Anointed an artistic genius, he dived headlong into the sex, rock-and-roll, and, especially, the drugs that came with the territory. As he candidly told Peter Biskind in seminal tome Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, “I was just too drugged out to solve the structure.”Īt this time Scorsese’s lifestyle – like several other 1970s ‘Movie Brats’ – embraced all the clichés of success and excess. “After Taxi Driver we got big heads and felt that no script was good enough.” New York, New York went $2 million over budget its first rough-cut ran some four-and-a-half hours.
After rapturous critical acclaim for his first three major features Mean Streets, Oscar-winning Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Cannes’ Palme D’Or for Taxi Driver, his latest, ambitious musical New York, New York, had been a critical and commercial flop. Ill health and troubled relationships with women – the latest, an imploded relationship with Liza Minnelli while his then-wife Julia Cameron was pregnant – were commonplace to Scorsese but this was his first encounter with professional failure.
“I’d reached a certain nadir,” the sixty-four-year old director now recalls, “In many different ways.” Those around Scorsese know that his malaise runs far deeper than dodgy pharmaceuticals. Officially, a dangerous cocktail of asthma medication, prescription drugs and a batch of bad coke is to blame. Hospitalised after blacking out, he’s bleeding, by several accounts, from every orifice. Labor Day, September 1978: Martin Scorsese is too sick to work, let alone celebrate the public holiday.
25 years after creating a legend, Leigh Singer asks how a punch-drunk Martin Scorsese, backed by Robert De Niro, got off the canvas to deliver the knockout of Raging Bull.
0 kommentar(er)
