by Shawn Levy
Ironically, given that we know (from the movie poster or DVD jacket, if nothing else) that Leonard will eventually emerge from his catatonic state, De Niro is arguably most compelling in the moments when he cannot move at all and sits or lies, his gaze alertly fixed on Sayer. There are three or four such episodes in the early going, and you find yourself looking deeply into De Niro’s eyes, in part because of the knowledge that he’s awake and cognizant in there (a condition that von Sydow has rightly labeled “unthinkable”), in part because De Niro has always been able to infuse silence with a gaze in such a way as to convey as much meaning as any passage of dialogue.
Unfrozen, Leonard regains his muscularity and speech slowly, so there is a gradual escalation in his motor abilities and his verbal fluency—another challenge that De Niro seems to relish. Fully recovered, Leonard is a man of simple affect and appearance, his shirts tucked in boyishly and buttoned all the way up to his chubby neck, whether or not he’s wearing his favored bowtie. He has old-fashioned ideas and a great store of knowledge (he has alerted Sayer that he’s awake inside his frozen body by writing out the phrase “Rilke’s panther” with a Ouija board); he’s a model of the efficacy of clinical psychology and pharmacological therapy.
But when Leonard starts to lose control of his body once again, the performance begins to be painted with the same broad brush with which the film has been directed. A rabble-rousing speech in which Leonard enlists a ward of able-bodied patients to his side in rejecting the rule of the administrators is as heavy-handed in its acting as its writing. From then, the physicality of the character becomes more and more the focus of De Niro’s efforts—and less and less easy to watch. Fully in the thrall of the sort of spasms you might see in someone with cerebral palsy, he gets so he can’t fix his gaze long enough on a page to read. Your heart goes out to him, partly because, even with the showiness, De Niro imbues Leonard with simple, recognizable humanity, partly because he has been so sweet with his doctor, mother, and nurses—as well as a girl (Penelope Ann Miller) to whom he has attached himself. Finally, he is “elsewhere” once again, frozen, dependent, the faraway look in his eyes infinitely more meaningful and pointed than it was at the start of the film.
Awakenings debuted in New York and Los Angeles in December 1990, in time for Academy Award eligibility, with a nationwide rollout planned for January. It outperformed Goodfellas at the box office, grossing more than $52 million and spending six weeks in the top ten—a second hit in a row. In fact, with Goodfellas still playing healthily, De Niro was enjoying his most successful combination of critical and commercial success since The Untouchables, maybe ever. In February, when Oscar nominations were announced, he was in the final running for the Best Actor prize, placing him in his first Academy Award race since Raging Bull. More impressive was that both Awakenings and Goodfellas were nominated for Best Picture, along with Ghost, The Godfather: Part III (which De Niro had lobbied Francis Coppola to play a role in) and the eventual winner, in one of the most often-cited instances of the Motion Picture Academy’s bland taste, Dances with Wolves, for which Kevin Costner aced out Martin Scorsese as Best Director. De Niro lost, in what nobody considered an upset or miscarriage of aesthetic justice, to Jeremy Irons for Reversal of Fortune. (Oliver Sacks wrote De Niro from London to say, “Sorry you didn’t get an Oscar—I was rooting for you.” But another character in the De Niro saga felt differently: Pauline Kael, Virginia Admiral’s onetime admirer and De Niro’s early champion, had long since turned on the actor, and his work in Awakenings was one of the last things she commented on before her 1991 retirement from criticism, declaring in an interview, “He does the tics and jiggles well. It’s in the quiet moments that he’s particularly bad. People get the idea that somebody is a great actor and it takes them decades to shake it off.”)
AFTER MAKING the move to CAA and acquiring the ability to command higher prices for his work and to have input into studio projects before the studio even acquired them, De Niro found himself wanting yet more control and earlier still in the process. He wanted to produce: to choose projects, select the creative team, pitch in on the script, cast actors, and help shape the PR campaign, even if he wasn’t going to appear in the film at all.
In part, he came to it because it was smart business—movie stars had routinely taken this sort of creative control of their careers, often helping others along, since the 1960s. In part, though, he came to it because he viewed his art on a kind of continuum with the art he’d grown up around—painting and writing—and was frustrated that his fame and wealth still didn’t bring him complete creative freedom: “A writer or a painter can control his work,” he explained, “but in movies it’s different. I see a tacky poster and I say, ‘Why was it done that way?’ Maybe I know a better way.” At the time he made that comment, he was already doing at least some producing work on We’re No Angels, and he had been actively working toward building a production company of his own, using the same meticulous practice with which he acted.
In part, he was driven by his new life. Upon divorcing Diahnne Abbott, De Niro bought a new apartment on Hudson Street, even further downtown than the Greenwich Village in which he’d lived almost his entire life. If the St. Luke’s Place townhouse was a family home appropriate to an up-and-coming actor and his wife, children, and pets, the new place was more befitting a bachelor prince—or a king, even. De Niro acquired the top floor of 110 Hudson Street, a building marked by Greek-style columns at the street level and, from De Niro’s 4,600-square-foot tenth-floor penthouse (complete with rooftop garden), expansive views of the Hudson River and the World Trade Center, mere blocks away. The neighborhood hadn’t yet become popular with developers, but it would soon have a trendy name: Tribeca. The area was a mix of underused industrial spaces and, for lower Manhattan, inexpensive housing, in large part because so many of the amenities that people expect from the city were lacking in the community. De Niro may have moved to Tribeca for the quiet, or for the bargains to be had in real estate (he convinced Harvey Keitel to buy a unit in the same building at around the same time). Or he may have done it because he already had a vision, however unformed, for a new sort of control over his career, not only a production company but an actual production facility.
Tribeca wasn’t an obvious choice for a home base for such a project. The film business per se had virtually no footprint in the area, despite the presence of adventuresome movie theaters and celebrity residents not very far away in more established neighborhoods. But in De Niro’s mind there was an idea of an office that would house his production company and be part of larger infrastructure—a complex of offices, say, or even a movie studio. And his new neighborhood had room in which to build such a thing.
Before he could tackle that, though, he knew that he needed a strong partner beside him who could do the things that he wouldn’t or couldn’t: talk to the press, drive hard bargains, say no a lot. He hoped eventually to choose a project from his producing workload to make his debut as a director, possibly acting in it as well. And for that, too, he would need a partner whom he could trust, someone who knew the movie business and could handle the high profile that working with De Niro in New York would entail.
He was as thorough in his search for a producing partner as he was in digging into an important role. “There were 20 people I met with,” he recalled. “I kept dragging it out.” Eventually he settled on someone, and, as was often the case when major Hollywood stars hung out a producing shingle, the perfect man for the job turned out to be a woman: Jane Rosenthal, a tall, energetic thirtysomething NYU film grad from Rhode Island with an impressively diverse resume and sufficient polish and energy to serve as the public face of a boss who preferred to show himself to the world when wearing the mask of a character.
Rosenthal had fast-tracked through Brown and NYU, had served as the youngest-ever (and first female) page in the Rhode Island House of Representatives, and had worked as an assistant to the director of the original Broadway production of The Be
st Little Whorehouse in Texas. As a young hire at CBS television, she butted heads with Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder in the sports department, helped create Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt in the news department, then produced TV movies and miniseries such as The Burning Bed and Haywire for the entertainment division. After that, she served as a production executive at Universal Pictures, at Disney (where she met Martin Scorsese while overseeing production on The Color of Money for the studio), and finally at Warner Bros., which was where she was working when De Niro first encountered her.
“Bob was shooting ‘Midnight Run,’ ” she said. “We had a number of friends and acquaintances in common, so I wasn’t that shaken [when we met]. I did become something of a motormouth, since he’s so quiet.” Rosenthal was flattered to be asked by De Niro if she’d consider going into business with him. But she was chary, too. They spoke on and off about the possibility for nearly a year; Scorsese even tried to convince her to take the gig, and she told him bluntly, “I’m not going to develop scripts for some actor, no matter who it is.”
During their negotiations, De Niro’s plans grew bolder and more substantial. The production company, named Tribeca after the neighborhood in which he lived and in which it would be based, was just part of a larger vision that included an office building designed to serve the New York filmmaking community, with a restaurant or maybe a nightclub on the ground floor. He wanted Rosenthal involved with all of it.
On one hand, she knew it was a crazy prospect: “People in LA thought I was cracked to even think about moving to New York. Also to work with an actor who wasn’t known for producing or restaurants or real estate.” But De Niro appealed to the world-beating drive he sensed in her. The chance to build a production company from the ground up was unlikely ever to present itself to her again—and certainly not in Hollywood. “He said, ‘What do you want to be—a studio executive all your life?’ ” She took off to a desert spa to mull it over, and she came to a realization: “If I don’t do something new and challenging, I will emotionally and creatively die.” Besides, she missed New York. In her work developing films, she had come up with a trick designed to keep her visiting the city: hiring New York playwrights to work on scripts. “By hiring all these writers,” she confessed, “I could come back for meetings. I’m not happy in any city where I can’t hail a cab.”
Finally she succumbed to De Niro’s offers—“Look, if it doesn’t work out, you can always hostess at the [restaurant],” he told her, only half joking—and took the job. (It was a nearer thing than she knew. “There was one guy I nearly hired,” De Niro said, “and I feel like I got lucky because he didn’t take the job. But Jane held in there, she kept up on it, she was always ready to go.”)
Right from the start, their disparate working styles and personalities proved complementary. “I’m just the producer,” Rosenthal remarked about her role in De Niro’s working life. “Nobody’s supposed to notice me.” But De Niro, who could get lost in the details of a work project, appreciated that she had the same capacity and was willing to insist on it, not by mumbling to a director, as he so often did, but by presenting her wishes forcefully to collaborators. “She does all the real nuts and bolts,” he said. “I’m just there, hovering. She’s the one on the front lines.”
They looked mismatched. “She is Miss Glam, the fund-raising, producing person,” said film executive Stacey Snider. “She puts it all out there. He seems to keep it all inside and use his feelings for his profession.” But they had a common impulse to get work done and get it done right: “Nobody is as meticulous as Bob,” Rosenthal said, “but I like things to be perfect, too.”
Tribeca Productions started on a modest scale. Upon launching in 1988, with the pair working at first out of De Niro’s apartment, it owned the rights to a small clutch of projects. As Rosenthal described them, “One is an out-of-print novel and one a current novel. Another is a collection of home videotapes of a real person, and the others are original ideas from screenwriters.” De Niro funded the early going out of his own pocket, but soon they had a two-year nonexclusive deal with TriStar to produce and distribute. The discretionary fund included in that deal allowed them to acquire more material: the Native American–themed crime story Thunderheart; William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways; The Battling Spumonti Brothers, a comedy about Chicago politics; and a few other spec scripts, particularly crime stories. One of Rosenthal’s concerns in accepting the job was that she wasn’t sure there would be enough actual producing to do in New York; on that she was wrong.
That was plenty to deal with, but right from the start Rosenthal was wearing a construction worker’s hard hat along with her movie producer clothes, because De Niro’s notion of a physical space in which to house the production company was becoming a reality. De Niro bought a stake in a building at 375 Greenwich Street, on the corner of Franklin, one city block from his home on Hudson Street. It had long been the warehouse of the Martinson Coffee company, and it still bore painted advertisements on its brick exterior touting the fact, but De Niro and his investment partners, Stewart Lane and Paul Wallace, were turning the eight-story building into an office block dedicated to film professionals, with a high-end restaurant as a key ground-floor tenant.
The warehouse offered 60,000 square feet of space and was an almost blank slate, so bare-bones that there were only two telephone lines in the entire building. De Niro and his partners acquired it for $7.2 million in 1988, three years after it had been purchased for $4.25 million—a sign of how quickly Tribeca, for many decades an industrial district of no particular commercial or residential appeal, was becoming a hot neighborhood. They hired the architect Lo-Yi Chan to reimagine it, and they set to work on renovations almost immediately.
Even though the building was entirely unsuited to the purposes for which he imagined it, De Niro was keen on it because of its proximity to his home. “When I started my own production offices, we worked out of my apartment.…[Back then] the only place for film people to work was midtown. But it’s such a hassle getting there. I live down here, and the pace is so much quieter, more leisurely. I dreamt that I wouldn’t have to leave the neighborhood to work. Then the building came up for sale, and it just seemed perfect. We could have production offices, and we could have a screening room, and we could have a restaurant. And I could work near home when I was in New York. Things sort of snowballed after that.”
Throughout 1989, the entire building was remade, with Rosenthal overseeing the details that De Niro could be convinced not to oversee himself. Electrical, plumbing, and climate systems were rebuilt or installed; three hundred phone lines were put in; elevators and stairways were reconfigured; windows were carved out; a thirty-foot skylight was revealed beneath decades of paint and roofing. There were touches of luxury throughout, including solid oak doors, sandblasted exposed brick walls, and brownstone imported from China. On the top floor, of which De Niro would claim 6,900 square feet for his production offices, a deluxe bathroom, complete with Jacuzzi, steam shower, and bidet was installed. There was a THX-certified screening room, the first in New York, on the second floor, alongside a multipurpose party space.
The building was designed on the model of condominiums, with whole floors of it for sale outright and other portions available for rent. The first truly important buyer was Miramax Films, which was making a significant name as a producer and distributor of independent and foreign films; it took the entire third floor. De Niro’s friend and producer Art Linson took offices, as did, on a rental basis in the earliest years, the productions of New Jack City, Bonfire of the Vanities, and Awakenings. After a period of courtship with the space, Martin Scorsese, who had long been based in the Brill Building in Times Square, chose to stay uptown. But for a variety of small production companies, talent agencies, and even solo writers who just needed a room with a door that they could close to the outside world, the Tribeca Film Center, as it was finally dubbed, was a perfect Hollywood-on-the-Hudson.
De Niro showed t
he place off proudly, explaining that he built it as a home for a New York film community that could often feel insignificant because it was so decentralized in a city with so many other priorities:
I haven’t seen any film place in New York, or anywhere else, that’s really “complete.” Initially, the idea was to find a home where I could be and where filmmakers could be, to have offices and a restaurant where they could hang out and feel like a community—a creative center where you can get input and feedback from other people.… You just come up with ideas when you’re around people. I always tell people I work with, if you just spend time together, an hour or so, you’re bound to come up with something, especially if you have a problem you’re trying to solve, but even if you’re just trying to create.… With people just being around each other a lot, their presence is felt. So you say, “Let’s talk to so-and-so about this idea.” That would be a nice situation. The people are close; it’s like a little community.
The soft launch of the Film Center came in December 1989, and throughout early 1990 tenants kept rolling in as the work on their offices was finished. By the springtime, work was done, and, almost as if to cap it, De Niro hosted an evening in honor of Nelson Mandela, who was making his first-ever visit to New York. The guest of honor was asked to make a few comments in the course of the evening, and he did. “At the end of Mandela’s speech,” remembered Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein, “he talked about how, when he was in prison for 20 [sic] years, they would show a film every Thursday night. And he felt that those actors and actresses were his friends, and they kept his spirits up. I looked over and saw De Niro and Jane with tears in their eyes, and I realized that this was their dream; to build this building, to get people who love film involved, to create a community where this can happen.… I’ve already told De Niro that if he went on to buy more buildings, Miramax would keep expanding with him.”
