Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  “Tell me what is my life/without your love/Tell me who am I/without you/by my side.” But the fuzzy guitar hook, the momentum of the rhythm section, the lift of the chorus, make it irresistible, and it adds great momentum to the feeling of relief that comes to Henry and Karen when they don’t see that chopper.

  “All these years later,” Harrison wrote in the liner notes for a 2000 remaster and rerelease of his album All Things Must Pass, from which this song derives (it was an international hit single, as well, peaking on Billboard’s chart at #10), “I would like to liberate some of the songs from the big production that seemed appropriate at the time, but now seem a bit over the top with the reverb in the wall of sound.” Later in these notes, he thanks, sort of, “the amazing Mr. Phil Spector, who produced so many fantastic records in the ’60s. He helped me so much to get this record made. In his company I came to realize the true value of the Hare Krishna mantra. God bless you, Phil.”

  One of the ostensible benefits of chanting the Hare Krishna mantra is “peace of mind.” Which Spector was not a purveyor of by this stage in his career. A substance-abusing and spouse-abusing gun nut, Spector was the subject of countless bad-behavior anecdotes from the 1970s well into this century. You’ve probably heard a few of them—like the time he held a gun to Leonard Cohen’s head and told the poet and songwriter that he loved him, to which the mordant Cohen replied, “I hope you do.” He killed the actress Lana Clarkson in 2003; now eighty, he will most likely die in prison. For a nondocumentary, this movie certainly does feature a large number of convicted criminals.

  * * *

  Waters’ “Mannish Boy,” featuring the appreciative whooping of Winters, plays out some more at Sandy’s place, as Henry mixes the coke with her, then skedaddles. As if to close a parenthesis, the mini–drum solo from “Jump into the Fire” plays as Henry and Lois fight it out about the lucky hat, and walk out to the driveway to meet their captors.

  * * *

  What is there to say about Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols’ version of “My Way”? The song, like “Beyond the Sea,” was composed and first recorded in France. “Comme d’habitude,” which sort of translates to “my way”—it’s literally “as is my practice” or “as usual”—written by Jacques Revaux with lyrics by François and Gilles Thibault, was recorded by Claude François in 1968. It caught the ear, at different times and in different ways, of Paul Anka and David Bowie. In the late ’60s Bowie, still trying to make it, was flirting with the idea of selling himself as a near-Continental pop chanteur, and tried to transform the melody into a song he called “Even a Fool Learns to Love.” In the meantime, the Canadian-born Anka, after a dinner with Frank Sinatra during which the Chairman of the Board talked about quitting this rotten business, put himself in Sinatra’s shoes and reworked the François rendition into the self-congratulatory ballad we all know, and many love. The frustrated Bowie went on to write “Life on Mars,” which stealthily confounds some of the chordings of Revaux’s tune.

  Sinatra’s song was a hit that became a kind of kitsch sacrament. The blithe sophistication, barely camouflaging a subtext of obsession and heartache, of Cole Porter; the understated devastation of an “Angel Eyes”; this is replaced in Sinatra’s testament by macho preening. People ate it up. They still do.

  Famously raucous, Vicious joined Sex Pistols after charter member Glen Matlock quit, or was fired—the early punk-rock scene was genuinely tumultuous at a multivalent level, and even today its myths have yet to be definitively sorted out. The lore of the time had it that Matlock was not sufficiently “punk.” Vicious, born John Richie, was. He didn’t bring instrumental prowess to the group. He brought sneers, safety pins, mucous. An untamable persona whose fall has been documented in a great many articles, books, and films (including Alex Cox’s estimable 1986 Sid and Nancy, starring Gary Oldman as Sid, in a breakout role), Vicious was also highly prone to substance abuse (his mother had been, and became again, an active heroin addict, and at some point the two began to share a habit). When asked, he could actually sing pleasantly enough: the Pistols’ covers of good-old-rock-’n’-roller Eddie Cochran’s songs “C’mon Everybody” and “Somethin’ Else” are genuinely fun and charming and enlivened by Vicious’ vocals.

  But that bad attitude of his made him the perfect person to take the piss out of “My Way.” His version was indeed considered sacrilegious when it came out as a single in the summer of 1978, when Vicious had well less than a year to live. Paul Anka deemed it “sincere.”

  As is the case when, say, eating the fried chicken from the Kansas City restaurant Stroud’s for the first time, when Goodfellas brings up the Vicious “My Way” it is one of those moments you wish you could experience unspoiled over and over again. It’s a shock, because Scorsese, while certainly a rock ’n’ roll person, is not (his fondness for the Clash notwithstanding) a punk person, so there’s some surprise that he pulled it out. But it’s one of those things that feels so right—the tossing of this self-aggrandizing procession into the trash. Anka is right—Vicious is sincere, in a sense. When he sings, “Regrets, I’ve had a few/But then again/too few to mention,” he means it, man (as his Sex Pistols bandmate John Lydon/Johnny Rotten would put it), but he divests the words of the pompous solemnity Sinatra’s version relies on. Burn it all down. Throw the egg noodles and ketchup at the wall. Fuck it.

  Six

  THE SCHOONMAKER TREATMENT

  Thelma Schoonmaker is the most consistent and stalwart collaborator Martin Scorsese has had, in a career distinguished by several collaborations that could be so characterized. Her first picture in his filmography is 1980’s Raging Bull, for which she won a Best Editing Academy Award. But the two had met and worked with each other well before that, in the 1960s, when Scorsese was at New York University.

  Schoonmaker recounted her meeting Scorsese—born in 1940, she is three years older than the director—to Mary Patrick Kelly: “I went to Columbia University for a year of graduate work in primitive art. And then I see an ad in the New York Times. First and last time it ever happened. Someone wanted to train an assistant film editor. I got the job and worked for a terrible old hack who was butchering the great foreign films for late-night television. [...] I learned enough to realize that maybe it was something I wanted to do.”

  With that in mind, she enrolled in an NYU summer course, and here she met Scorsese, Jim McBride (who would make the underground-to-mainstream-bridging David Holzman’s Diary in 1968, and go on to direct The Big Easy and a remake of Godard’s Breathless), and Michael Wadleigh. The head of the department, Haig Manoogian, one of Scorsese’s earliest and most important mentors, asked Schoonmaker to help Scorsese cut a negative on a project, even though she wasn’t in any class sections with her fellow student.

  Here began their working method, evolving from the basis that Scorsese himself was already a trained and somewhat accomplished editor. “I would go over to him and say, ‘We have to lose six frames here, do you want to do them at the tail or the head?’ He would decide and I would make the correction.”

  Schoonmaker was impressed with Scorsese’s energy and dedication. “He had much more drive and focus than any of the other people I met at NYU. Marty was burning up with wanting to get there.” (One is reminded of this anecdote recounted by Roger Ebert: “After Mean Streets was released, I wrote a review saying that Scorsese had a chance to become the American Fellini in ten years or so. The next time we met after the review appeared, Marty looked serious and concerned: ‘Do you really think it’s going to take ten years?’”)

  In the summer of 1969, Michael Wadleigh enlisted the duo to join him in shooting a documentary about what was then called the “Woodstock Music and Art Fair” and additionally “An Aquarian Exposition.” This morphed into, well, Woodstock, and then the film Woodstock. Schoonmaker described the shoot to Kelly as “an incredible nightmare.” In the summer of 2019 I moderated a Q&A about the movie with Schoonmaker and one of its produ
cers, and she was able to laugh about it. She described how nobody really knew what they were getting into—Scorsese packed a pair of nice cuff links in the event that he would maybe go to a high-end restaurant on the trip—and then ended up under the stage for three days. Scorsese was both an editor on the project and an assistant director. (The sequence in Woodstock featuring Sha-Na-Na, a ’50s tribute group that stuck out like a sore thumb at the flower-children-friendly concert, was cut entirely by Scorsese.) During the college-and-after years of honing his craft, Scorsese seems to have done a little bit of everything, and tackled it all with equal enthusiasm. Alfred Hitchcock famously did not like shooting; Sidney Lumet, in his largely exemplary book Making Movies, is frank in revealing that he considers sound mixing an utter bore. (His chapter on it is subtitled “The Only Dull Part of Moviemaking.”) Scorsese always gives the impression of being equally absorbed in all aspects of filmmaking, and accords to each of those aspects a special weight.

  There’s a famous picture of Wadleigh, Scorsese, and Schoonmaker during the editing of the great documentary. Scorsese has on a dress shirt with a neckerchief, Schoonmaker wears what looks like a gray pullover, while Wadleigh is shirtless. At the Q&A I asked Schoonmaker what the deal was with that—I’m all about the important questions—and she said, “Yeah, he just walked around with his shirt off a lot.” Ah, the ’60s.

  * * *

  “Raging Bull was my first feature!” Schoonmaker told Kelly. “When I came to work with Marty, I said, ‘You know, I’ve never cut a feature before.’ And he said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll do it together, it’ll be okay.’ It was my assistant, Sonya Polonsky, who taught me how to organize a room for a theatrical film. Marty had called me several times for other movies but I hadn’t gotten into the union when I was younger. Now they said I would have to work as an assistant for eight years before I could be an editor. I said no. But on Raging Bull, through Irwin Winkler, [consulting with] lawyers and standby editors [...] I got into the union. We were working all night. I’m not a night person. I’ve never adjusted to working all night. But in that solitude we found an incredible ability to concentrate.”

  That concentration became crucial to their work process, and they worked to make sure they could always achieve it. As such, the editing room is a closed shop, so to speak. David Leonard, who was part of the Scorsese editorial department from Last Temptation through Goodfellas, recalls, “Thelma did everything. Yeah. I mean, there wasn’t a lot of mentoring. That wasn’t the way they worked. The door was shut. There wasn’t a lot of ‘what’d you think of this, look at this.’ There was a whole editing lineage that went back to Dede Allen, who was very conscious about training assistants to the edit. So she always had an assistant who stood by her, and she would edit out loud and talk. Mostly Thelma didn’t really at that time cut until Marty was in the room. Dailies would come in, and there was a very elaborate system of organizing the footage so that when Marty came in there were takes set up in reels, because it was film and he could see his preferences from the notes of dailies back-to-back-to-back. So there were very elaborate assemblies but not really cut.

  “What she would do is she would run through the dailies and she’d mark them up with grease pencils, ins and outs, give it to us. We would have to then pull the sections out and rebuild them into new reels and there were two logbooks. There was the log of the main roll of dailies and then there was a select log so you knew where the trims went. So it was very organizationally intensive for the assistants.”

  One hallmark of Schoonmaker’s editing philosophy is that dynamic discrete moments matter more than issues of continuity. “Performance, performance, performance,” Leonard recalls as her motto. In a 2014 interview in Film Comment with the critic Nick Pinkerton, Schoonmaker elaborates. “I don’t understand why people get so hung up on these issues, because if you look at films throughout history, you will see enormous continuity errors everywhere, particularly when you’re talking about the [practically square] Academy aspect ratio where you see more in the frame. Even in The Red Shoes, a film that nobody ever has complaints about, there are enormous continuity bumps, and it doesn’t matter. You know why? Because you’re being carried along by the power of the film. So throughout our history of improvisational cutting, we have decided to go with the performance, or in this case particularly with the humor of a line, as opposed to trying to make sure a coffee cup is in the right place.”

  Schoonmaker then cites a pertinent example: “I remember that when I was nominated for an Academy Award for Goodfellas and we lost to Dances with Wolves for editing, the editor of that movie said to me: ‘Why did you make that bad continuity cut?’ And I said, ‘Which cut? Which continuity error? We have tons of them.’ He was talking about a scene with Paul Sorvino and another actor who was an amateur, but wonderful, though he didn’t know about matching. It was much more important for us to get this beautiful performance by this untrained actor than to worry about where the cigar is in Paul Sorvino’s hand. One doesn’t want to do that, one would hope not to do that, but if the choice comes between a beautiful, clean line and a laugh, we would always go for the laugh.”

  Here Schoonmaker’s recollection is not entirely precise: it’s not the cigar in the hand, which stays in continuity, but the cigar in the mouth. It’s the scene with Tony Darrow as the Bamboo Lounge owner begging Paulie to rein in Tommy, or take a business interest in the restaurant. It occurs about twenty-six minutes into the movie. There’s a behind-the-head shot of Paulie, with the cigar is in his mouth, in the cutaway to a reverse angle there’s no cigar in his mouth. Like so: “What the fuck you think I’m talking about, Paulie, please, come on.” Paulie says, “It’s not even fair,” then cut, cigar is out of his mouth, and he finishes saying, “No.” Yes, it is a “bad” cut, and I never noticed it until I read that interview and looked it up.

  David Leonard is a professional film editor to this day, and he says, “Yeah, I never got over that cut. As I watched the movie again, I was thinking I couldn’t remember what was so good about it or what the other takes were of Paulie in there that they had to have that moment.”

  The moments of feedback or active participation he was allowed are still special to Leonard. “During Last Temptation there’s that very long slow-motion shot of Jesus walking with the cross. It’s a very long shot. At one point I remember Thelma came out when we were eating dinner late and said, ‘Do you think that shot’s too long?’ And it was one of the few times I can remember that. For me as an assistant where I got Marty time was the mixing of Goodfellas, the scratch mixing, because especially at that point [Schoonmaker’s husband] Michael Powell wasn’t well”—the director, in his eighties, had cancer—“and Thelma was going home early. So I would generally go do a scratch mix with the mixer and then Marty would come and tweak it. So that was where I sort of had some one-on-one time with Marty. I remember once after a screening I went up to do something on the ninth floor and Marty was like, ‘Sounded great, David.’ There wasn’t a lot of that. Don’t get me wrong. He’s warm as shit. He’s great.”

  At one point Scorsese’s need to stay in the editing room uninterrupted for as long as possible became such that he had a soundproof phone booth installed in the room, so he could receive or make calls privately without leaving. As they were constructing it, Scorsese remarked to Leonard that it was like the isolation booth on the 1950s television quiz show The $64,000 Question, so Leonard rigged a device that would play that show’s “question time” theme music whenever Scorsese closed the door. Scorsese got a huge kick out of it. The director’s moodiness waxed and waned: “It depends whether he’s not happy with what he did that day on set and it’s three months later, or whether his agent said this person’s not going to do this. And I remember Thelma would sort of say he never knows if they’re going to let him make another movie.” He was past the point of, as rumor had it, destroying editing rooms à la Charles Foster Kane raging in his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s bedroom at th
e end of Citizen Kane. But he could still be volatile. “If you walked in the editing room without warning, Marty would jump up and say, ‘How the FUCK am I supposed to get any work done,’ or some such thing.”

  One of Leonard’s responsibilities was rounding up sources for the song soundtrack. “I always think about this. He handed me a list of music to have prepared for the cutting room and, like, ninety percent of what’s in the movie was on the list. And this was while he was shooting. It was, like, you know, have this stuff ready. That was always an amazing thing to me, all that stuff, and then it was in his shooting script. You know, ‘Jump into the Fire’ crosses with ‘Magic Bus.’

  “And there weren’t many CDs around in 1989. So we had to go find stuff and at that point you would transfer a 45 or a cut from vinyl onto a quarter-inch tape so you could constantly reprint magnetic stock of it, but we would have to go find this stuff and fortunately we were upstairs from Colony Records. So you could run downstairs and for fifty dollars get a copy of a Dean Martin record with ‘Ain’t That a Kick in the Head’ on it.”

  * * *

  Schoonmaker’s husband, Michael Powell, died at age eighty-four in February of 1990, while editing of Goodfellas was still underway. “So Thelma disappeared,” Leonard recalls. “She had to go to England. She was away for about two, three weeks. Michael’s devotion to Marty was wonderful. After a screening of Last Temptation Michael got up. There were death threats against Marty over the movie at that point and Mike was, like, ‘Marty, I’ll take a bullet for you.’ I got to have lunch with him a lot because Barbara had an assistant who had this dog, Elvis, a basset hound, and Thelma would say, ‘Why don’t you take Elvis to go see Michael,’ because they lived around the corner on 51st and 8th. So I would walk Elvis over, and then Mike would show up and Mike would have a plate and a teacup set up for me. And he would run and, like, jump on the carpet to play with Elvis. I’m thinking, ‘Great, Michael’s going to fall and break a hip. I’m going to get Michael Powell killed.’ He hadn’t a care. He would be playing with the dog.