This book started to become thinkable in 2006, when after some forty years of work on over seventy films Robert De Niro gifted his working papers to the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin. De Niro is indisputably one of the greatest film actors of the second half of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and his archive, which was opened to researchers in April 2009 after the extraordinary quantity of materials had been catalogued and indexed, opened up new, more fully informed ways of thinking about how screenplays are written and worked with, how the film text is created, and the role of the actor as writer—not only in directly devising the lines, and as a co-creator of the film text, but also as somebody who literally leaves traces of themselves on the film; indeed, these traces are the film, or are at least large parts of it.
These multiple ways in which an actor writes a film have not been studied enough: partly because prior to De Niro’s generous donation there were no such archival materials available of remotely comparable significance, partly because De Niro is unique in the range, ways and extent to which he participates in these processes, but also because film studies has tended to think of the film actor as something passive, as something to be looked at, or as a star or celebrity, rather than as somebody who is actively making conscious decisions at every moment about what will appear on film. It is notable, for example, that the first edition of Richard Dyer’s Stars (1979), the most widely cited academic study of film stars, makes no mention of De Niro; perhaps not surprisingly, since the three parts of the study look at ‘Stars as a Social Phenomenon’, ‘Stars as Images’ and ‘Stars as Signs’. The second edition (1998) contains a single reference to him in a supplementary chapter by Paul McDonald, under the resonantly suggestive subtitle ‘Stardom as Labour’—but only to dismiss (quite rightly) the ‘incoherence’ or inadequacy of remarks by other commentators to the effect that De Niro and Al Pacino are ‘the finest actors of their generation’, or that ‘film acting is very complex and psychological, and that people like Pacino and De Niro work in complex and psychological ways’.1
The problem with such simplistic constructions is not merely their excessive generalisation, but that they work at the level of affect: De Niro’s work appears complex and psychological, therefore he must be working in complex and psychological ways, but we don’t know what these are and so we can say no more. Consequently, in journalistic accounts of the actor there is a tendency to fall back on oft-repeated anecdotes about the lengths to which he would go in, for example, transforming his body while preparing to play the older Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. The archive can help to change all this, because in its most straightforward sense it represents De Niro’s decision to archive his process. It allows the researcher to look at this process in all its complexity, and how it developed and changed as he worked with different screenwriters and directors, beginning with his first feature film The Wedding Party, filmed in 1963 and directed by Brian De Palma. Since then he has worked with many of the world’s finest directors: apart from his close relationship with Martin Scorsese, with whom he has made eight films—the latest, The Irishman (2019), being released as this book was being completed—he has worked with an astonishing variety of other directors, including Elia Kazan, Roger Corman, Quentin Tarantino, Bernardo Bertolucci, Sergio Leone, Barry Levinson, Ron Howard, Penny Marshall and Harold Ramis.
The screenwriters he has worked with are equally illustrious, including Paul Schrader, Harold Pinter and David Mamet. The screenplays of almost all of his films are held in the archive, frequently accompanied by correspondence with directors, writers and other collaborators. The archive also retains many of his costumes and props—the material traces of an actor’s performance. We are able to see his reading lists and look at his notes on original source material and the various forms of annotation he makes on the screenplays themselves, all of which reveal his understanding of character and process. We can see how he develops that working process and how he learns and changes from film to film as he works with different directors and screenwriters on different roles.
The archive raises questions about the nature of the screenplay text and the film text, and the actor’s work. It deals with what is or appears ‘authentic’, ‘real’ or ‘natural’, and the work that a performer does to ensure that what they do on screen, or what the audience sees on screen, has the maximum dramatic and emotional effect on its audience. Actors do not only interpret a screenplay text and translate it to the screen: in an important sense they embody that text and become it as it transmogrifies into a different medium; they leave traces of themselves behind. The means by which De Niro prepares for this may sometimes be improvisational, but they are never accidental. They include the ability to write dialogue; to think about the way dialogue is stressed or spoken; to think about what other actors might be working with, and how; and to undertake different forms of textual analysis, often at a very intense theoretical level. As long ago as 1988, when the archive was unavailable to scholars and this aspect of the actor’s work was almost entirely hidden from view, James Naremore could accurately describe De Niro as ‘a sophisticated theorist, a man who seems drawn to self-reflexive performances’.2 The archive makes this aspect of his work newly visible: he analyses texts with the same level of sophistication as a literary critic or a film theorist, but he is also a historian and researcher, using many kinds of primary and secondary materials to find ways he can as an actor interpret, embody and articulate the text.
We write as scholars of the screenplay rather than performance. We are looking at how De Niro interprets a script and realises it in a different medium. And this has suggested useful analogies, such as translation studies or microhistory, on which screenplay studies can draw and through which it can be extended. We are looking at the screenplay not so much as a concept or a ‘screen idea’3 but as a material object, with a history and a purpose that was used by one person to realise their role in the film.
At the same time as De Niro’s archive was going through the process of painstaking cataloguing to prepare it for the use of researchers, a disparate group of scholars was beginning to question the marginalisation of the screenplay in both film and literary studies. Between 2007 and 2010 this group, in addition to publishing their own monographs and articles, established the Screenwriting Research Network, organised an ongoing series of annual international conferences, founded the Journal of Screenwriting, and a little later set up the Palgrave ‘Studies in Screenwriting’ book series in which the present volume appears. The authors of this book have both been extensively involved with these various activities, but one of the things that struck us most forcibly when researching De Niro’s archive at the HRC is that there has been remarkably little discussion about what happens to the screenplay for the actors: the people who in some cases (certainly De Niro’s case) work on it most, whose reading of the screenplay can often determine whether or not the film gets made at all, and certainly will help to determine how it is made. The archive is a manifesto that allows us to look at what one particular actor has done in order to make the performances he has made, and it asks important questions about how films come to be, and about how we understand them. In this book we would like to pick up that manifesto, and work with it.
These two contemporaneous developments—the establishment of the De Niro archive and the emergence of screenwriting studies as a new field of research—form the foundations on which the present book is built. In Chapter 2 we look at various theoretical approaches to the screenplay, including as a ‘boundary object’—a flexibly heuristic device for thinking about the multiple uses of screenplays and the many different kinds of practitioner who may use the ‘same’ screenplay for their own particular reasons. Not only screenplays, but also the actor and the archive, can all be thought of as boundary objects, intersecting productively with multiple users and for multiple purposes. We also look at the implications the existence of the archive presents for the study of De Niro as an actor, and for screenwriting studies, with a renewed focus on the materiality of the text and the role of the actor in embodying it and translating it from page to screen. In Chapter 3 we look at De Niro’s formation as an actor, and how his approach to both acting and the use of screenplays was influenced by his formative artistic and intellectual experiences.
In these two chapters, we use examples from many different archived screenplays to illustrate particular points; in the remaining chapters we examine De Niro’s annotations of particular screenplays in greater detail, with our criteria for inclusion being simply the most interesting texts, or those that exemplify the most interesting questions. Archives are to some extent processes of chance and contingency: things are discovered in there, and the scenes we have chosen to discuss in detail are either exemplary or distinctive. We aim to reveal the development and refinement of De Niro’s practice; and if we accept practice as research, in the manner of current emphases in academic research in the humanities, then De Niro is the most profound kind of researcher into the n...