Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  Later, Spielberg explained, with a degree of candor unusual for Hollywood, “We would have been better off with $10 million less, because we went from one plot to seven subplots. But at the time, I wanted it—the bigness, the power, hundreds of people at my beck and call, millions of dollars at my disposal, and everybody saying, Yes, yes, yes.” Now, he elaborates, “Power can go right to the head. I felt immortal after a critical hit and two box office hits, one being the biggest hit in history up to that moment. But 1941 was not a screw-you film, I can do anything I want, watch me fail upward. I was very indulgent on 1941, simply because I was insecure with the material. It wasn’t making me laugh, or any of us laugh, either in dailies or on the set. So I shot that movie every way I knew how, to try to save it from what I thought it actually became, which is a demolition derby.”

  Spielberg was so certain 1941 was going to be a disaster that on the night of the December 14, 1979, premiere, he fled the country, decamped with Amy to Japan, where they planned, finally, to get married. They had been engaged for months, sent out Christmas cards signed, “the Spielbergs.” Amy told friends, “I’ll be pregnant by April.” They never did get married there; by the time the plane landed in Tokyo, the two had called it off. Explains Irving, “I fell in love with Willie Nelson.” So low was Amy’s standing among Spielberg’s friends that they speculated she left him because the picture flopped. Says one friend, “He was so relieved that they broke up, because he wanted to marry her, and he just saw it as a narrow escape from years of alimony, because the marriage would not have lasted.”

  Spielberg was right—about Amy, about 1941. The reviews were awful, and the picture went down with a resounding thud. In the press, Steven ungallantly blamed the writers, Zemeckis and Gale, who “caught me at a weak moment,” he said. Amy moved to Santa Fe. It was a low point in Spielberg’s life and career, perhaps the lowest. 1941 popped the wunderkind balloon, and now, after advertising his marriage plans to everyone he knew, the squeaky-clean director had just managed to prove that his personal life was as out of control as his budgets. It took him a long time to recover. “It’s a lot easier to commit to a movie than a personal relationship,” he said, adding, “Life has finally caught up with me. I’ve spent so many years hiding from pain and fear behind a camera.... [But] I didn’t escape suffering. I only delayed it.”

  DURING THE LAST WEEK of Hardcore, when De Niro paid a visit to the set, Schrader knew something was up. The actor was not the sort to casually drop by. He told Schrader that UA wouldn’t make Raging Bull with Mardik’s script; he asked Schrader to rewrite it. He also told him he was fed up with Scorsese’s indifference to the project. By that time, Schrader had firmly established himself as a director, and he was not eager to work on other people’s scripts. At a dinner with Bob and Marty at Musso and Frank’s Grill in the summer of 1978, he agreed to do a polish, but he made sure they knew he was doing them a favor. This did not sit well with Marty.

  After reading Mardik’s drafts, Schrader concluded that more was needed than just a fix. He knew he had to go back to the sources, do his own research. It was then that he discovered Jake’s brother, Joey. Recalls Schrader, “They were both boxers. Joey was younger, better looking, and a real smooth talker. It occurred to Joey that he could do better at managing his brother. He wouldn’t have to get beat up, he’d still get the girls, and he would get the money. And having a brother myself, it was very easy for me to tap into that tension. I realized there was a movie there.” Raging Bull, among other things, became a version of Schrader’s relationship with Leonard.

  Meanwhile, the movie was coming together for De Niro. One day, at Scorsese’s suite in the Sherry, La Motta just got up and banged his head against the wall. Recalls Scorsese, “De Niro saw this movement and suddenly he got the whole character from him, the whole movie. We knew we wanted to make a movie that would reach a man at the point of making that gesture with the line, ‘I’m not an animal.’ ”

  Schrader wrote at Nickodell’s, a bar on Melrose next to Paramount that, in Simpson’s words, “was a great place to get fucked up, because it was dark and cavernous.” He remembers Schrader retiring to the bathroom for some moments, then emerging to take a seat at the bar, where he feverishly scribbled on a napkin. It was a scene in which La Motta, in jail and at the nadir of his fortunes, tries to masturbate. But he can’t get off, because his mind is flooded with guilt, memories of how terrible he’s been to the various women in his life. This was Schrader at his best, going places nobody else would go, raw and fearless.

  But material of this kind was way too rich for UA. Winkler met with the executives at Eric Pleskow’s apartment on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, near the beach. “We’d just done a boxing movie, Rocky,” recalls Medavoy, “and this was a real downer.” According to Winkler, the company wanted no part of Raging Bull. Still, the producer had a trump. “We were in a unique position, ‘cause we owned the rights to Rocky,” he says. UA had released Rocky in 1976. It was one of the coming crop of post-New Hollywood feel-good films, a throwback to the ’50s, and a peek at the ’80s, a racist, Great White Hope slap at Muhammad Ali—on whom the character of Rocky’s opponent was all too obviously based—and everything he stood for, the generation of uppity black folk and the antiwar, “nigger-loving” white kids who admired him. Rocky was a huge success, taking in about $110 million before it played out, making it the fifth highest grossing picture of all time. So all Winkler had to say was, “Want to make Raging Bull? No? Want to make Rocky II? Yes? Okay, let’s make a deal.”

  Even the writer of Taxi Driver found the characters repellent. Schrader told Marty, “We have to give Jake a depth, a stature he does not possess, otherwise he’s not worth making a movie about.” He says Scorsese didn’t get it. For Scorsese, Jake’s Neanderthal sensibility was the whole point. “Bob and I sort of pushed each other in terms of how unpleasant a character could be, and still people cared for him,” he says. “Because there’s something in Bob as an actor, something about his face, that people see the humanity.”

  Scorsese, De Niro, and Winkler met with Schrader at the Sherry to discuss the script. It was a tense meeting. Marty thought Schrader’s new draft was a breakthrough. He too responded to the sibling aspects of the script. Still, both he and De Niro had reservations. Recalls Schrader, “De Niro was balking at a lot of the heavier stuff, the raw, controversial stuff, the cock and the ice and all that, ‘Why do we have to do these things?’ Marty wasn’t going to take on Bob, because he had to work with him, so he was letting me fight those fights. It was a bold, original kind of scene. But looking at it from De Niro’s point of view, it was pretty hard to make it work, sitting there with your dick in your hand.” To Marty and Bob, Schrader’s attitude was, Here’s your script, I don’t need this, I want to get back to my own projects. At one point, Paul threw the script across the room, yelling, “If you want a secretary to take dictation, hire one. But I’m here to try to write a real story about someone that people care about,” and stormed out. Says Scorsese, “I’ll do anything and say anything to get what I want on the screen. Throw something at me, curse at me, do what you want to do as long as I get what I want. I sit there and smile and take it and run, which is what I did. He broke the icejam and gave us something special. But I certainly couldn’t embrace the person afterward. Not after years of slights and insults, it was just too much.”

  But Scorsese’s world came crashing down around his ears right after Labor Day 1978. He had been living with Isabella Rossellini since early summer. He, Rossellini, De Niro, and Martin, went to the Telluride Film Festival. “We didn’t have any coke, somebody gave us some garbage, it made us sick,” recalls Mardik. That weekend, Scorsese started coughing up blood, and blacked out for the first time in his life. From Telluride, he went to New York, where he collapsed. “He was bleeding from his mouth, bleeding from his nose, bleeding from his eyes, ass. He was very near death,” Martin adds. Rossellini had to go to Italy for work, and when she left, after that weekend,
she thought she was never going to see him alive again.

  Steve Prince took Scorsese to New York Hospital. A doctor came running down to the ER carrying a sample of his blood, yelling, “Is this your blood?”

  “Yeah,” Scorsese replied, blankly.

  “Do you realize you have no platelets?”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means you’re bleeding internally everywhere.”

  “I want to get back to work.”

  “You can’t go anywhere, you may get a brain hemorrhage any second.”

  Scorsese’s condition appeared to be a result of the interaction among his asthma medication, other prescription drugs, and the bad coke he had taken over the weekend. He was down to 109 pounds. The doctor stopped all the drugs and pumped him full of cortisone. He was put in a palatial room previously occupied by the Shah of Iran, but he couldn’t sleep, and the first three nights he stayed up watching movies, among them, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, appropriately enough. Eventually, the cortisone worked, and his platelet count started to rise, stopping the bleeding.

  “Finally,” says Robertson, “Marty got a doctor who conveyed the message that either he changed his life or he was going to die. We knew we had to change trains. Our lives were way too rich. The cholesterol level was unimaginable. I went back to my family, hoping they would overlook my fool heart.”

  De Niro came into Scorsese’s room, said, “What’s the matter with you, Marty? Don’t you wanna live to see if your daughter is gonna grow up and get married? Are you gonna be one of those flash-in-the-pan directors who does a couple of good movies and it’s over for them?” He changed the subject to Raging Bull, said, “You know, we can make this picture. We can really do a great job. Are we doing it or not?” Scorsese replied, “Yes.” He had finally found the hook: the self-destructiveness, the wanton damage to the people around him, just for its own sake. He thought: I am Jake.

  AFTER HIS STRING of high-profile reverses, Peter Bogdanovich’s ill-wishers whispered that he was washed up, could no longer get a studio deal. Cybill Shepherd had left him to marry a former bartender and parts manager for a Memphis-based Mercedes-Benz dealership, three years her junior. Bogdanovich derisively referred to him as “that garage mechanic.” He was depressed and at loose ends.

  Bogdanovich had become a frequent visitor at the Playboy Mansion, where he met Dorothy Stratten, in October 1978. She was a former Dairy Queen waitress from a cowtown in Canada, eighteen years old, and unhappily married to Paul Snider, twenty-nine, a sleazy hustler who was managing her career. Snider had sent her nude pictures to Playboy, where she had been featured as Miss August 1979, going on to become Playmate of the Year in 1980. Stratten was from the same mold as Shepherd, a stunning blonde, statuesque (five foot eleven), with great bone structure, full breasts, and was, of course, an aspiring actress. Dorothy was a pothead, spent her days stoned playing checkers and roller skating. She was almost comically nearsighted, but refused to wear glasses because they spoiled her looks. When she walked down Sunset to Mirabelle’s, a restaurant, perched on platform heels and wearing indecently brief terrycloth shorts with a tiny top, head high in the air, she invariably caused rear-enders—to which she was entirely oblivious because she was nearly blind.

  Bogdanovich took one look at Stratten and thought, This is the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my life. He told her he was casting a picture, which he wasn’t, and gave her his number. She never called. Exactly one year later, in October 1979, he ran into her again, and they started seeing each other. He told her he had made a star of Shepherd, he would do it again with her. She cried on his shoulder, complained about Snider. He clucked sympathetically. It was the old body-of-a-woman, mind-of-a-girl thing. Not yet twenty, she always had a man in her life to tell her what to do. Peter was more than happy to fill the bill. “She was not in love with Peter,” says someone who knew them both. “Every time she talked to me about ‘Peter, it was, Teter is okay.’ It was not like when I talked to Peter, ‘Oh, we love each other.’ She was along for the ride.” But, according to actress Colleen Camp, who was a friend, “She was totally smitten with Peter.”

  Several of Dorothy’s friends warned the couple that Snider was unstable. Dorothy always dismissed the idea, saying, “Oh, he’d never do anything. He’s very gentle.” Peter said, “I guess I should pay him some money.”

  Peter wrote Dorothy into They All Laughed, an $8.6 million romantic comedy with Audrey Hepburn, Ben Gazzara, and John Ritter. It was produced by a wannabe Hollywood company, Time-Life Films. Peter kissed her for the first time in mid-January of the new year, as they walked on the beach in Santa Monica. In the spring, she wrote Snider a letter informing him she wanted a separation.

  They All Laughed started up in New York. At that point in his career Peter, who always fancied himself an actor, was better at playing the director than actually directing, so much so that when Buck Henry was walking down Fifth Avenue past the Plaza and stumbled across the production, he saw a guy in a big Stetson and cowboy boots behind the camera, and said to his girlfriend, “Look, somebody’s making a movie about making a movie.”

  Snider was desperately trying to reach Dorothy, who had put a “Do Not Disturb” on her phone at the Wyndham Hotel. People warned her that it would drive Snider crazy if he did not have access to his wife. She paid no attention. After the picture wrapped in July, Stratten moved into Peter’s house. Snider, meanwhile, was starting to behave erratically. He bought a shotgun and shot pigeons in his backyard. One afternoon, he called Platt’s home, shouting, hoarsely, “Where’s Peter Bogdanovich, where’s Peter Bogdanovich?” Platt thought it was an out-of-work actor.

  Snider had convinced Stratten she still owed him for making her a center-fold, and she was giving him money. On the morning of August 14, she left Peter’s house without telling anyone where she was going. She was on her way to Snider’s home, apparently to make another payment. When she had not returned by noon, Peter began to worry. Trying to calm him down, his daughter Antonia said—ironically, as it turned out—“At least she’s not dead.”

  Probably loaded on booze and ’ludes, Snider blew Stratten’s head off with the shotgun, and then placed her prostrate on an exercise bench (later referred to in the press as a “bondage machine”) and had sex with her corpse. Her butt was slightly elevated by the bench, on which there were semen stains; there were two bloody handprints on her bottom. One of her fingers, apparently blown off when she raised her hands to protect herself, was stuck to the wall, along with a fair amount of blood. She was twenty. Snider then shot himself in the head. When the police discovered the body, one of his eyes had been moved to the center of his forehead by the force of the blast, so that he looked like a Cyclops.

  Bogdanovich was told about the murder-suicide by Hugh Hefner, who phoned him around midnight. “I dropped the phone, fell down, tried to scratch through the linoleum,” he recalls. “It was the way people reacted to heavy bombing during the war. They tried to dig through the ground. I wanted to get away from it, that’s what that crawling thing was about, but then it hit me, that no matter where I went, the problem was that I’d be there. Nobody would let me out of the house, which was just as well. I would’ve driven off a cliff or something. They gave me a whole shitload of Valium, and took me upstairs and put me to sleep.”

  LIKE ARTHUR KRIM AND COMPANY, the new production heads at UA, Steven Bach and David Field, found the Raging Bull script scabrous and depressing, thought it made Rocky look like a dust-up between two sissies in the sandbox. One of Winkler’s jobs was to keep bad news away from his volatile director. Scorsese had no idea the project was in jeopardy. He recalls, “I thought I could get any picture made, particularly with De Niro. He was a big star. I was naive about that.”

  Winkler finally called Marty, said, “We better have a meeting with the UA guys. Just say hello and talk about the script.”

  “What do they want to know? What do we have to talk about?”

  �
�Just say hello. It’s a hello meeting. It’s just something so they feel part of it.” At the end of November 1978, just after Thanksgiving, Bach and Field accompanied Winkler to Scorsese’s co-op in the Galleria on East 57th Street in New York. De Niro was there as well. Winkler wasn’t worried. He still had the Rocky trump. But Scorsese startled them by announcing he wanted to do the film in black and white. He wanted Raging Bull to have a tabloid look, like Weegee. Bach and Field demurred, eventually gave in, but came up with a series of objections to the script.

  “This picture is written as an X, and I don’t think we can afford that,” said Bach.

  “What makes you so sure it’s an X?”

  “When I read in a script ‘close-up on Jake La Motta’s erection as he pours ice water over it prior to the fight,’ then I think we’re in the land of X...”

  “Look,” interrupted Field, “it isn’t about the language or the things the writers wrote that you probably won’t shoot anyway. It’s the whole script. It’s this man,” Field said, quietly. “I don’t know who wants to see a movie that begins with a man so angry, so... choked with rage, that because his pregnant wife burns the steak, he slugs her to the kitchen floor and then kicks her in the abdomen until she aborts.”

  “We’ll find a writer who can lick it,” said Winkler, blandly.

  “It’s not finally about the writer,” said Field. “Can any writer make him more than what he seems to be in the scripts we’ve seen?”

  “Which is what?” asked Marty, brows knitted.

  Field regarded him with a faint smile. “A cockroach.”

  A suffocating silence fell over the room like a blanket. De Niro, in jeans and bare feet, slumped in an easy chair, had said nothing. He roused himself, and said, quietly but distinctly, “He is not a cockroach.... He is not a cockroach.”