Roger Corman: The Changing Scene

The Raven (Directed by Roger Corman)

Starting his Hollywood career as a runner for Fox in 1950, Roger Corman quickly discovered he had very little tolerance for studio ways and its crumbling system. Unafraid to grab the bull by the horns, he produced movies before he directed them — a sure sign of things to come. Corman had an excellent grasp of story, and coupled with his business acumen, had a knack for turning out good product fast and cheap. In the realm that he worked, his movies stood out above the rest. His talent caught the attention of eager showmen Jim Nicholson and Sam Arkoff, and together they discovered the most important audience of the movie marketplace: teenage America. Forming American International Pictures (AIP), they specialized in fun, hip, sexy, and contemporary alternatives to Hollywood’s stuffy spectacles and mundane melodramas. By satisfying this hungry portion of cinemagoers, AIP became the most successful independent film company in the world, of which no small part was due to Corman’s entertaining and energetic pictures.

Note that word pictures. More often than not, Corman refers to his output as pictures, a subtle but telling distinction. Maybe this is because he was informed with an old Hollywood attitude that viewed films first and foremost as entertainment. He might also have been referring to cinema as the art of the moving picture, a form that he loves with passion, not pretense. But he was an artisan first, artist second, and he made pictures.

Throughout the fifties, he developed both his intuitive knack for staying ahead of the curve and his reputation for speed, key factors necessary to maintain his output. He produced nearly every film he directed and established a tight unit that allowed him both comfort and control; this period climaxed with his first real film of merit, A Bucket of Blood, in which Corman basically created the horror satire. The sixties gave us Corman at his peak, starting with the first of his classic Poe cycle, House of Usher, which re-established American horror as a viable and lucrative genre and properly launched Corman as a filmmaker with a vision; at the same time, he could still crank out an auspicious programmer like The Little Shop of Horrors, which to this day remains a remarkable black comedy whose celebrated reputation has lifted it well above its poverty-row roots. The seventies saw Corman turn from directing to producing and distributing through New World Pictures, a period crucial in his establishment of New Hollywood and his support of foreign artists; cinema after Corman, both at home and abroad, would never be the same. After selling New World in 1983, he remained exploitative, and usually profitable, but the critical value of his direct-to-video and television productions are far removed from the strength of his early work. Even his brief return behind the camera, aptly named Roger Corman’s Frankenstein, was a throwback to an era that Hollywood had left behind.

His oeuvre is a mixed bag, but that comes with the territory he staked out. Remembered today as a “fearmaker,” he worked in every known genre: comedy, western, musical, gangster, suspense / thriller, action, war, sci-fi, drama, period, swords-n-sandals, fantasy, and of course, horror. Even his singular big-studio picture, The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967), is remarkably at odds with Hollywood gangster fare, in structure and style, and yet it still nails down the consistent Corman anti-hero embodied by both Al Capone (Jason Robards) and Bugs Moran (Ralph Meeker).

Regardless of his milieu, Corman remains a thinking-man’s filmmaker, passionate about the value of ideas. His deep fascination with human psychology boils below the surface of his stories and in the actions of his characters, who, like Corman, are rebels, distrustful and disdainful of conventional, even conservative, norms. They are social misfits, outsiders, strangers, intruders, all struggling to find their place in a senseless world, and there is no better example of the Corman complex than in his adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe. (C. Nasr).

The following is an excerpt from a speech delivered by Roger Corman on May 31 at the Thirteenth Annual Motion Picture Seminar of the Northwest, held in Seattle, Washington.

My subject today includes spotting new talent for the motion picture industry, which, to a certain extent, is a matter of being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and, on top of that, hopefully exercising some judgment.

I’ve just arbitrarily divided the subject up into four sections—those that I am the most familiar with and have dealt with most frequently: actors, writers, directors, and producers. However, Cal Bernstein, who spoke a little bit earlier, was talking about various cameramen and I realized that he and I had worked with some of the same cameramen, so I will mention them a bit, too.

Actually, I think there are four top cinematographers who either did their first feature for me or their first American film: Haskell Wexler, John Alonzo, Nestor Almendros, and Laszlo Kovacs. Vilmos Zsigmond and a number of others have worked with us, as well. As to how I chose these cinematographers, I’m not exactly certain. In some cases I looked at their film, but not in all cases. I never saw anything that Johnny Alonzo had done. He just came highly recommended to me. But usually it was a combination of looking at some film and really listening to other people’s advice—taking recommendations and then talking with the person. I’m a very firm believer in really sitting down and talking with somebody. In that way you gain a certain insight into the person’s ability and his temperament, as well as his willingness to work, particularly in low-budget films. But I feel that in any kind of filmmaking a person has to have not only ability, but also a certain stability, because this is a notoriously unstable field. You also have to be willing to work very, very hard. It’s almost as if you had a dedication, in the true religious sense. It’s almost a Catholic calling to a vocation, to work in films. Living in Southern California, if we simply wanted money we could all be working in real estate. We could make a lot of money more easily.

Now, breaking my subject down into actors, writers, directors, and producers, let me start with actors. You are on a little bit more solid ground in evaluating actors because you are able to look at film that they may have done previously, or to see them possibly on the stage. Then you can conduct interviews, which can be very misleading, because a person may come in and do very well in a cold reading or in an improvisation and either hang up on the set or be unable to go beyond that on the set.

I work on the basis of holding cold readings for actors when they come in. I explain the part to them a little bit, give them a script so that they can step into another room and look at it for a little while, and then ask them to come back and do the reading. I also work on the basis of improvisation, because you sometimes learn more from an improvisa- tion than you do from a cold reading. All of these methods are imper- fect, but they are the two ways in which I’ve found I could work the best. Plus, just talking with the actor and talking with other actors and other directors. We very seldom use screen tests, which are very good, but on our budgets, if I’m going to put together a crew for a day I’m not going to shoot a screen test; I’m going to shoot a day’s work on the film. Beyond that there are intangibles; charisma and, unfortunately, looks for a lead do mean something, although they don’t mean as much as they formerly did. We’ve had some success with the actors and actresses who have started with us.

In selecting writers you are on even more solid ground. We simply read what they have written before, but not necessarily screenplays. As a matter of fact, for our purposes, probably not screenplays, because working in a low-budget field we find that most of the established screenwriters are already beyond our budget limitations, so we must go elsewhere. We will go to film schools and find people who have written scripts or written and directed scripts in the course of their film training, or maybe written a script that has never been produced that we think has merit.

Very often we will go to novelists or short story writers who have been well reviewed. We subscribe to a number of literary journals and we read the reviews quite religiously, particularly of new novelists, new short story writers and a number of our best writers have come from that field. Bob Towne is a writer who won an Academy Award a couple of years ago and started with us and will be directing soon, as well. I might mention a number of the directors we have worked with who have been writers, as well, particularly Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Marty Scorsese. There is a unity between the work of the writer and the director, and the French, I know, refer continually to the auteur theory, although they have been referring to it a little bit less now than they formerly did. To me the true auteur is the writer-director-producer, the Ingmar Bergman, or somebody of that sort who combines all of those elements of the creative function in his hands. Now, as for directors, we have had some of our greatest success with directors such as Coppola, Bogdanovich, Scorsese, and Irv Kershner—I think someone mentioned a picture I had almost forgotten, Stakeout on Dope Street. The cameraman on that was Haskell Wexler, doing his first feature film, and the director was Irv Kershner, doing his first feature film.

Having been a director myself, I talk at great length to the director and listen to what he has to say. I look at previous film, particularly student films, more recently sometimes commercials. We have given first opportunities to many directors but we are not doing that quite as much as we have in the past because, like most other production companies, our budgets have risen and when I was making films for $50,000 or $100,000 or $150,000 it was not a difficult gamble to take somebody directly out of film school or somebody like Peter Bogdanovich, who had never even gone to film school, who just was a critic who had worked for me as an assistant and whom I felt was so bright that I could finance him in such a film.

Our films are now inching their way up to half-a-million, a million dollars. Battle Beyond the Stars will be close to $5 million, so we have become a little bit more cautious in those areas. As a matter of fact, speaking of Battle Beyond the Stars, we chose Jimmy Murakami as the director. He had never directed a feature film before, but was an Academy Award–winning animator and had worked for me as a second unit director and an art director in Ireland a number of years earlier and had been shooting some commercials in Europe. I chose Jimmy as the director of this film for a totally unrelated reason. We knew we were going to be shooting live action that would have to cut into special effects shots that might be shot six months later and, while I much appreciate the type of director who comes onto the set and becomes inspired and says, “I believe the camera should go there” (after an hour or so of deliberation) however, for the particular film I wanted a director who could storyboard the entire film, who could take a close-up of a pilot in a space ship with the camera right in front of him and, at a particular moment, that pilot looks in that direction to match a shot that will be filmed maybe ninety days later of another spaceship coming by. So Jimmy’s qualities as an animator and as a director of TV commercials working off of storyboards became very important for that type of work.

As to some of the more intangible attributes of a director, intelligence, I think, is important above all. I have never met in my life a successful director who was not intelligent. Beyond that there is this intangible spark, the creativity, the mark of the poet to go with the intelligence and again, as I say, the dedication to film and the ability to work very hard, because directing pictures is physically very hard work. I think people sometimes forget that.

Speaking now of producers, I might mention that a lot of people are producer-directors, like Coppola, Bogdanovich, and so forth. I might also mention my wife, who has had the most successful production career of anybody I know. She’s produced eight films and has had eight consecutive successes. I’ve had a couple of failures; everybody I know has had a couple of failures, but my wife is truly the only producer I’ve ever met who never had a failure. She may well support the family if Battle Beyond the Stars doesn’t do it this summer.

The attributes of the producer, I think, are very, very close to those of the director: The same intelligence, the same ability to work very hard. There are some theories today on right and left brain in which the left brain is possibly a fraction more poetic. The right hemisphere of the brain, if I have these correct, is more logical. I would say the function of the producer and the director are almost the same, or the attributes are almost the same, except that I would say that while the director might lean a little more to the left brain, I would look for a little bit more logic on the part of the producer I was going to hire.

On the other hand, the producer doesn’t generally get hired and you can underestimate what the producer does if you see what he is doing on the set, because if he’s really done his job he doesn’t do much on the set. His work is primarily accomplished before the picture goes into production. Most films start with an idea of a producer and then the decision is made to make that idea into a film. Now, that’s the most important decision that will ever be made on the film. So the producer, who must then carry forward on a logical basis, at that moment is functioning on a creative basis, as well.

As I say, putting all of this together you find, in general, that you are dealing with intelligent people who have learned the requisite technical skills, who are dedicated to the film medium and who are then willing to work very, very hard. Beyond that I don’t know. There is a certain personal feeling I get talking with people and that conversation, or series of conversations, is extremely important because it determines whether or not I think I can work well with them. Somebody might very well be successful with another producer or some other company but might not work well with me because of my own personal ways of functioning and because of the budget limitations of New World. Now this is possibly not as specific as some of you might like it to be, but it’s not a specific thing. It’s kind of an informed guess—to talk to somebody and say, “Yes, I think you can do this job.” That’s particularly true when you are dealing with new people who have never done the job before.

– Filmmaking in Hollywood: The Changing Scene. By Roger Corman. From American Cinematographer, August 1980.

Scorsese: Goodfellas, Gangsters and Guilt

Goodfellas (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

Goodfellas is about guilt more than anything else. But it is not a straightforward morality play, in which good is established and guilt is the appropriate reaction toward evil. No, the hero of this film feels guilty for not upholding the Mafia code – guilty of the sin of betrayal. And his punishment is banishment, into the witness protection program, where nobody has a name and the headwaiter certainly doesn't know it. What finally got to me after seeing this film – what makes it a great film – is that I understood Henry Hill's feelings. Just as his wife Karen grew so completely absorbed by the Mafia inner life that its values became her own, so did the film weave a seductive spell. It is almost possible to think, sometimes, of the characters as really being good fellows. Their camaraderie is so strong, their loyalty so unquestioned. But the laughter is strained and forced at times, and sometimes it's an effort to enjoy the party, and eventually, the whole mythology comes crashing down, and then the guilt – the real guilt, the guilt a Catholic like Scorsese understands intimately – is not that they did sinful things, but that they want to do them again. – Roger Ebert

Martin Scorsese's mid career masterwork GoodFellas (1990) is a follow-up to his own Mean Streets (1973), released in the same year as Francis Ford Coppola's third episode of his gangster epic The Godfather, Part III (1990). It is a gritty, honest examination of a true life mobster scenario involving three violent "wiseguys" accentuated by the Italian-American director's personal experience growing up in Little Italy. Scorsese reunites with one of his favourite actors, Robert De Niro, who previously featured in Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), New York, New York (1977), Raging Bull (1980), and The King of Comedy (1982)

The film's factual, semi-documentary narrative was adapted from Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese's script, which was based on Pileggi's 1985 non-fiction book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family. 

The true story involved a low-level, marginalised gangster (or 'foot-soldier') with mixed ethnic ancestry (half-Irish, half-Sicilian) - Henry Hill - who eventually broke the gangster's code of 'never ratting on your friends' and became an informant for the FBI.

The fast-paced, exhilarating, episodic plot, which is peppered with profanity, bold editing cuts and graphics, changing points of view, and people speaking directly to the camera, is delivered via voice-over narration by Henry Hill (Ray Liotta). It spans thirty years of his life, from his adolescent years in a Brooklyn Irish neighbourhood to his exploits as an adult gangster, ranging from the 1950s to the drug-fueled 1970s, during which he was married to Karen (Lorraine Bracco). The inclusion of his wife's voice-over gives more insight into the all-encompassing culture and allure of 'family life.' The freeze frames interspersed throughout emphasise the lasting, formative events of Henry's life. 

GoodFellas is a film defined by an extraordinary, almost anthropological attention to experiential and procedural detail, stylistic virtuosity manifested through freeze-frames, majestic subjective tracking shots, overlapping and occasionally improvised dialogue, propulsive editing, dual voice-overs, a breathless pop-rock soundtrack, and an insider's knowledge of organised crime. 

The picture is both wonderfully constructed and produced, as well as a bravura mash-up of tones, genres, and sensibilities, inspired by films such as Truffaut's Jules et Jim. 

This overpowering sense of the material realities and pleasures inherent in the film's chosen, sometimes gaudy, environment draws us into a mostly male, chauvinist world characterised by easy corruption, hair-trigger violence, moral ambiguity, and a sense of imperiousness. 

GoodFellas creates a minutely portrayed atmosphere that we both repelled and seduced by. As is the case with many Scorsese films, we identify with the scenario of an outsider being indoctrinated into a highly ritualised environment with each picture "filled with activity and texture," as Scorsese puts it. 

While essential collaborators such as editor Thelma Schoonmaker and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus have been rightfully recognised for their work, Kristi Zea's production design really brings this "cloistered" and insular universe to life. The garish, residential interiors are densely evocative and immersive. We're fascinated from the minute the picture starts in the middle of the tale, with bright red taillights illuminating Henry's face as he declares, "As long back as I can remember, I've always wanted to be a gangster." 

Scorsese's films often derive their cues from snippets of music, riffs from certain songs, or the rapid-fire transitions between tracks. This approach to music contributes to its jagged, sometimes abrupt, almost jazz-like rhythms and tones by Harry Nilsson, Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones.

Scorsese's career peaked with GoodFellas, and marked a notable return to form after his more disjointed work of the 1980s. The film ushers in an era of unprecedented output in the first half of the 1990s, which includes such landmark works as The Age of Innocence, his documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Films, and an equally violent and kaleidoscopic slice of mob life, Casino. 

In many respects, GoodFellas is an unsettling love letter to the gangster cinema, packed with distinctive allusions to earlier inspirations such as The Roaring Twenties, Public Enemy, and Scarface.

It is considered the defining work of Scorsese's career, drawing the audience into its hellish world through cinematic virtuosity, and dazzling performances, simultaneously promising the fulfilment of one’s deepest desires and the pain of getting what you want.

The filming is enticing because it portrays Hill's criminal lifestyle as alluring; it invites us into his world. Thus, Scorsese creates a subjective experience, frequently literally: in the shot introducing the film's various gangsters and hangers-on, all of whom speak directly into the camera ("I'm going to go get the papers, get the papers"), or in the film's infamous "May 11, 1980" sequence, which uses jagged cutting, jittery camerawork, and clashing musical cues to transport us directly into the action.

In comparison to prior tales of mob life (including The Godfather films), the immediacy of Goodfellas is striking, terrifying and visceral.

It left clear imprints on a number of subsequent films and television series. “Boogie Nights is unmistakably Goodfellas,” Glenn Kenny, author of the forthcoming book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, stated. He also finds a strong parallel to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs - specifically the repeated theme of gangsters who hang around, speak trash, and go about their business as if it were a business. 

The majority of gangster films concentrate on the top bosses and godfathers; Goodfellas and its sequels focus on the grinders, intermediaries, and lower level thugs. 

Kenny also identifies the concept of "mobsters having other facets of their existence," such as ordinary marital and family difficulties, which was a critical component of David Chase's groundbreaking series, The Sopranos. Chase has openly cited the film as his holy book, not only for the tone and viewpoint of the picture as inspiration for The Sopranos, but also the cast, which includes numerous future Sopranos co-stars. 

In the following extract from Richard Schickel’s Conversations with Scorsese, director Martin Scorsese discusses guilt, celebrity and the gangster in his great movie of mob life:

RICHARD SCHICKEL: Your next full-length feature after ‘Last Temptation’ was ‘Goodfellas’ in 1990, which I suppose with ‘Raging Bull’ is one of my two favorite movies of yours. Perhaps part of my feeling for that is based on the fact that most of us share a sort of love for gangsters as outsiders, or rebels. I mean, we always sort of sympathize with the gangster Jim Cagney, or people like him. They seem to have such a nice, rich life: lovely meals they’re always making for each other, a certain amount of friendship, brotherhood, and all that. They enjoy the good life, and at the same time they get to whack people.

MARTIN SCORSESE: When I was doing The Color of Money in Chicago, I was reading The New York Review of Books and saw a review of a book by Nick Pileggi called Wiseguy. It seemed like Nick was taking us through the different levels of purgatory and hell in the underworld, like Virgil or like Dante. Irwin Winkler said, ‘Are you interested in that?’ I said yes and he bought it for me. I said yes because I thought Nick was telling the story in a different way. It’s about that lifestyle, and the dangerous seduction of that lifestyle.

I remember I was talking to Marlon Brando from time to time, and he said, ‘Don’t do another gangster picture. You’ve done Mean Streets, you did the gangsters in Raging Bull. You don’t have to do that.’ I came to feel the same way. So I said to Michael Powell, ‘I think I don’t want to do this Goodfellas thing,’ or Wiseguys, as it was then called.

Michael Powell went back to his apartment with Thelma Schoonmaker, whom he’d married right after Raging Bull. He couldn’t see anymore, so she read the script to him. I was in the editing room, I remember, in the Brill Building, and suddenly he called and said, ‘This is wonderful. You must do it. It’s funny and no one’s ever seen this way of life before. You must do it.’ And that’s why I did it.

RS: Well, there’s a William Wellman story on ‘Public Enemy’. He found the script and he took it to [Darryl] Zanuck, who was running Warner Bros. It was then called ‘Beer and Blood.’ He loved it – these young writers had lived in Chicago and knew some of the mobsters. But Zanuck said, I can’t do another one of these. I’ve just done this, I’ve just done that. Tell me one good reason to do it. And Wellman said, ‘Because I’ll make it the toughest one you ever saw.’ And Zanuck said, ‘You got it.’ You could argue that, of all the modern gangland things, ‘Goodfellas’ is the toughest one of all. Was there some aspect of ‘Goodfellas’ for you that was like Wellman’s attitude, that you could do it tougher?

MS: I thought of it as being a kind of attack.

RS: Attack?

MS: Attacking the audience. I remember talking about it at one point and saying, ‘I want people to get infuriated by it.’ I wanted to seduce everybody into the movie and into the style. And then just take them apart with it. I guess I wanted to make a kind of angry gesture.

RS: Why were you angry?

MS: I guess I used to feel I was the outsider who has to punch his way back in, constantly. Some people don’t have to do that, but I do. I’m not just talking about films, but everything.

I get angry about the way things are and the way people are. I get very involved in stories and the way a character behaves and the way the world behaves. More than anger, I think, maybe it’s caring about how characters behave, how the world behaves. I’m curious about those things. I still get excited by the story. I still get upset by what a character does. And the anger is something to get me working. I have to get sometimes rather upset with myself or a situation before I can really start working, thinking clearly. Some other people can do it very quickly, which doesn’t mean they don’t put energy into it. But they don’t put their heart and soul into it. I’m one of those people who does. It’s every minute of the day and night.

In the Rolling Stones documentary, I do a takeoff on myself for the first ten minutes. It’s about everything that could go wrong for me as the director. And things do go wrong. And they affect you.

I remember a priest told my father to come to talk to him and bring me with him to the rectory one day. I wondered why, what I did that was so bad? I must’ve been about twelve. He said something about me going around with the seriousness and the weight of the world on my shoulders. At that age I shouldn’t be that way, the priest said. I should have been enjoying my life. And he told my father something I’ll never forget. He said, ‘This boy,’ he says, ‘behaves.’ I did really, because I always was sick and never got in trouble.

But then later, when they threw me out of the preparatory seminary, the monsignor told my father, ‘Your son? There’s a brick wall. Don’t hit your head against it, you’re going to get hurt.’ The monsignor gets up, mimes hitting his head against the brick wall, and that was the end of it.

Everybody cares about what they do. But I tend to get emotionally involved, or let it get to me. I get too emotionally involved with everything. So over the years it became funny. Except when it wasn’t funny. In my mind, whether it’s the stroke of a pen or a bullet, a lot can happen to people. In our America, businesspeople are slaughtered every day. People are robbed every day.

RS: Well, there’s that whole theory of Robert Warshow, about ‘the gangster as tragic hero.’

MS: I was going to mention Warshow.

RS: I’m not sure I completely buy into that in a movie like ‘Goodfellas’; there’s actually nothing very tragic about those guys.

MS: No.

RS: What happens to Henry Hill is not tragic; he’s just not having fun anymore.

MS: Right. Too bad for him!

RS: And it’s not a tragic ending.

MS: No, he’s still breathing.

RS: I guess I need you to explain where you’re coming from with that because it really is a unique movie, I think. You’ve said you can’t see ‘The Sopranos’ in it, but I see a sort of precursor in it.

MS: A lot of the wonderful actors in The Sopranos were in my pictures, so we always talk about it. A lot of the people in Goodfellas are not on the upper levels, so they’re not tragic. It’s just everyday tragedy. These guys are dealing on the everyday level. I knew them as people, not as criminals. If something fell off the truck, you know, we all bought it. It was part of surviving, part of living. Some of those guys were smarter than others. Some overstepped their bounds and were killed. That was based on reality.

There’s a danger in idolizing that world, but many of the police who were down there in that neighborhood were on the take. I was surprised the first time I saw the American system at work, which was in Twelve Angry Men, Sidney Lumet’s film. Today, I credit the priests in the neighborhood who screened a 16 millimeter print of it down in the basement of the church for some of the kids. It was like being on Mars.

RS: The surrogate in your film, practicing that idolization as a kid, is the Henry Hill character.

MS: Yes. If you engage in that life, certain things are expected of you. First of all, to make a lot of money for everybody. Or to be the muscle. You have to perform, and you have to be careful: the scene that Joe Pesci asked to be put in, and improvised with Ray Liotta – the ‘You think I’m funny?’ scene – shows that you could be killed any second. They don’t care who’s around. The trick in the picture was to sort of ignore that danger, make it a rollicking road movie in a way – like a kind of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby picture, with everybody on the road and having a great time.

When the Sicilian police finally broke up the Mafia in the early nineties, they arrested some guy – I forget his name, but he was the second in command – and an Italian reporter asked him if any movie about that world was accurate. And he said, Well, Goodfellas, in the scene where the guy says, ‘Do you think I’m funny?’ Because that’s the life we lead. You could be smiling and laughing one second, and [snaps fingers] in a split second you’re in a situation where you could lose your life.

RS: Quite an amazing anecdote.

MS: That is exactly where you live all the time. That’s the truth of it. Now that happened to Joe Pesci, originally, with a friend of his. He got out of it just by doing what Ray did. So when he told me the story, I said, ‘We’ve got to use that. That really encapsulates it completely. That’s the lifestyle.’

Remember when Jimmy Cagney got the AFI [American Film Institute] award, he thanked somebody I think was called Two-Times Ernie and the other street guys he knew as a kid. Because they taught him how to act. The kids in my neighborhood who told stories on the street corner, they’d have you enthralled, and often with a sense of humor about themselves. And these were some tough kids.

I’ll never forget one of the toughest I’d ever met telling a story about losing a fight in such a funny way, and not being embarrassed about it. [Laughs.] Not losing any dignity. I thought, That is brilliant: to accept the fact that he was knocked down so badly, had to get up again, get knocked down again. We were all laughing, and he was laughing. I’ll never forget it.

In the Wiseguy book, Henry Hill speaks that way, almost like a standup comic. He’s got his own rhythm. There’s a truth to it. Someone owes you money, and he doesn’t pay you. So you go to him, and he says, ‘Oh, my wife got sick.’ ‘Fuck you, pay me.’ ‘My daughter is –’ ‘Fuck you, pay me,’ a guy like Hill says. ‘My mother –’ ‘Fuck you, pay me’.

RS: De Niro in ‘Mean Streets’ has no conscious sense of consequences, always living in the moment. That’s symbolized in ‘Goodfellas’ by the great tracking shot into the Copacabana, when they all go out on the town. That’s the privileged moment they pay for in blood and death.

MS: Well, the Copacabana – that’s the top of the line for Henry – it was Valhalla. When you were able to get a table there, it was like being in the court of the kings. The Mob guys were really the ones in charge. The Copa lounge was always more significant because the real guys were up there. That’s why you have a lot happening in Raging Bull in the Copa lounge. My friend’s father, the one who would read and listen to opera, his father was the head bartender there. We have him in Raging Bull. Nice guy.

Everyone paid for the privilege eventually. The danger of the picture is that young people could look at it and think, Hey, what a great life. But you’ve got to see the last hour of the picture when things start going wrong in a big way.

RS: I think in one of the voice-over lines Henry Hill says, You only have it for maybe ten years.

MS: That’s right.

RS: That made me think about celebrity. Ballplayers, for example, only have maybe ten years.

MS: Right. Actors, filmmakers, you’ve got about ten years. Some of the greatest filmmakers had a run for ten years. It’s part of American celebrity.

– From Richard Schickel: Conversations with Scorsese (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). Copyright © 2011 by Richard Schickel.