Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  Lorraine Bracco had a connection to Scorsese by dint of her marriage to Harvey Keitel, who’d acted in four prior Scorsese movies, all crucial ones: Who’s That Knocking at My Door, Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and Last Temptation. She and Keitel lived at the time in the same Tribeca property as Robert De Niro and Scorsese’s first assistant director Joseph Reidy; that property was owned by Chuck Low, who cameoed as a restaurant patron mocking Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy and would play Morrie in Goodfellas. Which is not to say that Bracco’s part came about through coincidence, happenstance, or nepotism. She was an accomplished actor who was building a solid résumé, but she also had the freshness of a relative newcomer. As it happened, she had auditioned for a role in Scorsese’s After Hours some years prior, and while she did not get it, Scorsese told her how much he’d liked what she did and that he would keep her in mind for future roles. In a 2017 interview with the Guardian, she recalls being dubious: “Like the date who says he’ll call you, right?” But years later, Scorsese called, inviting her to his apartment, where he and Ray Liotta waited. “The three of us have a nice drink. That was my audition.”

  The Warner executive Terry Semel had floated Tom Cruise and Madonna for the parts of Henry and Karen, a suggestion that was privately ridiculed by the film’s makers at the time and may now be ridiculed by many more. Winkler was careful, in recounting his own disdain for the idea, to not have it reflect on Cruise himself: “I asked [Mike Ovitz] if Cruise had even read the script, since he was so wrong for the part (and Cruise is an actor who has a very good sense about what roles he should play). Did Cruise want to be a cokehead?” As for Madonna? “And Madonna we wouldn’t discuss.”

  Paul Sorvino had doubts about playing Paul Vario, the mob boss whose name would later be changed to Paul Cicero. The voluble character actor was curious about why he was approached to play someone so quiet. And while he’d portrayed criminals before, he had never played such a killer. At a Tribeca Film Festival Q&A commemorating the making of the movie, Sorvino said, “The real difficulty there was the inner life...that weird bifurcation of character. When they’re home, they’re family people. When they’re out, they’re shooting people.” His doubts continued in the run-up to the shoot. “I was quitting after almost four weeks and we were supposed to start three days later and I called my manager and said, ‘Get me out of this, I can’t do it.’” One day, feeling some frustration at being unable to tie a tie properly, or feeling some spinach in his teeth (Sorvino’s recollection is like anyone else’s in its changeability), he caught an unguarded look at himself in the mirror, and the unpleasant look on his face gave him the key to playing Paulie.

  * * *

  In his book Winkler tells of a phone call in which Barbara De Fina complained that the studio was delaying a green light for the production, and that if one was not forthcoming, Scorsese would move to another picture. Winkler went to Terry Semel, who told him that “with our casting of Ray Liotta and Joe Pesci and our budget of $16 million he couldn’t okay the film unless we had a major star for the other lead. After a lot of arguing, Semel said that if I gave him my word that we would get a major star for the third role, he would give Goodfellas the okay. I promised but really had no idea who would play Jimmy Conway. Marty had an idea. He called me the next day and had spoken to Bob De Niro, and we had our star.”

  * * *

  The teaming of director Scorsese and actor De Niro is one of the most storied and lauded in American cinema, world cinema even. Anyone who’s seen the pair together, as recently on panels to promote The Irishman, can detect the affinity and good humor that flows between them. Their films together, even one as mixed as Cape Fear, bristle with energy and virtuosity.

  The two men cannot help but be personally close, but they are not as close personally as pop-culture conventional wisdom implicitly maintains. (“People who think that Bob and Marty hang out...” Barbara De Fina said to me, with an eye roll, during one of our talks.) They have close friends in common, including the screenwriter and critic Jay Cocks, who helped introduce the two in 1971; it was at a Christmas party hosted by Jay and his wife, the actress Verna Bloom, at which Scorsese and De Niro formally met. (Both men recollect running into each other in the neighborhood when they were growing up.) Brian De Palma, who could count De Niro as his discovery (he cast the very young actor in the 1963-shot comedy The Wedding Party, a college film De Palma codirected with Wilford Leach and Cynthia Munroe; the movie did not see any kind of release until 1969), was also in attendance at the event.

  Looking at the films Scorsese and De Niro made together with a consideration of how they ended up being made, the story that emerges is one of some affinities, but also a large percentage of shared self-interest. They first collaborated on Mean Streets, for which Harvey Keitel, having played another Scorsese surrogate in the 1967 Who’s That Knocking at My Door, had been chosen for the lead. De Niro has recalled in interviews bring miffed that he had not been considered for that role until he saw what he could do with the irrepressible Johnny Boy. De Niro says that at the time he was “competitive,” and the way he almost steals the movie from each of the main male actors (the others are David Proval and Richard Romanus, both superb) shows just how competitive.

  Paul Schrader’s script for Taxi Driver had kicked around a bit before Scorsese became the director; there had once been a possibility that Jeff Bridges would play the title role. Once Scorsese signed on as director, De Niro had two big things going for him: his work in Mean Streets and his Oscar-winning role as young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II. The casting had a logic beyond the pair’s personal desire to work together again. With New York, New York, the Taxi Driver momentum yielded a project that was probably the most personal iteration of the relationship between the director and the actor, both of them pouring a lot into the conception of Jimmy Doyle, the sax player who’s an inspired creator and a near-impossible person. And that film precipitated a crash-and-burn for Scorsese.

  It was at the director’s hospital bed, after a drug-related collapse, that De Niro brought the Raging Bull project up to Scorsese. Scorsese has spoken in interviews of his difficulty in finding his way into the material. Once Scorsese had regained some of his health and he and De Niro retreated to the Caribbean to rework the script, he was able to give it a full commitment. But shooting the film wound up beating up Scorsese’s health again.

  And it was De Niro who brought The King of Comedy to Scorsese. In a note on the front page of one of the scripts of The King of Comedy (which De Niro had bought while it was still a novel by the film critic Paul D. Zimmerman, who subsequently transformed it into a treatment, then a screenplay), De Niro wrote, “Marty: Don’t always want to be weird or crazy.”

  The subsequent film was, for Scorsese, whose asthma was acting up, hard to shoot: “I was coughing on the floor and sounding like a character from The Magic Mountain,” Scorsese told Ian Christie and David Thompson. “It got so bad that some days I wouldn’t get there until 2:30 in the afternoon [...] We were shooting in New York and there were maybe five trailers, which you had to park in a certain way because the teamsters wanted this and the police wanted that. Finally, if you wanted to move, the entire company had to go along like a caravan through the city streets in the daytime. We didn’t get one break from anybody there, or at least that’s how it felt. If we wanted something, we had to pay for it and pay a lot. It was like making a film with a dinosaur: the tail was so big it was wagging and slamming into everything, perhaps not intentionally, but destroying things as in a Godzilla movie.”

  De Niro doesn’t think that it was the difficulty of making The King of Comedy that broke up the collaboration for several years. “I had a good time making it,” he said with a wry shrug. In fact, he does not read much of anything into the hiatus (he reads only slightly more into the twenty-year pause between Casino and The Irishman). The actor does not process his career in terms of things like landmark ro
les. He’s a working actor who goes where the work is. The pronounced box-office failure of The King of Comedy raised more crucial questions for Scorsese than whether he’d be able to work with De Niro again. It raised questions as to whether he’d be able to work at all. Retrenching took the form of the black comedy After Hours, a project brought to him by actors-turned-producers Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson, who’d had some indie success in backing the John Sayles film Baby It’s You in 1983. Robinson had played Theresa in Mean Streets. Shot in a semiguerrilla style not entirely dissimilar to the mode of Mean Streets, After Hours testified to Scorsese’s continued vitality. (“On the first day of shooting I realized happily that I had no time to sit down or wait in my trailer,” he told Christie and Thompson. “If I was sitting down there was something wrong!”)

  But it was Paul Newman’s approach to the director that ended up becoming The Color of Money, a sequel to Newman’s 1961 classic The Hustler and the project that helped deliver Scorsese from “movie jail.”

  And during this period, with films such as Midnight Run, De Niro became what his one-time agent Harry Ufland had predicted he would never become: a mainstream movie star.

  In my interview with him for this book, the only time that De Niro got defensive was when I observed that when Scorsese came to him about doing Goodfellas, De Niro was in a different position in Hollywood than he had been when The King of Comedy wrapped. “How so?” he asked. “Well,” I sputtered, citing Midnight Run, “there’s more money, more leverage.” “There’s more attention, that’s for sure,” he responded. He shrugged as if to allow the point, but it was clear that discussing the business as such was not something he was interested in. But when Goodfellas was coming together, De Niro was a player, regardless if he was outsourcing the ins and outs of his deals.

  And when Scorsese spoke to Amy Taubin in one of the first interviews to promote Goodfellas, he frankly told her, “I want to be a player.” (“To be a player in Hollywood, you have to take a lot of bruising,” he added.) Immediately after The Color of Money, Scorsese made Life Lessons, one-third of New York Stories, an anthology movie with other minimovies by Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen. Starring Nick Nolte and Rosanna Arquette (who had worked with Scorsese on After Hours), the knotty tale of an old painter and his young assistant/love interest/erotic obsession, inspired in part by episodes from the life of Dostoevsky, is a New York story without physical violence or crime, something Scorsese has rarely done since. (The Age of Innocence, set in old Manhattan, is a notable exception. And both Life Lessons and The Age of Innocence bristle with emotional violence.) The extent to which Scorsese made Goodfellas with the aim of realizing the ambition he revealed to Taubin is unclear. But the fact is that when Scorsese approached De Niro to play Jimmy Burke, as the character was still called, for that was the criminal’s real name, their professional dynamic was substantively different than it had been at the wrap of The King of Comedy. It was he who had to ask De Niro this time.

  De Niro recalls reading Wiseguy while on the set of We’re No Angels, the 1989 release directed by Neil Jordan from a script by David Mamet. A remake of a minor 1955 crime comedy directed by Michael Curtiz in which Humphrey Bogart and Aldo Ray are escaped convicts masquerading as priests, the movie mainly consists of De Niro and Sean Penn doing impersonations of Bowery Boys Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey. (During my interview with De Niro I neglected to inquire whether this was intentional.)

  “I was in Canada, and I read the book on a weekend. I knew I couldn’t play Henry, I was too old to play. I remember it was on a weekend and I went out to one of the islands near Vancouver, and I called Marty, I remember, and said, ‘You know, what about the part of Jimmy?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ And that’s how it started. And then I started working on it right after I wrapped Angels. I flew to New York, I had to get ready right away, because they had already started shooting. Or they were very far into preproduction.”

  Pileggi recalls De Niro visiting him and Scorsese while they revised the script. “Marty was very excited, he said, ‘I think we got Bob to do it, he’s coming by later.’ And that was wonderful, I hadn’t seen Bob in many, many years. And he showed up. We went from there directly to Richard Bruno, the costume designer on the picture. Bob started going through costumes, and he wanted more of this and more of that, I mean, the attention to detail... I was just really so impressed.”

  * * *

  Some accounts—ridiculous accounts, one would note from this position—say De Niro’s agreement to work on Goodfellas secured $20 million over the original budget. Less dubious accounts put the final budget at Goodfellas at somewhere between $20 million and $25 million. Winkler’s book has the budget, pre–De Niro, at $16 million. Getting the picture made at any of those prices would be a nearly monumental undertaking. But Scorsese had the people who could do it. And he had his own meticulousness.

  Three

  THE PREP WORK

  When I interviewed Robert De Niro for this book, he was friendly, welcoming, and willing to help. The actor is, however, by nature taciturn, particularly with people he’s just met. He doesn’t process his work the way critics and journalists and much of the rest of the world does; his idea of a milestone film in his career is more related to his life circumstances or frame of mind at the time than its critical reputation. A lot of the time when considering his work in the 1980s, his mind went back to 1986’s The Mission rather than The King of Comedy or Midnight Run.

  De Niro is not blessed with a prodigious memory. This has nothing to do with his being seventy-six. In an outtake from the 1995 Casino included in a reel screened at a tribute to Don Rickles, the insult comic is seen ribbing De Niro for not properly reading a cue card with his dialogue on it. “For the money you’re making...go to your trailer and study!” This picture was made when De Niro was fifty-two. The challenges of memorization may be one reason he’s favored screen acting over stage work; having to deliver lines piecemeal is less demanding in that respect than performing a whole drama over a few hours. And Goodfellas is now a film that he shot thirty years ago. So when I mentioned that I would be traveling to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas to look at an archive of his papers, he said, “You might find something there.”

  * * *

  My friend and colleague Shawn Levy had gotten there first. In his 2014 biography of De Niro, Levy writes, “De Niro dove into preparing for the part of Jimmy the Gent with a vigor he hadn’t demonstrated in years.” He reproduces some of De Niro’s notes on the character.

  Lots of bets...he liked to laugh...when drunk a little loud...tried to be part of any situation...good at bullshitting people...bookmaker all the time...plays gin rummy...fabulous memory...dozen roses to mothers of guys in can...glide, little bounce...always shaking hands... Didn’t like strangers... I’d go over in a restaurant if I knew them and say hello, buy drinks, send a bottle...big spender...likes to tell jokes, good company, a laugher... I created my own crew [...] I networked very well. I was always working, my mind was working. Anybody and anything... I made myself known and I made myself feared [...] Good dresser. A rebel but respectful [...] my mind was on making scores, not so much a woman...

  Several of De Niro’s observations tend to be at least slightly contradicted by Jimmy’s actual actions in the movie. “Respectful” certainly doesn’t characterize Jimmy’s ultimate approach to Billy Batts. But that’s not the point. What De Niro is limning is Jimmy’s self-image, who “Jimmy the Gent” envisions himself as. This is as much a product of creative imagination as it is research.

  During my own time at the Ransom Center I also found a good deal, and it demonstrated something that I had only intuited when I wrote a critical account of his career (Robert De Niro: Anatomy of an Actor) that was published by Phaidon/ Cahiers du Cinéma in 2014. That is, De Niro’s genius in building a character is reflective—of course—of the way the man himself seems to think. He is not interested in abstractions. Psychol
ogy for him is articulated via gesture and action, and is most vividly amplified through personal appearance/presentation. This has been the case for him since he began pursuing acting in the early 1960s.

  While De Niro’s dedication to craft is most famously associated with genuine feats of physical transformation—he infamously gained sixty pounds to play the middle-aged, gone-to-seed version of boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull—the actor was never a pure naturalist. Levy writes of his early approach to headshots: he would concoct “a small library” of them—“single images and composites in the guises of various personae: cops, cabbies, beatniks, a hippie with a guitar, a Chekhovian man with glasses and a suit, an Italian gangster with cape and goatee, even some with hair apparently dyed blond, and beyond that a thick pile of photos of him in various suits, coats, and hats, with dark glasses, cigars, a pistol, and so on and so on [...] He was projecting an image of himself as a chameleonic sort of actor, not a leading man but somebody who could play a variety of offbeat types.”

  With Jimmy Burke, later to be renamed Conway, every scene meant a new outfit. The span of the movie meant that De Niro would play the character at several different ages. All of these things were opportunities for specific new presentations. Hence, De Niro’s scripts contain, in blank pages at the end, or on the facing pages of scripts that have print on only one side, lists such as these: