De Niro: A Biography. John Baxter
But Scorsese knew an enormous amount about movies, and, what’s more, could apply that knowledge to make new ones. A friendship with John Cassavetes led him into directing, and the low-budget 1970 Who’s that Knocking at my Door? persuaded Roger Corman to offer him an even lower-budget project, Box-Car Bertha, another in the lengthening series of Bonnie and Clyde rip-offs begun with Bloody Mama.
When it was finished, Corman suggested Scorsese make a cheap version of Papillon called I Escaped from Devil’s Island. Scorsese was all set to do so when he screened Bertha to Cassavetes, who gave him what’s been called ‘a sound three-hour talking to’. ‘Now that you’ve made a piece of shit,’ Cassavetes told him, ‘why don’t you make a movie about something you really care about?’
What Scorsese cared about was guilt and gangs. They were the subject of ‘Season of the Witch’, a script he’d first written in 1966, the last part of a projected trilogy that began with ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem’, which was never filmed, and continued with the fifty-eight-minute Who’s that Knocking at my Door?. He dusted it off, and asked his friend Mardik Martin to help him rewrite it. Without an apartment in which to work, they cruised Manhattan in Scorsese’s old Valiant, pulling in periodically to put their ideas on paper.
At the suggestion of screenwriter/critic Jay Cocks, they renamed the script Mean Streets, from Raymond Chandler’s essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’. Describing the moral hero who acts in all crime stories as a counterbalance and corrective to the criminal anarchy of the city, Chandler wrote, ‘down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean’.
In Scorsese’s story, based on people with whom he’d grown up, the man ‘not himself mean’ is Charlie Cappa, a young man on the fringes of organised crime who’s torn between his inclination to a moral life and his loyalty to the Mafia into which he has been born. The conflict is embodied in his friendship with ‘Johnny Boy’ Cervello, a borderline psychopath with a penchant for random violence. Charlie’s friends Michael, a local hood on the rise, and Tony, owner of the bar where they hang out, barely tolerate Johnny Boy for Charlie’s sake, and when Michael, enraged over Johnny Boy’s refusal to pay off a debt, decides to have him killed, Charlie must choose between his family and his friend. To make the point that such decisions don’t always follow the Hollywood line, Scorsese would himself play the gunman who shoots Johnny Boy.
Mardik Martin acknowledged that Charlie and Johnny Boy comprised a dual portrait of Scorsese. ‘One is the guilt-ridden nice guy who’s basically a coward. The other is a crazy doer who doesn’t care how he destroys himself.’ When Scorsese formed his own film company in the eighties, he called it Cappa Films, after Charlie.
De Niro knew of Scorsese, and had seen Who’s that Knocking at my Door?, but they’d never met. Nor, as it turned out, had Scorsese seen any of De Niro’s films. Brian De Palma introduced them at Christmas 1972 at the home of Jay Cocks and his actress wife Verna Bloom.
Their first conversation was, predictably, about the Old Neighbourhood. Once De Niro saw the little man with the greasy pageboy haircut, rat-trap mouth and machine-gun voice, he realised he’d glimpsed him before – at dances, for instance, in a Latin-American club on 14th Street, and at Webster Hall, where Scorsese would shoot some of the scenes in Raging Bull.
‘I know you,’ said De Niro in the slightly hooting baritone that could seem almost a parody of Italian-American diction. ‘You used to hang out with Joe Morali and Kurdy on Elizabeth Street.’
‘And you used to hang out in Kenmare Street and Grand,’ snapped back Scorsese.
They were soon deep in conversation. ‘De Niro found in Martin the one person who would talk for fifteen minutes on the way a character would tie a knot,’ says Scorsese’s second wife, Julia Cameron. ‘That’s what drew them together, and since then I have seen them go at it for ten hours virtually non-stop.’
‘We were both brought up in the same area,’ explains Scorsese, ‘and we see things the same way. I think, also, we both had the sense of being outsiders.’
But neither was as tough as he played it. They’d purchased admittance to the society of the streets by being alert, funny, and sensitive to the play of power behind the apparently featureless façade of the gangs. It took Scorsese very little time talking to Bobby to see in him a performer who could play his characters at least as well as he could write them. A virtuoso had found his instrument.
But it would take Scorsese more than a year to find the money for Mean Streets. Meanwhile, De Niro went back to the hand-to-mouth life of a minor-league New York actor, starting with a few days in two one-act plays by Merle Molofsky, presented under the title Kool-Aid by Lincoln Center Repertory in 1971. Despite its critical and box-office failure, The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight should have gained De Niro some attention. He played his role so convincingly, however, that casting agents thought he was an Italian imported for the movie. As a result, his next film part, and one of the most important in his career, came about just like the role in The Wedding Party – from a cattle-call audition.
The project was Bang the Drum Slowly, from Mark Harris’s novel about the friendship of two professional baseball players in the fictional New York Mammoths. Henry Wiggen is their star pitcher, while rookie catcher Bruce Pearson, no asset, socially or professionally, to the team, looks sure to be sent back to the minor leagues. Despite this, and even though Pearson, as Wiggen explains in a weary voice-over, ‘chews tobacco, pisses in the sink, and is almost too dumb to play a joke on’, the pitcher befriends him.
The revelation that Pearson has a fatal blood disease brings them even closer (the film’s title comes from the lachrymose ballad ‘Streets of Laredo’, about a cowboy dying young). Wiggen accompanies Pearson to Georgia to meet his family, loyally hides the diagnosis from the team manager, Dutch Schnell, and even keeps Pearson from being fired by tying his contract to that of his friend; if they want Wiggen, they have to keep Pearson. Schnell hires a detective to find out the truth, but by then the Mammoths have won the title and Pearson is ready to enter hospital to die. Even at this point, Wiggen is on hand to dissuade him from marrying a gold-digger who has her eye on his insurance.
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