by Shawn Levy
—MARTIN SCORSESE, 1987
HISTORY AND LEGEND TELL US THAT JOHN FORD DISCOVERED John Wayne running errands on a movie studio lot; that John Waters was introduced to Divine by a mutual friend while they waited for a school bus; that François Truffaut spoke with hundreds of kids before the unknown Jean-Pierre Léaud delivered an audition so good that parts of it wound up, raw, in The 400 Blows.
And from such a similarly humble instance of kismet came the decades-long relationship between the great director Martin Scorsese and his greatest acting asset and alter ego, Robert De Niro.
At the time, they were only slightly better known to each other than they were to the world at large. Scorsese, a voracious consumer of movies and an ambitious figure in the small world of New York independent film, somehow hadn’t yet caught Greetings or Hi, Mom!, so he’d never actually seen De Niro act. But a vibe of familiarity fluttered inside him: he knew this guy from somewhere, and that somewhere turned out to be the streets.
De Niro, though, knew Scorsese—or at least his work. He’d seen and enjoyed his first picture, the student film Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, which, like The Wedding Party, cost its maker several years of editing, financing, and additional shooting before its public premiere. But even though he acknowledged that he was, indeed, the Bobby Milk whom Scorsese recalled, he didn’t have a similar flash of recognition. “I didn’t really know him,” he said years later. “I’d see him around. We remembered each other. Sometimes when we were kids, we’d meet at the dances at a place on 14th Street.… It was just an Italian American dance place. I saw Marty around there. We knew each other. Friends of his, from his group, sometimes would change over into our group. We had like a crossover of friends.”
They chatted, appreciating their common bond: among all the film and theater people at the party, they were the only ones who’d grown up with some of the dirt of the downtown streets underneath their fingernails. Of course, Scorsese didn’t know at that moment that the cagy, watchful De Niro was more of an observer of neighborhood life than a full-throttle participant in it, that he was an art-world brat, not some tough kid. And De Niro, likewise, didn’t know if the compact fast talker in front of him, who seemed to have the energy to direct ten movies before the night was out, was a genuine Little Italy street guy. They chatted for a bit, then parted, each far too caught up in his own struggle to make headway in his nascent career to think much more of it.
AFTER THE HOLIDAYS, De Niro became engrossed in pursuing a particular film role, one for which he wasn’t the fellow you’d first consider: a dimwitted baseball player from Georgia in Bang the Drum Slowly. The movie was an adaptation of a 1956 novel by Mark Harris that had been memorably performed as a live teleplay some fifteen years prior. That production had starred Paul Newman as Henry Wiggen, a hotshot pitcher for the fictional New York Mammoths, who finds himself saddled with the dumb, earnest catcher Bruce Pearson (played by Albert Salmi) as batterymate and roommate. Wiggen, the protagonist of no fewer than four novels by Harris, has ambitions beyond the baseball field—selling insurance, writing books, squeezing extra money out of the front office—but Pearson, only modestly talented as an athlete, is just happy to be able to play the game, even if his grip on a major league career is somewhat tenuous. Wiggen considers his teammate a rube, and not without reason: thinking he’s in sync with teammates who tease Wiggen by calling him “Author,” Pearson calls him “Arthur.” But when Pearson reveals in confidence that he’s suffering from Hodgkin’s disease and wants to hide it from the manager so as not to risk his spot in the lineup, Wiggen surprises himself by doing the honorable thing: without asking for recompense or credit of any kind, he supports his catcher professionally and personally until he is too ill to continue playing, and then until his death. Ashamed at the memory of his early treatment of his friend, he ends by declaring, “From here on in, I rag nobody.”
The 1956 broadcast created a stir, and there was immediate talk of bringing the story to the big screen or even the stage. Producer-director Josh Logan announced plans for a film version starring Newman; Broadway impresario David Merrick toyed with the notion of presenting it as a stage drama; and Harold Rome, who’d done the trick with Destry Rides Again and I Can Get It for You Wholesale, imagined it as a musical. But the opportunity to do something bigger with Harris’s book fell finally to a showbiz neophyte, the Chicago civil rights lawyer Maurice Rosenfield, who along with his wife, Lois, had read and admired the novel and decided to invest their own money, which Rosenfield had made defending, among other clients, Playboy magazine and Lenny Bruce.
The Rosenfields were hands-on producers—it was their money—and they made choices in their own fashion and their own time. As director, they selected John Hancock, a tall, thirtyish Harvard grad who’d grown up playing football (and violin) in nearby Cicero, Illinois, and was emerging as a stage director and indie filmmaker. He had a low-budget horror movie to his credit—the deliciously titled Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. But it was his Oscar-nominated live-action short film, Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet, about out-of-shape businessmen who play touch football in Central Park, that caught the Rosenfields’ attention when they saw it on TV. They hired him to direct the script that Harris was adapting from his own novel.
As grand as it might have sounded, the Rosenfields had barely enough money to mount something as big as a sports film, so they were extremely particular about every aspect of the project, especially the casting. They had the hunch that casting newcomers would be economical and impart a certain verisimilitude to the production, and so they threw a wide net, having the then-unknown James Woods, Tommy Lee Jones, and John Lithgow, among many others, read for them.
De Niro made his way to the suite at Manhattan’s Warwick Hotel where the Rosenfields were meeting actors. At first he read for the Wiggen role, but then, perhaps encouraged by his ability to reproduce the southern accent he’d developed for Bloody Mama, they steered him toward Pearson. If they were enthusiastic, they didn’t let on immediately. “I read for John Hancock seven times,” De Niro remembered. “I read for him, the producer, the producer’s wife. But that’s okay. I wanted them to be sure about me.” Besides, the drawn-out business allowed him to address a fundamental deficiency in his qualifications for the role: he didn’t know how to play baseball.
In reflection, it makes some sense that a kid raised in lower Manhattan by parents immersed in the art world hadn’t been a Little Leaguer, even if his boyhood did coincide with the fullest flush of baseball in New York City (he was in his early teens when the Dodgers and Giants left for California). Faced with the possibility of playing a ballplayer, he set about systematically teaching himself the game, reading and heavily annotating books on batting and, once he knew he’d play Pearson, catching; taking tutelage from City College baseball coach Del Bethel; watching and making notes on more than a dozen games, in person and on TV, paying fastidious attention not only to the actual competitive action (“Learn to slide!!!!” he reminded himself) but also to the little details of behavior exhibited by batters and catchers. He was careful, for instance, to note something not found in books, namely, the habitual demeanor of professional athletes: “I saw in every baseball game how relaxed the players were. I could just pick it up. I could practice in my room watching them do nothing.” That might’ve sounded deprecatory, but he genuinely developed a taste for the game. “I used to think it was a pretty dull sport unless you were playing. But now I go once in a while to Yankee Stadium with some friends and sip beer and spend the day having a good time.”
When he finally got the part after the dragged-out casting process (“after which, I thought I deserved it,” he said), he dove further. He sought out the advice of some experts, including Jim Bouton, the former Yankees pitcher who’d published the pioneering tell-all book Ball Four the year before and was then breaking into TV sportscasting. “I told him to read a wonderful book called ‘Ball Four,’ ” Bouton said later, “and spend two weeks riding the buse
s with some minor league team down South.” In fact, De Niro visited major league spring training camps in Florida, giving him the opportunity to soak up the sort of details he found enlightening: physiques, habits, clothing, little insiderish ways of talking. He went to the Yankees’ camp and spoke with the young catcher Thurman Munson. But he found that professional players weren’t much interested in helping him. “I went down to Florida and hung around,” he said, “but that wasn’t so good. Baseball players are like stars in a way—it’s always, ‘Later, kid.’ ”
From there he went to Georgia, spending time in towns of the sort that Pearson would have been from, observing local codes of dress, demeanor, diet, work, leisure, and especially speech. “I wanted to listen to the way Georgians talk,” he explained. “I carried a tape recorder around with me into bars, gas stations, and hotels. Most everyone was remarkably friendly. I told them I was an actor preparing for a role and even went so far as to ask a couple of guys if they’d mind reading lines from the script into my recorder.” He got so chummy with a few of them, including a small-town mayor, that he would practice line readings on them: “They would correct me when I sounded too much like a New Yorker,” he said. After getting an idea of how the locals dressed, he bought a few outfits from a general store, and he took careful notes about how folks drove, how they stood while fishing, how they fussed to make sure that their hair was just so (“always carry a comb,” he noted).
He read at length about Hodgkin’s disease and spoke with doctors to learn how it would affect his behavior, mood, and energy. (He eventually hit upon a technique of spinning himself around a few times before a shot in which he needed to appear ill: “It made me dizzy, a very similar thing that the character was feeling,” he recalled.) He read books about the process of dying. He built up his leg muscles for all the squatting he’d have to do behind the plate; he ate a high-protein diet to give himself a more athletic build. He also learned how to chew tobacco—and made himself ill more than once in the effort. “He worked like a dog,” his director, Hancock, said. “He got sick chewing that tobacco but kept it up until he finally could do it.” (“I tried mixing a lot of other things together to get the same effect,” De Niro explained. “I bought licorice and tea leaves. But nothing works like the real thing.”)
The most important thing he did, though, was to find the reality of the character Bruce Pearson. Reminding himself that it was important “to show what’s unlikeable about me,” he sketched out a bit of business that would show the man’s inner life: “I do all the opposite things that people do (or are called to do) in certain situations. Like smiling when [I] tell Arthur Mamma died.” He would play the part with a dignity and solidity that weren’t immediately obvious in the character: “I didn’t try to play dumb. I just tried to play each scene for where it was. Some people are dumb but they’re not dumb—I guess they’re insensitive, but they’re not insensitive to everything.” Hancock had his own idea of how De Niro achieved the effect he sought. “He used stupid eyes,” he said. “Most actors play a dumb characterization with a wide-eyed, bland look. Bobby really knew what stupid eyes are—you’re watching carefully in hopes of finding out what’s going on, but you don’t want to get caught watching.” Hancock emphasized that he was not saying his star wasn’t intelligent: “Bobby is very smart,” he said, and then added, “but he feels he’s not.” De Niro seemed to confirm his director’s impression with a telling note he made on his script: “Don’t hide behind Bruce, but be exposed within him.”
Another young actor, Jon Cutler, served as De Niro’s stand-in and lighting double on the film (something he would continue to do for several years), and he admitted later that he didn’t reckon much of what he saw De Niro doing, until he figured out the proper way to look at it:
I watched Bob at first off-camera from the sidelines. He was totally unimpressive. Then, later on during the scene where he sits on his bed, too weak to pull on his pants, I walked closer to the camera. Finally I was sitting under the camera, on the crab dolly. Crouching under the lens, I discovered a fascinating fact. If I leaned my head three feet away from the lens, I didn’t see very much coming out of De Niro. He looked boring. But if I stuck my head under the lens, I was watching a genius. He was only brilliant when I sat under the lens. Bob is a guy the camera loves.
Since so much of Bang the Drum Slowly involved the actual sporting interplay of his cast, Hancock held baseball practice in Central Park every day before they rehearsed their scenes. They did this for three weeks, during which time a friend of novelist Mark Harris’s visited the set and, astonished by De Niro’s transformation, reported back to the man who’d created Bruce Pearson, “He has death in his eyes.” De Niro developed a rapport with Michael Moriarty, who, playing the pitcher Wiggen, was also more or less unknown at the time; the rest of the cast included Vincent Gardenia, the thick-featured New York stage actor, as the Mammoths’ manager; comic Phil Foster in a key role as a coach; and, in virtually his first filmed role, Danny Aiello in a small part as a fellow player.*1 They shot game and locker room sequences in Shea and Yankee Stadiums (the film had such a low budget that Hancock could afford only seventy-five extras at a time and had to re-create crowd scenes by moving them all around the stadium), and they used Clearwater, Florida, as the location for Bruce’s hometown. By summer the film was in the can and De Niro once again was scrambling for a job. And then he heard from the guy he’d met at that Christmas party.
SOON AFTER THEIR fateful encounter in December, Martin Scorsese found himself hired by none other than Roger Corman to direct a commercial feature film—Scorsese’s first—and was sent off to, of all places, rural Arkansas to film it. The original idea was for a sequel to Bloody Mama, yet another made-on-the-cheap gangster movie set in the Depression. Instead, in the way of the American International Pictures gristmill, it morphed into Boxcar Bertha, the based-on-truth story of a couple of radical labor organizers who fall into a romance while fighting the corrupt management of a railroad company. It was a quickie production, as could be expected, falling into Scorsese’s lap in early 1972 and due out in theaters before summer. But it had a budget of about a half million dollars, it starred a couple of hot young actors in David Carradine and Barbara Hershey, and it was a real movie, not a student film.
Scorsese had moved to Los Angeles in 1971 to seek work opportunities, which was how he came to Corman’s attention. But he had also discovered a friend and mentor in one of his idols, John Cassavetes, the broody actor who was slowly building a catalogue of independent films as a writer-director. Cassavetes had already seen Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, Scorsese’s student film that, in its shaggy, personality-driven storytelling, resembled one of the older director’s films, and he’d expressed appreciation for it. Scorsese, pleased to have completed Boxcar Bertha, arranged for Cassavetes to see it in rough cut. When it was over, Cassavetes called him into his office and told him point-blank, “You just spent a whole year of your life making a piece of shit. It’s a good picture, but you’re better than the people who make this kind of movie.” He asked if Scorsese had anything else in mind like Who’s That Knocking?, a movie that he was dying to make.
Scorsese did. Who’s That Knocking? had been filmed piecemeal over a few years and hadn’t fully explored the territory in which it took place, a world of young men in Little Italy whose lives consisted of petty crime, boozy nights, furtive romances, and stymied ambitions, a kind of update of Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni in which the characters and textures mattered more than the plot. Scorsese and his writing buddy Mardik Martin had been noodling with a second take on the material, another film about young, aimless men from the neighborhood caught between the culture of their immediate environment and the larger world beyond, which was changing in ways that ignited their own ambivalences about tradition, religion, honor, obligation, friendship, and more. Smitten by pop music almost as much he was by the cinema, Scorsese had given it the working title Season of the Witch, after the ominous Do
novan hit. He told Cassavetes about it, saying that it still needed rewrites, and Cassavetes encouraged him to focus on that instead of signing on to direct one of the other projects that Corman might offer him (indeed, there were a couple). And so, in a Los Angeles apartment, Scorsese set about remembering and reimagining the old neighborhood.
THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD, in Scorsese’s case, meant Elizabeth Street in Little Italy, where he lived from the age of seven or so. But, really, it might as well have been Polizzi Generosa or Cimmina, the hardscrabble towns near Palermo, Sicily, from which his family hailed—or, just as much, the make-believe world of the movies, whether on a gigantic movie screen or the little black-and-white TV in his family’s apartment. By blood Scorsese was a product of ancient culture, manners, obsessions, and tastes, but by personality he was purely a creature of the here and now, as embodied by the art of cinema.
He’d been born in 1942 to Charlie and Catherine Scorsese, themselves the children of Sicilian immigrants, who had managed through hard work in New York’s garment district to lift themselves out of the tenements of lower Manhattan to the relative comfort of Corona, Queens, where their sons, Frank and Marty, were born. But money troubles forced them back to Little Italy, a place that, as the young Scorsese experienced it, was as tribal and insular as the provincial towns from which his grandparents immigrated.
Scorsese was a sickly kid, asthmatic, and Frank, who was six years older, took special care to see that he wasn’t hassled, that he was included in the goings-on in the street, and that he got to do his favorite thing of all—go to the movies in Times Square, where the young Scorsese ate up the massive images on the big screen. It was an all-consuming passion: he watched movies on TV (once a week, a local station broadcast a film in Italian, which he’d never miss), and he was obsessed with pictures of all sorts. Always bookish, he was drawn to religious study in part because of the art in his schoolbooks and in the churches, particularly at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, where he served as an altar boy. He had a romantic fantasy of becoming a painter, and he drew page after page of illustrations of stories. But that wasn’t anything he would have shared with the flashy kids in the streets, sawed-off little tough guys who acted like the gangsters that they saw around them or in the movies. Scorsese was a small, nervous kid—a nail-biter, a twitcher, a chatterbox—but he knew enough to keep quiet out in the neighborhood, watching, making mental notes, timing his comings and goings so as to avoid conflicts, keeping an eye on the doorways and corners when he was in public places such as restaurants. (“For a long time,” he revealed, “wherever I went, I tried to sit with my back to the wall.”)
