Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  Meanwhile, dazzled with the prospect of big-buck profits, new independents like Kassar and Vajna’s Carolco, anxious to gain credibility with the exhibitors, struggled to attract talent. Abetted by agents and the other megaproducers, they bid star salaries upward, injecting high-octane dollars into an already over-heated star system, fueling an unprecedented escalation of salaries that put the most extravagant directors of the ’70s to shame. Simpson and Bruckheimer sired Tom Cruise and Eddie Murphy, Kassar and Vajna fattened Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. Reynolds got $5 million for The Cannonball Run.

  It was becoming a first-weekend business. Recalls producer Art Linson, then a novice, “I had a film, American Hot Wax, I went to the National Theater in L.A. on Friday night, I was in the lobby, Simpson was there, Katzenberg was there, and Katzenberg said, ‘It’s over.’ I mean, it was opening night. I went, ‘What do you mean it’s over?’ ‘The picture, it’s a flop.’ I said, ‘God, it’s only Friday night at six o’clock, maybe it’ll build, it’s a good movie, let’s advertise tomorrow, how do you know this?’ ‘We know it. We got the numbers back from New York. It’s over.’ ”

  So much was riding on every picture, even the superstar directors came to be terrified of failure. Directors were no longer given a second chance. “Realizing his life is going to be affected with one throw of the dice the director starts protecting himself by trying to make it beautiful, spectacular, and one of a kind—almost without regard for what were the original priorities of the piece,” said Coppola. Even Spielberg agreed: “It used to be you only had to debut once, and then you had a career. Now, every single movie that I make, I’m debuting again, everybody’s judging me like it’s my first film.” Concludes Friedkin, “In the ’70s, if you had a flop, the attitude was, ‘That’s too bad, but it was a good picture.’ Then it became, if you made a film that was not a hit, they put you under indictment. You were a fuckin’ criminal.”

  With movies so expensive, the studios less intrepid than Paramount assumed a defensive stance. As Tanen put it in 1983, “It’s really about hedges—what is our exposure on this movie? How much can we lose?” The studios also tried to minimize risk by conducting the kind of product research employed by manufacturers of consumer goods. Scorsese was never forced to test-screen a picture until GoodFellas, in 1990. Says Bart, “Testing changed the nature of the dialogue within the studio. The questions we asked—like, ‘Does it work?’ ‘Is it a good movie?’—started to sound stupid and old-fashioned. Instead, they were asking, ‘What sort of demos are we going to get?’ ‘Are the kids going to like it?’ ‘Does it skew toward women?’ ”

  As producer Michael Phillips puts it, “In the ’70s, the U.S. domestic market accounted for 85 percent of the business. If an executive had a hunch, he would take a shot. It was a seat-of-the-pants business. There was no more than two, three million dollars on the line, and virtually nothing in releasing costs, because it was a pay-as-you-go process. You opened in one or two theaters in each of the major cities, saw how it went. Nurse it along. When the economics started to drive film distribution in the direction of thousand- to two-thousand-print releases and big national buys of media and launch costs of ten, thirteen million dollars, the stakes were so high that each decision was fraught with sheer terror. Instead of a seat-of-the-pants process, people were grasping for a rational framework to make decisions, and the only rational process available was precedent and analogy. So the mentality of the sequel or the look-alike emerged in the ’80s. ‘jaws in Outer Space.’ Movies were designed to be sequelized.”

  Eventually, Simpson was eased out of Paramount and became a producer. Although he was, so far as anyone could tell, aggressively hetero, he took gay culture, with its conflation of fashion, movies, disco, and advertising—images and sound—and used it as a bridge between the “naive” high-concept pictures of Spielberg and Lucas in the ’70s, and highly designed, highly self-conscious high-concept pictures like Flashdance, the Beverly Hills Cop films, and Top Gun of the ’80s. (Recall the discussion of the gay subtext of that movie by Quentin Tarantino in Sleep with Me.) It was no accident that high concept was born and raised at Paramount, which some people considered the gayest studio in Hollywood. Simpson was to gay culture what Elvis Presley was to rhythm and blues, ripping it off and repackaging it for a straight audience. The blockbusters Simpson made with Bruckheimer were star vehicles comprised of little more than a series of movie moments set to a pounding score. If, as Susan Sontag observed, the essential movie experience lay in the desire “to be kidnapped by the movie... overwhelmed by the physical presence of the image,” the Simpson-Bruckheimer movies—Top Gun, Days of Thunder— upped the ante. They took the audience by force. It was little better than rape.

  The Don-and-Jerry pictures were perfect for the Reagan ’80s. As Towne puts it, “So much of the ’70s was about revealing the disparity between what the country said it was, and what the filmmakers perceived it to be, and they had an audience that was interested in that. When the ’80s came along, we entered a world of steroided-out superheroes, starting with Superman. Sly, Arnold, even Bruce Willis would re-fight the Vietnam war, and win. A country that in LBJ’s words had truly become a helpless giant, needed a fantasy where it was not impotent, where it was as strong as Arnold, as invulnerable as Robocop.”

  THE COMMERCIAL FAILURE of Raging Bull, on top of New York, New York, was a crushing blow for Scorsese. “Marty wanted the kind of success that Lucas and Coppola had,” says Sandy Weintraub. “He was afraid he would always be the critics’ darling, but the American public never would love him.” He was terrified that he wouldn’t be allowed to continue making movies if he didn’t make money. She adds, “There was nothing in his life besides movies. What would he do?”

  Later, when Ordinary People beat out Raging Bull for the Oscar, Scorsese was bitter. He always thought he could work within the system and maintain his vision, and for a while, he had. “When I lost for Raging Bull, that’s when I realized what my place in the system would be, if I did survive at all—on the outside looking in.”

  After Raging Bull landed with a resounding thud, Scorsese directed The King of Comedy, which he did as a favor to De Niro. He regretted it: “We had explored everything that we could with each other on Raging Bull. I should not have done The King of Comedy, I should have waited for something that came from me.” It turned into another troubled production. He says, “I found that I had to convince myself every day to be a pro and go into work, and I disappointed myself, like very often I was late in the morning and that sort of thing, and the picture went over budget.”

  During the editing, Scorsese hit a stone wall. “It was partly because I shot so much footage, almost a million feet of film I had to sit through. There were twenty, twenty-five takes of one shot, forty variations on a line. For the first two months, I just couldn’t do it. At the same time, from November ’81 to March ’82, my marriage with Isabella was breaking up.” When Scorsese met her, she was a TV journalist. He had not been pleased when she decided to become an actress, and when she divorced him in 1983, she complained to Time, “he wanted me to spend life between the cookstove and the kids.”

  “That left me flat, and crazed,” continues Scorsese. “I sought out a doctor, and that started very intense therapy, five days a week, and phone calls on weekends, all through ‘82 and ‘83, ‘84, into ‘85. I got myself into such a state of anxiety that I just completely crashed. I’d come downstairs from the editing room, and I’d see a message from somebody about some problem and I’d say, ‘I can’t work today. It’s impossible.’ My friends said, ‘Marty, the negative is sitting there. The studio is going crazy. They’re paying interest! You’ve got to finish the film.’ Finally, I began to understand a lesson I learned when I went to NYU. It was up to me. Nobody cared, ultimately, even your closest friends. You’re gonna act crazy? You’re gonna get into a situation where you can’t work? Nobody gives a damn. And you wind up alone. You face yourself anyway. It’s Jake La Mott
a looking in the mirror at the end of Raging Bull.”

  The King of Comedy was plagued by negative word on the street, and when it was finally released, it bombed. Despite his disappointment, Scorsese plunged ahead with The Last Temptation of Christ, a labor of love he had been gestating since Barbara Hershey first gave him the Nikos Kazantzakis novel in 1971, on the set of Boxcar Bertha. While he was trying to set it up, he found himself the object of ridicule on the Hollywood-New York party axis. “Big people in the business were turning around saying, ‘Yeah, I know the pictures you make,’” he recalls. “One guy introduced me to someone who was the head of some company. He says, ‘This guy’s gonna make Last Temptation.’ The guy looked at me and laughed in my face. Walked away. ‘Yeah, right. Call me next week.’ I mean, I’d come through all those years to get that? It was like a kick in the heart.”

  Although Scorsese (and Coppola) blamed Heaven’s Gate, in many respects, the movie brats did themselves in. Says Bart, “At the beginning of the decade, you have a group of people who really wanted to be on budget and on schedule. They were earnest young people who couldn’t believe that they were being allowed to work within this system, and that the studios would be able to accommodate them. By the end of the decade, they became the big exploiters of the system.”

  It all came home to Scorsese when he had a meeting with Fox about King of Comedy. “They explained that it didn’t pay for them to support King of Comedy any further at the box office, so after a month, they were going to pull it,” he recalls. “Basically, it was, Screw you, forget the picture. The same thing happened that year at Fox with Robert Altman’s H.E.A.L.T.H. They didn’t even release the film, and Altman didn’t do another studio picture for, like, ten years. I realized at that point nobody cared, and that was when I really understood that the ’70s were over for me, that the directors, the ones with the personal voices, had lost. The studios got the power back. Today you look at an ad you don’t even know who directed a picture.”

  Last Temptation was set up at Paramount, only to have the studio pull the plug well into preproduction when it realized the flak it would have to take from the religious right if it proceeded. Scorsese had not had a hit in nearly a decade, since Taxi Driver in 1976. After the successive failures of New York, New York, Raging Bull, and The King of Comedy, it was a crushing blow. “I had to make up my mind whether I really wanted to continue making films.” he says. “There was such negativity that you might as well stop. So what do you do? Stay down dead? No. I realized then, you can’t let the system crush your spirit. I really did want to continue making pictures. I’m a director, I’ll make a low-budget picture, After Hours. I’m going to try to be a pro and start all over again.” He did, and he survived.

  Fourteen:

  “We Blew It”

  1980s

  • How Coppola finally bankrupted Zoetrope, while The Two Jakes broke up the old gang, Lucas’s empire struck back, Spielberg’s life became a soap, Friedkin glimpsed a better world, and Ashby took leave of this one.

  “Now, here we are, twenty years after Heaven’s Gate. Directors don’t have much power anymore, the executives make unheard of amounts of money, and budgets are more out of control than they ever were. And there hasn’t been a classic in ten years.”

  — FRANCIS COPPOLA

  What a long, strange trip it was. At the end of Easy Rider, when Wyatt tells Billy, “We blew it,” he would be proved correct, although it would take over a decade to see it. Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda had created an anthem for a generation, but they had also imagined its apocalyptic destruction, which many of the decade’s directors did their best to emulate. Like Billy and Wyatt, they blew it. Says Bogdanovich, “I felt that by the mid-’70s, I’d blown it, Friedkin had blown it, Altman went into eclipse, one flop after another, Francis went crazy, even Raging Bull didn’t do any business. Everybody kind of blew it in varying shapes and sizes.” All but the most tenacious and disciplined directors of the ’70s who had managed to walk the tightrope between art and commerce, fell to their deaths in the ’80s.

  Whereas Hollywood directors of earlier eras worked into their sixties and seventies, sometimes longer, as did such great foreign directors as Buñuel, Kurosawa, Fellini, and Bergman, the American directors of the ’70s, with few exceptions, burned out like Roman candles after an all-too-brief flash of brilliance, cut off in mid-career. Friedkin, Bogdanovich, Ashby, Schrader, Rafelson, and Penn, all went down. Only Scorsese, and to a lesser extent Altman, came back. Polanski fled the country in 1977 after he was convicted of rape. Milius never recovered from Big Wednesday. Malick left the business, simply disappeared for twenty years. Hopper’s career also ended for some twenty years after The Last Movie. Although Beatty, De Palma, Lucas, and Spielberg hit their peak as the decade ended, of that group, only Spielberg cruised through the next decade, going from blockbuster to blockbuster.

  Most of the other figures of the ’70s suffered as well. “None of us were prepared for the ’80s,” says Margot Kidder. “Our heads were still in the ’70s, and we were at sea in a business run by young agents with blow-dried hairdos.” Bert Schneider never again equaled the high times of BBS. Nicholson struggled through a dry spell that lasted almost half a decade. Pacino and De Niro suffered through the ’80s, while the careers of Voight, Caan, O’Neal, Reynolds, Gould, Segal, Cannon, Burstyn, Christie, and Clayburgh all collapsed. Towne never even approximated the run of scripts he wrote in the early ’70s, and flopped badly as a director. Carole and Charles Eastman disappeared. Buck Henry only sporadically fulfilled his early promise, as did such other writers as Jeremy Larner, Rudy Wurlitzer, W. D. Richter, David Ward, Leonard Schrader, Mardik Martin, William Goldman, Alvin Sargent, and Frank Pierson. Mengers burned out, Begelman’s career was ruined by a check forging scandal, and terminated by suicide in 1995. Simpson died prematurely, a victim of a life of drug abuse. Of the major ’70s executives, Tanen survived for a few years in the ’80s before he hit the skids; Evans destroyed himself in a self-inflicted auto-da-fe of legendary proportions, returning in the ’90s as a grim parody of his former self, a wax figure from Madame Tussaud attached to a couple of pictures that were doomed from the start. Only Calley showed any real sense. He sat out the decade, resurfaced in 1993, and now heads Sony Entertainment.

  For those few who did survive, the cost was high. “The trick, for me personally, has been to divest my life of complications,” says Scorsese. “Your friends become less and less important. I adore Francis and Steven, but we don’t see each other that often. I don’t expect much from people anymore, and I don’t want them to expect much from me. I just want to be left alone.”

  By the mid-’80s, at a meeting of the New York Society of Film Critics, Kael leaned over to Richard Schickel and whispered, sadly, “It isn’t any fun anymore.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Remember how it was in the ’60s and ’70s, when movies were hot, when we were hot? Movies seemed to matter.”

  •

  IF MOST of the New Hollywood directors crashed and burned in the ’80s, few were obliging enough to do it neatly, at the turn of the decade. Each did it in his own time, in his own way. And each fashioned the climax of his story with the degree of finesse accorded him by his gift.

  IT WOULD TAKE a couple of years for the topography of the post-New Hollywood landscape to emerge from the blizzard of coke. Meanwhile, the director’s cinema entered its decadent phase, lingering into the first half of the ’80s—it still exists in a debased form even today—in the guise of several megabuck projects—Beatty’s Reds, Coppola’s One from the Heart, Evans and Coppola’s The Cotton Club, and the abortive Nicholson-Towne-Evans sequel to Chinatown, The Two Jakes. These pictures were the New Hollywood’s version of the Old Hollywood’s big budget musicals of the late ’60s, and of them, only Reds was a commercial and critical success (it won Beatty an Oscar for Best Director).

  Schrader’s Paint Your Wagon was an ambitious horror movie called Cat People that h
e made for Tanen at Universal. As the ’70s ended, Schrader was riding high—on the back of American Gigolo. He was taking truckloads of powder and pills. “When you could get away with doing half a gram on a weekend, it was great fun,” he recalls. “But when I moved up to a gram a day, then it wasn’t fun anymore. After writing all night, and finding the next morning I only had a page and a half, I realized I wasn’t producing. I was having motor problems. It got to the point where I couldn’t hit the keys. I got paranoid, I couldn’t focus. The whole balance of life shifted from day to night, the quality of the people in my life was getting scuzzier and scuzzier, darker and darker, until I was dealing with drug dealers and pimps and guns, and it got really ugly. In your forties, you really have to want to be a drug user, because it’s so hard to keep the hours.”

  Tanen thought that in Cat People he would get a classy exploitation film starring Nastassja Kinski, while Schrader was happy to finally get a big studio movie with lots of special effects. But he gave Tanen more than he bargained for, a lyrical ode to sensuality, incest, and death, which only Schrader could have imagined would change his image. “Everybody on the film was doing drugs except Nastassja,” he continues. “The drugs were really fucking me up. One day, I had been doing some coke in my trailer, I didn’t want to come out. My AD came in to get me. He started doing drugs. The second AD came in to try and get us both out. Then the three of us were there, doing coke. All the PAs were standing around the trailer, because they didn’t have anybody left. Somebody said, ‘How are we gonna get anybody to direct this movie?”