Martin Scorsese is a scary little guy with mean friends in New York's Little Italy, but he's also a driven artist and almost certainly our finest American screen director. Even when he blunders, he's world-class as opposed to flash.
At mid-career, the director is fascinating to watch because he hasn't totally sold out, as the old saying goes. He's inching in that direction, but with reservations and with honor. If we're lucky, he'll squeak through the strangling confinements of today's Hollywood hit factories and make another string of great pictures, having mainly his own ferocious achievements to surpass.
Several of Scorsese's films are now solidly in the classic repertory: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull among them.
His lesser but still considerable achievements include Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, New York, New York, The Last Waltz, The King of Comedy, After Hours, and the aptly-titled The Color of Money.
On the debit side I count Scorsese's various dabblings in the music-video form-notably Michael Jackson's "Bad," also aptly-titled--and the interminably gassy, vacuous, and "controversial" The Last Temptation of Christ.
Let me hasten to say that I have no particular problem with Last Temptation's theology--but as a movie I hated it from beginning to end (running time. 163 minutes). It struck me as one of the emptiest movies of the 1980s. Before it was over, it made me wish I was dead with my back broken.
Yet with my thumb literally stuck to the VCR's fast-forward button, I never doubted Scorsese's sincerity or seriousness in bringing Nikos Kazantzakis's novel to the screen, and I'm even less inclined to do so after reading Scorsese's account of the production's fractured history.
Does that make Last Temptation a better picture? Hardly. But when Scorsese talks at all, he tends to tell the truth, and his commentary on how the movie biz works when faced with a "serious" project is quietly devastating.
Since he entered the national consciousness in the mid-1970s ("Was you talkin' to me?"), Scorsese has relentlessly avoided interviews. Accordingly, the publication of Scorsese on Scorsese marks something of an occasion, amounting as it does to a sketchy and highly elliptical autobiography.
The slim little volume, distilled from three lectures the director gave at British film institutions in 1987, shies away from the more intimate aspects of Scorsese's personal history, which is largely confined to brief information squibs provided by the editors. Thus, the book is an appetizer rather than a full-course meal, yet revealing and valuable all the same.
Scorsese discusses each of his 25 films, videos, and TV commercials, from the early experimental shorts to his current production, Good Fellas. He pays touching homage to his father and the early treks they made together to movie theaters. In passing, he offers brief but tantalizing glimpses of producer Sam Arkoff, film composer Bernard Herrmann, Bob Dylan, Robbie Robertson, John Cassavetes, British director Michael Powell, and agent Michael Ovitz. Above all, Scorsese voices his passionate commitment to films and filmmaking.
"The first image that I remember seeing on a cinema screen," he recalls, "was a Tru-color trailer for a Roy Rogers movie... Westerns remained my favorite movies until I was about ten."
"I'm not a very well-read person," he says later, "because I grew up in a house without books, and basically everything I learned was visual."
The young Scorsese--a devout Catholic lad who began to confuse religion with the movies--belonged to the first generation of American film-school students circa 1960-65. In a rise that transcended the spectacular, he flashed up through the system, making the then-obligatory stop to film a Roger Corman cheapo (Boxcar Bertha, 1972) before making Mean Streets in 1973 and the even more astonishing Taxi Driver in 1975. As sometimes happens, he got famous and he got a little lost. With his fifth studio film--New York, New York (1977)--he foundered on several fronts, and the magical spell was broken.
Following the "first triumphant decade of his career," the editors note discreetly, "there were many inclined to regard Scorsese as a spent or compromised force in the aftermath of the early eighties"--i.e., after 1982's $20 million boxoffice failure The King of Comedy and the onset of myriad personal problems.
In that climate, following a years-long obsession with filming The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese entered Hollywood's Goofy Zone. The picture was eventually produced and released by Universal in 1988--but an earlier commitment for backing by another studio turned out to be no commitment at all.
"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.