Into the black-tie breach once more

By Paul Lieberman

Feb. 27, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

New York — “WE’RE waiting for the envelope,” Martin Scorsese says. He is talking about his 5-year-old daughter, of course, and how he and his wife will learn, any day, whether she has gotten into a Manhattan private school.

Scorsese figures the news in the envelope would not be good if it were him trying to get into, say, a stuffy Park Avenue condo building. “That’s OK. I’ve been out of things most of my life,” he says. “I was never let in the clubs.”

The schools would be nuts, though, not to take his little girl. They should know how her 62-year-old father has funded a scholarship at New York University and how his old high school, Cardinal Hayes, is getting a “visual literacy” department. Plus his daughter is showing traces of the talent he displayed as an asthmatic boy on the Lower East Side when he began sketching movie scenes in his room. A half-century later, his girl churns out colorful collages, always “drawing and painting, constructing things. Very concentrated.”

So now “it’s up to them,” Scorsese says.

They watch “Road Runner” cartoons together, he and little Francesca. The kid squeals at the wild chases like any kid. Papa sees a bit more in them, as he has since the ‘70s, when he and Steven Spielberg would try to figure out what Warner Bros.’ great animation director, Chuck Jones, was up to with that Road Runner and his pursuer, Wile E. Coyote.

“It’s totally surreal,” Scorsese says. “The nature of the chase. Over landscapes that sort of represent life in a way. I mean, being human and being in the midst of this perennial Monument Valley, which doesn’t change, no matter where they run.

“I’m not very good at this kind of analysis,” insists our most brilliant analyst of most any kind of film, “but ... there’s a sagacity, is that the word? At a certain point, as you watch, I just go ‘I see. I know the feeling. I know the feeling.’ Life is chasing you. You try to get away. Death is chasing you.”

He apologizes that maybe that’s just him, the glass-half-empty guy.

“But it does have a kind of cathartic feeling,” he goes on, “of watching the Road Runner get away. And I do like the coyote. He tries everything, as we do often in our lives. But he has that one fatal flaw in every device he works on, you know? And the Road Runner just keeps on going. And then suddenly the camera’s all the way up in the sky and you see roads and strange, surreal patterns. It’s a world created in and of itself, as opposed to the Bugs Bunny cartoons, as opposed to the Daffy Duck ones. It represents life, really, for me.

“It’s the nature of the chase and that poor coyote who’s just never going to get him. Never gonna get him. And you keep trying in life.”

Young man, Old Hollywood

When Marty Scorsese made his first trip to Los Angeles, 40 years ago, it was to accept an award. He had been honored once before, with the Edward L. Kingsley Award at NYU, but that was more of a stipend, helping him pay for another semester in the film program. This honor was in a different league -- the Jesse L. Lasky Intercollegiate Competition Award bestowed by the Producers Guild. Students at 10 schools submitted their best shorts of 1964 and the 22-year-old Scorsese won for “It’s Not Just You, Murray!,” a 15-minute takeoff on 1920s gangster films whose cast included his mother, Catherine.

They flew him west, put him up at the Beverly Hilton and assigned him a seat at the end of the dais for the guild’s annual dinner on March 7, 1965. Director Alfred Hitchcock was being feted, at 64, for a lifetime of achievement from silent films through “Psycho.”

Thus did Scorsese get his first exposure to Old Hollywood and its style of honoring its own.

“I remember being in the back room where they worked out how everyone was to come out,” he says. “There’s David O. Selznick, Sam Goldwyn [and] Cary Grant, who ... saw I was a little nervous, so he said, ‘Oh, calm down, don’t worry about it.’ He asked my name. I told him my name. He said, ‘You may have to change that.’ ”

At the cocktail party, he thought he might seek out Selznick -- at 63, just three months from his death -- to talk about production values in “Gone With the Wind.” But the Hollywood titans were hard to reach, so he instead asked Maureen O’Hara about one of his idols, director John Ford, who was ill, it turned out, and had made the last of his westerns. “I was like a fan -- what can you say? -- a little silly kid,” Scorsese says.

When he got his plaque from German bombshell Elke Sommer, he tried to get away with a mere “Thank you” until Cary Grant reminded him “you’re supposed to kiss her,” so he did.

Hitchcock’s speech at the dinner was a riff on their “bizarre trade.” It wasn’t true, the Englishman said, that he called actors cattle: “I said actors should be treated like cattle.”

Scorsese says he realized that night that “I’m from a different world,” and that feeling stayed with him over the decades, even during the 13 years he tried living the high life in Los Angeles.

He’d be at a party and someone would ask, “What are you doing here?” After he moved back east in 1983, he said that L.A. had become too much a “movie star town.” And while he had attempted to imitate the versatility of the old directors -- doing a comedy here, a musical there -- his heart remained with raw stories “out of the cobblestone,” with characters who were dark and disturbed, “not your usual heroes.”

Yet he never completely divorced himself from Hollywood or its rituals. Part of that was practical -- he still wanted to make “big films” that cost a lot of money. But he also was not disdainful, like Brando and others became, of its clubs and accolades. Part of that too was practical -- playing the game helped sell those expensive movies, or so went the conventional wisdom.

In the end, either you cared or you didn’t whether they called your name from the stage. He did.

So it was that Scorsese was back last month at the same Beverly Hilton that gave him his first peek, as a student, into the inner sanctum. He was there now as an elder statesman, for the Directors Guild of America awards, and won the loudest ovation even as he lost the evening’s top honor to Clint Eastwood, whose “Million Dollar Baby” was destined to fight it out with his “The Aviator” through this year’s “contest season.” They were like two fencers in an Errol Flynn film, going at it on the castle floor, then the staircase, then again in the balcony ... each suffering a wound or two until the fateful showdown, which in the filmmakers’ case comes this evening.

Scorsese spent the morning after his DGA defeat writing his remarks for another awards ceremony, one that illustrated how those have multiplied and changed over the decades -- and how you don’t have to be Hitchcock’s age to earn a career retrospective nowadays.

That night, Scorsese had to introduce one for Leonardo DiCaprio, who is 30, at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. “Look at this,” Scorsese told him, “as a welcome.”

His unlikely bonding with DiCaprio in recent years -- and they’re not done yet -- suggests some rethinking of movie-star culture.

Only when power broker Mike Ovitz announced that he had the “Titanic” heartthrob on board and “Which picture would you like to make?” did Scorsese get backing for his $100-million dream project of a quarter-century, “Gangs of New York.” DiCaprio may have been a horrible choice to play his knife-wielding, 19th century street tough, but Scorsese insists that that was not the problem with what was supposed to be his ultimate cobblestone saga. It proved torturous instead, with its year of delays and his squabbles with Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein over whether he really needed an elephant rampaging amid the Civil War draft riots. “I said, ‘I have to have the elephant!’ ” recalls Scorsese.

He at least got that obsession behind him, and then DiCaprio, instead of going his own way, enlisted Scorsese -- who had no other job lined up after “Gangs” -- to direct his dream project. It was easy to see why DiCaprio would be better suited to playing the billionaire Howard Hughes in his glory days, before he went completely bonkers. But Scorsese? The story was set more in the clouds than on the cobblestone and featured more courage than carnage.

For years, he has been saying that his only goal -- forget glory -- is a simple one: to be able to continue to work, especially on films that mean something to him. Friends say that nervousness is no act, and that at times, like after “Gangs,” it has been a realistic concern.

“He’s still living in that place like at any moment someone is in a position to pull the rug out,” was how musician Robbie Robertson put it at the time. “That’s a scary place to be standing.”

But two years later Scorsese was standing before a packed theater in Santa Barbara thanking a onetime teen idol for giving him “a new lease on my own creativity.”

‘That fire in your head’

“How fast things can change. It’s the old story.”

Scorsese is talking again about his daughter, of course, and his most poignant memory of “Gangs.” On the first day of shooting, on the set in Italy, Francesca, sitting in her mother Helen’s lap, blurted out, for the first time, “Daddy.”

Now that seems both like a blink ago and a lifetime ago -- for that precocious kid these days likes giving her daddy hell, especially when she hears him in his “private” den, speaking on the phone in a way that’s, oh, a tad agitated.

“She comes in, ‘Why are you crazy?’ ”

“ ‘I’m not crazy. I’m being emphatic. We’re trying to make movies -- we’re trying to get our points across.’ ”

“ ‘Why are you speaking so loud?’ ”

” ’ ‘Cause also I’m Italian American. Your mother speaks American, her family goes all the way back. We are more extroverted. Even though you have blond hair and blue eyes, you are half-Sicilian.’ ”

The kid strikes back, “You’ve got that fire in your head,” and scrunches her face to imitate his scowl and how his enormous eyebrows, the caricaturists’ delight, meet between his eyes.

Scorsese is relating this, cackling all the way, in his production offices in midtown Manhattan where he had been toiling until 10:30 the night before to finish last-minute business before flying to L.A. for a stopover and then to the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Awards. What his daughter has overheard of late is his frantic work on two post-”Aviator” projects, his immediate priority being a PBS documentary on Bob Dylan. The singer’s longtime manager plunked this project in his lap, offering Dylan’s own library of vintage footage for a four-hour “American Masters” look at Dylan’s rise to prominence, ending with his 1966 motorcycle crash. Scorsese intends to portray him as a mythic “shape changer.”

“You can never pin him down. He’s moving around,” Scorsese says. “This goes back to a primitive time, where someone would get up, wear an animal skin and tell a story, but sing it and dance it and suddenly they change into the animal. That’s what they do, poets in the ancient world.”

Scorsese has to have the documentary done quickly because in late April the cameras roll in Boston on his next feature, a “modern noir” genre piece inspired by the 2002 Hong Kong thriller “Wu Jian Dao” (“Infernal Affairs”). It’s been reset among Boston’s Irish American mob and police department, with DiCaprio playing an undercover cop who infiltrates the mob, Matt Damon a mob guy who infiltrates the police force and Jack Nicholson an Irish mob boss -- Jack back doing menace after his forays into lonely souls and a farce or two. The film is titled “The Departed,” after all their pals who have gone on to a not-necessarily-better place.

Scorsese had sworn off making gangster pictures until he got the William Monahan script and saw “the characters were all duplicitous and all deceiving each other and ultimately all wind up in a kind of elegant ... a pretty bad end.”

With that, he wrings his hands in glee -- he’s long gotten a hoot out of this side of human nature. He finds a similarly delicious worldview in his bedtime readings of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.”

Scorsese says one downside of coming from a lineage of peasants and ditch diggers was the absence of books in the house. He loves the family stories, as we know, like how one grandfather rented a tiny plot of land in Staten Island so he could tend to a single fig tree. We know too how his clan would gather around a black-and-white TV to watch De Sica’s “The Bicycle Thief” and other neo-realistic films from the home country. But it would have been nice to have had some classical literature around, and to have learned Greek and Latin early on, so he wouldn’t have to rely on translations now as he goes through those epics of Homer time and again.

Talk about duplicitous -- look how the gods behave.

“Oh, yeah. The mother of Achilles, Thetis, she just gives it to Zeus,” Scorsese says. “She wants Achilles taken care of and [Zeus] has to knock around the Achaeans in such a way as to bring Achilles back into the fray. She forces Zeus to create such havoc ... they gotta beg Achilles to come back.... And Achilles is filled with rage, constantly angry, and the descriptions of the battles, it’s phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal, the cruelty, the brutality....”

He exults in these tales until 2 or 3 a.m., when he falls into a sleep that’s interrupted many nights by the same dream, a little anxiety number that has him showing up on the set having no idea what he’s is doing. Someone’s always saying, “Don’t worry,” but no one’s given him a script, the actors are staring at him “and I discover they’ve taken,” he says, “my director’s chair away.”

Oscar nights

Scorsese accepted an Oscar one time -- for Ellen Burstyn, who was anointed best actress for 1974’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” She was in New York doing the play “Same Time Next Year” and asked him to stand in for her and to thank, among others, himself.

Two years later, a female FBI agent in an evening gown (and a gun in her handbag) kept an eye on him during the ceremony because of an anonymous threat to kill him if Jodie Foster won best supporting actress for “Taxi Driver.” A fan apparently thought he’d corrupted the 13-year-old by having her play a prostitute to Robert De Niro’s avenging cabby who looks in the mirror and asks, “You talkin’ to me?”

Scorsese had more protection at the 1981 ceremony because federal agents had just discovered who may have been behind the earlier threat -- would-be presidential assassin and obsessed Foster fan John Hinckley Jr. After the Oscars were put off a day -- until it was clear President Ronald Reagan would survive -- Scorsese protege Thelma Schoonmaker won the honors for film editing on “Raging Bull” and then told everyone who would listen that the statuette rightfully belonged to the director, who was a master of that craft too, “from the time he was in the womb.”

Scorsese figures that in the ‘80s many people in Hollywood thought he must have gotten an Oscar. It wasn’t until after 1990’s “GoodFellas” lost best picture to Kevin Costner’s “Dances With Wolves,” and Scorsese lost the director’s honor to first-timer Costner, that the talk accelerated about how he’d never won, putting that King Kong on his back. Like Orson Welles or Hitchcock, he shoulda, you know, but....

Scorsese’s style has been to try to laugh off the snubs, even after those last three films wound up on the American Film Institute’s all-time top 100 list. “Yeah,” he’ll say, “but they were nasty films.” He’ll say he became resigned early, after he wasn’t nominated personally for “Taxi Driver,” that “I was going to be lucky enough just to get the films made -- if you just keep your mouth shut.” He’ll say how fortunate he was to have gotten directing honors from BAFTA and Cannes -- for two of his lesser films -- and later “so many lifetime achievement awards ... I’ve forgotten,” most while his parents were still alive. Or he’ll say, “I’m glad it didn’t happen in the ‘70s. I think it would have gone to my head.”

He makes the case himself why it was logical for the motion picture academy to favor Costner’s Civil War-era story of imperiled Native Americans over “GoodFellas,” however much its style, especially its long camera tracking shot in the nightclub, influenced other filmmakers. “It’s an establishment organization, and they have to sometimes be very careful about what they endorse,” he says. “ ‘GoodFellas,’ it was a risky movie ... R-rated, and it was not for young people. ‘Dances With Wolves,’ whatever you may think of the film, politically was very important ... for younger generations to see what had happened [to the Indians].”

Going back in time, he makes it seem logical too why Welles and 1941’s “Citizen Kane” lost to “How Green Was My Valley,” which earned John Ford his third of four directing Oscars. Though Ford often chronicled the American experience on a grand scale, an approach known to appeal to academy voters, this film was set in a Welsh mining town. “It didn’t matter,” Scorsese argues. “It’s about a family and hard-working people and coming of age. Universal.”

And Welles, the boy wonder who also co-wrote and starred in what many consider the greatest American film?

“Yeah, but ... maybe they didn’t like Orson Welles. Maybe he insulted some people. I don’t know.... ... He’s 25 and he was brash,” says Scorsese, who has described himself at times as “a pain in the neck.”

You almost get the impression that he endorses the vote putting Welles and his movie in their place.

“No, not really,” Scorsese sets that straight. “I prefer ‘Kane’ over ‘Valley.’ ”

By 1997, he was saying, “Oscar time is over for me. The films that I could have been cited for have been done.”

As for this year ...

His brain trust had a strategy session shortly after the Golden Globes, where “The Aviator” won best picture. The film had not yet gotten its 11 Oscar nominations (and Scorsese’s fifth for direction), but it was clear they’d be in the running. Among those in on the conference call were his agent, John Lesher; the film’s main producer, Graham King; and Miramax’s Weinstein, whose role this time was principally that of co-distributor -- no one might have survived any more on-the-set fights over elephants.

They also needed to avoid a replay of “Gangs’ ” awards campaign, when ads touted an essay supposedly written by multiple-Oscar-winning director Robert Wise -- a former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences -- declaring Scorsese’s film “both a remarkable movie in its own right and in many ways a summation of his entire body of work.” The problem was, a Miramax publicist had written the rave. Though they could protest all they wanted that such ghost puffing had gone on before, there went their chances. When the true authorship was disclosed, it prompted “dismay, anger and outrage” among Oscar voters, the academy president said then.

This year, Scorsese “raised a few questions, that’s all” as he listened to the planning for a much better film, “The Aviator,” by the people who live for this time of year.

“As far as the politics, war strategy ... the climate in Hollywood, the temperature, I have no idea,” he says. “Even when I was living there I had no idea.”

In an ideal world, they’d decide these things like some classical music auditions, where candidates perform behind a curtain, so “other factors” don’t sway votes. But if you follow Hollywood tea leaf readers, so many “story lines” come into play here that have little to do with whose work is best: Marty will win because Clint’s already got one; Clint will win because Marty, for all those events he attends, is indeed an outsider; or that voters will split tickets, opting for “Aviator” as best pic and Clint as director.

Your head can spin trying to figure out who got too much buzz too early, so the momentum has to swing against them, or who will benefit in the end by protests of the assisted suicide angle in “Million Dollar Baby” or whether there will be a “sympathy vote” for Marty, for those times he’s had to hear someone else’s name called out.

That talk especially worries Scorsese, who says, “You don’t do mercy things. You don’t give awards for that.” He knows it happens -- he directed “The Color of Money,” which gave voters a chance to make up for past slights of Paul Newman. But that sort of pitch can backfire. “People don’t like to be told what to do,” he notes. “To be told ‘This man should get this one ... because we have the past 30 years.’ Well, ‘Don’t tell us how to behave,’ and I totally understand. Yet ...”

You can’t win, in other words.

But some things are changing, in interesting little ways.

The night of the DGA awards, when Clint got the better of him, Scorsese went back to his room at the Hilton and the TV was showing “Raging Bull,” his film that’s 24th on the AFI top 100 but which got beat at the Oscars by “Ordinary People” and another actor-turned-director, Robert Redford. In the past, Scorsese has insisted that he never watches his old stuff. If there’s a screening, he’s out the door. If it’s on the tube, change the channel. This time he didn’t.

“I saw some scenes I hadn’t seen for years,” he says, and while he naturally “felt some things were not quite right,” and pondered fixes, he liked some of his work. He saw how much was going on in the frame at the Copacabana, the double-breasted suits, the women’s hair, the flurry of violence when there’s a fight, the density of it all. “It suddenly looked,” he said, “like something real special.”

It also struck him that, with “The Aviator,” his style may be mellowing, in almost a “quietly elegant way.” He used to say he couldn’t care less if people identified with his “really negative characters.”

This time, the whole idea was to get them caring about a man best known as a freakish hermit. Scorsese held back his camera too -- not in the flying scenes, where he did his virtuoso thing, but to create wordless drama, as when Hughes stares at a doorknob, imagining its germs.

Scorsese really gushes, though, when he gets on the directing of

“God, he’s a screen presence, right?” Scorsese says. “His personality is there in each shot and the way he paces a movie.... His films seem to have taken on his persona of the quiet power, of his face, the elegance of his slow moves. I must say this goes way back to ...”

With that, Scorsese heads off into the style of the silent film cowboy William S. Hart and how another onetime actor, Frank Borzage, won the first Academy Award for directing, for 1927-28 for ...

Relaxation

His fondest memory of the night “GoodFellas” was up for six Oscars is of how he was able to relax by the time they reached the big awards. His film had lost all categories but Joe Pesci’s best supporting actor, so there was no chance they’d call his name and make him go up there, where he was sure to forget to thank someone, like in those nightmares where he’s never prepared. That was one time he didn’t feel his heart pound as they opened the envelope. Odds are it won’t be so easy tonight. His daughter has started getting envelopes from New York’s private schools and the news in those is good.

But whenever he takes off now, Francesca asks why, and when he returns she asks, “Did you get your reward?”

They went through that when he got back from England, where BAFTA gave its directing honor to hometown boy Mike Leigh for “Vera Drake.”

“She says, ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ ” Scorsese relates, “you got plenty upstairs.”

“Yes, I know, sweetie. It’s OK.”