Conversations with Scorsese (19 page)

MS:
Me, too.

RS:
Because he was straight up.

MS:
Yup.

RS:
This is the time you have. This is what you must do. Other than that, you can do kind of anything you want. Was that it?

MS:
Exactly.

RS:
But you had to make your schedule, you had to make your budget.

MS:
Yes. He would come into the cutting room. I thought I had all the time in the world to cut it. The credit isn’t mine because of the editors’ union. [Scorsese was not a member.]

RS:
Right.

MS:
But he had to tell me, “No, you have to finish this now.” “Oh, I see. Okay, I hear you.” He thought I was being willful. I didn’t quite understand that you pay a certain amount for the editing room, for the assistant. So he needed for us to get it done.

I had cut a ten-minute promo. Then when I showed him the first cut of the picture, which was about two hours, Roger looked at me and he goes, “You know, the energy you had in that promo reel? That’s what this needs.” And that was the only thing he had to say. Within a week and a half or so I had it all cut down to less than ninety minutes.

And that was it. I worked as an editor on other films for him. He would sit there in rough cuts and say, “Two more frames on that.”

RS:
Really?

MS:
Yeah. “One more frame. Cut that, that’s a little too long. The picture’s too short here, we have to add something.”

RS:
That’s the kind of thing I say when I’m editing.

MS:
Me, too.

RS:
But you don’t expect it from somebody like Corman.

MS:
No. But don’t forget I met him in 1970 or 1971. And he was directing his last picture, I think it was
Gas.
But the cult around Corman had really culminated by that time. Because the Poe films were really quite beautiful.
The Tomb of Ligeia,
based on the
Edgar Allan Poe story—

RS:
Oh, beautiful.

MS:
—was one of my favorites, a beautiful film. Moving and interesting, and provocative. And atmospheric.
The Masque of the Red Death
[also based on a Poe story] to a certain extent, too. And
The Trip
[about a bad LSD experience] I also liked. Because it was like an experimental film. And he was dealing with it in a very serious way. Yes, it was exploitation, but—

RS:
Well, I think for all the kind of weird stuff he’s put out in his life, he’s actually a serious man.

MS:
Yes, I know. I was very surprised when I first met him.

RS:
Would you say working for him kind of took away the sour taste of the pictures you’d gotten fired off?

MS:
Oh, absolutely. But this was a different situation. You only have a certain amount of time, and it’s got to get done. This particular company says you can put your own elements into it as much as you want, but you still have to deliver this package to the marketplace on time. And it has to have these elements. The next was
Mean Streets,
and it was so different. But, as I said, there’s no way I could have made that without having gone through the school, so to speak, of what Corman taught me.

RS:
It’s funny, people always use that term about Roger: the School of Corman.

MS:
It
was
like a school. His persona was that way, as if he were a professor in a way. He was very firm, but he also had a kindness about him. So it was a more gentle introduction, rather than having to do a B film, let’s say, or a low-budget film, in the studios, in a much harsher situation. I was lucky in that. I brought
Mean Streets
to him first, but he suggested doing it all African-American.

RS:
Really?

MS:
Because he said,
Gene Corman, his brother, had just released
Cool Breeze,
I think it was called. It was an African-American remake of
The Asphalt Jungle
set in Harlem. And he’d made a big hit with it, and Roger said, “My brother’s just had a very good reaction to his film. And I read your script. I can give you a hundred thousand dollars, you could shoot it in New York, if you’re willing to swing a little bit.” I said, “Yes?” “Would you think of doing it all black?” I said, “I’ll think about it.” [
Laughs.
] Of course, I never said no …

RS:
Well, how could you?

MS:
You couldn’t walk on his psyche.

RS:
It’s about being an Italian guy!

MS:
An Italian American.

RS:
On the
Lower East Side!

MS:
So then he offered me
I Escaped from Devil’s Island
with
Jim Brown. And that was going to be done in order to capitalize on
Papillon.

Again, it was a very dense script. And, I said, No, I’m not going to do it. There were two people who gave me advice to be realistic, to do it. One was Freddy
Weintraub. He said to me after
Boxcar,
when I was saying, “No, I’ve got to try to raise the money on
Mean Streets,
” he said, “Take this other picture. You’ve got this picture, it’s real, and the other thing is not real. It may never happen. Go with this. This is a good thing.” And I refused.

RS:
It’s sometimes very, very hard to say no.

MS:
I know.

RS:
Because, you know, you’re kind of running out of dough—

MS:
Exactly. That’s what he was telling me. Be realistic about it.

RS:
You’ve got a check. You can cash the check. And it’s tied in with what we’d now call “family values.” When I was twenty-six, twenty-seven, these older guys would kind of clap me on the shoulder and say something like, Say, young fellow, isn’t it about time you started thinking about family, wife, children? And I’d kind of go, “Oh, yeah, I’m definitely thinking about that.” I mean, they all wanted to get you a house on Revolutionary Road.

MS:
Exactly! They didn’t even know where I came from, man—certainly no house on Revolutionary Road, I can tell you that. I read
Richard Yates later; boy, it’s rough, it’s strong—very disturbing.

RS:
Well, there I had the advantage over you, because I’d been brought up in a suburb, which was very pleasant, but also very stifling.

MS:
There was one other man. I don’t remember his name, but he was the head of the
CBS News editorial department. It was 1966 or ’67. I had worked six weeks there as an assistant editor. And I liked the job very much, it was wonderful. And I met some very interesting men and women there, editors, news producers. One was a producer who was really tough. People would have to wear helmets when they were screening their rough cuts for him. He’d throw things.

I mean, it was really quite something. But I was doing the editing, and I did it as best I could. And this older gentleman took me into his office one day, and he said, “We’d like to have you stay on.” And he offered me a job as assistant editor and also, eventually, as an editor. And I said, “Well, you see, I have it in my mind to make features.” And he was very sweet about it. He got up from his desk, he looked at me and he said, “Look, you’re young yet. And many things in life you may want when you’re young, you may not be able to get. And I’m giving you something very tangible here.” He basically said, People have dreams but they don’t come true a lot of the time. “I hope it does in your case,” he said, “but it may not. Know that.”

Then later, after
Boxcar,
I took a job editing
Elvis on Tour,
and I was having too many meetings with actors for
Mean Streets
and I had to be taken off that, too. The editor of
Elvis
was
Sid Levin, who was working with the producer-writer Robert Abel. He has credit as editor on
Mean Streets,
but I edited the film. He helped me along. They were friendly, but they were pros; it wasn’t like a family, like the
Woodstock
situation. And basically they told me, We have a schedule, we need you here on
Elvis,
and if you can’t be here we’ve got to take you off the picture. And I said okay. So then I started doing
Mean Streets.
I asked them right away, Can I cut it here? And actually I wound up editing
Mean Streets
in their room.

RS:
It’s funny: Even though our lives are so different, we’ve both faced the same issues. Lots of people offered me jobs back then, right after I sort of began making a little name for myself reviewing for
Life.
“Come to
The New York Times.
You can start as the second-string film critic but, you know—”
Harrison Salisbury, the managing editor, said, “Mr. Crowther, there”—he pointed at Bosley, who saw me sitting there in the newsroom—“is our film critic. Not, I hope, for very much longer.” And you kind of go, Geez—

MS:
Was that around the time they hired
Renata Adler?

RS:
It was just before that. But Bosley was on the skids a little bit already. And then
Bonnie and Clyde
came along and he kept attacking it and that was that.

MS:
What this gentleman was offering was basically a job for the rest of your life.

RS:
What he was offering was, at the end of the line, a pension. It was: Fifty years from now you’ll be glad you did this.

MS:
You’ll be glad if you do it because you have a family. I had a wife and kid. People said to me sometimes, “Don’t you realize your responsibility?” I guess I didn’t.

RS:
No, your responsibility was to
Mean Streets,
which you’d been writing, off and on, for something like six years, I think.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
Mean Streets
was done at the urging of
John Cassavetes, because he liked
Who’s That Knocking
a lot. He said, Don’t do those other movies. He didn’t like Hollywood films. But I loved them. And I figured, well,
Boxcar Bertha
is like a
genre. And
gangster films, and
musicals, and
westerns—I want to do all of it. And he said, No, no, no
—Who’s That Knocking,
you should do pictures like that. And he forced me. He said, You just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit. He said, The actors are good. I can tell you liked the actors. It’s a lot of fun. But you shouldn’t do that kind of picture. After
Who’s That Knocking,
you’ve got to do something you really feel. Do you have a script? And I said, Yeah, I have this script I keep working on. He says, Do that. Within a year, I had it done. And so that got me the introduction into the studios, and also a critical reception, which was good.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
Let’s talk about how the picture got going, practically speaking, I mean.

MS:
Paul Rapp, who was working with Roger at the time, gave me the idea of how to do
Mean Streets
in the
Roger Corman style, in terms of production. He showed
me how to do it, if I did most of it in L.A. And so it was really thanks to Roger and his group, but mainly Paul. I did the first six days and nights in New York, and the rest, twenty days, in L.A. We flew people in from New York for no pay. De Niro fired the gun at the Empire State Building in New York and it hit a window in L.A. [
Laughs.
]

Marty on the set of
Mean Streets,
his breakthrough film of 1973.

RS:
Well, that makes sense, albeit it in a crazy sort of way.

MS:
That pool hall scene, where that big fight occurs—it’s a big, epic scene and you’ve got to shoot it in one day. I mean, I laid it out not only in drawings, but with lines and arrows showing where everyone would move. And they just went with it, because we had to get out of there. It took about sixteen hours shooting nonstop.

I did have to shoot certain things in New York that you could not replicate in L.A. I couldn’t find the hallway where Harvey and Bob had that big fight at the end.