Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  “At first you felt like you could make five films at once,” Scorsese recalls. “And then you wound up spending four days in bed every week because you were exhausted and your body couldn’t take it.” He had been in and out of the hospital a number of times with asthma attacks. “The doctor would say, ‘Take these pills. You’re suffering from exhaustion,’” says Robertson. “But we had places to go, people to see.” The rule was, live-fast-and-leave-a-good-looking-corpse. Scorsese was convinced he wouldn’t see forty. “It was a matter of pushing the envelope, of being bad, seeing how much you can do,” he continues. “Embracing a way of life to its limit. I did a lot of drugs because I wanted to do a lot, I wanted to push all the way to the very very end, and see if I could die. That was the key thing, to see what it would be like getting close to death.” This kind of recklessness lent his work a high passion that hoisted it above the ordinary, but it was dangerous. “I’ve always felt that there’s something self-destructive in directors,” says Ned Tanen—himself no slouch in that department—contemplating the sorry spectacle of the New Hollywood directors careening pell-mell down the mountain, arriving in a heap at the bottom, careers shattered, marriages sundered, friendships broken, lives in ruins. “I once asked Howard Hawks, my former father-in-law, about it, and he said, ‘The studio system worked because we couldn’t be excessive, we couldn’t just do what we wanted to do.’ ”

  One day there was a party at Winkler’s home. Scorsese, Martin, and Robertson came late, stoned out of their minds, hung out by themselves at the far end of the pool. Scorsese was dressed in the crisp white suit he favored above all others. All of a sudden John Cassavetes walked up, pulled Marty aside, started in on him for doing drugs. “Whatsamatter with you?” he growled. “Why are you doing this, ruining yourself? You’re fucking up your talent. Shape up.” Scorsese broke out into a sweat. Cassavetes was a notorious drunk himself, but no one could call him on what he said, because they knew it was true.

  De Niro had not given up on Raging Bull. But he was still having a hard time getting Scorsese’s attention. Marty’s personal life was in such turmoil he couldn’t concentrate on his work. Despite his success, Scorsese was still extremely fragile, emotionally speaking, a state of affairs that doubtless stemmed from the aggravations of his childhood: his diminutive stature, his frailty, his perception of himself as unattractive. His feelings were easily hurt; he was quick to feel slighted and slow to forgive. He nursed grudges for years. He built a wall around himself. “He was lost personally,” says Martin. “Secure as he was on a film set, he was very insecure with himself as a man, dealing with people.” Martin once invited him to a party. “I said to him, ‘We’ll have a lot of fun, girls, orgies...’ He said, ‘Nah... somebody will know who I am...’ I said, ‘You don’t have to tell them who you are. Nobody cares.’ He said, ‘No, no, no, I can’t deal with a woman who doesn’t know who I am.’ He had to be ‘Martin Scorsese’ for him to deal with a woman, but then he worried she would only like him because he was ‘Martin Scorsese.’ ”

  “I was making love to different women, but I didn’t find that very interesting,” Scorsese recalls. He was doing it more, enjoying it less. He got into a tempestuous relationship with an assistant, and one night he went to a party where he encountered her, Liza Minnelli, and Julia Cameron, all at the same time. She was the kind of woman who always had another man in her life, which drove Marty insane with jealousy. She threatened suicide every other day, which is to say, she was perfect for him. “Marty sort of likes a little bit of drama, and if it’s not there, he creates it,” says Martin. “It was a typical living-dangerously mentality. She brought out the worst in him.” Scorsese could never stand to be alone. One night, he drove her out and then ran naked down Mulholland after her, screaming, “Come back, don’t leave me.”

  Scorsese knew he was acting badly, driving people away from him, but he couldn’t help it. He says, “I was always angry, throwing glasses, provoking people, really unpleasant to be around. I always found, no matter what anybody said, something to take offense at. I’d be the host, but at some point during the evening I’d flip out, just like when I’m shooting.” He began to have paranoid hallucinations. He’d say, “I think somebody’s watching me,” or, “Somebody’s trying to get in.” Marty had a one-night stand with Yeu-Bun Yee’s girlfriend, who looked like a model, and was afraid that he would come up in the middle of the night and kill him. One of Steve Prince’s jobs was to protect him from real or imagined dangers.

  Scorsese and Robertson took The Last Waltz to Cannes in the spring of 1978. Fueled by coke, Marty was doing back-to-back interviews, but even he eventually ran out of words. And coke. He joked, “No more coke, no more interviews.” He couldn’t score in Cannes, so a private plane was dispatched to Paris to bring back more coke.

  “It hit me finally, when I was watching the end credits crawl of The Last Waltz at the Cinerama Dome, that I didn’t enjoy it anymore,” says Scorsese. “There was nothing left. I knew when I broke up the second marriage—I had a child, I knew I was not going to see the child for a while—but I always had a bottom line: the work, and felt good about having been able to say something in a movie, but this one day, it was like rock bottom. I thought, I’ve lost my voice.”

  Scorsese kept everyone at bay, just yessing them to death, but refusing to move forward on Raging Bull. He was emotionally and spiritually tapped out. “We were just circling the globe constantly, going from party to party, trying to find what it was that would inspire us again to do work,” he recalls. “I knew what I wanted to say in Mean Streets, like I knew what I wanted to say in Taxi Driver. I even knew what I wanted to say in New York, New York. But I know I didn’t know what the hell Raging Bull was about.” He had done three straight pictures with De Niro. “After a while, you want to do movies just on your own, especially after the unhappy experience with New York, New York,” he adds. “I just didn’t want to play anymore.”

  Mardik was already on salary at Winkler’s company, in which he was partnered with Robert Chartoff. Winkler told him to go ahead anyway, write a script. Mardik did a draft, which Scorsese couldn’t even bring himself to read. One day, after Mardik pestered him for the hundredth time, the director asked, “Okay, whaddya got?”

  “I got one good scene that you’re gonna like. You have these gladiators, see, just like in Rome, two guys, fighting each other, and you got all these rich people, fur coats, tuxedos, sitting in the front row, and Bobby gets punched in the face, and his nose starts to squirt blood, and it splatters all over these rich people’s clothes and furs.”

  “Whew, that’s great, I love that. Lemme read the script.” Scorsese read the script, told Mardik, “I wanna make it more personal.” His grandfather, who used to live on Staten Island, owned a fine fig tree, and one day he said, “If the fig tree dies, I’m gonna die.” And sure enough, the fig tree died, and he died. Recalls Mardik, “He wanted me to put that in the movie, a lot of crazy stuff that had nothing to do with Jake La Motta. I didn’t want him to say no, so I catered to his whims and bullshit. It was driving me crazy. I said, ‘Marty, I don’t think this makes any sense, Bobby’s gonna kill me.’” Indeed, De Niro hated it, said, “What’s going on? This is not the picture we agreed upon.”

  Continues Mardik, “One day, Marty said to me, ‘Whaddya think of Paul Schrader coming in for a polish.’ Because Marty was not listening to me anymore, he was doing his Godfather bit. I said, ‘Sure, why not.’ Paul didn’t even come to me. He sent somebody to get all my research, all my versions, three of them. I gave it to the guy, said, ‘Good luck.’ ”

  AFTER HIS TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCE on Star Wars, Lucas decided he’d had it with directing. Just as he had read the post-Vietnam cultural tea leaves and exploited what he sensed in Graffiti and Star Wars, so his move from directing to producing would prove to be equally prescient. He hired Irvin Kershner, who had taught at USC and been something of a mentor for George and his friends. Even so, The Empire Strikes Back, also shot
in London, was another difficult production. Kershner was unhappy, Lucas was unhappy. Kershner was good with actors, used to edgy contemporary material, had been widely praised for a film called Loving. But he had never directed a special effects picture. He complained, to anyone who would listen, “It’s amazing. I direct the actors, and then [the footage] goes to California and then I find out what the scene is about.”

  He was also known as a ditherer, a director who could turn a green light into a development deal, someone who would change his mind by the end of a long sentence, and he had a slow DP. One day, as the shooting spilled over the wrap date, it became evident that Kershner had exceeded the budget by a good $5 million, with six unanticipated weeks to go. Lucas, who was financing the picture himself, was apoplectic, and blamed his long-term friend and associate, producer Gary Kurtz. Eventually, Empire ran over by eight weeks and $10 million, with the budget finally coming in at $33 million, roughly three times the cost of Star Wars. Lucas never worked with Kurtz again.

  The huge budget overruns nearly sank Lucas. Stretched to the breaking point, he was forced to take a bank loan, and worse, was humiliated by having to beg Fox to guarantee the loan. In exchange, Fox insisted on renegotiating the deal. Still, he came out with $430 million worth of tickets worldwide, recouping his $33 million in only three months—and finally achieved his dream: financial independence from the studios.

  Less flexible and forgiving than his mentor, George disliked the Hollywood establishment even more than Francis did. In 1981, the man who had once called Hollywood “a foreign country,” got into a tiff with the guilds because he had placed Kershner’s director’s credit at the end of the film instead of at the beginning, as DGA rules required. He also crossed swords with the Writers Guild. Both guilds fined him, and in response, Lucas resigned from the Motion Picture Academy and tore up his membership card to the Directors Guild. Around Memorial Day, he dramatically severed his last remaining ties to Hollywood. Lucasfilm closed its offices across the street from Universal, and moved north of San Francisco to San Rafael, where ILM was located. Says Lucas, “Once the corporations bought in, and once the agents, lawyers, and accountants took over, people who read the Wall Street Journal and cared less about the movies than the price of the stock, that’s when that whole thing died.”

  Lucas was determined to build his own version of Zoetrope, a full-service state-of-the-art production facility where his friends could come and work on their films in an idyllic, Northern California setting far from the fleshpots of tinsel town—the agents and the drugs, the limos and the trendy restaurants. He bought four-thousand odd hilly acres of scrub off Lucas (no relation) Valley Road in Marin County and called it Skywalker Ranch. Skywalker included a library, a lake, a baseball diamond, stables, and a vineyard. No building was visible from any other building. The three-acre lake was stocked with trout.

  Lucas imagined that Skywalker would be a cinematic think tank. There would be lectures, conferences, retreats, and all his friends would have offices there. Predictably, Skywalker was the flip side of Zoetrope, where the food was great but the toilets were always broken. It ran like clockwork, but was antiseptic and anonymous, with Big Brother vibes.

  Marcia told him he was crazy. “By the time George could afford to have a film facility, he no longer wanted to direct,” she says. “After Star Wars, he insisted, ‘I’m never going to direct another establishment-type movie again.’ I used to say, ‘For someone who wants to be an experimental filmmaker, why are you spending this fortune on a facility to make Hollywood movies? We edited THX in our attic, we edited American Graffiti over Francis’s garage, I just don’t get it, George.’ The Lucasfilm empire—the computer division, ILM, the licensing and lawyers—seemed to me to be this inverted triangle sitting on a pea, which was the Star Wars trilogy. But he wasn’t going to make any more Star Wars, and the pea was going to dry up and crumble, and then he was going to be left with this huge facility with its enormous overhead. And why did he want to do that if he wasn’t going to make movies? I still don’t get it.”

  Coppola was at once envious and disappointed that he wasn’t part of it. “I’m the only one of all his friends who never had a piece of Star Wars,” he says. “Although I was the one whom he would talk to about it. I helped him, but clearly, once he went on, he went on. It was clear to me he just wanted his own show. I had brought him along with me everywhere I went, but he didn’t bring me along with him.”

  •

  SCHRADER TOOK TO COKE like mother’s milk; he plunged into the drug scene with the enthusiasm of a lapsed fundamentalist. Like Scorsese, he believed coke helped him creatively. He had always been in the habit of writing while intoxicated, so the transition to drugs was easy. “I would write stoned and revise sober,” he says. “When you’re very, very stoned you have access to fantasies that are harder to get at when you’re straight, particularly for somebody like me that didn’t have access to that inner life. The prose gets sometimes a little excessive, and the syntax gets a little wacked. But it’s basically what you want to say, and often, very, very alive. I would write a scene at three o’clock in the morning, and I would be all jacked up, so excited I would be singing and dancing around the room. Substance abuse was the key that opened that door. It would be hypocritical to look back and blame the key.”

  A gram cost about $100 in the late ’70s, which included the packaging and the convenience of delivery. (It was cheaper on the street.) Schrader’s dealer supplied grams in little envelopes fashioned from pages torn out of Playboy and Penthouse, with the grade (the highest was SG—Show Girl), marked on the front. Schrader was doing an ounce (twenty-eight grams) a week, a habit that cost him about $12,000 a month, or $144,000 a year. He bought a quarter of an ounce (seven grams) at a time, never more than nineteen grams, because in a bust, twenty grams could pull down a conviction for dealing, rather than mere possession.

  Schrader was working hard and playing hard. He became very much a part of the gay party scene, which he had been flirting with since the Taxi Driver days in 1975. “This was a kind of heady period, where for the first time in American culture, gay choices about music, clothes, design were considered to be the future,” says Rosenman. “This was the cutting edge, but it was so exciting and gorgeous and glamorous that everybody knew that it was leading toward an abyss. And that was attractive in and of itself. There was a mystic wildness about the partying, the music, the drugs, the clothes, the free sexuality—the interchange of partners, the constant fucking of boys, girls, it was so shocking and exhilarating. People like Schrader were attracted to it because they understood there was something religious in the intertwining of sex, death, and ecstasy.”

  Schrader’s friends wondered how far Schrader went. Although it would be hard to imagine a less sympathetic audience than the gun-crazed Milius, Schrader used to lecture his friend on the importance of the gay aesthetic. “The arbiters of taste in our society are gay. Most of my friends are gay.”

  “Well, Paul, are you gay?”

  “I can’t do it, I can’t even succeed here.”

  Says Milius, “Schrader was this character who had fallen from his Calvinist grace, and was really enjoying his time in hell, sampling every part of it. He loved perversion, but all sexuality in some way was a failure for him. One night, when he was making Hardcore, I noticed his wrists were marked. He explained, ‘I went to Mistress Vicky and she hung me up and cuffed me. I could only take it for three minutes.’ Like, he wasn’t a true pervert. He couldn’t take it for a half an hour like a real-man pervert. The same thing with being gay, he failed at that too, couldn’t get it up for boys.”

  But Schrader’s sexual preferences were less interesting than his cultural ones. For a while, at any rate, he was able to anticipate the sudden and not so sudden changes in the cultural weather, and when he joked to Milius that he’d exchanged “violence for design,” he was expressing more than a personal inclination. As Kael noted, there was a rising revulsion against violence in m
ovies. Schrader’s carefully nurtured reputation as a wild man had run its course and was now a liability. Whereas Time’s cover story on Bonnie and Clyde in December 1967 lauded shockers like Point Blank, in October 1980, Schrader was featured on the cover of Saturday Review with Scorsese, De Palma, and Walter Hill under the cover line, “The Brutalists: Making Movies Mean and Ugly.” He recalls, “I started getting labeled as a filmmaker who was only into violence. I winced at that, realized I really had to change my image.” It was part of the backlash against the New Hollywood—and Schrader sensed that what worked for Taxi Driver would work no longer.

  THE MOVIE 1941 went into production in October 1978. It was a quixotic venture from the start. Spielberg’s friends wondered, “Why is Steven doing comedy. Where has Steven been funny?” But Animal House had been a huge hit, Saturday Night Live was all the rage and, funny or not, Spielberg felt he had to join the party. He cast John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, among others; Milius produced, and did some work on the script. He didn’t much like working with his friend. He says, “Steve just wouldn’t listen. He would never say, ‘Well you’re wrong, come up with something better,’ like Francis would do. Instead, he’d go talk to his other team of writers that you didn’t know existed.”

  It was Spielberg’s only foray into genre deconstruction, a la Altman et al., and it quickly became clear even to him that he wasn’t good at it. The director had snatched victory from the jaws of a shark once before, but this time it was different. The budget was out of control. Spielberg was suffering from auteur’s disease. He was using a Louma crane—an extremely costly piece of equipment—to shoot inserts, an elephant stepping on a pea. When the picture wrapped on May 16, 1979, Spielberg had been shooting for 178 days, nearly a month longer than Jaws, and eventually the budget peaked at $31.5 million (some placed it at $40 million), giving Apocalypse Now a run for its money. Before the movie came out, Saturday Night Live writer Michael O’Donoghue had distributed buttons that read, “John Belushi: 1952-1941.”