Profile: Martin Scorcese (Part 1)
Our friend Trevor Hogg has another profile at Flickering Myth, this one on Martin Scorcese.
Noted as one of America’s most distinctive directors, Scorcese also has 14 film writing credits including Mean Streets, Goodfellas, and Age of Innocence. Here is an excerpt from Part 1 of the profile:
“I wrote the outline first and then brought it to Mardik [Martin], who used to write all my shorts with me at NYU,” stated Martin Scorsese as to the origins of the project called Season of the Witch. “Mardik worked out the structure for me and I worked out the characters and the incidents. Then we took the script around for years and we could never get it done.” Heeding the advice given to him by John Cassevetes, Scorsese reworked the film with Martin. “The whole idea was to make a story of a modern saint, a saint in his own society but his society happens to be gangsters.” The crime drama that stars Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro (Heat), David Proval (The Shawshank Redemption), Amy Robinson (Julie & Julia), Richard Romanus (The Assassin), Cesare Danova (Tender Is the Night), Harry Northup (The Silence of the Lambs), and David Carradine was subsequently renamed. “Mean Streets [1973] shows that organized crime is similar to big government. They’re both machines. In Sicilian culture, we learned never to expect much from the government, having been trod upon by one government or another for some two thousand years. That is why the family is the unit we always look to for strength.” Elements of the story were drawn from actual events. “One night some of the neighbourhood guys went in [a bar called Foxy’s Corner] with the Johnny Boy character and his older brother; they got into a fight. They tried to settle an argument. That’s exactly and literally what happened in the film.”
Though the tale takes place in the city of the director’s birth, the majority of the principle photography took place elsewhere. “We only shot six days in New York,” revealed Martin Scorsese. “When De Niro’s shooting his gun off the roof, the roof is in New York because you can see the Empire State Building, but the window is in Los Angeles. When David Carradine gets shot in the bar, the guy falling in the street is actually in New York — that was a double — we shot that first. We blocked out his face just right so that he falls and hits the car…The rest of the scene was shot in Los Angeles.” The $670,000 production, which screened at the 1973 New York Film Festival, turned out to be a grueling affair. “It was done in twenty-seven days,” said Scorsese. “I kept pushing the limits of the budget and drove everybody crazy. But that was the only thing we could do because the more we got down, the more fun we had and the more we realized the atmosphere we wanted to get.” For their writing efforts, Martin Scorsese and Mardik Martin received a Writers Guild of America nomination for Best Original Screenplay — Drama. Robert De Niro won Best Performance in a Foreign Film at the Sant Jordi Awards as well as Best Supporting actor at the National Society of Film Critics Awards. Mean Streets was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1997. Responding to the movie being compared to The Godfather (1972), the filmmaker replied, “We weren’t trying to do the same thing at all. Francis Coppola made an epic Hollywood picture, an old-fashion movie in the good sense like Gone with the Wind [1939], only better.”
For more, go to FlickeringMyth.com.
