by Shawn Levy
THE FILM WAS scheduled to shoot in Manhattan in the summer of 1981, but Scorsese took ill that spring and sought to delay production. That wasn’t possible, though, because of an impending strike by the Directors Guild of America; if a certain quota of key material on a film hadn’t been shot by a specific date, the production would be shut down. Ill or not—and he was, per his own words, “coughing on the floor and sounding like a character from The Magic Mountain”—Scorsese would have to proceed.
Ironically, given that he was as thoroughly associated with New York as were Woody Allen and Sidney Lumet, this was only the second film that Scorsese would shoot entirely in the city since turning pro, and he found that the requirements of unions, permitting officials, and traffic control turned even the simplest procedure into an elaborate ritual. “It was like making a film with a dinosaur,” he remembered. “The tail was so big it was wagging and slamming into everything, perhaps not intentionally, but destroying things as in a Godzilla movie.” On top of his struggles with his health and De Niro’s need for excessive retakes and reshoots, the filming schedule began to expand well beyond its original length—and all during the fetid heat of a Manhattan summer.
For Lewis, who had made dozens of films at the rapid-fire pace of the old Hollywood system, the protracted shoot was astounding. “When I saw Take 29 for a scene with no words,” he remembered, “just walking from a theater mob to a limo, I said, ‘We’re in a mess.’ I never saw the number 29 before in my career! When I saw we had four pages of dialogue the next day, I said to one of the crew, ‘If this doesn’t go to 136 takes, I’ll buy you a car.’ ”
But Lewis knew he was in on a good thing, and from the very beginning he determined to keep his peace and do whatever was asked of him. As Scorsese recalled, Lewis told him at the outset, “I know I’m number two in this picture. I won’t give you any difficulty and I’ll do what you want. I’m a consummate professional. I know where I stand. If you want me to wait around, you’re paying for my time, I’ll do that.” Lewis remembered the conversation with more or less the same gist but with a spicier tenor:
I went in with a very simple philosophy: If what they do got Raging Bull up on the screen, then I’m prepared to do whatever’s necessary. Bobby and Marty have eccentricities that I as a filmmaker had to adjust to because I wasn’t there as a filmmaker. If they had hired me as a part of the filmmaking team, I’d have killed them both because it was against everything that I was taught. For example: I do my homework. When I come on the set I can tell you every shot that will be made on that picture that day, right up to wrap. Marty comes on the set and waits to see the temperature of De Niro before he really lays out in his mind what he’s gonna do. Now, he’s done his homework, but he’s done it loose. If Bobby came on and was troubled, Marty would have a way to go to nurture that problem, or he’d go another way. Marty said, “Go with the flow.”… So I kept my mouth shut and stayed in my trailer. When I am a passenger on the other captain’s ship, I’m just a passenger. And if it means I see this ship going down because this fucker’s pulling the cork out, he ain’t gonna hear anything from me.
As Lewis came to see, Scorsese’s indulgence of his star paid off in extraordinary bits of acting. “Bobby is no fool,” he said. “He knows his craft. And that his craft needs his time, it needs his gut for it. Marty could tell him from now until next Tuesday that Take 5 was super. But De Niro knows fucking well that if he goes into Take 12 and 14 and 15, he’ll find an ‘if’ and an ‘and.’ If he does Take 20, he’ll pick up a quick turn, and on Take 28 he’s got lips tightening, which he never had through the first 27 takes. I watched him feign poor retention just to work a scene. I watched him literally look like he couldn’t remember dialogue. He knew the fucking dialogue. It was masterful. There’s nothing he did that didn’t stagger me.”
LEWIS’S EQUANIMITY WAS tested repeatedly, however, not so much by the waiting around as by the actual material in which he was performing. In one of the most indelible scenes in the film, Rupert Pupkin shows up uninvited at Jerry Langford’s Long Island estate and tries to wheedle the talk show host into letting him stay. Langford, predictably and understandably, takes a firm line and then explodes. The scene took two weeks to shoot, Scorsese said, and it was “extremely difficult for everyone.… It was just so painful because the scene itself was so excruciating.”
Perhaps the length of time spent on the sequence was causing Lewis’s energy to lag, because De Niro finally felt he had to prod his co-star into a more believable performance than he was giving. When it came time to shoot Langford’s explosion, De Niro showed up agitated and mumbling invective, apparently upset with Lewis. The Jews, De Niro muttered, “turned this world into garbage for 5,000 years.” Lewis, always quick to detect anti-Semitism, was truly staggered, and shot right back at him:
I said, “You cocksucker, you’re lucky you’re alive. I’ll rip your fucking head off.” I didn’t know he and Marty had met already, to go for it. “Do you realize you are close to my ripping your head off?” And the cameras are rolling. I know Marty is getting what he wants. I know Bobby is feeding me. But for me not to be aware of two cameras and an entire crew, and Bobby De Niro, throwing dialogue at me. “Maybe the Jews were motherfuckers in the first place.” That didn’t … But “If Hitler had lived, he’d have gotten all of you cocksuckers” was the fucking trigger. He knew … the son of a bitch knew. And he’s doing this to me because he’s just off camera. I pulled him into the scene by three feet, and I was on my way. Whew! He came into the dressing room. “Are you okay?” “Yes, I’m fine. I never want to work with you again.”
(Questioned about this legendary bit of scene-building some time later, De Niro sidestepped it: “I don’t know if I said anything anti-Semitic. I might have said something to really bust his balls.”)
Lewis had a similarly volatile experience acting opposite Bernhard, with whom he had just the one long, difficult scene in which he has been kidnapped, bound and gagged, and subjected to her psychosexual ministrations. Bernhard, cast in large part for her ability to improvise in the scene, taunted, teased, and provoked Lewis, and he had to sit there in squelched silence, burning with rage underneath his bindings.
Bernhard adored working with De Niro and Scorsese—“When you work with great people it gives you a great sense of confidence, and it’s a vote of confidence for your talents. You’re like, ‘How could I go wrong here?’ ” Propitiously, her first scene—Masha attacking Langford as he gets into his limo after a TV broadcast—was shot on the night of her birthday, June 6. But Lewis, she remembered, “didn’t have anything to do with making things easier … I was just who I was, and that’s who he was stuck with. I think he would’ve felt the same way about any actress who he had to play that role with.… I don’t think he felt comfortable at all in the situation. Being intimidated by a young woman isn’t really Jerry’s forte.” Lewis tried to improvise Langford’s escape so as to physically humiliate Bernhard—“he wanted me, in my bra and panties and high heels, to spin into a large glass table lit with a hundred candles.” But Scorsese devised a simpler, if similarly violent, bit of action. (“Marty told me later,” Bernhard said, “that he had thought I really scared Jerry Lewis.”)
Finally, Scorsese was happy with Lewis’s participation. “Jerry is totally surreal,” he said. “But he was very easy to direct. The role was difficult. He had to look as if nothing were going on—as if he were just walking along the street. He wasn’t used to acting that way, and he had to keep his face less than elastic. That’s hard to do.” And Lewis, for his part, saved his highest praise for De Niro, with some reservations: “In order to work with Bobby, you have to make a deal with the Devil. He’s one of the best actors I’ve ever seen in my fuckin’ life when he’s banging it out of the park. Bobby is very, very much like Babe Ruth in that he gets 60 out of that park. But remember, Ruth struck out 3,766*4 times.… I’m awestruck by Bobby’s work, by his commitment. But he fears intellect. He fears anyone who can say an
ything other than ‘Hi.’ ”
For De Niro, the difficulty in the film had nothing to do with getting along with Lewis or protecting Bernhard. He was interested in pushing Pupkin as far as he could, bringing the character to the edge of caricature but retaining a patent sense of his humanity. “What De Niro and I were trying for,” Scorsese said, “was to see how far we could push that character—how far over the top Rupert could go and still remain within a realistic framework. How much could he get away with as an actor playing a character like that.” Bernhard concurred that De Niro seemed vulnerable as Pupkin: “He didn’t have that helmet on. He didn’t have that shield, because somebody that intense and desperate, they don’t even think about protecting themselves.”
It all came to a head for De Niro when he shot the climactic comedy routine that Pupkin delivers on national TV as his payment for the safe release of the kidnapped Langford. The monologue—brutally self-lacerating and actually rather funny—was scripted carefully and built up by De Niro in exactly the way a stand-up comedian builds a set of jokes: the timing, the wording, the costume and posture. “The whole routine,” he remembered, “was word-for-word—the whole timing and the way it builds.” But shooting it, he confessed, was a trauma. As Scorsese recalled, when they finished the first take of it, De Niro told him, “I’ve never been as terrified, as humiliated in my life.” Scorsese felt that De Niro had nailed it, but they went for another take. Again, it was grueling. After that they did one more take, and then they let it drop. “We reshot that monologue twice,” De Niro remembered. “I wanted to do it again, but we let it go.” They did make one change to it, at De Niro’s suggestion. In the earliest versions of the script, the monologue appeared chronologically, at the moment in which it was performed live; De Niro urged Scorsese to show it later, when Rupert watches it on tape, along with the rest of the world, broadcast on the small TV in the tavern where his old high school crush tends bar. It was a savvy insight, adding both to the drama (is he any good?) and to the pathos of the climactic scene: Rupert may not be a king, we learn, but he’s actually kind of funny and not at all bad at what he aspires to do.
Shooting on King of Comedy wrapped in early autumn, and Scorsese spent the rest of the fall and the better part of the winter editing. When he presented it to 20th Century Fox, they didn’t know what to do with it. It fit no genre, its stars were either wildly out of their familiar métiers or completely unknown, and it had an ambiguous ending that seemed almost to mock the audience’s credulity. They tested it in a few midwestern markets and it received horrible scores from preview audiences. They decided to release it in early February 1983, nearly two years after production had begun.
YOU START WITH the name, an impossible encumbrance: Rupert Pupkin. “Often misspelled and mispronounced,” he repeatedly says, and before long we hear “Pipkin” and “Pumpkin” and “Pupnik.”
There is the hair, combed to one side like a snowdrift, so big and thick and full that it almost looks like he snaps it on in the morning. The mustache is a dapper touch, and the wardrobe, well … On one hand, he’s impeccable: three-piece suits, ties, polished shoes, always cleaned and pressed and straightened. But the colors can be a bit loud, the cuts a tad out of fashion, the shoes glaringly white beneath dark slacks: the whole thing is off, somehow, but never exactly objectionable. He’s presentable, but within quotation marks, as it were. (Even dressed down to perform a kidnapping, he’s a peacock, in a flame-red and orange aloha shirt, oversized sunglasses, and a Panama hat.) He’s decorous, solicitous, polite. And yet somehow you feel it’s a put-on. There’s nobody actually like this guy, is there? Not in New York in 1982, not on planet Earth, not in real life.
In fact, Rupert Pupkin only partly exists in real life. He lives in New Jersey, commutes to Manhattan to work as the world’s best-dressed messenger, hovers around stage doors to collect autographs (although he insists, “It’s not my whole life”), drinks coffee at Howard Johnson’s, has insane parleys with his frenemy Masha. He’s alive, he’s here, as far as that goes.
But he is truly and most completely alive when he’s not here—when he’s having imaginary conversations with Jerry Langford in his head, dreaming of himself as a guest on Langford’s show, or sitting in his basement on a mock-up of the Langford show set, complete with fullsized cardboard cutouts of Langford and Liza Minnelli (just five years, mind, after New York, New York). In these moments, Rupert chats, schmoozes, argues, exchanges hugs, shares knee-slapping show-biz laughs, and genuinely seems to commune with his celebrity heroes. It’s all in his head, but it’s more real to him than Times Square.
If his ambition ended at reverie, he would be a simple soul—deluded, living at home with his mother, content to be, in his words, a “schmuck for a lifetime.” But his desire for more, for a career in showbiz, for a real spot on the real couch on the real Langford show, leads him into conflicts: with his never-seen mother (voiced, almost inevitably, by Catherine Scorsese), who complains that he’s too loud; with Masha, with whom he gets into wailing, siblinglike arguments in the street; with Langford’s staff, from a receptionist who can’t remember his name and an assistant program director who takes a pass on his material to a security guard who gives him the bum’s rush and a butler who claims he’s “having a heart attack” when Rupert touches things around Langford’s house; and finally with Langford himself. Conflict, we’re told, reveals the true inner person. If that is the case, the true Rupert Pupkin is a whining, wheedling brat who insists on getting his own way and will stop at nothing until he does.
But if his conversations with his mother and especially with Masha reveal the innermost man most clearly, the conversations with Langford reveal the full Rupert Pupkin in all his contradictory glory. There is the flustered Rupert, so eager to make a good impression on Langford in the back of a limousine that he can’t get his words out and won’t let the encounter end (“You don’t know how many times I’ve had this conversation in my head,” he confesses, almost innocently). There is the imaginary superstar Rupert who dotes on his own public image and makes the dream-world Langford beg him for a favor. There is the humble-ish Rupert who confesses, again in his own mind, that his comedy comes from his human pain (“I look at my whole life, and I see the awful, terrible things in my life, and I turn it into something funny”). There is the showbiz Rupert, appearing on the Langford show, where he is kowtowed to by his high school principal and then, on live TV, married to his high school crush. There is the determined Rupert who holds a (fake) gun to Langford’s head and forces him to read cue cards about his own doom, but who is still sufficiently star-struck to help himself to one of the TV host’s cough drops, like a saint’s relic.
All of these Ruperts come together in the remarkable scene in which his weekend visit to Langford’s Long Island estate is revealed to be a bizarre home invasion. Pupkin, per Langford’s butler, “knows everything” about the house—the décor, the routines. He is helping himself piecemeal to the man’s life: he even has the moxie to offer Langford a drink from his own bar when the man shows up, called away from his golf match to deal with the insane situation. For a long time Rupert tries to play the moment light, funny, flippant. But when he sees how angry Langford is, he drops the blithe act and chummy voice and returns to the supplicating tenor he had in their first encounter (and, until now, their only real one). He has called Langford “a prince” and he fancies himself “the king,” but really he’s a serf and he knows it. He’s fortunate to be in the presence of royalty at all, and sometimes that fact becomes clear to him even in his perennial fog.
Watching De Niro through all this, it’s impossible to conceive that we’re looking at the man who, a mere two and a half years earlier, had been in credible fighting trim as Jake LaMotta—or had ballooned up like the older LaMotta, or, indeed, had looked or acted anything like LaMotta at all. In his fifth film with Scorsese in a decade, he looks, sounds, gestures, laughs, behaves, dresses, self-presents, and moves in a fashion unlike anything he�
��s ever displayed before. Pumping up his image for secretaries whom he seeks to impress with his intimacy with Langford, he’s haughty and slick. Told that his work is not quite ready for TV, he sinks into denial, his head bobbing like a chicken’s, trying to be polite but nearing an edge. Goaded by Masha to insist on seeing Langford, he seems almost ready to explode, but he’s still strangely decorous and in check, able to segue quickly into his veneer of civility when his humiliating ejection becomes public. De Niro had been in business against Marlon Brando all these years for the title of most in-depth and most committed actor in movies; here he seems more like Peter Sellers (or, indeed, Jerry Lewis) in his willingness to deflect vanity and even embrace shame for effect.
As complex as his relationships with Masha and Langford are, the most curious and beguiling encounters Rupert has are with Rita, the barmaid whom he had voted for as Most Beautiful when they were high school classmates (“Mr. Romance,” she remembers). She’s played by Diahnne Abbott with a knowing, world-weary air. “Do I know you?” she asks her estranged real-life husband when he sits at her bar. “I think you might,” he replies. Rita is “a working girl,” in her own words, who, in her mid-thirties, has clearly missed whatever train was going to take her to wherever she dreamed of going. For want of other prospects, she lets Rupert buy her a Chinese dinner and some fruity cocktails, and she endures his displays of childish ego during the meal, laughing along as the stranger behind Rupert mocks him to curry favor with her. Invited to a weekend on Long Island, she dolls herself up quite prettily, then helps herself to a drink, plays records to dance to, and—in a shocking, almost gratuitous little insert shot—steals a tchotchke from Langford’s living room. She seems, in short, a bit graspy and desperate. But she knows with certainty that Rupert isn’t the answer to her longing. “What do you want, Rupert?” she asks him, almost as if exhausted by the knowledge that he will answer, “You.” It’s a lovely performance.*5
