De Niro: A Life (59 page)

The warehouse offered 60,000 square feet of space and was an almost blank slate, so bare-bones that there were only two telephone lines in the entire building. De Niro and his partners acquired it for $7.2 million in 1988, three years after it had been purchased for $4.25 million—a sign of how quickly Tribeca, for many decades an industrial district of no particular commercial or residential appeal, was becoming a hot neighborhood. They hired the architect Lo-Yi Chan to reimagine it, and they set to work on renovations almost immediately.

Even though the building was entirely unsuited to the purposes for which he imagined it, De Niro was keen on it because of its proximity to his home. “
When I started my own production offices, we worked out of my apartment.…[Back then] the only place for film people to work was midtown. But it’s such a hassle getting there. I live down here, and the pace is so much quieter, more leisurely. I dreamt that I wouldn’t have to leave the neighborhood to work. Then the building came up for sale, and it just seemed perfect. We could have production offices, and we could have a screening room, and we could have a restaurant. And I could work near home when I was in New York. Things sort of snowballed after that.”

Throughout 1989, the entire building was remade, with Rosenthal overseeing the details that De Niro could be convinced not to oversee himself. Electrical, plumbing, and climate systems were rebuilt or installed; three hundred phone lines were put in; elevators and stairways were reconfigured; windows were carved out; a thirty-foot skylight was revealed beneath decades of paint and roofing. There were touches of luxury throughout, including solid oak doors, sandblasted exposed brick walls, and brownstone imported from China. On the top floor, of which De Niro would claim 6,900 square feet for his production offices, a deluxe bathroom, complete with Jacuzzi, steam shower, and bidet was installed. There was a THX-certified screening room, the first in New York, on the second floor, alongside a multipurpose party space.

The building was designed on the model of condominiums, with whole floors of it for sale outright and other portions available for rent. The first truly important buyer was Miramax Films, which was making a significant name as a producer and distributor of independent and foreign films; it took the entire third floor. De Niro’s friend and producer Art Linson took offices, as did, on a rental basis in the earliest years, the productions of
New Jack City
,
Bonfire of the Vanities
, and
Awakenings.
After a period of courtship with the space, Martin Scorsese, who had long been based in the Brill Building in Times Square, chose to stay uptown. But for a variety of small production companies, talent agencies, and even solo writers who just needed a room with a door that they could close to the outside world, the Tribeca Film Center, as it was finally dubbed, was a perfect Hollywood-on-the-Hudson.

De Niro showed the place off proudly, explaining that he built it as a home for a New York film community that could often feel insignificant because it was so decentralized in a city with so many other priorities:

The soft launch of the Film Center came in December 1989, and throughout early 1990 tenants kept rolling in as the work on their offices was finished. By the springtime, work was done, and, almost as if to cap it, De Niro hosted an evening in honor of Nelson Mandela,
who was making his first-ever visit to New York. The guest of honor was asked to make a few comments in the course of the evening, and he did. “
At the end of Mandela’s speech,” remembered Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein, “he talked about how, when he was in prison for 20 [
sic
] years, they would show a film every Thursday night. And he felt that those actors and actresses were his friends, and they kept his spirits up. I looked over and saw De Niro and Jane with tears in their eyes, and I realized that this was their dream; to build this building, to get people who love film involved, to create a community where this can happen.… I’ve already told De Niro that if he went on to buy more buildings, Miramax would keep expanding with him.”

I
N
J
UNE 1990
D
E
N
IRO STOOD ON A STREET CORNER IN
L
OS
Angeles that was covered with snow, staring at a newsstand that was selling New York newspapers from December 1951. His longtime friend and producer, Irwin Winkler, was doing something highly unusual for a producer to do on a movie set: giving direction. “Remember, it’s freezing cold,” Winkler told De Niro, and then he proclaimed “Action,” and a film shot began.

After nearly twenty-five years as a producer, Winkler was making his directorial debut with a film titled, temporarily,
Fear No Evil
, a story about the impact of the Communist witch hunts and subsequent blacklist on the Hollywood filmmaking community of the late 1940s. De Niro was cast in the lead as David Merrill, a respected director whose brief dalliance with leftist causes more than a decade earlier was coming back to haunt him, crushing him professionally and personally. The script, which Winkler wrote after conversations with the onetime blacklistee Abraham Polonsky and extensive research on the period, dealt with the reactions of a number of filmmakers to the pressure imposed on them by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC): some named names and saved their careers, some embraced their political beliefs and fled the country, and some, like Merrill, tried to defy the committee by keeping honorable silence and attempting to stay working in the movie business, the management of which was eager to ferret out anyone whom HUAC deemed undesirable. Merrill was a composite character, but the script involved a number of thinly veiled stories that anyone familiar with the period would recognize, including a director, based on Joseph Losey, who moves to
Europe because he’s an avowed Communist, and an actor, based on Larry Parks, who caves in to the pressure to testify and is blacklisted despite the fact.

Winkler brought the script to De Niro when they were making
Goodfellas
, and De Niro’s interest encouraged Warner Bros. to fund the $13 million budget (“A picture like this with a star like De Niro should cost $20 million,” Winkler bragged/moaned in typical producer fashion). Annette Bening was cast as De Niro’s ex-wife and principal confidante; Chris Cooper played the Parks character, and Patricia Wettig was cast as his wife, an actress based on Dorothy Comingore, whose blacklisting led to a complete collapse and early death. In a nifty twist, Sam Wanamaker, an actor who left Hollywood rather than succumb to HUAC, appeared as an attorney who tries to bully potential witnesses into cooperating.

De Niro expressed no particular concerns about working with a first-time director. “
I had faith he could do it,” he explained. “I have faith in myself, why shouldn’t I have faith in somebody else?” Even though he regarded the film as “simple” dramatically, De Niro was engaged in the process of coming to seem genuinely like a director of the post–World War II era. He had worked with Elia Kazan, who was notorious for having named names in front of HUAC, and drew upon his memories of Kazan’s on-set posture. And he studied photographs of directors at work to see how they dressed, where they positioned themselves in relation to the actors and the camera, what they held in their hands, and so forth. (“It was a question,” he joked, “of whether I should wear a beret and use a bullhorn.”) In the end, he focused on the look of John Huston, of whom he amassed a thick file of photographs, and the at-work personality of Kazan: “
Think of involvement … For ex. the way Kazan does, that energy!” He watched film and read transcripts of HUAC hearings, he spoke with some survivors of the period, and he read several books on the subject. It was movie history, and he took it seriously.

The film, eventually entitled
Guilty by Suspicion
, shot through the spring of 1990 and debuted the following March. De Niro was in Florida working on another film, but he flew to New York to support the release by appearing at a press conference and giving select interviews.
The subject of Kazan came up, inevitably: many in the film world hadn’t yet forgiven him, even four decades on, for cooperating with HUAC. As De Niro reflected, “
It was really a no-win situation, and I feel sorry for people no matter what position they took. It was terrible for Kazan that he had to do what he did; I know him, he’s a friend, and I have a great respect for him.” At the same time, though, he acknowledged that he would at least like to think he would have handled himself differently. “
I’d like to think I’d refuse to betray anyone and somehow survive like [Arthur] Miller did,” he said, “but I honestly don’t know.”
Guilty by Suspicion
came and went with little impact, but in time De Niro would have occasion to consider further the history of Hollywood’s blacklist era.

W
HILE WORKING ON
Guilty by Suspicion
, he lined up his next two films. One was a pet project in which he was taking a producer’s interest: a remake of the 1962 thriller
Cape Fear
, in which he would play an updated version of Robert Mitchum’s role, an ex-con terrorizing the family of the lawyer who he believed perverted justice to put him away. Martin Scorsese would be directing in Florida and North Carolina in the winter. Before that, though, De Niro would go to Chicago for a chunk of the summer to play a feature role in
Backdraft
, a sprawling film about firefighters and arsonists written by Greg Widen and set to be directed by Ron Howard. Kurt Russell and Billy Baldwin were the stars, and De Niro would play an obsessive arson investigator named Rimgale, after a famed Chicago fireman who, at six feet six inches tall, cut an impressive figure around fire scenes.

De Niro was focused, it seemed, more on
Cape Fear
, for which he was whittling down his body to its slimmest form since the boxing sequences in
Raging Bull
, working out vigorously every day and observing a strict diet. As a result, he conducted most of his research work for
Backdraft
more or less on the job, latching on to Bill Cosgrove, a barrel-chested veteran of the Chicago fire department who was offered to De Niro as a technical advisor. Cosgrove had both fought fires and investigated them in his time on the force, and during De Niro’s weeks in Chicago, he let the actor pick his brain, borrow (or, in some cases,
outright buy) his equipment, and tag along to fires and fire investigations.

Just as Art Linson had upon initially meeting the star before shooting
The Untouchables
, Cosgrove found De Niro a shock at first: unshaven, his clothes slightly disheveled, his hair a mop, his feet sockless in his boat shoes. But he soon saw how De Niro dedicated himself to learning absolutely everything he could about the work he’d be portraying: the protocol, the tools, the language, the attitude. (He had to be admonished about the socks, though: on his first visit to a fire scene, De Niro wound up limping from blisters on his feet caused by wearing heavy boots without socks. When Cosgrove celebrated his birthday during the production, De Niro presented him with a signed script of the film, a bottle of Dom Perignon, a Dominican cigar, and a pair of socks to replace the ones Cosgrove had given him that first day.)

The two men bonded, De Niro appreciating Cosgrove’s practicality and expertise. The movie star taught the firefighter to drink cappuccinos and, less successfully, Patrón tequila; introduced him to his kids, Drena and Raphael, and to Toukie Smith, all of whom visited Chicago in August for De Niro’s birthday at the posh Chez Paul restaurant; and never stopped asking him questions, a tape recorder always at the ready to soak up more information about the job. De Niro was eager to meet a well-known Chicago arsonist named Fat Albert, and Cosgrove was willing to oblige, but his bosses in the fire department nixed it, fearing that any celebrity falling the fellow’s way might encourage copycats. And De Niro was very respectful when introduced to a veteran fireman who had suffered burns, photographing the man’s scars to serve as the basis of the make-believe scars he’d wear on his own back in a brief but compelling scene.