Conversations with Scorsese (63 page)

MS:
I do think it’s valid. I think it feeds the soul in a way.

RS:
Well, it certainly feeds your soul.

MS:
A good friend of mine recently said, to make a point about the necessity of art, “Let’s sell the
Sistine Chapel to a developer so the poor can eat for one day with the profits.” But then what? They would eat for one day, but we would have lost the Sistine Chapel. And the Sistine Chapel may be of more value for people for the next ten centuries. It’s food for the soul. It’s spiritual nourishment.

RS:
Saving a glorious film that’s in danger of being lost or destroyed might also possibly sustain souls.

MS:
I know it will.

RS:
So you should feel fine.

MS:
I
do
feel okay about that. Maybe it’s just that we take ourselves too seriously in this business. How do you develop as a person? Am I in touch with what moves me at this age? Am I able to convey it through the films I make?

Lenses, nature, actors. This has to be enough to drive you at a certain age, to keep you believing in what you’re doing. If you don’t believe in it, then you can’t do it.

Marty particularly admired the gaudy
color palette director John Stahl employed on this 1945 melodrama.
Gene Tierney’s lipstick alone was enough to blow you out of the theater.

RS:
I’m entirely with you on that. I don’t really have to work anymore, but I like to work. I know you like to work. What the hell else would you do?

MS:
I tried thinking of it, and I don’t think I belong anywhere else, really. Maybe I should make more documentaries, especially the music ones. I need to find new forms of expression, narrative expression. And music is enriching. Whether it’s Dylan, George Harrison, or the blues musicians we featured on the PBS series.

RS:
The other aspect of your collecting is the posters. They’re fabulous. When did all that begin for you?

MS:
While I was doing the storyboards as a kid, I also did posters and movie ads.

RS:
I didn’t realize that. It makes me think of Walter Benjamin, the brilliant, tragic Jewish intellectual who died early in
World War II.

MS:
I know the name, but I’ve never read him.

RS:
He wrote a very famous article called “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” His notion was that a great painting has an aura about it, and that the further you get from the original, through mechanical reproduction—newspaper lithographs and so forth—the more the aura diminishes, my point being that a movie is not a static object. It’s not in any particular place. It’s in thousands of places simultaneously. Almost intrinsically it can’t have an aura the way a Rembrandt painting can. Whereas a poster of that movie can have an aura of some sort.

MS:
That’s right, exactly.

RS:
It’s possible that a poster in some ways can have a poignancy and a power that the actual movie may not have. It’s showing you maybe the three or four images that are the best parts of the movie. Maybe that’s why posters have a kind of a particular pull for you.

MS:
By the early seventies I started to become obsessive about collecting them. It was part of this urge or impulse to possess the cinema experience. The posters promise something. They really do. A special dream.

RS:
If a poster is a good poster, it encompasses the movie instantly for you. Especially if you’ve seen the movie.

MS:
True.

RS:
But you’ve also spoken to me about the promise of the poster outside of the theater.

MS:
Yes, exactly.

RS:
But now that you’re collecting them, it’s not the promise anymore, it’s the memory.

MS:
Yes. The poster of
Leave Her to Heaven
evokes the entire movie for me. It’s not the greatest film, but it’s one of my favorites; I like watching it.

RS:
Gene Tierney’s lipstick blows your mind.

MS:
It just knocks you down. We studied it for
Aviator.

RS:
All the lipsticks in that film are terribly vivid.

MS:
For years I lived with a part of a six-sheet of
East of Eden.
A six-sheet is a giant poster, basically. But the greater part of it was missing. I just had the one image from the middle of it. I framed it. It was over the couch in L.A. for a while. It’s in the vault now, I guess. It was just
James Dean and
Lois Smith in a dark hall; he’s getting ready to go down the hall to his mother’s room. Kazan came to dinner one night and was so taken by that. It conveyed all the fear of finding out what was at the end of the hall, what was in the room. There was no calligraphy, nothing, just that image. The
East of Eden
one-sheet doesn’t evoke the film for me in the same way.

RS:
What got you started collecting posters?

MS:
Well, it’s absurd, in a way—you can’t possess the film because you didn’t make the film, and you can’t possess the moment that the film was projected. It’s like chasing a phantom. The only way you can try to possess films is to make your own films. But they don’t come anywhere near the films that influenced you or impressed you when you were in your formative years. So you try to capture something of them.

RS:
I guess you could say a poster makes an object of a film.

MS:
It does.

RS:
I think it was
Claude Chabrol who did a documentary showing clips of films made by the Nazis during the French occupation in
World War II. There is this sequence when the narrator says, in a very chipper way, “Your favorite films are being used and recycled. And, in fact, very often you may find that certain films are being recycled as shoe polish.” For example, they show someone shining his shoes, and there’s his favorite actress smiling back at him from his shoe tip, and the man smiles back. The true essence of a movie doesn’t exist in the real, physical world, as opposed, maybe, to a poster, which is a stand-alone physical object. Can you remember the first movie poster you ever bought?

MS:
Phantom of the Opera.
It’s a Belgian poster. My brother and I happened to see that movie on a rerelease on Halloween night at the
Jefferson Theater in the 1950s.

RS:
I liked that movie.

MS:
Me, too. And I never saw
color like that before. And the way it’s cut to the operetta
Martha—
it’s as well cut to the music and as well designed to the music
as some of the scenes in
Colonel Blimp,
or
Tales of Hoffmann.
It’s a little silly at times, but it made such an impression on me.

RS:
It’s the only version of
The Phantom
that gives the Phantom a motive.

MS:
I’ll never forget the scene when acid is thrown into
Claude Rains’s face— turning his mild-mannered musician into the film’s eponymous monster.

RS:
It’s one of the great scenes.

MS:
And the poor guy goes into the sewer—

RS:
I saw it when I was twelve years old and I’ve never forgotten it.

MS:
By the way, the original one, tinted and slow, eighteen frames a second, is excellent. It’s with
Lon Chaney.

RS:
Oh, it’s a very good
silent film.

MS:
His movements are excellent.

RS:
So how many posters do you have now?

MS:
Three thousand maybe. They’re mainly at the Museum of Modern Art, which uses them for different shows. If there’s a film that’s restored, or there’s a special show for a filmmaker, I’m asked for certain posters. We just make sure they’re presented in a certain way, and that we can get them back. Recently, for the
Roberto Rossellini show, we loaned them a few.

RS:
But your original motive was just that you wanted that first poster?

MS:
Well, yes. I looked at the use of color on it, and I was so obsessed with that three-strip
Technicolor.

RS:
Where did you see it?

MS:
The poster was somewhere in
Greenwich Village. It cost me maybe $25. Some years ago I found another copy, and that’s in the editing room. I always look at it.

RS:
Those Belgian posters, originally, all that same odd size.

MS:
And they are in both French and Flemish.

RS:
And what’s the first movie you collected?

MS:
I think it was
Citizen Kane.
And then I got
8½. 8½
is still very watchable for me.

RS:
It’s a wonderful film. Somebody said to me the other day that I had given it a
bad review. I said, “I couldn’t have. I love that film.” But maybe I did, being young and stupid. I don’t even remember actually reviewing it.

MS:
I remember reviews people wrote in the sixties, even the fifties. I remember the
Daily News
review for
The Night of the Hunter,
two and a half stars. I went to see it anyway. I remember the review for
Forbidden Planet
in the
Daily News
—two stars, “a waste of electricity.”

RS:
Well, to be honest with you, I wouldn’t have given more than two and a half stars to
The Night of the Hunter,
either—at the time.

MS:
There are people who don’t like it, there’s no doubt about it.

RS:
At the end of the day, if you liked it, and I didn’t like it, it doesn’t make any difference. That’s just opinion.

MS:
It has to do with different generations as well.

RS:
Absolutely.

MS:
As I mentioned, some people say
Fight Club
is
The Clockwork Orange
of its generation. Whatever you may think of the film is neither here nor there. It’s the way it has affected many young people under the age of thirty right now.

One of the ornaments of Marty’s poster collection.
The Red Shoes
(1948) was co-directed by
Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger; the former became Scorsese’s friend and mentor later in life, as well as Thelma Schoonmaker’s husband.

RS:
How many films have you collected, do you think?

MS:
About four thousand.

RS:
No wonder you’re broke all the time!

MS:
I’ve stopped. I was living comfortably, I’d say, until we did
Gangs of New York.
And then
Gangs
put me way in debt.

RS:
You put your own money in it?