Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  Recalls Scorsese, “The period from ’71 to ’76 was the best period, because we were just starting out. We couldn’t wait for our friends’ next pictures, Brian’s next picture, Francis’s next picture, to see what they were doing. Dinners in Chinese restaurants midday in L.A. with Spielberg and Lucas. My daughter named one of Steven’s movies Watch the Skies, although he renamed it Close Encounters after that.”

  ONE OF THE BOYS on the beach was Paul Schrader. When Schrader got to UCLA in 1968, he spent a year making up for lost time, watching the films his fundamentalist parents wouldn’t let him see as a kid, crisscrossing the city, scuttling from one film society to another. “People today complain about watching a movie on tape,” he says. “Did you ever watch an 8mm print of Nosferatu on a sheet?” Everyone was under the sway of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist. Continues Schrader: “You looked at Bertolucci, it was just like he took Godard and Antonioni, put them in bed together, held a gun to their heads, and said, ‘You guys fuck or I’ll shoot you.’” He didn’t do particularly well at UCLA. Recalls screenwriter Gloria Katz, “He failed production, and was crying in the halls trying to get us to sign a petition so he could continue, and they spun him off into film history.”

  Like Scorsese and others who were culturally and emotionally sandbagged by the ’50s, Schrader was a bomb waiting to go off. By the time he got to L.A., he was seriously deranged, although he massaged his reputation as a wild man when he realized he could make it work for him. He adopted the standard garb of the Vietnam generation: an army surplus jacket and combat boots. After a couple of years in L.A., Schrader left his wife, Jeanine Oppewall, and took up with Beverly Walker, a successful publicist who handled New Hollywood films like Zabriskie Point, Two-Lane Blacktop, and Marvin Gardens. Schrader was a proponent of what he called “fucking up,” that is, forming attachments to those above him in the food chain. Since he was a bottom feeder at the time, almost anyone, even a publicist, qualified, but it was a shrewd move, because Walker was well connected and highly regarded. In addition to a love and a publicist, he also found a cheerleader, in-house agent, and editorial consultant.

  In this sea of nerds, Schrader was the nerdiest. Short, with greasy black hair, a broad, fleshy nose, and geeky, Groucho Marx glasses, he carried all his childhood frailties with him into young adulthood. He suffered from nervous tics, ulcers, and asthma. A speech impediment made him mumble self-consciously, eyes cast down, staring at his feet. He was even claustrophobic.

  But Schrader had a formidable intelligence, and the ability to reinvent himself again and again. He was funny, fierce, and ambitious, and Walker liked him. When he took her to see movies at UCLA, he drove like a maniac up on the sidewalk to outflank the traffic. But soon she turned wary. “What I couldn’t stand about him was that he used me so relentlessly,” she says. “I knew a lot of people who were very successful. He didn’t know any of them, and wanted to meet them. Then he would try to exclude me and develop his own relationships with them, so he could forward his own career.”

  Walker had had a desultory romance with Clint Eastwood. “In Hollywood, men put enormous pressure on women to fuck them, even if it’s only once,” she says. “It’s like the dog that pisses on the lamppost. They want that kind of connection to you, and then maybe they can relax.” Eastwood and Walker had remained friends, and Paul knew it. “What kind of a relationship can you have with someone when you fuck them, and then you turn over, and they’re asking you to give a script to Clint Eastwood?” she asks. Almost immediately, Beverly and Paul started to sour as he would rifle her Rolodex for contacts. “I really think he would steal his own mother’s diary if he could,” she says. “He had absolutely no conscience, no moral scruples.” His brother, Leonard, recalls, “I used to say to him, ‘Paul, how can you use people like that, who are your friends.’ He gave me a puzzled look and said, ‘What else are friends for?’ He knew it was shitty, but so what? ‘You want to make it, or what?’”

  Eventually, Walker left Schrader, temporarily relocating to Northern California, in June 1972, where she worked as an assistant to the producers of American Graffiti. She recalls, “Paul was calling me every night, begging to come up, but I would never let him, because I knew he just wanted to meet George, and from there, Francis and all these people who lived up there whom I knew. He was practically having a nervous breakdown, sobbing and threatening to commit suicide.”

  AFTER THE THX FIASCO, Lucas found himself at a crossroads. His reaction was not unlike Hopper’s reaction to the failure of The Last Movie. “George thought not only had he managed to make a movie which was visually exciting, but it was really about something,” recalls screenwriter and friend Matthew Robbins. “He was disappointed that there was no audience for American art films.”

  Francis told George, “Don’t be so weird, try to do something that’s human. Don’t do these abstract things. All you do is science fiction. Everyone thinks you’re a cold fish, but you can be a warm and funny guy, make a warm and funny movie.” Marcia was on his case as well. “After THX went down the toilet, I never said, ‘I told you so,’ but I reminded George that I warned him it hadn’t involved the audience emotionally,” she recalls. “He always said, ‘Emotionally involving the audience is easy. Anybody can do it blindfolded, get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck.’ All he wanted to do was abstract filmmaking, tone poems, collections of images. So finally, George said to me, ‘I’m gonna show you how easy it is. I’ll make a film that emotionally involves the audience.’”

  Lucas was bitter that he had been forced into making a commercial movie, but it was also a challenge. He recognized that Hollywood was ignoring a big part of its potential audience, one that was tiring of the steady diet of sex, violence, and pessimism doled out by the New Hollywood, and was nostalgic for the upbeat values of the Old Hollywood. “Before American Graffiti, I was working on basically negative movies—Apocalypse Now and THX, both very angry,” he said. “We all know, as every movie in the last ten years has pointed out, how terrible we are, how wrong we were in Vietnam, how we have ruined the world, what schmucks we are and how rotten everything is. It had become depressing to go to the movies. I decided it was time to make a movie where people felt better coming out of the theater than when they went in. I became really aware of the fact that the kids were really lost, the sort of heritage we built up since the war [World War II] had been wiped out by the ’60s, and it wasn’t groovy to act that way anymore, now you just sort of sat there and got stoned. I wanted to preserve what a certain generation of Americans thought being a teenager was really about—from about 1945 to 1962.” He wanted to make a film about something he knew intimately, teenage rites of passage in a small town in the ’50s—the hotrods, the top ten musical wallpaper that formed the background for everything from drag racing to heavy petting, the drinking, the girls, the anxieties generated by leaving home. He set the plot in the early ’60s, on the eve of the Vietnam War, so that the story had a little more resonance, became an elegy for American innocence.

  Graffiti was a difficult idea to make work on paper. It was an ensemble piece focusing on four young men with separate stories, and there was precious little in the way of plot. When Lucas’s agent, Jeff Berg, sent his script to the studios, most of them turned it down. Bart was one of the executives underimpressed by Lucas. He thought, I can’t imagine George directing a movie because he’s so noncommunicative, the ultimate passive-aggressive. You’d have to grab him by the throat and shake him to get a word out of him. Finally, Universal showed a flicker of interest. Ned Tanen had grown up in the cruising culture of Southern California. He loved cars, and was intrigued by Lucas’s tale of nerds on wheels. Graffiti became the last film in his group of low-budget pictures.

  Tanen knew he needed a good producer to work with Lucas. Coppola, whom only yesterday Tanen had ridiculed as a clown, “Francis the Mad,” was now the salvation of the industry, and so was the logical choice. Tanen gave Lucas a list of producers to choo
se from. George immediately put a check next to Francis’s name. He wasn’t too happy about it; he had been determined to go out on his own after THX, but now it seemed all roads led back to Francis. Coppola agreed immediately, saying, “Yeah, sure, great. But ya know, we should be doing this picture. Let’s get it out of Universal, I’ll finance it myself.” Lucas gulped, thought, Oh my God, what’s gonna happen here? Francis is going to fuck up my deal with his grandiose ideas. But Universal was not about to bow out, especially now that someone else was interested.

  According to Coppola, there was no deal with Universal when he first went to City Bank in Beverly Hills, and secured a $700,000 loan against his cut of The Godfather. But Sidney Korshak dissuaded him, explaining that if Graffiti flopped, which was likely, his children would lose their annuity, that is, their future income from The Godfather. At the same time, Ellie Coppola, who did not particularly like the Graffiti script, convinced her husband that the time to borrow against The Godfather was when he would have to finance his own personal project that no studio would back. So he gave up his efforts to find financing.

  Coppola got $25,000 and 10 percent of the net from Universal, and another 15 percent from Lucas. Tanen offered Lucas a budget of $600,000, including the music rights. Berg got it up to $750,000, still humiliating for Lucas, who had spent $1.2 million for THX. He was going backward. Still, it was something, with $20,000 for himself, and twenty-five points.

  Coppola persuaded Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz to work on the script. From their point of view, “Francis got the movie made,” says Huyck. “George would be at the airport, and he’d see two guys arguing, and he’d say, ‘They’re the exact people I want for my movie,’ so he’d bring them in for a reading, and Francis would say, ‘George, I think we need real actors.’” Graffiti, more than most, was a movie made in the casting, and once again it was Fred Roos who selected future stars like Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford, and Cindy Williams.

  Graffiti was shot in twenty-eight days, starting in the last week of June 1972. It was a tough shoot, no money, no time. Lucas was worried about directing the actors, never his strong suit. He hadn’t the foggiest idea what to say to them, and he liked to say that actors are irrelevant. He believed that the most important parts of a film are the first five minutes and the last twenty. Everything in between is filler, and if there is enough action, no one will notice that the characters aren’t particularly complex, or that the acting is wooden. He hired a drama coach to work with the actors, while he confined himself to presiding over the camera. Says Coppola, “George was given this cast, and he had to shoot so fast that there wasn’t any time for any directing. He stood ’em up and shot ’em, and they were so talented, they—It was just lucky.”

  Tanen, fixated on one of his big productions, Jesus Christ Superstar, drove George crazy. George could never get him on the phone. On the other hand, when Tanen made one of his infrequent visits to the set, Lucas ignored him. “George has no social graces,” says Katz. “And in his psychology, the suits had no business other than writing the checks. He didn’t want to hear what they said, he didn’t respect them, nothing. The idea that the suits actually made a profit on his movie was just appalling to him. And Ned was very combative. George did not appreciate that.”

  Tanen put Verna Fields on the movie, to edit it, assisted by Marcia. Fields had made a name for herself working for Bogdanovich on Targets, What’s Up, Doc?, and Paper Moon. She was a large, warm woman with short brown hair and half glasses, hung on a string, perched on the tip of her nose. She was like a Jewish aunt, except that instead of talking gefilte fish recipes, she talked editing. They called her “Mother Cutter,” and listened raptly as she dispensed Verna-isms, like “If you can’t solve it, dissolve it.”

  In fact, Marcia first met and fell in love with George when Fields hired them both in the late ’60s to help file and cut footage of LBJ’s trips to the Far East for the U.S. Information Agency in her tract house in the Valley. Born in Modesto in 1947, Marcia Griffin was an air force brat. Her parents divorced when she was an infant, and she was raised by her mother in straitened circumstances in North Hollywood. Marcia was as outgoing as George was reserved. She was sunny, George dark. Like Bogdanovich and Platt, they complemented each other. They married in February 1969. When they moved to the Bay Area to participate in the Zoetrope experiment, they rented a house in Mill Valley, just north of San Francisco.

  Verna and Marcia and George cut Graffiti in the garage of a house Coppola owned in Mill Valley that had been converted to editing rooms. On the Moviola, Francis had taped Xeroxes of checks made out to him from Paramount for The Godfather for millions of dollars.

  MEANWHILE SCORSESE was still struggling. He and Sandy went to parties, hung out. It was fun, but for the young wannabe director, they were always work. “I was an opportunist,” he says. “I went to every party, talked to everybody I could to get a picture made. I looked at people in terms of whether they could help me. I’d find things out about them, or ways that I could see them and find their ideas tolerable—even if they weren’t very likable. I had my own agenda. I was obsessive, relentless, ruthless.” As Schrader puts it, “No one succeeds in film if he’s not hustling. The first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning is, Who can I hustle? and the last thing you think of before you go to bed is, Who can I hustle?”

  There was nobody he exploited more than Sandy. She took care of him, helped him with his scripts, nursed and mothered him as well as loved him. “He needed a lot of attention,” says Weintraub. “We went to buy Marty clothes. We went to buy Marty a car. He had a little Lotus. It was so cute because he was so tiny and he had this tiny car.” When it got to be too much, she used to complain he sucked her dry, like a vampire. Indeed, he was known as “Dracula” because of his nocturnal habits.

  Scorsese was filled with phobias and anxieties, and he began to see a therapist. He hated to fly, and during takeoff gripped a crucifix in his fist until his knuckles turned white. He was beset by superstitions, a melding of Catholicism and some arcana of his own making, forebodings drawn from dreams, signs and portents of various kinds. He had an unlucky number, 11. They lived in a building with numbered parking spaces. When the digits on a space added up to 11, he would walk around it. He wouldn’t travel on the 11th of the month, avoided flights in which the numbers added up to 11, and wouldn’t take a room on the 11th floor of a hotel. He had a gold amulet to ward off evil spirits, and wore a pouch around his neck filled with lucky charms. On one occasion, he lost the pouch, freaked. Sandy had to run out, buy more charms, fill a new pouch with them.

  “Marty had a kind of Rimbaud philosophy,” says Taplin. “He said to me one time, ‘I won’t live past forty.’ He really had this live hard, do your work, and die young philosophy. It wasn’t that he was self-destructive, he just had a morbid feeling that he was going to die, either through an airplane crash, or his health was going to give out, and so he had to get as much in as possible.”

  Marty needed Sandy, but at the same time resented the tender loving care she lavished on him. Says Taplin, “She was very mothering, and he didn’t want to be mothered sometimes.” She was young and self-righteous, thought she knew everything. He had a bad temper, and although he was circumspect and indirect with men, with women he gave it full rein. The two fought constantly. “He got angry once and swept off the table with his arms and a glass went flying, and I was naked and I got some glass in my back. He never attacked me or hit me, but he was a wall puncher. And a phone thrower. We could not keep a phone in the house. One time I was on the phone with Taplin, angry about something. Marty grabbed it out of my hand, yelled at Taplin, threw the phone and broke it. Then he went down in the elevator, put a dime in a pay phone on the street, and continued to yell at Taplin.”

  As Marty became more successful, women who previously wouldn’t have given him the time of day suddenly became available. This too was hard on their relationship. “You watched somebody who was not very physically f
it, who never got the women, who was never considered handsome and attractive, all of a sudden go from being a little sort of overweight nebbishy nothing, to famous and rich,” recalls Weintraub. “It had this enormous effect on you. It was like that beautiful cool blonde you wanted all your life, that shiksa, she was throwing herself at you and I was supposed to say no? It was the ’70s, open relationships and stuff. I used to explain this to him, which would drive him nuts. I guess he felt like I didn’t care. You lost either way.”

  Much of Scorsese’s passion came from anger. Weintraub thinks the rage came from his father: “I remember his parents coming to visit, and his father leaned over and said kind of quietly, ‘Are you still seeing that funny doctor,’ the therapist. And Marty said, ‘Yeah, it’s really helping me.’ His father turned around and his face got all distorted, really red and angry, and he said, ‘When are you gonna grow up and be a man?’”

  Toward the middle of 1971, Corman offered Marty Boxcar Bertha to direct. It was a variation on the theme of Bonnie and Clyde, a Depression-era drama about a persecuted union organizer (David Carradine), and a boxcar-riding hobo bimbo (Barbara Seagull, then Hershey), just the kind of tabloid melding of politics and sex that Corman loved. Says Simpson, “Roger, I swear, didn’t know what picture Marty was making. All he cared about was, ‘Is Barbara gonna, like, show tits in Boxcar?’”

  Bertha opened on a double bill with 1000 Convicts and a Woman. Scorsese was embarrassed by the film. He showed it to Cassavetes, who gave voice to what Scorsese himself had been thinking. “Nice work, but don’t fucking ever do something like this again,” said Cassavetes. “Why don’t you make a movie about something you really care about.” Scorsese turned down Corman’s next assignment to make Mean Streets.