up again and get the whole company back and reshoot.’”
They went to lunch. Smith placed a Sony tape recorder on the tablecloth, as if he were going to record everything they said. (There was no tape, nor batteries.) The waiter came by, said, “Anyone want anything to drink? Iced tea, Coke, diet Pepsi?”
“Let me have some vodka,” replied Friedkin.
“A glass?”
“No, a bottle of Smirnoff.”
“Would you like some ice?”
“No.” Friedkin didn’t drink, and as he swigged vodka right out of the bottle, his complexion turned ruddy.
They had already shot for eleven months, cut and screened the film. It was too late in the day for major changes, but Diller and Sheinberg had a long list of tweaks. Among other things, they complained that the movie didn’t make it clear how many miles the drivers had traveled with the nitro, and how many miles they still had to go. Maybe it would be a good idea to cut away to a shot of the odometer every so often. Friedkin knocked back some vodka, nodded his head, said, “If that’s what you want, no problem. Okay, Bud, we have to call the actors, get the whole crew back. Let’s see if we can get permission to do it in the DR. It shouldn’t take more than a month to do it.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Diller remonstrated, waving his hand. “Why do we need the actors and why do we need the Dominican Republic? All I’m talking about is a shot of—”
“I don’t shoot inserts.”
Toward the end of the lunch, Sheinberg proudly showed him an ad line the studio had prepared. Friedkin simply pitched forward in his seat and fell on the floor. Sheinberg looked down at him and asked, “What happened to him?” Smith replied, “That ad line knocked him out!” Says Friedkin, “They thought I was fucking nuts and they simply withdrew.”
A few days later, Sheinberg was in the publicity department, bending over some artwork. Billy came up behind him whistling a tune from the ’40s, “Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid,” grabbed the air on either side of his waist, “doing one of these numbers,” recalls Smith, who was watching, “fucking him in the ass.”
When Tanen finally saw Sorcerer with Sheinberg, Wasserman, and the other top Universal executives, he was appalled, but also gratified in a perverse way, because his worst fears had been fulfilled. He said, “We’re fucked. We went through all this, for that?”
Joe Hyams was at the screening. In front of the Universal brass, Friedkin turned to him, said, “Joe, you were with me the night that I got Clouzot to give me his permission to make this picture. What did I tell him? Do you remember?”
“You said you’d never make it as well as he did.”
“I was right!”
TAXI DRIVER opened at the Cinema I in New York City on February 8, 1976, at noon. Schrader overslept on the morning of the premiere, got to the theater around 12:15. There was a line around the block comprised of Travis Bickle look-alikes: pale young men with buzz cuts in army surplus jackets. Schrader thought to himself, Oh fuck, something’s gone wrong, they haven’t let them in yet. Then he realized that this was the line for the next show. He ran into the theater as the credits were coming on, joined Marty, Michael, and Julia in the back. The word-of-mouth was so strong that as the words “Taxi Driver” came up, the audience started applauding. The three filmmakers hugged each other, danced in the lobby. “It was a moment of pure joy,” says Schrader. “Not to speak of the vindication.” There was another screening in L.A. at the Directors Guild. Julia bumped into Towne and Bert Schneider coming out of the screening, thought they didn’t like the movie, but neither would say so. Five years later, after John Hinckley, apparently under the influence of Taxi Driver, shot Reagan, Julia again ran into Schneider. “See, it wasn’t such a bad movie,” she said, smiling. He replied, “If it was really great he would’ve killed him.”
Taxi Driver flabbergasted everyone by becoming a commercial hit; it did $58,000 the first week in New York, and $12.5 million in rentals before it played out. It also got generally good reviews. Kael indeed loved it, and she also understood that for all of Scorsese’s Cassavetes- and Godard-inflected street realism, he had a Catholic, Wellesian Expressionist streak that lent the streets of New York City the kind of trippy intensity that Coppola would shortly achieve for Vietnam in the Philippines.
It was Taxi Driver’s ambition to take Bonnie and Clyde one better, extending its inquiry into the phenomenon of celebrity. When the media treat Travis Bickle as a hero, it is meant as a criticism of the media. “Characters like Travis are justified by publicity,” said Schrader. “If you’re on the cover of Newsweek, like Lynette Fromme, then you’re important. The reason why you’re on that cover is unimportant.” Ultimately, however, the critique got lost in the shuffle. “One of the reasons we wanted to make this movie was because of the message,” recalls Weintraub. “Marty may not have said, ‘I want to make political message movies,’ but I certainly think he had a consciousness about it. He was around for the ’60s. Woodstock did blow his mind. Marty hoped that by becoming that violent he would capture a big audience, but they were overwhelmed by the violence of the film, all that blood and gore. They missed that message. I was really disappointed.”
And if Schrader thought he was contriving a commentary on the moral bankruptcy of the media, he was wrong. He was not glossing Bonnie and Clyde; he was turning it inside out. Although the movie brats were ’60s people, they were half a decade younger than the Beatty-Nicholson-Hopper generation, and those years were crucial. Pace Weintraub, they were not into prescriptive, politically correct cinema. Schrader brought the war home, but drained it of the passion that animated the peace movement (as Scorsese was forced to desaturate the color of the blood), and inflected it instead with European alienation and American vigilantism. To paraphrase Schrader, if you put Penn and Antonioni in bed together, put a gun to their heads and told them to fuck while Bresson watched through the keyhole, you got Taxi Driver.
Although Bonnie and Clyde had been attacked for its ironic refusal to judge its characters, Taxi Driver made Bonnie and Clyde look positively moralistic, and rendered its implicit liberal—once radical—politic more evident in retrospect than it was when the film was released nine years earlier. By darkening and deglamorizing Bonnie and Clyde, by putting Bickle and Betsy into a sleazy, contemporary, urban environment and frustrating the love affair altogether, Scorsese and Sch
rader stripped the Depression-era outlaws of their aura of populist romance and turned their story into one of simple brutality redeemed only by Schrader’s Calvinist fascination with the cleansing violence of the Manson figure.
Taxi Driver was a picture completely in keeping with the new centrist administration of Jimmy Carter, who turned his back on the left wing of his party, the McGovernites. As Beatty puts it, “What animated Hollywood in the ’70s was politics. You can mark the end of that with the election of Carter. There’s nothing that can destroy the Democratic party like a Democrat.” The only part of Bonnie and Clyde that survived was the violence.
•
THE ACADEMY AWARDS for 1975 were held on March 29, 1976. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which beat Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, and Nashville, was the first of an unprecedented run of three Oscars in a row for UA, after years of floundering. Verna Fields took Best Editing for Jaws. Louise Fletcher won Best Actress for her portrayal of Nurse Ratched in Cuckoo’s Nest. She still bore the wound Altman had inflicted when he gave the role based on her parents to Lily Tomlin, a wound that was reopened when Tomlin was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Nashville. “What drove me crazy was I could have done both,” she says. “But the worst thing Bob did, at the Academy Awards, when I won—it was the Bicentennial—we all went out on stage and sang ‘America the Beautiful,’ and I thanked my parents in sign language. I looked down, and there in one of the front rows was Bob.” His face distorted into a grimace, he was mimicking her signing movements, his hands dancing about as if they had a life of their own. He was making fun of Fletcher signing to her deaf parents. She tried to put the best face on it. “I can’t believe that Bob meant it in that malicious way,” she says. “I think he meant it as a kind of joke, but I thought it was incredibly ironic, with Nashville, and then what had happened that night, and then to have Bob put this tag on it.”
In May, the Taxi Driver gang went to Cannes. It was a heady time for Schrader, who also had Obsession in competition. He sat on the terrace of the Carlton, late into the night, with Marty, Brian, Sergio Leone, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, inhaling the scented air of the Riviera springtime, sipping scotch, talking to them like an equal. Taxi Driver won the Palme d’Or. Schrader had arrived.
Obsession was released in August, and did surprising box office. That, combined with the vast success of Taxi Driver, enabled Schrader to move from writing to directing, with Blue Collar.
Fueled by his big hit, Scorsese moved full speed ahead on New York, New York, which he was doing with UA. New York, New York would be a New Hollywood musical, a big budget homage to the musicals of the past with a film student’s inflection, a sort of cross between Vincente Minnelli and John Cassavetes. It starred De Niro and Liza Minnelli.
But there was a price to pay. Perhaps it was the success, perhaps it was the drugs, but Scorsese was setting himself up for a fall. “One of the things I will always thank the French for was giving me that grand prize at Cannes for Taxi Driver that allowed me to reveal to myself what a total failure I could be,” he says. “It was a few weeks after the night when Taxi Driver opened that I remember I started playing with drugs when I was doing New York, New York. For me it was just the beginning of going into an abyss for about two years and coming out of it just barely alive.”
Eleven:
Star Bucks
1977
• How George Lucas finished with Star Wars what Jaws started, Friedkin was bewitched by Sorcerer, and Spielberg had a close encounter with Amy Irving.
“Star Wars was the film that ate the heart and the soul of Hollywood. It created the big-budget comic book mentality.”
—PAUL SCHRADER
Martin Scorsese was mixing the sound for New York, New York at the old Samuel Goldwyn Studios during the day. Marcia Lucas had been one of the editors on the picture, and George was finishing Star Wars at night at the same facility. The word on the street was that New York, New York, with its lush sets, extravagant production numbers, and hip modern story, complete with the de rigueur unhappy ending, was a masterpiece. Marcia told George, “New York, New York is a film for grown-ups, yours is just a kids’ movie, and nobody’s going to take it seriously.” George was depressed that Star Wars was going over budget and certain it wasn’t going to make any money. It faced stiff competition that summer: a Jaws rip-off called The Deep, A Bridge Too Far, Smokey and the Bandit, and Damnation Alley, another sci-fi picture, were all slotted for Memorial Day. George called his friends, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, and complained, “They’re all being released at once; my movie’s going to be the fourth best.”
George was so worried about New York, New York, he wanted the couple to sneak into a screening and report back. Jay Cocks got them an invitation. Huyck saw the movie, called up George, and said, “I just don’t get it. I just don’t understand why people think this is going to be such a successful movie. It’s really boring.” He wasn’t sure George believed him, or just thought he was being loyal. Lucas continued to worry. Of course, worrying came naturally to him.
•
GEORGE LUCAS WAS BORN in Modesto, California, on May 14, 1944. He was raised in a rather conventional fashion, which he would later refer to wryly as his “Norman Rockwell upbringing.” He grew up on the short side, five foot seven, and like most of the movie brats, he was an introverted kid who had great difficulty relating to others. He was frail, unathletic, and timid; although he didn’t know it at the time, he had diabetes. He was frequently picked on by bullies, and had to rely on a younger sister to chase them away.
Compared to the tortures inflicted on the Schraders, the chilly Lutheranism and cultural impoverishment of small-town life in Modesto was nugatory, but of course, young George had nothing to compare it to, and felt it keenly. His father, George Sr., was a rock-ribbed Republican, a businessman who grew up during the Depression and ran an office supply store. He regarded young George, who never did particularly well in school, as a slacker who would probably come to no good. He once referred to his son disdainfully as a “scrawny little devil.” He subscribed to the boot camp school of child-rearing, and every summer he shaved his son’s hair off. He was in the habit of derogating Hollywood as Sin City, and wanted George to follow him into office supplies. Later he opposed George’s decision to go to film school. Very much the disciplinarian, he ironically managed to instill a lifelong anti-authoritarian attitude in his repressed and angry son that would later express itself in his movies. It always seemed that his rupture with his father led him to seek paternal relationships elsewhere, like the one he formed with Coppola. At the same time, many of his father’s values took root. George prized hard work and ambition, vowed to beat the adults at their own game, and early on identified money with power and freedom. This ambivalence was nicely expressed when, arguing with his father over going to film school, dad said, “You’ll be back in a few years,” and George shouted, “I’m never coming back,” and then added, “I’m going to be a millionaire before I’m thirty.”
Like Spielberg, Lucas was a child of television. “Movies had extremely little effect on me when I was growing up,” he said. “Television had a much larger effect.” It was during the two years he put in at Modesto Junior College that he started going to movies, making the trek to North Beach in San Francisco to watch local underground filmmakers such as Scott Bartlett, Bruce Conner, and Jordan Belson. He transferred to USC as a junior in 1964, moved over to film, and quickly realized he had found his vocation, plunging into it with a passion that was almost frightening in its intensity. He worked day and night, lived on candy bars. “What we had in common is we grew up in the ’60s, protesting the Vietnam War,” says Lucas. “We were gonna take over the world. The other thing was that we were passionate about movies. We never thought we were going to make money at it, or that it was a good way to become rich and famous. It was like an addiction. We were always scrambling to get our next fix, to get a little film in the camera and shoot something.”
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Lucas was such a star at USC that he scooped up the few training gigs available. He and a couple of other USC and UCLA students got a Columbia Pictures scholarship to shoot a short documentary on the making of MacKenna’s Gold, which was being shot in Page, Arizona. It was a lumbering, elephantine studio Western, very much in the style of the bloated musicals of the ’60s, and it was Lucas’s introduction to the Old Hollywood. “We had never been around such opulence, zillions of dollars being spent every five minutes on this huge, unwieldly thing,” he said. “It was mind-boggling to us because we had been making films for $300, and seeing this incredible waste—that was the worst of Hollywood.” While the other students shot conventional “making-of’ documentaries, Lucas shot an imagistic film about the beauty of the desert, with the production barely visible in the far distance. The experience confirmed his anti-studio attitude. He said, “LA. is where they make deals, do business in the classic corporate way, which is screw everybody and do whatever you can to turn the biggest profit.... I don’t want anything to do with them.” He also got the fateful Warners scholarship that brought him to the set of Finian’s Rainbow.
GRAFFITI convinced Lucas he was on the right track. “When I did Graffiti, I discovered that making a positive film is exhilarating,” he said. “I thought, Maybe I should make a film like this for even younger kids. Graffiti was for sixteen-year-olds; this [Star Wars] is for ten- and twelve-year-olds, who have lost something even more significant than the teenager. I saw that kids today don’t have any fantasy life the way we had—they don’t have Westerns, they don’t have pirate movies.... the real Errol Flynn, John Wayne kind of adventures. Disney had abdicated its reign over the children’s market, and nothing had replaced it.”
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 47
