Martin Scorcese: Swimming with the Sharks

"In 1983, Paramount--which then consisted of Barry Diller, Michael Eisner (company president) and Jeff Katzenberg (head of productions)--decided to go ahead with the film," Scorsese recalls. "[W]e began nine months of casting and checking out locations...finally choosing Israel...All the executives...felt that the furthest away from Hollywood you could make a film was San Francisco, because it's only an hour by plane...If something went wrong, they could go right on to the set and stop the production or fire the director...

"Every other week, Michael Eisner would call me up and say, 'There's a green light on this picture; it's a "go" picture and Jeff Katzenberg is really behind it.' Two weeks later, Jeff Katzenberg called to say, 'Michael Eisner's fighting for you to make this picture'...

"But just two days before Christmas Barry Diller finally said, 'We just don't want to make it. It's not worth the trouble.' "

The way out of the impasse, Scorsese decided, was to make another film, almost any other film, right away: "I [still] had a good relationship with Katzenberg and Eisner... and they offered me some scripts... They would look at me and say, 'Beverly Hills Cop, do you want to do that? It's for Sylvester Stallone.' I asked what it was about and they replied, 'It's a fish out of water.' 'What's a fish out of water?' 'You know, a cop from somewhere else comes to New York.' I replied, 'That's the Don Siegel picture Coogan's Bluff.' And they'd say, 'No, no, it's Beverly Hills Cop.' "

Scorsese went on to make After Hours in 1985 (for "a quarter of my normal salary") and then landed at Touchstone to direct 1986's The Color of Money--under the supervision of Katzenberg and Eisner.

"We watched the pennies," Scorsese relates, "even down to the phone bill! Imagine, you're going into the picture and you have Paul Newman and Tom Cruise. We all get trailers. Paul needs a phone, Tom needs a phone, so why can't I have a phone? I can't because it'll cost too much. OK, I can make calls from the set. So I started making calls from the set, putting my quarter in and using credit charge, and other people would come and throw me off. It became rather embarrassing."

So, alas, was the picture, although it gave Scorsese a much-needed popular success with the kind of people who don't mind going to juiceless sequels.

Scorsese on Scorsese seems to me a text, as the literary scholars say, to be read and reread for irony and suppressed anger. In the current corporate configuration of Hollywood, the "personal filmmakers" of a braver time are becoming an endangered species--the true fish out of water. Risk-takers and visionaries are increasingly forced into accommodation with mainstream packagers such as Touchstone, which is, to my mind, the quintessential home of the slick, the glossy, and the palpably false.

What, then, will become of Scorsese, our personal filmmaker par excellence? As noted, he's presently busy with Good Fellas, based on a best-selling book about the Mafia by reporter Nicholas Pileggi. If all goes well, we can expect a cracking good crime yarn, a genre picture returning the director to his roots. And if Scorsese is lucky and continues to play ball, he'll continue to get such plum assignments.

Maybe hitting the old genre trail--plying popular taste--won't turn out to be so bad in Scorsese's case.

Maybe he'll make a Western.

Scorsese on Scorsese, edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie. Faber and Faber, 178 pages, $17.95.

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Grover Lewis is the author of Academy All the Way, a collection of Hollywood reportage. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone and The Village Voice.

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