De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  Given his studious nature and his genuine affection for the pageantry and ritual of the Church, it seemed natural that he would think about a life in the priesthood, and in his teens he would go on retreats with other serious-minded boys from his school and even entered Cathedral Preparatory High School, a junior seminary in Manhattan. But he was distracted, he later joked, by the twin temptations of girls and rock-and-roll, and he lasted just a single year. Attending Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, he had hopes of enrolling at Fordham University, a Jesuit school, but his grades were too low. Instead, he wound up at New York University, just a few blocks away from home but worlds apart from the insulated microcommunity of Little Italy.

  For Charlie and Catherine Scorsese, the hardworking children of immigrants, having a son at NYU would have been an achievement—“I always looked at the NYU college buildings and I used to say, ‘I hope some day one of my sons will go there,’ ” Charlie Scorsese remembered—but Marty wasn’t on the path to a traditional white-collar profession. (Nor, for that matter, was his older brother, who became a printing press operator.) He had spoken at first of becoming an English major, with an eye toward teaching someday. But in reality, he hadn’t chosen NYU because of its excellent literature programs or even its proximity to home. Indeed, the gulf between his home world and the school was so great that he’d only been on the campus once before matriculating there. Rather, he’d chosen it because he knew that they taught filmmaking. He had already started to tinker with 8 mm movies made with his friends, complete with storyboards and title cards. At NYU, if things went right, he’d get a real chance to make a real film.

  Almost right away, he found a mentor: Haig Manoogian, who taught a large lecture class in the history of cinema. Manoogian, who Scorsese remembered talked “even faster than me,” began teaching filmmaking and film aesthetics at NYU soon after World War II, and he was famously ruthless on his classes, whittling the number of students down during their first years in the program until they were permitted to make films as juniors and seniors. Scorsese was sufficiently serious about his film studies to make sure not only that he survived the cullings but also that his scripts were among the few selected to be shot and that he got to direct them. His student short films and his academic record were good enough that after he graduated he was admitted to NYU’s master’s program in film. And that was where he began work on Who’s That Knocking?, the film that impressed both Cassavetes and De Niro.

  In the years between the first, short version of that student movie (which had been fleshed out to feature length in part with a dream sequence involving a nude girl at the behest of a distributor who explained that bare skin could get the film onto screens) and Boxcar Bertha, Scorsese had been banging mightily at the door of the movie biz. He made more shorts, including the prize-winning film The Big Shave; he worked as a camera operator on the stage at Woodstock, providing footage for Michael Wadleigh’s hit documentary Woodstock, which he then helped edit; he got editing jobs on other musical films, including Medicine Ball Caravan and Elvis on Tour; he did production chores on some student films; he taught a little bit at NYU; he even got hired to direct a low-budget thriller, The Honeymoon Killers, only to find himself fired after a week for taking too much time and shooting footage that was too arty.*2 And, almost as an aside, he had married, had a daughter, divorced, and moved to Hollywood.

  He had ideas for films, but there was never any money to make them. And he was becoming genuinely morose about his prospects. Around him, similarly young filmmakers such as Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas—all of whom he’d met in the course of his various professional sallies—were getting to make bigger films and, often, films of their own devising; he, on the other hand, was cutting together footage of Elvis Presley concerts and struggling with his asthma in the filthy air of Los Angeles. Unsurprisingly, the chance to direct Boxcar Bertha seemed like a lifeline to him. And when it was over and he had in a sense proven himself, he had, if Cassavetes was right, the chance to do the sort of thing he’d always wanted to do: a real movie of his own, from his own head and heart, filled with his own experiences and inspirations.

  So he set about rewriting Season of the Witch, with the help of his girlfriend, Sandy Weintraub, the New York–born daughter of a Warner Bros. development executive. “The first version of the script,” remembered Scorsese, “was steeped very much in the religious conflict,” the desire of the main character to live a saintly life in the garb of a modern-day Little Italy wiseguy. But Weintraub had a different take on the material. “Sandy had heard all the stories I told about my childhood,” he said, “and she wondered why things like that weren’t in the script I had at that time. Well, they weren’t because they didn’t bear directly on the story. But Sandy convinced me to concentrate on the atmosphere.” What emerged from the rewriting was a more elliptical and episodic script, with an emphasis on the seemingly unimportant textures and tangents rather than the putative plot line. “The studios complained,” Scorsese said, “that the plot is constantly interrupted by digressions. I said, ‘But that’s what it’s all about. The idea is to start out broad, and then to build and build like a pyramid to the explosion at the end.’ ”

  The script, retitled Mean Streets at the suggestion of Jay Cocks, echoing a phrase from Raymond Chandler, dealt with a small knot of neighborhood friends, in particular Charlie and Johnny Boy. Charlie is semirespectable, connected to the Mafia through his uncle, ambitious for some sort of personal redemption and even for escape from Little Italy; Johnny Boy is a crazed hothead whose disrespect for traditional decorum and propriety is in part informed by the cultural upheavals of the time and, even more, by a strain of anarchy woven into his very being. Charlie is a variation on the lead character of Who’s That Knocking?, a tormented soul who is eager to please, with a sense of greater things but also a timid streak that often holds him from taking action. Johnny Boy, however, was something new in Scorsese’s work, a hellion who doesn’t care what people think of him and has no sense of embarrassment or fear of self-destruction. The other characters function as foils or enablers of the plot, but the heart of the film is the interplay of Charlie and Johnny Boy, two strong personalities—both of which, it was clear to those who knew him, lived within Scorsese: “One is the guilt-ridden nice guy who’s basically a coward,” said Mardik Martin. “The other is a crazy doer who doesn’t care how he destroys himself.”

  Scorsese had done just what John Cassavetes had counseled him to and written something unique and personal and impassioned, something that he had no choice but to film. Naturally, it was turned down all over Hollywood—except at, of all places, American International Pictures, where Roger Corman was interested in it, in a fashion. The taste for African American–themed crime films was emerging at the box office, and Corman thought Scorsese’s script could be reworked to meet it. As Scorsese remembered, the producer told him, “ ‘If you want to make Mean Streets, and if you’re willing to swing a little’—I’ll never forget that phrase—‘and make them all black, I’ll give you $150,000 and you can shoot it with a non-union crew in New York.’ ” But for Scorsese the subject matter was too personal, the milieu too specific. Even with a deal on the table in front of him, he wasn’t willing to “swing.”

  Scorsese related his frustrations to Verna Bloom, his New York actress pal who was in Los Angeles performing in a play. Bloom had an inspiration: she’d recently met Jonathan Taplin, a young guy from the music business who was looking at breaking into movies and seemed to have a line on some money. She suggested that the two of them meet and see if there was any common ground.

  Though he had no personal connection to the material in Scorsese’s script, Taplin had a feel for what the director was trying to do, and he decided to go ahead and try to get the picture made. Rebuffed by several Hollywood studios from which he tried to raise funding, Taplin turned to what he referred to as “acquaintances” in his hometown, Cleveland, and managed to put together a budg
et of just under a half million dollars, which was enormous by the standards of independent filmmaking but insufficient for the sort of on-location shooting that Scorsese had in mind. Paul Rapp, who had handled production management for him on Boxcar Bertha, told him point-blank: “You’re gonna have to shoot it in Los Angeles.” Scorsese panicked, but then figured out a plan: he’d film the absolutely essential things in New York on a breakneck schedule—four days at first, bumped up to six, then eight—then film all the interiors in LA. It would be a challenge, but it was a lifeline to an opportunity that seemed as if it might get away if he didn’t seize it. Somehow, he figured, he would make it work.

  Then there was the matter of casting. In the lead role of J.R. in Who’s That Knocking?, Scorsese had cast a young actor named Harvey Keitel who had answered an ad calling for actors, as De Niro so often had, that the director had placed in the showbiz trade papers. He was slightly older than Scorsese, a Jewish kid from Brooklyn, an ex-Marine who made ends meet in the lean early days of his acting career by working as a court stenographer. Keitel and Scorsese had become chummy during the on-and-off production of the film, and as Keitel still hadn’t made a name for himself, he would be available for another low-paying job. Indeed, throughout the process of conceiving and writing the film, Scorsese had always imagined it as the second of a trilogy about the J.R./Charlie character, and so that was naturally where he saw Keitel. But others involved in the production were carping at him to aim higher for his lead actor, and so the script was presented to Jon Voight with the idea that he’d play Charlie and Keitel would play Johnny Boy. Voight considered the role for a while, then backed out, meaning that Keitel was back to playing the lead. Scorsese then had to fill the other roles, and he immediately thought of the guy he’d met at Verna Bloom and Jay Cocks’s Christmas party. He got the script to De Niro and told him he could have his pick of roles in it—except, of course, the role of Charlie.

  DE NIRO HAD just finished playing a co-starring role in a studio film, and while Bang the Drum Slowly was taking a while to reach the screen, he felt that he was due for bigger things. He remembered Scorsese and Who’s That Knocking? with fondness, and he knew Keitel from the acting trenches, but he had a more ambitious idea of his current stature in the business. He resisted Scorsese’s overtures, holding out for the leading role, if not in this film, then in the next.*3 Then one day, walking through Greenwich Village, he bumped into Keitel. “He’d already been cast in the movie as Charlie,” De Niro recalled. “I had done a couple of leads in movies before, so I said, ‘Well, careerwise, I should be playing Charlie.’ I didn’t say it like a wiseass. I was saying it sincerely, but not in a way that was threatening to him. Then Harvey said, ‘You know who you should play? Johnny Boy.’ And that clicked.” (As an aside, De Niro added, “Now I say to people, ‘If you get a part, do it.’ ”)

  De Niro went to discuss the role with Scorsese and, as ever, came prepared with props—in this case, a small-brimmed fedora. Little did he know when he selected it from his closet that it would be the thing that nailed it for him. “I had never seen Bobby act when I cast him in Mean Streets,” Scorsese remembered. “We just talked. He was wearing a hat and tilted it a certain way, saying he thought the character would wear it that way, and I hired him.” (As he put it later, “When I saw that crazy hat, I knew he’d be perfect.”)

  The two had a subverbal understanding of one another. As Scorsese put it, describing their early collaborations, “Bobby and I were as close as Siamese twins emotionally. We were tied together for the good and the bad—for everything.… There are certain things we relate to emotionally that cannot be explained.” De Niro, naturally, was equally unable to find words to explain their bond: “There’s a connection, but it’s hard for me to define.” But whether De Niro was an alter ego for Scorsese or simply a vessel that the director could fill, if only intuitively, with what he needed for a given picture, he had found a perfect actor for the work he wanted to do. And De Niro had found a director who was willing to work with him in a way that felt familiar and comfortable, who accepted his groping process, his incessant questioning of details, his need to make every bit of work intimate in order to allow his energy to flow fully.

  At work on Mean Streets, De Niro prepared his script with what had become his habitual meticulousness. He badgered Scorsese for more screen time for his character, partly out of ego, no doubt, but partly because he sensed that there would be real interest in the explosive personality: “Marty: I think (know) audience is gonna wanna see more of Johnny. From experience. I know,” he wrote. He carefully totted up, as best he could, a list of Johnny Boy’s debts and debtors, as well as an estimation of his salary in the menial job that Charlie’s uncle had arranged for him; he made plans to buy a new hat for the role, to acquire a St. Christopher medal, and to walk through Little Italy to make notes on haircuts and wardrobe. He reminded himself to salt his dialogue with mild Italian oaths (mingia, Madonna mi) and with nervous interjections such as “yes, but” and “you know, but.” And he made note of a key to Johnny Boy’s identity: “I aspire to be a big shot, but am slipping from that mold.”

  In a way, this was the first truly comfortable role he’d played, a variation on the neighborhood kid who made good in that AMC Ambassador commercial from a few years prior: Italian American, effusive, emotional, overflowing with grand gestures. He wasn’t, of course, made entirely from that cloth, but he’d seen enough of it to know how it should look. That brief episode in which he was Bobby Milk, his little fling with being a sawed-off wiseguy, would now serve as raw material for his creative work. As he revealed later, preparing to play Johnny Boy was “a question of remembering my boyhood, recalling all the gestures and characteristics of friends and neighbors.”

  Ironically, he was as close to the real thing as Mean Streets would have. In the other crucial parts, Scorsese had cast complete unknowns: David Proval, like Keitel a Jewish guy from Brooklyn, and Richard Romanus, of Lebanese descent, from a small town in Vermont, as, respectively, Tony the barkeeper and Michael the loan shark, the other members of Charlie’s circle; and Amy Robinson, a Jewish girl from Jersey, as Teresa, Johnny Boy’s cousin (and, in a key plot point, Charlie’s on-the-sly girlfriend). He was making a movie about the insular ways of Little Italy, and he had only one full-blooded Italian actor—Cesare Danova, playing Charlie’s mobbed-up uncle—in anything like a key role. But these quixotic casting decisions were nothing compared to the confident heedlessness with which he went about actually making the thing.

  SHOOTING OF Mean Streets began with the New York portion, which included rehearsals, in October 1972. Most of the street action, a couple of shots involving the Empire State Building and St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, some of the interior hallway shots (the location scouts found nothing in LA that looked quite like the innards of a Lower East Side tenement), and, most crucially, the footage of the famed San Gennaro Feast on Mott Street were all filmed in hurried, guerilla fashion. People in Scorsese’s old neighborhood didn’t know exactly what to make of the shoot. Chary of the negative impression of Italian Americans created by The Godfather, they were alarmed to see the title Mean Streets on the production slate. And the feast presented nightmarish logistical obstacles for the tiny crew. For one thing, they endured terrific winds and rain during the shoot, along with massive crowds so choking the street that it could take a half hour to move a single block. “The neighborhood was just a sea of heads,” Scorsese remembered. “We got caught in the middle of the crowd with the camera and we couldn’t move and just about passed out, which was worse than Woodstock, and I know because I was on the stage there for four days.” Too, filming the famously mobbed-up San Gennaro Feast without the permission of the shadowy powers who ran it was a real risk. Eventually, Scorsese said, the organizers billed him $5,000, a sum he borrowed from Francis Coppola and then repaid as soon as the film was bought by a distributor.

  The Los Angeles portion of the shoot was just as fast and loose, taking barely
three weeks. De Niro stayed at the Montecito Hotel in the middle of Hollywood and kept himself deep in his role, impressing the relative newcomer Romanus with his determination to play the part as he thought he could and never settle for a take that wasn’t fully committed. The gulf between De Niro’s full-blooded immersion and Romanus’s inexperience became an issue in a scene in which Johnny Boy taunts Michael as a fool for lending him money. Romanus reacted instinctively by laughing—“I was saving face,” he said—but De Niro became increasingly agitated with him, feeling Michael should be angry. As Scorsese later remembered, “They had got on each other’s nerves to the point where they really wanted to kill each other.”

  The rapport between De Niro and Keitel was different. Both savored the use of improvised rehearsals to build scenes, and some of the best-remembered and most revealing moments in the film would result from their experiments before the cameras rolled: a late-night battle in the streets of Little Italy using garbage can lids as shields and the justly famous “Joey Clams” scene, a touch of Abbott and Costello, in the backroom of a bar. Remembering the advice of Sandy Weintraub that the atmosphere was at least as important as the storytelling, Scorsese kept adding little bits like these to the film as he and his actors invented them.