by Shawn Levy
They had in mind a film festival to be held the following spring, focusing, like Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival, on independent moviemaking. They discovered that the name Tribeca Film Festival was already being used, as a placeholder if nothing else; there was even a fledgling website dedicated to it. Through the aegis of the not-for-profit Tribeca Film Institute, they negotiated with the founder of that enterprise, the artist Nicole Bartelme, to buy the title, and in December, De Niro, Rosenthal, New York governor George Pataki, Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, and others held a press event to announce the first Tribeca Film Festival for the following spring, with American Express stepping in as the chief sponsor to the tune of a couple of million dollars.
At first they said they’d program forty features and a similar number of shorts, but when they finally got around to announcing the full lineup in the spring of 2002, the festival boasted 150 titles, shorts and features combined, culled from more than 1,500 submissions. There were world premieres, including Tribeca’s own production of About a Boy, featuring Hugh Grant in an adaptation of a bestselling novel by Nick Hornby, and Insomnia, a remake of a Swedish crime thriller starring Al Pacino and directed by Christopher Nolan. There were independent films from around the world. There were films with themes drawn from the experience of September 11, an entire block of children’s films, and a restoration of Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata anchoring a selection of classic films curated by Scorsese. The judges for the awards included Helen Hunt, Kevin Spacey, Frances McDormand, Barry Levinson, Julian Schnabel, Isaac Mizrahi, and Richard Holbrooke; speakers on the various panels dotting the festival would include Susan Sarandon, Alan Alda, and Sidney Lumet. And the event was granted a massive boost when George Lucas agreed to a premiere screening of Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones as the centerpiece of a closing-night gala.
Rosenthal wasn’t entirely sure they could pull it off. “I keep reminding myself I’m going to make mistakes,” she said. “I know that no matter what I do, some important person will feel snubbed. I just hope people will understand we’re only doing this to try to help downtown.” Whether there were any bruised egos among the boldface names or not, the moviegoing public responded to the glitter, the hoopla, and the chance to reclaim lower Manhattan. More than 150,000 tickets were sold to the screenings, talks, and parties, a truly impressive number considering that the festival ran a mere five days. There were grumblings about “Hollywood East” and about how few films actually made in the neighborhood were included in the festival, but these were relatively few, and the thing was undeniably a hit.
They decided to make it a yearly event. “This neighborhood is my home,” De Niro said. “I’m committed to it, and that’s what this festival is about.” In 2003, there were more than 200 films in the festival; the following year, they broke the 250-film barrier and augmented the springtime film festival with the first (and only) Tribeca Theater Festival in October, a fortnight of plays, readings, and discussions. By 2006, the total number of titles in the film festival had climbed to 274, which turned out to be the high-water mark. Over time, festival organizers pared back just slightly to an average of some 200 titles per year.
The trick for Tribeca was to distinguish itself from all the world’s other film festivals, especially the biggies like Sundance (held in January in Park City, Utah), Berlin (February), Cannes (May on the French Riviera), Venice (August), and Toronto (September). Each had its own peculiar identity, history, savor. Tribeca seemed a mishmash in comparison: not curated to represent a small selection of high-quality work, like Venice or the venerable New York Film Festival (October at Lincoln Center); not a market for emerging talent or work available to purchase, like Sundance or Cannes; too early in the year to serve as a launching pad for awards season, like Toronto.
Jane Rosenthal liked to remind the press that there was a reason for the festival to exist beyond the movie screen. “It wasn’t started as a traditional film festival,” she said. “My sole goal was to bring people back downtown.” But a decade on, downtown Manhattan was fully alive again, and the festival was moving along under its own momentum. De Niro came, rightly, to see it as part of his legacy, “part of the tradition of New York, part of the fabric, that I hope will be what it will be in years to come.”*1
AFTER MORE THAN thirty years in the movies, his became one of those names people thought of when they thought about giving awards. One of the most prestigious was the Life Achievement Award of the American Film Institute, which had been presented in a gala (filmed for television) since 1973 to such icons as John Ford, Orson Welles, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Elizabeth Taylor, Jack Lemmon, Sidney Poitier, Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, and, in his own generation, Steven Spielberg, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, and Martin Scorsese. In late 2002, the AFI announced that De Niro would be presented with the honor the following spring, and the ensuing gala was as pomp-filled as could be hoped for.
De Niro was lauded by a range of his collaborators and friends, from Scorsese (“He has an extraordinary genius to be able to transform himself, to simply be, just be the person he’s playing, not act but become and command and inhabit the character”) to Jodie Foster, who remembered his transformative instruction on the set of Taxi Driver (“Although I had already been working for nine years, no one had ever trusted that I was capable of understanding what an actor really does.… I am grateful to you, Bob. You make a fine Henry Higgins”). There were Joe Pesci, Robin Williams, Leonardo DiCaprio, Billy Crystal, Harvey Keitel, Edward Norton, and James Woods, the last of whom brought down the house by describing Once Upon a Time in America as being about “an older man reviewing his life as a thug—not unlike tonight.” The evening began on a solemn note with a filmed appearance by Gregory Peck, who had died earlier that day at age eighty-seven. And when De Niro finally spoke at night’s end, he brought the affair full circle: “This isn’t easy for me, but it isn’t so bad as I look back on my life and all these movies.… Good night, and good night, Gregory Peck.”
The following year, he accepted an award for his civic work from the Citizens Committee for New York and agreed to be toasted and lightly roasted at a dinner benefiting the American Museum of the Moving Image. You could do good things simply by putting on a tuxedo and saying a few words, he’d learned; though he never lost his reputations for reclusiveness and recalcitrance, he willingly attended such events as these and the many, many events to which Grace Hightower dragged him in her capacity as a philanthropist and socialite.
AND WHILE OTHERS were celebrating him, he came to celebrate himself. As he approached his sixties, with decades of moviemaking behind him, he confronted his lifelong pack-rat tendencies and discovered that he’d amassed a treasure. Since the days when he had first cluttered up his mother’s 14th Street apartment with all those thrift store costumes, he had built, almost accidentally, a huge archive of materials to do with his acting career, his business ventures, and the simple stuff of life: not only written materials such as scripts and memos and research notes but trunkloads of costumes and props from his film career, from the baseball bat used by Al Capone in The Untouchables to the garish suits from Casino, boxing gloves from Raging Bull, and old makeup kits to which he ascribed some sentimental value.
It was an impressive collection—invaluable, truly—but what in the world to do with it? The first inkling he had that there was real worth in it came in 2001, when the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens worked with him to mount an exhibit dedicated to his collection. Robert De Niro: Costume and Character opened in February 2002 and ran for the better part of a year, drawing tens of thousands of visitors through a truly unique tour of an actor’s work as seen, in effect, from the inside out. De Niro may no longer have been making the epochal sorts of films that launched him, but it was clear that even his lesser roles had consumed him at the level of character creation. Costumer Rita Ryack, who dressed him for several films, remarked on the wardrobe he wore in
The Fan, much of which came from J. C. Penney’s: “He looked like a million bucks. He’d say, ‘This suit looks too expensive,’ and we’d say, ‘But it cost $125 and it’s made from Teflon!’ He just looks really good in clothing; he just has the kind of shoulders that make him dress wonderfully. So you have to work very hard to dress him down—that’s an interesting challenge.”
The collection made curators around the country aware of what kind of treasure De Niro was sitting on, and they came courting. Finally, in 2005, he reached an agreement with the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas, Austin, a massive research facility filled with manuscripts, artifacts, and every imaginable sort of original material from significant figures in literature, art, politics, theater, and film. The Ransom Center’s jewels included items from Stella Adler, David Mamet, and others whose lives and work touched on De Niro’s (Paul Schrader’s papers would eventually find a home there, too). And De Niro’s bequest was one of the largest in the collection: two eighteen-wheelers delivered wardrobe cases, trunks, and literally hundreds of banker’s boxes filled with notes, memos, letters, annotated scripts, photographs, sketches, and so forth, dating from his days in student theater and dinner theater in the 1960s through the films he made in 2005.
He was up for donating material, even very revealing material, but he could not be persuaded to tell his story on the page. In early 2004, word surfaced that De Niro and Scorsese would co-author a memoir about the eight films they’d made together and some of the issues that bonded them, such as growing up in Manhattan and losing their fathers (Charles Scorsese, a staple character in his son’s films, died at age eighty just months after the senior Robert De Niro passed; they were in the same hospital at the same time during their final illnesses, and De Niro always made a point of dropping in on the elder Scorsese whenever he visited his own dad). The book never surfaced, though, and in 2013 De Niro declared that he simply wouldn’t know where to begin his memoirs and that he couldn’t imagine he’d ever write them.
IT WAS OFTEN remarked that De Niro had stopped working hard in the 1980s, perhaps with Raging Bull. But the films he made in that decade, which included some of his finest if less-recognized performances, simply didn’t bear that out. He had done The King of Comedy, The Untouchables, Once Upon a Time in America, True Confessions, and so on: a film a year, more or less, of some palpable quality. Nor, in fact, did his work in the 1990s constitute sleepwalking: there were more films than ever, and if the roles were not as challenging, the productions were, in the main, ambitious and varied and nearly always had something of genuine interest either in the subject matter or, especially, the collaborators. In those ten years, he almost always worked with notable directors: three Scorseses, two Levinsons, a Mann, a Tarantino, a Frankenheimer, a Cuarón, a Branagh, and so on.
But after the success of Meet the Parents, the arithmetic he did in choosing roles changed, and he began making films out of dubious material with scripts and co-stars and directors that left audiences puzzling why De Niro was involved. He was accused of taking roles to support Tribeca, but Meet the Parents and We Will Rock You were hits, and the production company wasn’t so big as to require constant cash infusions. He had multiple homes, children with three women, and a deluxe lifestyle to support, and that might explain some of the pace of his work. But it didn’t necessarily explain the quality of the projects. His peers—Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson—also appeared often in films that seemed lesser than their talents could command. But De Niro outdid them all in frequency, and, alas, in the relatively low ambitions of the material he seemed again and again to select.
The first film to truly mark a dip in his interest in his work was City by the Sea, a potboiler by This Boy’s Life director Michael Caton-Jones based on an Esquire magazine article by Mike McAlary about Vincent LaMarca, a homicide detective who learns that his son is wanted for murder. James Franco was cast as the younger LaMarca, which sounds like an exciting possibility until you realize that most of their scenes together are telephone conversations, with each actor standing on a set alone on what was probably the other fellow’s day off.
The $60 million production was shot during the winter of 2000–2001 and held from release until September 2002, when it grossed a mere $22.4 million and scored the rare coup of angering the residents of two New York–area beach towns: Long Beach, Long Island, where the film was set and the real-life events actually took place, and Asbury Park, New Jersey, where it was filmed. People in both places felt their respective communities were made to seem more squalid and dangerous than they really were. They could take comfort in the knowledge, then, that very few moviegoers had bothered to leave themselves open to the possibility of acquiring that impression.
After just a few months off, De Niro was playing a cop again in Showtime, which shot in the spring of 2001 and was released just about a year later. It was a satire of the media, but far more strictly a comedy than 15 Minutes, with De Niro as a crusty LAPD veteran forced to appear in a reality TV series in which he’s partnered with a wacky patrolman, played by Eddie Murphy. The film was directed by Tom Dey, who had previously delivered the similar—and successful—buddy comedy Shanghai Noon with Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson. And Dey was sharp enough to see what he was working with in De Niro and Murphy: “Bob is very technical. He adheres to the script. Eddie improvises a lot. Eddie, who is a very physical comedian as well, may have the last word in a scene, but Bob usually has the last gesture, something economical, just a facial movement, perhaps.”
Economical was an interesting word choice. In a deal finalized after the walloping success of Meet the Parents, De Niro was paid $17.5 million of Showtime’s $85 million budget. Which meant that he was paid more than the picture made in its opening weekend: $15 million, en route to an anemic $38 million gross.
HE STILL PROTECTED his privacy zealously. In 2002, for instance, he sued the Celebrity Vibe photo agency for circulating a photo in which he and Sean Penn blew out the candles on their joint birthday cake (they were both born on August 17) at a private party held in the rooftop garden of De Niro’s penthouse. And yet, because of the line of work he’d chosen, his private life could sometimes become a matter of public record.
For instance, in September 2003 De Niro was visiting a Manhattan urologist whom he had been seeing regularly for more than twenty years. The visits had begun in 1980 when De Niro was experiencing trouble urinating freely, particularly after sexual activity. He was examined thoroughly, and he was diagnosed with inflammation of the prostate, a frequent and often harmless condition, particularly in a man of thirty-six years of age; De Niro left with a few prescriptions and no other treatment.
Three years later, when his father was diagnosed with prostate cancer, De Niro decided to become more vigilant about his health and told his doctor he wanted to be examined three or four times a year, a schedule he maintained regularly thereafter. At each visit his prostate was examined physically and blood tests were taken, and always he was deemed healthy. Over time he asked the doctor about a few discomforts to do with the urinary tract: a burning sensation upon urinating, hesitancy in the urine stream, and nocturia, the need to get out of bed to urinate several times throughout the night. Examinations found him healthy on all of these occasions, and he was so little troubled by the condition that he chose not to take the medication prescribed to curtail his nighttime visits to the bathroom.
Over the years, levels of the bloodborne protein PSA, which when elevated indicate prostate disease, had always been in the normal range, though they had risen over time, as happens in many men; an upward trend in the PSA doesn’t necessarily indicate cancer. Still, in the later summer of 2003, the combination of his family history and the widely publicized prostate cancer episodes of Rudolph Giuliani, Joe Torre, and John Kerry inspired De Niro to get even more serious, to seek out a second urologist and to have a biopsy taken of his prostate, which was the most definitive way to identify or rule out cancer. “I decided to
be even more proactive about monitoring my prostate health,” he said. “I was concerned because of my age, and because [my PSA] was rising a bit. Although everybody was telling me there’s no problem, I still was concerned because my father had died from it and I just wanted to be a little more proactive.” On October 10, 2003, he had a biopsy taken.
Three days later, De Niro was in a Manhattan clothing store being fitted for costumes for a new film, Hide and Seek, which was set to begin shooting on October 27 and in which he would play a widowed New York psychiatrist whose daughter begins to have supernatural visions. As a routine part of the pre-production process, he was given a medical examination in the store by a doctor working for the producers and the insurance company that protected the production against delays and interruptions caused by health problems in essential members of the cast and crew. That exam raised no flags, and as a result, De Niro and the production were forthwith insured by Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company to the tune of $2 million.
Two days after that, De Niro learned from his urologist that his biopsy had come back positive for prostate cancer.
It was, of course, staggering news. De Niro had just turned sixty, approximately the same age his father was at the time his cancer was diagnosed, and even though the thought of cancer had always loomed over him, he declared himself “shocked” in a statement his spokesperson revealed to the world a week later. In the years since the senior De Niro’s cancer had been discovered, the survival rate of prostate cancer patients had dramatically increased from 67 percent to 97 percent, a trend attributed in large part to public awareness of the disease and an emphasis on screening and early treatment. The elder De Niro had struggled for a decade before succumbing, but his son was fortunate to have caught his condition earlier, almost without symptoms to prompt him to look for it. Given the very early detection and De Niro’s overall fine health—he still worked out regularly to keep himself trim—his chance for a complete recovery was excellent.
