Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  There was one big room with a big, white wall, and there were seven projectors, all of them in sync, so that you had seven cameramen, and you saw the whole scene in sync. The effect of running all those multiple images was so strong—usually it was three or four images at a time, not seven all together. There was something about the visceral quality of all the film going through the projectors simultaneously. And we agreed that was the way it should be cut.

  When we all did Woodstock together we really thought of a Woodstock Nation, we really believed in it. Up until Altamont, of course [another filmed rock concert that ended in a deadly riot in 1969]. But, still, even then, I think Michael and the others really believed it. And I think they lived it. I think they were in a good way militant against the conventional ways of working, the conventional studio system.

  RS: It was alternative cinema, technically speaking.

  MS: That’s right. And thank God they did it that way. But then, right around Christmas, they were taking the film to California to finish it there. And I was told by Bob Maurice, who was the producer, that I wouldn’t be allowed to go. I was devastated. I looked at him, and asked, “Why?” And he said, “Well, Marty, this is the reality—there can only be one director.”

  I said, “Okay, I get it.”

  RS: So you were really intruding on Mike?

  MS: I guess. I guess I was intruding on everybody. I think I was just overexcited, overenthusiastic, and probably taking over everything. And they finally said, You’ve got to go. So I said, “I feel so bad.” He said, “We know you do, but you’ve got to get out of here.” And that was it.

  RS: Well, you have a credit on it.

  MS: Yeah, I got a nice credit on it. And next thing I knew, I was in L.A.—got a job editing this film called Medicine Ball Caravan, which was a rock film.

  I don’t think I ever saw any of them again, except, of course, Thelma, who came to work with me much later on. By that time I was with Brian De Palma. And Jay Cocks was very helpful having me meet people. And they were right. I somehow had to do my own films in the feature film world.

  RS: And Wadleigh?

  MS: He’s around. And I know that they’ve had reunions and retrospectives of the film. But I’m not in touch with any of them, except Thelma.

  RS: Talk about going out to Hollywood and working there.

  MS: Freddy Weintraub, who was the guy who sold Woodstock to Warners, and John Calley, who was at the studio, made a connection with me. Freddy liked me, and he remembered me. Freddy was, and is, a wonderful man. He was the Harvey Weinstein of his day. And he had Medicine Ball Caravan and he called me and said, “Look. Why don’t you come out to L.A.? Come out for two weeks, see what you can do with the picture. I won’t screw you too bad. [Laughs.] And you’ll have a nice time. See what happens.”

  I went out by myself, and took the poster for Two Weeks in Another Town and put it over the bed.

  And the earthquake hit two weeks after I arrived out there.

  RS: I remember that.

  MS: It made me very nervous.

  RS: I’m nervous every day out there about earthquakes.

  MS: Oh—have you been in one?

  RS: Oh, yes. I was there for the last big one.

  MS: Oh, no—that’s like the one I was there for in 1971.

  RS: They were about the same size. And located in kind of the same area, out there in the Valley.

  MS: But, anyway, I started working on this thing. And fell into a bad period in my life. All kinds of things happened. I wound up going to a doctor and got myself back in shape emotionally, but it was very hard. It was the first of the three bad times I had in my life—the first big one. And Harvey Keitel came out, too, and stayed on the couch.

  RS: Were you doing drugs?

  MS: No, no, no. It was just emotional.

  RS: Why did it happen, looking back?

  MS: Oh—end of a first marriage. I had a child. I left them. I went to L.A., had another relationship that didn’t work out. The next thing I know, I’m seeing this psychiatrist, which actually helped a great deal. And I was medicated.

  There was one thing in that book by Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls [1998]. One guy who was hanging around—one of the San Francisco people in the seventies, and L.A., too—said, “Scorsese, there’s something about him. We knew he was going to be something interesting, but I never liked him.” And I say, “Never liked me?” Why did he not like me? I don’t understand.

  RS: You’ll never know. But I guess you sensed Hollywood’s downside even before you read that comment.

  MS: I only realized how the sun set in L.A. because of Sunset Boulevard. I was driving to the beach and I see the sun setting. I said, “I get it. Sunset Boulevard!” You see, in my mind it was something else entirely, because of the movie, where Sunset Boulevard was just a kind of metaphor for the things that get me nervous about Hollywood. That What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? architecture, that terror of being down and out in L.A., after having been in the movie business. And the sun sets. You get it?

  I could never live in one of those old mansions in L.A. For me Sunset Boulevard was the metaphor for the downward spiral—no comebacks allowed.

  RS: I’m guessing, though, that the excitement of what you were feeling mostly overrode those dark thoughts.

  MS: In the early seventies, the kind of clothes we were wearing … I loved the western films, and we used to go to Nudie’s [a famous western clothing store on Lankershim Boulevard in the Valley] and get cowboy shirts. They were beautiful. When I was a little boy I loved cowboy shirts. So I was acting out the fantasy.

  But ambition doesn’t even come near to what we were all feeling when we finally got together as a group in L.A. and Brian De Palma took me around and introduced me to Schrader and gave me the script for Taxi Driver. Spielberg. George Lucas, to a certain extent, but Lucas was always more of a laid-back guy.

  RS: Yes.

  MS: And John Milius [the screenwriter and director], too, was part of that, although I was hanging around more with Lucas and De Palma, and Steve a lot, because of his love for movies, his audacious way of thinking and expanding on spectacle.

  We were just so excited. And the one who helped me out was Coppola, in the early seventies. You know, he guided, advised, smacked me in the back of the head [laughs].

  RS: Well, at least he would have some understanding of the Italian temperament.

  MS: Absolutely. But my ambition must’ve been extraordinary, I think.

  RS: You were unaware of it?

  MS: No. I was aware of it. We were just there and it was time to do it. By the time I got to do Mean Streets, it was the end of 1972 and the film was released in 1973. But those two years were very tough in L.A. I wound up in the hospital a lot. I was sick. I told you about that asthma.

  RS: You did.

  MS: But Brian De Palma was doing Get to Know Your Rabbit, and they’d taken the film away from him. And George Lucas was doing THX 1138, and they were threatening to take the film away from him. And I was doing this rock ’n’ roll documentary, just sitting there on the lot at Warner Bros., just totally depressed. But we’d go everywhere, everywhere that would let us in—any party they’d let us in [laughs]. But it wasn’t like we behaved in an ambitious manner or arrogantly. No, we just knew what we wanted to do.

  And we felt that if we got to the right ears they’d listen. And, you know, ultimately they listened, in my case when they saw Mean Streets. That’s when they really listened. And that came about just by working through independent cinema and exploitation films, and meeting everybody. You’d never know what was going to happen.

  But emotionally it was really nerve-racking. John Cassavetes helped me out and took me into his house and took care of me. And I slowly got back to myself—working every day on Medicine Ball.

  RS: You’ve told me elsewhere that you had some idea of being an old-fashioned Hollywood studio director, kind of grinding ’em out. But it’s obvious to me you couldn’t have
fit, by your nature, into that context.

  MS: No.

  RS: Because they didn’t have room for obsession. I mean, you can read the memos that came down from Hal Wallis [in charge of production at Warner Bros.] to Michael Curtiz [the studio’s prolific director in the 1930s and ’40s]. “Stop laying track. Just shoot it. Please.”

  MS: Yeah, yeah. Shoot it.

  RS: “We’re falling behind.”

  MS: Or what Frank Capra did when Harry Cohn ordered him to do one take. He said, Okay, and he did the thing ten times in one take, without turning off the camera between the shots.

  RS: Right. I’ve sometimes said that maybe the art of directing in its essence is knowing how to throw a terrific party. So everybody’s happy, everybody’s having a good time. At the same time, they are focused on trying to make something worthwhile.

  MS: Exactly, exactly.

  RS: It’s a very delicate thing.

  MS: It’s very delicate. And then, too, I had an expectation about the Hollywood people who make films, the lives they lead. I’m an outsider coming in. My generation were considered outsiders. I still had many ideals about the nature of the films that were made and the way people behaved, and the way they worked together and that sort of thing. I still had this idea about “the magic of cinema.”

  RS: Right.

  MS: And it’s not magic. You have to make the magic. I didn’t understand that. I didn’t really even understand how the studio system had worked, quite honestly. I was surprised that a lot of those sets weren’t standing.

  RS: Really?

  MS: I was disappointed. We had to create all that stuff.

  RS: Well, actually, you were coming in the era when they were beginning to rip down the standing sets.

  MS: They were ripping them down and I still had dreams that they were there. So, in a way, I guess, it was a matter of growing out of my first infatuation or passion for Hollywood itself.

  RS: And giving up the notion of being a sort of grind-’em-out contract director.

  MS: There is no such thing as a studio director today. It’s a different kind of thing. So something had already died off just as I was beginning to realize it existed.

  RS: Exactly.

  MS: But I thought it was fascinating because the type of films they did seemed to fit these different directors, seemed to fit their peculiar personalities.

  RS: It’s odd, isn’t it?

  MS: And they were able to work within this extraordinarily complex system, which was dealing with a lot of money. It wasn’t something where a few people would see a film. No, you had to reach the widest common denominator.

  RS: And you had to do it in twenty-one days or twenty-eight days.

  MS: But don’t forget that in that period, especially in sound cinema, the cutting was less. The editing was less. Unless you were [director Rouben] Mamoulian experimenting with some interesting things. And that classical style of sound film—you know, wide shot, medium shot, close-up—was generally simpler. So in a funny way, you could maybe do two, three pictures a year—the style fit the system.

  RS: Yet they did get personality into it.

  MS: They really did.

  RS: That’s what was so interesting about it. I mean, it doesn’t take you long to see, looking at two movies without seeing the credits, that Raoul Walsh is a lot different from Howard Hawks. And so on. But even if the studio system had persisted, I don’t think you could have fit into it.

  MS: No, I know that. I realized that after doing Raging Bull, and after doing King of Comedy. And when I tried to get Last Temptation made and I couldn’t. And when I did After Hours. But in any event, I found that certain things that I saw [George] Cukor do, or other directors did so seemingly effortlessly, I was laboring over.

  RS: But did you think, Well, look, I grew up in this neighborhood, I went to an urban university, I’m a New York kid through and through. So really there’s some part of me that will always make urban films.

  MS: Oh, no, no, I never thought that.

  RS: You never thought, This is my world, this is where I belong?

  MS: Not at all. In fact, I lived in California twelve years, thirteen years, yet people always considered me a total New Yorker. I moved back in 1984. My mother and father were still alive. My kids were here. So I moved back and accepted the fact that I’d be on the East Coast. But I always thought I could handle different types of pictures.

  RS: I’m not talking genres. It’s more about settings. I mean, King of Comedy—it’s a very urban picture.

  MS: I know you’re right. But I tried—

  RS: It’s—city kid. I don’t know how else to put it.

  MS: Anyway, right around this time I met Roger Corman. He asked me to do Boxcar Bertha. You know, 1930s, Bonnie and Clyde genre.

  RS: What do you think of that movie now?

  MS: It’s an exploitation picture. Not good. But Barbara Hershey and David Carradine were wonderful to work with. And Bernie Casey. I got to meet Barry Primus, because he was Bob De Niro’s closest friend, so it was a good experience. And Corman was great. And all the people who did it.

  BOXCAR BERTHA

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: I guess every young guy in Hollywood somehow met Roger Corman, right?

  MARTIN SCORSESE: Well, my agent set up a meeting with Roger when I went out to edit Medicine Ball Caravan. Who’s That Knocking had opened at the Vagabond Theater, under a different title—everybody kept changing the title—and he said, Would you like to do a sort of sequel to Bloody Mama, which Bob De Niro had been in, and I said, “Yeah. Absolutely.” And then he went away for six months. I went back to editing. And I just thought nothing was going to happen.

  RS: The usual.

  MS: But he had gotten married to Julie Corman. And when they came back from their honeymoon, I had finished Medicine Ball Caravan, which didn’t turn out well, and I needed work and I needed to be around L.A. So John Cassavetes put me on as assistant sound editor on Minnie and Moskowitz, and I started to hang around with John. And one day out at Universal around my twenty-ninth birthday, Elaine Gorman, who later married [director] Jeremy Paul Kagan and later played the mother in Goodfellas, got a call from William Morris for me; they were looking for me because they had a film for me to direct. And she said, “Oh, don’t be silly,” and she hung up. Thought it was a joke. And so a few days go by, and finally my agent, Irv Schechter, contacted me. And it was this film that Roger Corman had for me—six months after we’d met.

  RS: He had a script?

  MS: By Joyce and John Corrington. It was a very complex, very dense script. It was just a matter of the budget, of getting all the stuff on screen; it eventually got pared down. But the script ended that way it does on screen, with a crucifixion. I had nothing to do with that.

  Barbara Hershey helplessly witnesses union organizer David Carradine’s tragic ending in Boxcar Bertha (1972), Scorsese’s first Hollywood film, made for Roger Corman, mentor to a generation of soon-to-be-great filmmakers.

  RS: Really? I think people probably think, Oh, there goes Marty.

  MS: I know. I had nothing to do with it.

  RS: One of the things that I flashed on when I saw it again recently was that notion you had of doing the Christ story in Manhattan.

  MS: That’s right.

  RS: Somebody ending up crucified in some unlikely place.

  MS: Well, on the docks, where the West Side Highway was, with the cobblestones. It was so beautiful, the old New York.

  But the thing was, Boxcar was very important for me. It came in the period of the doors being closed—the Honeymoon Killers—where I didn’t bring the right spirit to the material. Whereas, with Boxcar, I was able to take something that was abstract and design it on the page in drawings. I was doing what was required of the material, and I was not taken off the picture after twenty-four days. That was a big, big achievement.

  RS: You finished it!

  MS: We finished it on schedule. A lot of troubles. Three operators. But the dir
ector of photography was very, very good. The rest of it was having met [the actors]. I had a good time with them. They were really nice. And a lot of it was Corman.

  RS: You were shooting down south, right?

  MS: We were shooting in Camden, Arkansas. There was more to it than not getting fired. It was also a learning experience which gave me the crew for Mean Streets. Without that, without having made Boxcar, there was no way I could’ve made Mean Streets. No studio was going to make it. So I had to find the independent element in L.A. New York independents were not going to make it. We tried that. The independent cinema was out there, and it was doing all the kinds of movies that nowadays you can actually see on TCM [Turner Classic Movies], underground movies, that sort of thing. That was the group I had to be with. And that’s why out of twenty-six days of shooting Mean Streets, only about seven were shot in New York. The rest was in L.A.

  RS: Using people you had met.

  MS: Literally. Paul Rapp, the production manager, who was the associate producer on Boxcar, and the cameraman he introduced me to, Kent Wakefield.

  RS: Does the movie mean anything to you except as a learning experience? Did it have any, how shall I say, Scorsesean values to it?

  MS: I did a rewrite of the script. Not a lot. Not a great deal. But I tried to add some elements.

  RS: Well, it’s a movie with violence in it. And people always equate violence and you.

  MS: Yes, it’s violent. I mean, that was the exploitation element at the time, you know. Also there had to be nudity or the suggestion of nudity every fifteen minutes. Read the script. [It’s a story about a union organizer and his lover trying to take revenge on the exploitative management of a railroad.] And the Depression, which is the time it’s set in. The Grapes of Wrath was something I liked a great deal. And of course Tobacco Road and other Ford films.