Hollywood's New Yorker

The Making of Martin Scorsese

Marc Raymond

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781438445724, 9781438445717
• eBook ISBN: 9781438445731
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

When Martin Scorsese finally won an Academy Award in 2007, for The Departed, it was widely viewed as the crowning achievement of a remarkable film career. But what it also represented was an acceptance by Hollywood of a man who became a prestigious auteur precisely because of his status as an outsider from New York. For someone with a high-culture reputation like Scorsese's, this middlebrow sign of respectability was not about cultural standing; rather, it was about using and even sacrificing his distinctive outsider status for a greater share of industry authority within the world of Hollywood. In Hollywood's New Yorker, Marc Raymond offers a fresh look at Scorsese's career in relation to the critical and social environment of the past fifty years. He traces Scorsese's career and films through his association with various cultural institutions, from his role as a student and instructor at New York University, to his move to Hollywood and his relationship with the studio system, to his relationship with prestigious institutions like the Museum of Modern Art. This sociological approach to film authorship provides analysis of previously overlooked Scorsese projects, particularly his documentary work, and gives importance to the role his extracurricular activities in the film preservation movement have played in the rise of his reputation. Hollywood's New Yorker places Scorsese and his films firmly within the various time periods of his career and compares the director with his peers, from fellow New Yorkers like Brian De Palma and Woody Allen to New Hollywood movie brats such as Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg. The result is a complete picture of Scorsese and the post–World War II American film culture he has both shaped and been shaped by.

1

Scorsese and the University

[The first film class] was a three-hour course, once a week, called “The History of Motion Pictures, Television and Radio.” Most of the kids took the class because they thought they wouldn't have to do anything much except watch films and get two credits for it. But Haig was brutal! He would talk so fast—even faster than me—and he described everything in great detail from the very beginning…. Haig would come on stage, hit you with a lecture for one-and-a-half hours, then show a film. Once he showed Stroheim's Greed and a student asked why there was no music. Back came the answer, “Do you think this is a show? Get the hell out!” He would weed people out, semester after semester. The idea was to be as serious about it as possible—serious in the sense that you could argue, laugh and joke about the films, but you really had to be there for the love of cinema.

—Martin Scorsese¹

ONE OF THE GOALS OF THIS BOOK is to analyze Scorsese's films and his career beyond the formal features of his work, and an examination of his relation to academic institutions is a fruitful place to begin. The reception and mediation of Scorsese's cultural work within academic and popular circles can be traced back to this university connection. But the university also offers an opportunity to examine Scorsese within a very different environment than the profit-driven world of Hollywood where he would eventually work for the majority of his career. Pierre Bourdieu has analyzed the field of cultural production as comprising two subfields: “restricted production, in which the producers produce for other producers, and the field of large-scale production, which is symbolically excluded and discredited.”² In Scorsese's case, this division among the two subfields is represented geographically: he attended New York University from 1960 to 1965 and worked part-time as an instructor until 1970, when he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in Hollywood. This part of Scorsese's biography is emphasized within the literature, especially NYU's role as an intellectual breeding ground. James Cole Potter acknowledges NYU as a prestige institution and reiterates this romantic, auteurist discourse, describing how at NYU Scorsese developed “an artistic sensibility from which he has not wavered.”³ Ultimately, Potter's lack of detail and examination in the comment reflects his broader aims of textual analysis over context, a recurring trend in Scorsese literature. This chapter illuminates the complex relationship between Scorsese and the university, as well as between the university and Hollywood. With this goal in mind, different questions need to be addressed. What was the reputation of NYU at the time? Did this help establish Scorsese's reputation in a way that would not have been possible if Scorsese had been a graduate of a West Coast institution such as Francis Ford Coppola or George Lucas? Potter's statement about NYU's prestige certainly makes sense retrospectively, and Scorsese's “New York-ness” has been important in the making of his critical reputation, but was this the case at the time? Can Bourdieu's concepts of restricted and large-scale production be mapped onto NYU and Hollywood in the unproblematic way that has been so often implied within the literature? And finally, how do these questions impact on the way Scorsese's filmmaking activities at NYU are understood?

Scorsese entered NYU in 1960, eventually becoming a film major and continuing on to complete a master's degree. Scorsese's filmmaking career began with his work at this institution: the short films What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (1963) and It's Not Just You, Murray! (1964), the feature Who's That Knocking at My Door (a.k.a. J. R. and I Call First) (1966–1969), and the collective student documentary Street Scenes 1970 (1970). The current availability of these titles differs significantly, and these differences are telling. Who's That Knocking at My Door is the only one of the titles with a wide release on DVD. The short films have had limited home video runs and are available for rental on 16mm through Kino International (an art cinema distributor) and for screening at such institutions as the George Eastman House in Rochester. They have also become available in pirated form on such Internet venues as YouTube. Street Scenes 1970, however, is a very difficult film to see. There is no video rental distribution at all. The accessibility of the film through the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is restricted by Scorsese himself because it is part of his own personal collection. Because of this limited access and associations with art cinema distribution, many are tempted to consider Scorsese's university career as operating within the subfield of restricted production in which symbolic power takes precedence over economics. And this has certainly been how NYU has been positioned within the cultural field, an association from which Scorsese has also benefited. However, this assumption needs to be examined more closely. How was this rhetoric around NYU established, and how accurate is this portrait of NYU as distinct from the more industry-oriented programs of the West Coast?

New York University in the 1960s

Part of this image of NYU rests on its geographical location away from Hollywood. Its association with the East Coast and especially New York City has been perceived as more authentic culturally than the artificiality of Los Angeles as represented by Hollywood, the place where, to quote Alvy Singer from the quintessential New Yorker Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977), “the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light.” The economic power of Hollywood as a field of large-scale production serves to reduce its cultural and symbolic capital while increasing the prestige of those institutions and individuals most distanced from it. Here, the economic hierarchy is reversed. In an article on Scorsese at NYU, Allan Arkush, who was one of Scorsese's students in 1969–1970, at first confirms Potter's assessment of NYU as an artistic rather than industry training ground, stating, “I was a very, very serious film student. The cinema was not fun, it was art. If it was entertaining, it was frivolous and my days of frivolous movie-going were behind me.”⁴ Scorsese's own recollections quoted at the start of the chapter regarding the head of the school, Haig Manoogian, support Arkush's comments on the “seriousness” of NYU at the time. Anecdotes involving the poverty of the school's equipment further enhanced this reputation of NYU as an institution of art over industry.⁵ This coexistence of serious intent and mechanical impoverishment positioned NYU as closer to anticommercial filmmaking (documentary, experimental) than the Hollywood industry.

But Arkush's article then makes the point that Scorsese as an instructor helped to change the situation at NYU, both in terms of the school's equipment and in terms of what was regarded as worthy of study.⁶ Arkush recalls Scorsese helping to lead a student protest for better equipment and “better” courses, one of which was “American Movies,” taught by Scorsese himself. Arkush describes this course with Scorsese in very loving terms, stating that “those Tuesday afternoon classes changed my view of movies forever. I went to work for Roger Corman, because the films screened in Marty's class helped me see the kind of movies I wanted to make.”⁷ Arkush has more than forty director credits to his name over the past thirty plus years, the large majority of them for network television series. Another student of Scorsese's, Ezra Sacks, spent years in Hollywood working as a screenwriter. Three of these screenplays were produced: the Universal film FM (John A. Alonzo, 1978); the United Artists feature A Small Circle of Friends (Rob Cohen, 1980); and the Goldie Hawn comedy Wildcats (Michael Ritchie, 1986). Thus, in addition to “auteurs” such as Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, and Jim Jarmusch, NYU has also produced individuals who have felt comfortable working anonymously within the industry. Furthermore, both Arkush and Sacks have cited Scorsese as a primary inspiration for them and their filmmaking careers. NYU's actual legacy, like that of most film schools, is more mixed in its focus on artistic and industrial issues than its reputation would suggest.⁸

The actual course catalogue NYU offered, circa 1970, shows a mixture of art and industry, as well as a mix of filmmaking practice and theory. NYU featured an undergraduate program as well as two separate programs at the graduate level: a production-centered program administered through the Institute of Film and Television, and a scholarly and critical program administered through the Graduate School of the Arts and Sciences. The graduate program in production listed five objectives, two of which are fairly compatible with the image of the school as one focused on aesthetics: “To provide students the opportunity to develop their creative talent through intensive class experiences and actual production experience” and “to provide lectures and seminars in aesthetic, historical and critical studies so that students may be aware of the best of the past and present as it may be applicable to the future.” But the objectives also include other factors besides artistic expression. The program guide states that “entrepreneurial competence” is needed, which is why the studies “will provide students with the basic knowledge to deal creatively with professional structures and procedures.”⁹ This explicitly stated emphasis on the pragmatic details of working in the industry places NYU, despite perceptions, as a rather typical film school: emphasizing artistic expression, but stressing that this can be achieved within the industry. This is exactly the path that Scorsese himself has followed and all of this is not merely coincidental. As Arkush states, Scorsese as an instructor at NYU went a long way toward integrating the study and appreciation of popular cinema into the curriculum. It is important, of course, not to fall into the trap of seeing this strictly in terms of Scorsese's individual influence. By the late 1960s, the auteur theory had begun to influence critical taste within the United States, primarily through the work of Andrew Sarris, who wrote weekly articles in the Village Voice, published his book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions (1968), and taught courses at New York universities (mostly at Columbia University but briefly at NYU as well). But Scorsese was part of this legitimizing function, representing a certain generational shift within the NYU community.

Arkush's article makes it clear that when he began as a film student, the great divide between high art and mass culture was firmly in place. Scorsese's comments confirm that this was the attitude many of the senior instructors in the faculty, including his mentor, Manoogian, adopted, who dismissed an early Scorsese essay on The Third Man as being “just a thriller.”¹⁰ Scorsese also acknowledges the influence of the cultural scene happening around him and the adversarial relationship between this new taste formation and the critical stance of the NYU faculty:

At this time the new American Underground was emerging, and since our campus was in Greenwich Village we had access to all of these films. Jonas Mekas was writing his Village Voice column every week, while Andrew Sarris was deploying the politique des auteurs, imported from the French Cahiers du cinema, in Film Culture magazine. Then Movie magazine appeared from Britain with its list of great directors, and there were Hawks and Hitchcock at the top. The professors were totally against these critical views, but what we learned was that the new critics liked John Wayne movies, but they weren't just John Wayne movies, but John Ford and Howard Hawks working through him. What had impressed us as good when we were young had impressed other people too.¹¹

The question one may ask, then, is how did Scorsese function within this environment whose tastes are seemingly at odds with his own? Manoogian actually produced his first feature film, and he was even brought in as an instructor in 1969, a position he held until he left for Hollywood in the fall of 1970. In Bourdieu's terms, how did Scorsese accumulate this level of symbolic power within this institution, especially given these differences in cultural taste?

Student Filmmaking and the New York Underground

Here a third critical grouping needs to be introduced: the New American underground cinema, which operates much closer to Bourdieu's idea of a restricted field of cultural production than the university. As Bourdieu explains, academic institutions, while certainly operating outside of the field of large-scale production in artistic endeavors, can also be seen as a hindrance to a field defining itself as truly autonomous or disinterested. In fact, “the absence of any academic training or consecration may be considered a virtue.”¹² Training in filmmaking at the university level implies a certain “apprenticeship” for the mainstream industry rather than a concern with film as an aesthetic experience. Student films are not aimed at the public at large, but yet they appear to lack the autonomy of an avant-garde practice such as the New American Cinema led by Jonas Mekas, in which opposition to the values of the mainstream cinema is explicit. Like student filmmaking, there is an emphasis on the personal, but the personal filmmaking of the underground defines itself negatively, as being anything but Hollywood: “Our movies come from our hearts—our little movies, not the Hollywood movies.”¹³ No such explicit rejection is seen at NYU, especially after the influence of Scorsese himself as instructor.

Furthermore, the place of the avant-garde within American film culture and its various institutions during the 1960s is unique. Experimental art frequently relies on cultural institutions as well as government funding to sustain itself in the case of film as well as other cultural forms. However, beginning in the post–World War II period and continuing into the 1970s, MoMA denied support to avant-garde film in New York. Additionally, after its formation in 1965, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) similarly rejected experimental cinema. This is despite the fact that these institutions were in general funding abstract, noncommercial artistic expression. As Peter Decherney argues, although the NEA, MoMA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and other institutions devoted themselves to funding avant-garde art in every other medium, with the cinematic medium they supported Hollywood film.¹⁴ Through this exclusion, the restricted field of cultural production represented by avant-garde film was formed, however “accidentally.” Because the New American Cinema group and other avant-garde collectives and individuals could not rely on institutional funding, they had to define themselves as anti-institutional. Because of the logic of restricted fields of production, the unintended result was an increase in this avant-garde's cultural capital. This is because the avant-garde has always had a highly problematic relationship with cultural institutions as Decherney points out: “Can the avant-garde have a museum at all? Or do museums necessarily rob art of its avant-garde status?”¹⁵ Indeed, once an archive for experimental cinema was founded at Anthology Film Archives in 1970, the prestige of the avant-garde as anti-institutional was lowered, and through the changing structure of the New Hollywood the avant-garde found a home in the more traditional institutions that it was previously denied. The fact that this anti-institutional stance of the filmic avant-garde in the 1960s was always a fiction, that Mekas and company constantly sought institutional support and created an institutional structure through patronage, is ultimately not the issue. What is important is to understand the multiple fields of film production at this time, how they operated, and how Scorsese is situated within this culture.

Scorsese mentions this New American Cinema group in the context of the new film culture of the 1960s. It is a curiosity of this time and place that Sarris and Mekas w...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Martin Scorsese and Film Culture
• 1. Scorsese and the University
• 2. The Formation of Scorsese's Critical Reputation
• 3. Scorsese and the Fall of the Hollywood Renaissance
• 4. Histories of Cinema and Cinematic Histories: Scorsese as Historian
• 5. What is Scorsese?: Scorsese's Role in Contemporary Postmodern Culture
• Conclusion: The Next Scorsese (?): The Future of Artistic Reputations in American Cinema
• Notes
• Sources