Mean Streets with Miriam Bale

Starting the Scorsese miniseries

0:00Blank Jack with Griffin and David. Blank Jack with Griffin and David. Don't know what to say or to expect. All you need to know is that the name of the show is Blank Jack.

0:21We're not paying because this guy, this guy's a fucking podcast. But I ain't seen nothing. And we don't pay podcasts. Podcast, I'm a pod. Yes. What's a podcast? A podcast? What's a podcast?

0:34There's a fourth character, Griffin. This is a disaster. Ben, take that line. I don't know. What's a podcast? You can't call me a podcast. I can't. No. I'll give you a podcast. I don't know. Wow. I guess this is not a movie with like, should we all just clap for ourselves? That's really good. So good. It's a little scene lit. What? What, David? What? No, I'm thinking about Mean Streets. I'm thinking about how I guess, yeah, it's not, I mean, it has some of the, the inner dialogue is very iconic, but the dialogue is iconic just because it's that. It's all them going like, you know, like they're just all yelling at each other.

1:14There's a lot of iconic dialogue. I mean, IMDb, of course, points out a repeated line. What's the matter with you? What's the matter with you? I just like brackets. Repeated line. That's not even what it's like. What's the matter with you? Honorable men go with honorable. Honorable podcasters go with honorable podcasters. I don't like this attitude of, I picked the wrong thing. This was, this was fun. This was a little act out. Attitude? I'm just looking at the Mean Streets lines. It's funny because they repeat the word over and over again. You know what the queen said? If I had balls, I'd be king. I don't remember that.

1:46This is our first Scorsese session. And I got to tell you. Yes. Disaster. No. Off the rails. Perfect. I, watching this movie, it's been a minute. I am feeling so comforted. If a Ben movie. Oh, that we're doing this?

Marketing and Little Italy

2:00It's not just that it's a Ben movie, but it's reminding me of growing up in northern New Jersey. Well, hey. And the characters that I used to know. And I'm just, I'm thrilled to dive back in. Are you telling me Mean Streets is autobiographical to your life? Not at all.

2:16I just like that this movie, I was, I was, I was watching some of the special features on the Criterion disc. And there is like a promotional featurette. Um, that is, let me see what the name of it is. It's called, uh, uh, Martin Scorsese colon back on the block. And it almost feels like a National Geographic documentary. They're like New York City, City of Dreams, or some of the wealthiest live. But it also has little neighborhoods. And one of those little neighborhoods is called Little Italy.

2:50And what do you believe it? A filmmaker came from there named Martin Scorsese. And now he's back on the block. And it's like Scorsese explaining what his childhood was to create a frame of reference for the movie. You know, that like, the marketing of this film was like, this guy came from a place you can't even imagine. These people that he grew up with, you'd never seen them in movies before. That was the vibe, right? Yeah. It's just funny because like, there's lots of neighborhoods in New York that, uh, were very, very, very Italian.

3:23And some of them were little. Well, only one of them gets to be a little Italy. It's rude. Yeah. I remember my parents saying Little Italy once. And I was like, what do you mean Little Italy? And they're like, it's this neighborhood that's kind of informally called Little Italy. And I was like, why? And they're like, because the Italians live there. And somewhere I was like, aren't they? You put it that way. It sounds patronizing. Absolutely. I was like, what do you mean? You got your little Italy. And they're like, no, but it's where the Italian restaurants are. I'm like, I've been to Italian restaurants in other parts of New York City. But this was a little neighborhood.

3:53Good. You can talk, uh, a friend of the show who's on the show. You can, you can jump in. Guest. Guest is the term we usually use. Yes. Yeah. Hey. Nice. Do you like Little Italy? I, I, do I like Little Italy? Yeah. I mean, sure. I mean, I would say the same when I lived here, when I lived in New York. I liked Little Italy, except for the festival. The festival. The festival's tough. It's quite annoying. And it's, it's kind of the best part of this movie is it's sort of frustration at. Ah, fucking San Gennaro.

4:24Yeah, we're talking about the San Gennaro festival. Yeah. Um. Which takes over probably like three, four blocks. It's just, it's really just a couple blocks. Yeah, it's Mulberry and Mott probably between like now and. Well, Little Italy is quite small. Well, Little Italy now is, right, is like a historically protected like two to three block thing. Right. Because no Italian, not that many Italians actually live there anymore. It's all Chinatown. Sure. And then also like Soho and, yeah. And some restaurants. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, there's just those couple blocks where there's still the, you know, you want

4:55to pay a lot of money for red sauce, even though there's a million other places you can get red sauce. Yeah. Right there if you want to. It feels so touristy these days. Yes. But I mean, it's still kind of fun. Sure. Get some moots, you know. Wait, I saw an interview, um, it was before this, uh, with Grisezi and he was talking about, um, he, it was important for him to set it at the festival because it was about the malevolent nature of a celebration. Oh, fuck yeah. See, he gets it. That's also a very New York thing where anytime there's a celebration like that, you're like,

5:26this city can't handle this right now. This is getting in the way of too many things. We're not a town that can stop and shut down and be like, today is just about San Gennaro. Didn't you live in an apartment for like a month during San Gennaro? Friend of the show, Ray Tentori. Yeah. Yes. Uh, when I was going through a breakup, I was couch surfing. Right. And our friend Ray was gracious enough to let me stay in his apartment in Little Italy. And it felt like, oh, this is like a miracle. What a nice place to stay. He's going to be out of town working. This is perfect. How, I couldn't have a better setup.

5:58I realized why he had left town. Because. Because the festival. The festival was quite loud. And there, it just felt like there was a floodlight directly outside of the window where the bed was. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. There was, there was like a week or two of you coming into records very frazzled. For sure. Yes. This is. Yes.

Podcast Fellas introduction

6:17Blank Check with Griffin and Dave. Thank you. I'm Griffin. You're welcome. What's your nickname? Come on. What's my nickname? Griff the Grip. Oh, we're using my, my sportscaster nickname. No, he needs a new one. Yeah. Get a new one. Griffey, Griffey Parm. Yeah, sure. My name's Griffey Parm. That's actually really good. Yeah. I'm here with my co-host, David Spaghetti. I feel like we can pass that out. That's actually a little offensive.

6:48David Spag. David Gabagool Sims. I think David Spaghetti is really sticky. No, I think it's, I think it's David Baggs because he's got bags on his side. Oh, that's actually pretty good. What if it's David Baggs-o-Spaghetti? No, I, I, I'm not a big spaghetti guy. It's not like it's like, oh, David, he's always eating his spaghetti. He's always slurping up spaghetti. David, what is the matter with you? It's not about what you like. It's about honoring little Italy. Of course. David Baggs. I love David Baggs. What is the matter? David Spaggs, I would say.

7:18It's a podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success. It's early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want. And sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce baby. This is a mini series on the films of Martin Scorsese. And of course it is called Podcast Fellas. I think it's the best title we've ever come up with. Podcast Fellas. Podcast Fellas. One word. Yeah. Rolls off the tongue trippingly. Do you think we should all just, the cover should just be us, you know? Yeah. Arms crossed. Arms crossed or? Yeah. Yes. It should be all of us back to back to back.

7:49Arms crossed. But I want to be Ellen Burstyn and Alice doesn't live here anymore. Cool. And I want to be the clockwork thing in Hugo. Yeah. The automaton. Yeah. That's what I want to be. Yeah. And he's writing down the name David Spaghetti. That's what the automaton's doing with its pen. All right. Well, if we're calling it out, then I want to be De Niro and Casino with those big sunglasses. Oh, sure. Sure. Yeah. That'd be good. Maybe I want to be Sharon Stone in Casino, actually. Maybe we should just all be in Casino. Maybe we should just be Casino. Well, I like Pesci in the Casino.

8:19When I was a kid and Casino came out. Mm-hmm. And I was nine. Mm-hmm. Or, yeah, nine. Ninety-five, right? Yeah. And I was like, well, I know Casino has dice. And so I really appreciated that Joe Pesci was holding a pair of dice on the poster. Oh, sure. Sure. Because I was like, what's this movie about? Dice? Like, they make dice? They roll dice? If I'm paying $8, I better get dice. I don't want to just see cards. Um, I just remember my mom being like, it's really violent. And I'm like, why? And like, aren't they rolling, like, playing board games? They roll the dice and they win or they lose? Aren't they playing?

8:50Well, he has dice! He's literally holding a pair of fucking dice on the poster. How violent can Gatsi get? Exactly. We'll get to that in some months from now. But watching Casino in 4K is quite an experience. Because you can see, uh, that Joe Pesci's face is literally being pulled back by strings. He looks crazy in that movie. That whole era of Pesci, he like, wouldn't get a facelift. No. But would put, like, cables. Rubber bands. Yes. Yeah. Underneath a wig. And all those movies now, like, uh, uh, my cousin Vinny's the same way.

9:24Were you watching? You're like, what the fuck is going on with his face? We were never supposed to see this this clearly. Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. Who's our guest? We have to introduce our guest. Or are we talking about the movie first?

The importance of Mean Streets

9:36We have to say that this is an episode on Mean Streets. Mean Streets! The Guarantur. Oh, absolutely. Yes. A phenomenon I would maybe call the second first film. Uh, sure. You know what I'm saying? Your first real debut. Right. You make other movies, but this is your debut. Like, Cameron with the Terminator or... Yeah. And like Shyamalan with Sixth Sense. Right. Right. Where this is the first... Most people on the street, if you ask them, would say, this is the first film, but it's also because this is the movie where everything clicks and the rest of the career is off to the races.

10:07We're talking about Mean Streets. Wait, is Boxcar Bertha... It doesn't count. It does. I mean, of course it counts. Boxcar Bertha. It definitely counts. Yeah. But like, you know, this is kind of also his debut. You know what I mean? I mean, I think Who's That Knocking is like very him. It is. That kind of is the spanner and the wrench. Yeah. I mean, some of those... That's not the argument. Yeah. The like party scenes and stuff. You know, I would make an argument, even more than being the debut of a like Scorsese style,

10:38it is. I mean, especially with the movement and the music, which we'll get into. But like, I actually, this is a, this is more of a wild take. I'm excited to hear this. But I think this is the debut of De Niro. Yes. Oh, yes. That's the big thing. Because he made a lot of movies before. He'd been in stuff, but not, right, not in any significant way. And I think it's almost accidental. Yes. Because like, you know, he was maybe going to play Charlie or like wanted to. And then the only thing left was playing this role.

11:08And it wasn't what he was going towards before. Before that, he was like, you know, in the De Palma movies. And, you know, he's this guy. Which are so experimental. Yeah. Yeah. But he's also kind of like a cipher. He's always this like weird creep. Yeah. And then all of a sudden he comes and he's this like crazy Italian-American. And that's who he is. It's not what he becomes known for. This performance is kind of unique in his career. It undeniably is like what makes him stick. Yeah. Did he ever play like this kind of wild card?

11:40Because it's like the Untouchables or whatever where he's over the top. That's different. It's different. He's gone big before and he's played like charismatic before. But I do think the wild card thing is kind of unique. And it's like off of this Coppola, Kasim, and Godfather Part 2. Which is more what we think of. Yeah. It's the focus. It has to turn. Right. There's a scariness. But it's quiet. It's coiled. I've never seen The Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight. Okay. I was hoping you'd bring that up. Okay. Because I feel like I'm one of 30 people who have seen this.

12:11It's like a couple years before.

Guest Miriam Bale joins

12:13Let's say our guest today is Miriam Bale. Maybe breaking the record for longest time in between appearances. But incredibly excited we could get you on this. Because I feel like you have a lot of early Scorsese context, takes. Sure. This is one of your. My guys? Yeah. Right? Yeah. You're not supposed to say that here. No. We say that here. We say that proudly here. Of course. Yeah. Um, yeah, I love him. I mean, this was like, I could, I mean, I could just get into it. This was, um, for, well, I saw Goodfellas like way too young, way too young.

12:45And like, it, it kind of changed my life in a way. But I saw Mean Streets when I was in, as I was studying film production. Okay. And this is such a, you're in film school. You love this movie. It has like lines and a bar and sheets, you know, just has all these like accessible things. It also kind of has the story of like, this, this is kind of the patron saint movie of just like, go out and just make the movie that only you can make. You know, the ethos of what this comes out of and how it does feel like the full emergence

13:19of a person. Yeah. Yeah. But even more importantly, it's sort of, I mean, it's, it's the personal film, like the, you know, the Cassavetes personal film and Cassavetes really encouraged him to make this movie because he'd made Boxcar Bertha and he was like, you're just spending a year of your life. He shat all over it. Cassavetes is so mean. I know. He said that he gave him a big hug. He was always remembered. He came in and gave him a big hug. It's so, it's, I've never forgotten it whenever I've heard, you know, cause it's, it does feel like something you would really, you know, made him make Mean Streets, right?

13:51The Cassavetes was like, you wasted a year of your life on this shit. Ben, the legendary story is that Cassavetes was a mentor of Scorsese's and he shows him Boxcar Bertha, which is like the first movie he does for hire. And he goes, congratulations, you just wasted a year of your life making a piece of shit. Damn. And then from there, basically kind of like grabs him by the lapels and says like, you need to make the movie that only you can make the personal film, the film about you, the thing that comes from you. And, and Scorsese says like that, I never would have thought.

14:23It would have been difficult for me to feel emboldened enough to prioritize Mean Streets, which we'll get into. He had spent like seven years kind of drafting and noodling on, had, had Cassavetes not said that to him. Yeah. Anyway, sorry. But it is, you know, do you think Scorsese is going to sound like, you know, come on, Vinegar Syndrome is going to put out a really nice edition of Boxcar Bertha in 15 years. This will be interesting where it is. That's right. Yeah. People will watch it and be like, oh, there's stuff here. It's not nothing. Come on, John. Give me a break. I think John said there's stuff here. It's like the actors are good. Yeah. Right, right. It's a piece of shit.

14:53It also feels like Cassavetes, like, that's what he was like as a director with actors. Like, he was a very keen psychological manipulator of knowing what's the thing I need to say to a person to get what I need out of them. And I think the subtext of that story is he knew that's the way it would fire up Scorsese to actually make the move. Right. Right, but gang who shouldn't shoot, who couldn't shoot straight, the 1971 James Coulson. Yeah. Oh, wait. I was going to say about this film. Can I finish? Finish in film school.

15:23Okay, then I'll go back. Okay. Oh, yeah, right. We were right. No, no, it's okay. I can go all the way. All the way back. All the way. So, yeah, I saw this in film school and I loved it. And I was in a sound class, Dan Olmstead, the greatest sound mixer. So I wrote a paper on this and was really interested in, like, the music and, like, and how so much of the movement was cut to music. And I was, like, so into that. And unfortunately, or fortunately, no, I think unfortunately, it led me down a path of writing

15:57about movies. Sure. It's terrible, terrible news. Yeah. And it kept going. And then also, I would say that this film is, like, a personal film, like we were saying about Cassavetes, but it's also a genre film. It's, like, and the combination of that is why this is, like, yeah, the film's, like, this is the urtex for these kind of things. It's, like, and that was the next step for me, as you guys might know, as I was here before, just listing off films from the 40s. Hell yeah. This is, I'm going to go back to that. This is, like, he was really inspired by these, like, you know, these especially Warner Brothers

16:32crime films of the 30s. He loves the Cagney movies, right? Like Roaring Twenties. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. But what if you take the plot mechanics out of it? What if it's also a Hangout movie? Yeah. No. And then, so for me, the next step for me for Scorsese is, like, he, I think he is as important as, like, a film scholar as he is a filmmaker. Like, I think, like, and a film preservationist, like, I think that that, so soon after this, I watched, like, The Personal Journey Through American Film. The best. Yeah. And then it was just, like, my life has changed.

17:04Like, I was, you know, and so that's my origin story. No, I mean, when I said it's the second first film, it's not that I, because I like Who's That Knockin' My Door a lot, and I think Boxcar Birth is interesting, but it's more that thing of, like, right, he makes kind of a traditional first film that is, like, a small, personal, focused thing. And then he makes an impersonal genre exercise. And then this is the movie where he's, like, I've figured out the entire thing. I have figured out how I can use genre to make my personal statements.

17:36Here's the style. Here's one of my key collaborators. You know, something in, it's fascinating to have this be the, like, you know, Keitel De Niro two-hander movie. It's not like those two guys don't coexist in the same movie ever again, but it does feel like there's a bit of a baton pass here. He always says, like, the three actors I had this kind of, like, primal connection with in my career were Keitel, De Niro, and DiCaprio. They're the three guys where there's just been the unspoken language.

18:08And Keitel starts out as, like, his Antoine Daniel. It's like, this is my representation on screen. This is the prism through which I'm expressing my things. And then, you know, it's one of those moments where an actor enters a movie, where a character enters a movie and a star is born definitively, inarguably, in a moment. De Niro at the bar in Jumping Jack Flash, like, changes the course of American movies. You see Scorsese watch what's happening on screen and going, like, there's shit I can do if I have this piece of technology here that I never even considered before.

18:43Well, I think his intro is also the mailbox. Yes. The, you see him. And to me, it's like, that's like you see him and it's like, I mean, let's just take a moment to appreciate how good looking he is. He is so hot in this movie. He is so hot. The haircut. Robert De Niro. Yes, incredible. Oh my God. I was obsessed with it in high school. Like, the bits. It's like Oasis. You know Oasis. Oasis is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Like, you know, on the sideburns. Yes.

19:13But it has the, like, the kind of, like, severe bang. It's so good. That's what I love about it is that it is the haircut of a guy who probably doesn't think that hard about the haircut he's getting, but he still looks like cute. A mod rocker. Yeah, exactly. And a casual. It's great. But he's so, yeah, I would say Robert De Niro, he's sort of the mascot of many black women. We love him. Well, he obviously, he's got it. He's got a type that is, you know. Miriam, do you know the Awakening story? No.

19:43I think I've told this anecdote, like, five times on the podcast because I do think it's one of the funniest things to ever happen. Okay. But, you know, Awakenings, where he plays this guy with this medical condition who was, like, frozen in his body. Yeah. Basically fully paralyzed for, like, years and years and years. And there was a scene they were shooting where Robin Williams and De Niro were in a cab, or in the back of a car, at least. And it was in the period before he has the Awakening. So here's De Niro, this incredibly focused, famously sort of intense methody actor.

20:14And he's fully, you know, frozen. And they're just driving around New York City. And this guy on the street corner is yelling stuff out. Oh, hey, Mork! Hey, De Niro! And De Niro's just locked in, you know, unconcerned. Robin Williams is, like, focused. And then the guy goes, Bobby, you still like that black pussy?

20:37Did he break? Yes. That's amazing. Yes. And Robin Williams was, like, it was the only time he ever broke. And he kind of just looked at the guy and, like, nodded.

20:47Spag. He's the best. He's the king. He's my favorite. I mean, I always shout out to his off-menu podcast appearance where they ask him, so what's your favorite appetizer? He's like, no, I don't know. Whatever they want to give me. And they're like, well, no, you have to pick. The premise of this show is your dream menu. And he's like, I'd ask the chef whatever's good. It's the best thing I've ever made. And they're like, don't you own restaurants? And he's like, yeah, just tell them to do whatever they want. Yeah. And they're like, okay, well, what about the food at your restaurant? He's like, yeah, it's good. Yeah, yeah. You guys, this is what I mean. I'm not saying this was the birth of De Niro, like, his type.

21:21I'm saying this is the birth of him as a person. Do you remember this? Because he has zero persons. Yes, Miriam. It's so fascinating. Do you remember the Who's Hotter De Niro or Pacino debate on Twitter? Do you remember that? I think I missed it. It was such a war. It was a few years ago. Yeah. And it is just one of those things where it's like, I don't know, like, pick your day, you know, like, you know, like, aren't we who you prefer? They're such different guys. They're both sexy. They're also both kind of odd. Like, they're both like these funny little guys, but they both can also kind of shock you with how, you know, beautiful they are. De Niro was more conventionally handsome.

21:53De Niro's a little more handsome. Oh, you think so. I think so. Yeah. I don't know. Because Pacino's so pretty. I think Pacino's more pretty. And Pacino's a little scary, you know? Ah. I don't know. I prefer De Niro, but I think that Pacino's beautiful. Yeah. He's gorgeous. He's so beautiful. Like, young Pacino? Yeah. I mean, I guess we're not going to talk about it. Talk about what? We're not going to talk about young Pacino? No, young Pacino in Scorsese's career. It's, you know, you got to wait for old Pacino. Ben and I just spent the weekend in Wisconsin with J.J.

22:24Birch, our researcher. That's right. And he was saying, I don't know if he made it into the dossier, because J.J. vets his information very thoroughly. But he asked me, he was like, had you ever heard this anecdote that Scorsese wanted Pacino to play Johnny Boy? Uh-huh. And Pacino just straight up turned it down? And then they don't work together, obviously, for like 40 years? I mean, like, Pacino had already been in The Godfather. So, like, it would have been, like, right. I mean, yes. Well, Pacino was supposed to be in The Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight.

22:58Oh, that's interesting. Right. And then De Niro got it because he was making The Godfather. But I hadn't heard that about for Mean Streets and Pacino, who was, who he wanted to play, which doesn't make sense at all, Jon Voight. Yes. That's crazy. Yes. That's interesting. Right. But I think that was also a little bit of, like, would that appease the studio? Right, right. Exactly. And we can look at the dossier, but, like, wait, because you mentioned it again, The Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight. I just want to ask, what is De Niro? That's in, Jerry Orbach is the star of that. Oh, my God. That's the crazy thing. This is the crazy thing.

23:29It's like, it was written for Marcello Mastrioni. That sounds pretty good. Yeah. And then he admitted towards when they were getting close to production that he couldn't speak English. Perfect. Perdone. It's the right time. So they replaced him with Jerry Orbach. Of course. We love. One to one. Yeah. I mean, Jerry Orbach makes more sense as, like, a New York, tough. Yeah. He's not Italian, but he was, you know. Yes. He was close enough. Right. It would have been weirder to have Marcello Mastrioni.

24:00Yeah, but yeah. Okay. Well, and De Niro actually plays an Italian. He plays an Italian, like a kleptomaniac Italian. Mario Trantino. Yeah. So is he silly? Like, is he kind of in more of a busy mode? So this is the weird thing is, like, I've interviewed De Niro, and I think one of the things he really hates, I mean, you know, he barely says anything in an interview, but he, I think you can tell he's annoyed with this idea that he started comedy in the 2000s with Analyze This or with, like, Midnight Run or something. Because he was doing comedy in the beginning.

24:31Right. And, like, he was doing comedy with De Palma, and this is, like, a straight-up comedy. Is it good? No, it's not. It's very bad. Right. It's so bad. Right. It's, like, very, it doesn't work. So they were thinking at first Mean Streets would be kind of, like, the gangster comedy. Sure. And they were like, oh, like, the gang who couldn't shoot straight. But then the gang who couldn't shoot straight didn't work. Right. Like, it was a failure. So at first they were like, oh, yeah, De Niro will be in, like, shorts and shooting. And, you know, when we see him, when he walks down that street in the bar, he's, like, in

25:05his boxers. So I think in the beginning he was, like, doing these kind of zany comedy roles. I mean, this is the thing. He's, like, we're talking about Little Italy, but, like, De Niro's from the village. Right. He's from, like, his artist parents. Yes. He went to the Little Red School. It's very different. He's, like, he's, like, it's so, it's, like, a couple blocks, but it's such a difference. And he talks about it. I didn't know those guys as well, like, in the Marty doc. He had proximity. He understood it. He saw these things. And he's Irish-Italian.

25:35Right. He's not full Italian. Right. He's Irish. His mom is Irish. His father is Irish-Italian. His mother is, like, a sort of Dutch-English, you know, who knows. Oh, yeah, like Waspie. And his dad was, like, a lapsed Catholic. So there was no real, like, religion in the same way. Like, it's not, like, it's not the Marty thing of, like... I mean, Marty is just, like, a child's cartoon of a little Italian-American boy. You know, with his vaguely mobbed-up dad and his mom just, like, constantly stirring a big pot of sauce.

26:06And him looking out a window with asthma. Right. And him living in a tiny apartment with a bunch of people. Right. And, like, you know, like, everyone in the neighborhood knows each other and they play stickball and shit. But there's something to De Niro. De Niro's priests. De Niro having, like, the same reference points without the same lived experiences in a way. Yeah. That I do think gives him this sort of, like, this expressive elasticity in what he can put on screen that's different than Scorsese's very, like, personal experience. Yeah. Well, I think that they're both kind of outsiders because of the whole asthma thing.

26:39So they're both kind of, like, know the thing. But I don't see either of these guys getting in big stakes, big fights. You know? No. I think they're there. Yes. They're observers. They're observers. They're insider-outsider. So that's, like, where they overlap. It's a thing Scorsese said that, well, I'm making the movie about my experiences and being this age and growing up with these people and all of this. And then he said, I think years later when he rewatched the movie, he's like, this is actually about, like, my dad and my uncle. Well, Charlie, that's his dad. Right. He's like, this isn't my lived experience. I said it in the present day.

27:09I gave it the milieu of the songs I grew up on and the outfits and the language. But actually in terms of the characters. Right. He didn't have this crisis of, like, am I too close to this criminal life and all that. Right. Like, in the same way. Right. He was, like, am I going to be a priest or a director? He wasn't. He was too little to get in trouble. But it is this thing that is a little lost time. I think you're right, Miriam, which is, like, those early De Palma movies, because what De Niro and De Palma go on to do separately are so different and loom so large, people forget that those early movies are, like, closer to, like, Matt Johnson films.

27:46That they're, like, weird sort of exercises. They're almost, like, multimedia projects. And they're really kind of using De Niro as, like, if not a purely comedic figure. It's, like, this is a guy who's just, like, boundless energy pushing boundaries. I said bound fucking twice. And then, you know, like, Mean Streets is harnessing that into a dramatic context. And then Godfather Part II, like, just sets the mold for how he's seen forever.

28:20A little bit. I feel like he was, like, a phenom. There was, obviously, Panic! at Needle Park happened pretty early. And even when people were, like, are audiences ready for this guy as a leading man? There was a type he had established in the way he could sort of hold the center and the focus and this nervy sort of unconventional protagonist that was very different than what De Niro was doing up until this point. You know, I have a question. What do you think his, like, natural accent is?

28:51Because I don't think... That's a really good question. I don't think he has one. I mean, I think it's... I think he has a voice. Yeah. And I think, like, you hear it in those... Right, right. Yeah, he talks like this. And he has, like, his kind of gravelly. And you hear it in the things. And it's, like, great. But I think that he obviously, you know, from his Italian-American family, he heard some of this in his neighborhood. But I think it's kind of... I think it's kind of a role. I think he's sort of like, you know, what you hear about Peter Sellers. Like, just kind of a blank. Right. And then, like, he would just reflect something, you know.

29:21Yeah. But he was... Right. If there was no real guy that you could find. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, he is famously one of the worst interviewers... Interview subjects alive. Yes. Essentially always, although once in a while you'll see, like, someone he knows essentially get a little more out of him. Yeah. I mean, and don't ask him about our president, Donald Trump, who I support. But De Niro seems to have a... What does he do? He applauds him. He hands him medals. And he has a couple nitpicks about him. Pats him on the back. My favorite thing about De Niro is just... It's so crazy. And these guys, to be clear, I don't support Donald Trump. But, like, you know, just like when you're like, he's such an amazing actor.

29:54He's got such a long legacy. He's like, oh, I watch MSNBC all day. I think Trump sucks. You know, like, they're just so, like, regular boomer dad about politics. And also, every time he gets up and is like, I'm presenting the breakout artist award to Harris Dickinson, fuck Donald Trump. He does it with an energy as, like, maybe this takes him down. Yeah, right. You're like, I think it might be time to say it. Trump no good. Yeah. He's so crazy about it. But then maybe he's the only one who's not crazy about it. That's right. I think Bobby's right. Yeah. He absolutely is.

30:24I was going to say that I have heard people who have worked with De Niro in interviews been, like, he's very protective of his process. Totally. That unlike Peter Sellers, where there was this kind of, like, there is no me. I am just weirdly, like, a conduit for these things. I can't talk about this shit. That De Niro, there, like, is a very specific process, but it's entirely internalized. And that part of it for him is that he feels like it needs to be private. Yeah.

30:54So that even the people who are right up next to him are like, there's something going on. It's not just that he's, like, a savant. It's not just that he's, like, a cipher. There's intentionality and there's, like, work and there's effort. But he really doesn't want to talk about what he's pulling from. I wouldn't be able to go up to him and be like, would I be able to talk to him about the Mets or something? Like, would I never, like. That's my feel. Like, can I get him just chatting? I think, like, just from, like, the brief time that I tried to interview him, he's communicating, but it's not in words.

31:26It's all in body language. Right. Which is really hard to transcribe. Yeah. But he's communicating really well. I just think he's sort of somewhat nonverbal. And so you get this kind of, like, nonverbal guy who meets motormouth Marty. That's also what's so interesting about him being a motormouth in this. I was struggling to think of another performance where he is this verbal. I mean, like, I think of, I don't know. Where he's nonstop, you know? Where is he nonstop? Because there's, like, stuff in his later career, like Silver Linings Playbook, where he has, like, big kind of, like, yelly speeches and stuff.

32:00But that's the De Niro explosion. It's the explosion. It's not, what about the comedian? I haven't seen his set yet. Have you seen Taylor Hackford's The Comedian? No. I missed it. I heard, I remember it. He does a lot of stand-up comedy. In my memory, it's De Niro-esque. Sure. But he's still doing, you know, this. But I was going to say, isn't that, like, a movie where people go, it feels unnatural to watch you do this? I mean, my brain is erased. It clearly is a trauma response. So, yes. That movie's co-written by Jeff Ross.

32:30Good. Does he talk a lot in Dirty Grandpa? Let me, uh, let me, uh, see your ass. That's what I imagine Dirty Grandpa saying. Yeah. You know, I have seen it. There's the part of Dirty Grandpa where he raps, right, doing karaoke. Yeah. And he asks the audience if he can say the N-word, and they say that he can, and then he does, right? Don't bring it that way. I've seen that clip. Well, I've just seen that clip because people have posted, because the whole thing with De Niro is, like, he made 200 movies. Yeah. A hundred and forty of them are bad. Right. And so you can find these clips where it's like, do you know that De Niro did this?

33:01Right. You know, it's like people post Al Pacino doing Dunk a Chino. I was gonna say. I'm like, give it a break. De Niro has endless that, you know? The stuff that De Niro has done on screen is wild. But I think you're right that when he does something that feels outside of the sort of basic cultural understanding of the De Niro archetype, it basically just gets memory washed. People just don't keep that shit in their head. It doesn't matter. He's still bulletproof. Right. He could make shit for another hundred years, and maybe he will. But even when he does it well, like, even when he stretches outside of his sort of obvious movie star persona successfully,

33:37I feel like within five years, people are still just reducing him to the ten big performance. You've seen Alto Nights. I have. So there's two characters in that. Are either of them big? You know what? Yes. Like, one of them's big? I actually think he's very good in Alto Nights. Frank Costello is probably the bigger one? Or, like, which of the two guys? One of them, he is clearly playing Pesci. One of them, he's playing, like, more the elderly De Niro archetype. Right. And one of them feels like him doing, trying, it looks so fun to be the Joe Pesci guy in a movie.

34:10Because I guess that's the other part of it, is Pesci starts to be the Johnny boy standing next to De Niro as the strong silent type. Right? As the person who's struggling to communicate with words. That's true, actually. Well, so I think, like, I think there's some conflicting stuff in, as far as biographies I've said, I've read. But I think that they started shooting with Harvey Keitel. So, basically, like, it was October. The festival was coming. They didn't have all the funding. They didn't have everything together.

34:42So, they're like, if we don't shoot now, we have to wait until next year in October to do it. So, they shot some stuff with Harvey Keitel. And I'm not sure, this is where I'm not sure, but I think he met, like, De Niro met Scorsese or officially really met at some party at Christmas after that October. And so, then he was like, oh, you can play anything, but you can't play Charlie because it's already this. And he was annoyed. Yes. He wanted to play Charlie. He wanted to play Charlie. But then he ran into Harvey Keitel on the street, and they were just like, they started laughing.

35:17They were just like, oh, okay, you're an actor, too. This is going to be fine. But I think, yeah, so he played the Joe Pesci. He played the crazy guy. Right, right, right. And that's just something he doesn't get to do much. Altonites, he does play the old man version of it. And Altonites is as good as Mean Streets, right? No, it's better than Mean Streets. Okay, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Marty could never. Do you think Marty saw Altonites? Do you think Marty sees everything De Niro makes? Definitely not. Like, De Niro's like, I made a movie with Sebastian Mendeskow. You got to watch it. And Marty's like, okay. Life is short.

35:48I think he watches most of it. No way. Because he watches a lot of movies. Yeah. But it does feel like he's very invested in Bob's career. You know? Like, it does feel like there's a sense of, like, I want to keep up with what Bob's doing. I think De Niro hasn't seen all the movies De Niro's done. I'm sure he hasn't. Yeah. Wait, you guys keep saying that there aren't a lot of, like, wild card roles for De Niro. But what about, like, Cape Fear and Jaxie? But those are all, like, scary guys, right?

36:19Right, right. And it's like, Cape Fear, he is so, so big. That is so true. But, like, by wild card, I mean the kind of jokey, like, character in a group of guys where there's the wild card who's kind of like, he might put a fucking firecracker in a mailbox, right? And the guy who's the motor. Yeah, who's just like, you know, and it's like, so often, yes, there's stuff like Cape Fear, but, like, in, like, Brazil, he's so funny and weird. Yes. But that movie is not a reality-based movie.

36:49I feel like when he's doing kind of character actor-y stuff. Right. Even Cape Fear, where he's, like, a lead, but he's obviously not the protagonist of the story. But, like, in the 80s, in the 70s, it's the Godfather 2 stuff. So it's, like, 1900 and last, right, like, all that. In the 80s, it's the Raging Bull stuff. So I feel like it's, like, transformation. That's true, but also just, like, you know, more, like, intense, scary characters. I want to sort him by, uh, chronology here, because actually, this is, there's so much to talk about.

37:21Yeah. I know, we haven't even started. I know, God. I mean, this is all about it. We're talking about De Niro. No, because I think you are right, Miriam. I guess he really didn't make a lot of movies in the 80s. But, like, Once Upon a Time in America is, like, that the mission is, like, the angel heart, these, like, stoic characters. And then, like, in the 90s, I've never seen Jackknife. Have you ever seen Jackknife? I've never seen Jackknife. That is a classic. I would pull that off the shelf at Blockbuster or at the video store all the time, being like, what is this movie? Yeah. Vietnam Bat movie. And the poster is just a painting of De Niro with a beard and a Boston Red Sox hat.

37:54He does have a Red Sox hat. But, you know, the 90s of, like, Goodfellas, let's put Cape Fear aside, but, like, Goodfellas, Bronx Tale, you know, Casino Heat, Sleepers. Like, these movies, Ronin, where he's just, like, the impassive guy. Yeah. And he also did do, like, Jackie Brown and This Boy's Life and Frankenstein. He did a lot of weird shit, too. Jackie Brown, he's so funny. But Jackie Brown, the whole thing is how withdrawn he is. I know. He's hysterical. And then he breaks. Oh, yeah. That's another kind of wild card. But, I mean, it's a silent until he breaks.

38:24God, the sex scene in that movie makes me laugh so hard. Thank you. It was in, you read my mind. This is his sexiest era. Heat and Jackie Brown. For me. I think this is, I mean, I've thought this before I was middle-aged. What about Midnight Run? I always will go back for him. He's so hot in Midnight Run. He's so hot in that. Midnight Run is one of his best performances, but I wouldn't say his hottest. I feel like there's something about that a little bit later. Yeah, just that 90s, like, that, there's, uh, yeah. You like sad mustache De Niro. I love it.

38:55Yeah, I think that it's just, I mean, I just think it's objectively his hottest. I mean, some might say this is Mean Streets. I don't know. Yeah. I guess Wag the Dog is almost him doing something similar. He's fucking great in Wag the Dog. To this. Yeah. Right? I love that performance. Like, it's. He rocks. You know what? De Niro's not so bad. I like that guy. We think De Niro's a good actor. Yeah. That's our official stance on Blank Check. I think what is, Miriam, is what you're saying, that, like, Coppola was mentor to all these guys, right? He watches Mean Streets and is like, fuck, that's my young Corleone.

39:30And that's not an obvious move. It was kind of genius to see him and go, like, if this guy stops talking, but that energy is still there, it's going to be really captivating to watch. And that's a performance where he doesn't talk that much. And all the talking he does is in Italian. And he wins an Oscar basically for physical presence and for how much he's able to communicate just in his body silently. Yeah. Before the gang who couldn't shoot straight, he went to Sicily. To learn Italian. To, like, practice Italian. But the character is from Calabria.

40:02So, I think, like, was he gaming for this? Like, was he? I don't know. Yeah. I think they're going to do a prequel. I'm going to beat Brando. Yeah.

40:14David.

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41:35The styles sell out, so don't sit on it. That's Z-E-N-N-I dot com slash podcast, promo code podcast15. All right, I'm going to open the dossier, actually, just so we can stay on track a little bit.

Development and title origins

41:56So, Mean Streets, originally called, Miriam, do you know? Season of the Witch. Which is fascinating. You know, and they, Marty correctly was like, Cage is going to want that. I assume Nicholas Coppola was, what, like five years old? Yes, yes. He was like, we'll save that for Nick Cage. Yes. Is it a reference to the Donovan song? I think it's reference to the song and to the festival, right? And all that, you know, and it's like the kind of like, you know, you're playing with the devil. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the way the club is like all red and it's like the underworld or, you know, like, Mean Streets is better.

42:26Mean Streets is a great title. I don't think Mean Streets can really be beat as a title.

42:32This is his long gestating passion project. He works on it with his college classmate, Marty Martin. Sorry, I just want, I want to, no, no, I wanted to be correct about this. The movie they're watching with Vincent Price. Yes. That's, is that the Witchfinder General? I mean, that's a classic Vincent Price movie, but I don't think it would be. It looks like a dumber Vincent Price movie. It's a Roger Corman movie. Right, okay.

43:02It's, which is it? Witchfinder General is the Vincent Price movie that's like really intense. Yes. And like his performance in it is so magnificent. It's not trashy. Right. But there is the Season of the Witch movie. Well, that is a Romero movie that has two titles. No, it's not. Okay, okay. It's not a reference to anything. Okay. So, uh, Marnic Martin. So Marnic Martin worked on what? On Who's That Knocking at My Door? On New York, New York, on Raging Bull. And what you like. You know, like the early Scorsese collaborator.

43:33Am I saying it right? This is our first episode. Martin Scorsese? How do I say it? Scorsese. Scorsese. Wait. Miriam, I feel like you. I feel like it's Scorsese. Scorsese. I feel like I've heard him say Scorsese. And like. He's one of those guys who's kind of like, oh, it's funny. You know what's funny? I saw an old comedian, um, talking, like, on the David Letterman show. And he was like, Coppola. And he was like, Coppola? He's like, he doesn't know how to pronounce his name. This was in like the early 80s. And he's actually right.

44:03It's the classic thing of the Americans don't know how to pronounce their name. I mean, his name is a transcription error. Yeah. The family was Scorsese or with double Z's in Sicily. Which means Scottish or something. Like, you know, in Italian. And it was changed when they, you know, moved. Yeah. Because someone wrote it down wrong or whatever. I feel like the effort to correct the last 15 years has been towards Scorsese versus Scorsese. Right. Yeah. Everyone used to say Scorsese and that's wrong.

44:33Yeah. I think. Yeah. Ben? I've just been saying that the whole time. Yeah. You're wrong! All right. I think. Scorsese. Okay, so. Do you feel okay? How do you, do you feel familiar enough to say Marty? Marty. Can we just call, can we give ourselves permission to call him Marty? Marty, of course. Marty, yeah. You've worked with him. I have. I called him Marty. I have been in his office and screening room. Sure. He wasn't there. Yeah. But I watched Killers of the Flower Moon in his office. I'm sure I'll bring up a million more times. I was going to say, that's where you saw the Super Mario Galaxy movie.

45:07So, Marduk and him sat down. They work out the structure of this movie. They work out the characters. They work out the incidents. I guess, who's that knocking at my door? This was originally meant to be a continuation. A continuation of that. A continuation of that. A Anton Doaniel style. I'm following this guy, Charlie, will be my analog across stages in life. And when this movie came out, he said he was going to make a third film of him settling down and having a family that was... Fucking bed and board or whatever, like the third. But also like Italian-American. Right.

45:37Like, I want to represent my family life that I've put into this documentary through this fictional character. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was written, but never made. It's kind of boring. It's kind of in a fun way. I don't think I read it. So, he started this Mean Streets season in The Witch in like... Did you say the date? Like mid-60s, right? It's like 65 is where he puts it. Basically, maybe 66. And obviously, it's inspired by his life a little bit. But as you guys already said, he wasn't in a gang. They didn't really get in fights.

46:08They hung out in bars and picked up girls or whatever. But like, they didn't even smoke pot, he said. Like, really. Like, you know, we were not like... He's got asthma for God's sake. He's got asthma. Yeah. He didn't really do the hard stuff. No. Years later, Marcus Persezzi would, yes, identify his nose and the possibilities. Ah, my lungs aren't connected. Well, they are, but I mean... It's a less direct route. Yeah. Marty has been working... To be clear, was working on Mean Streets for a long time before like The Godfather... Yes. ...was ever thought of.

46:38Because when this movie comes out, I think it draws comparisons to The Godfather. Yes. Because like, press is probably a little like... Italian-American gangster. Right. You know. That's an epic film. Obviously, this is the opposite. The priest who has the young man test his hand against the flame of a candle, that comes from like a retreat he went on with, you know, other boys. You know, so that's a memory that's real. Well, as you said, Miriam, right? Some one of you two said, like, it's really his father, he realized.

47:08Yeah. It's the story. Right. Film screenplay initially was much harder on the religious aspects.

47:15To make a story of a modern saint in his own society, but the society happens to be gangsters. But also more reflective of our friend Marty's personal experience, which was like, do I go into the parish or do I make movies? You know, really being pulled between the two as equal forces rather than in this, where it just feels like it's kind of a thing hanging over his head, but not the active tug. Um, yeah. So I think like some of the difference, so I think some of the religious stuff changed

47:46and then also he developed the Teresa character a little more. Um, and then I think, I think a big influence on developing the screenplay was, um, uh, Sandy Weintrape was his girlfriend at the time. Right. And her dad was a studio exec and, uh, she's in the film, I think playing Heather Weintrape. Mm-hmm. So she said, you got to put some more of your funny stories in there. You know, like, I think he had his like things like, put in the MOOC story, put in the firecracker story, put in this kind of stuff. So I think, um, yeah, what do you guys think?

Women in the film

48:18I mean, maybe we're not ready for that, but what do you think of the women in this film?

48:24Look, it is, and he talks about it. It's why he went straight to Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore after this, because even from this film, people were saying, eh, this guy doesn't really know how to put women on screen. Right. Like, this early on, he felt the need to combat that. Yeah. It definitely feels like, um, it's interesting. I, I think Amy Robinson's really fucking good in this movie. Yeah. I also think it's interesting that in the way we're talking about this being positioned

48:54as an autobiographical film, but him acknowledging, I didn't actually really live, you know, walk the walk and talk the talk of these characters. I watched these guys, that her and her epilepsy does feel. Oh, okay. She's Amy Robinson's Teresa. Yes. Who is De Niro's cousin. Right. Yeah. Right. And, and Charlie's love interest. Right. Yeah. And she was friends with, I think she worked with De Palma, so she knew like Margot Kidder. Yeah. She worked on sisters and stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

49:24But her epilepsy feels a little bit like an analog for Scorsese's asthma to me. Maybe. Yeah. This feeling of, here is someone in and of this community who's looking to get just a little bit out. And one is treated a little, like it's not a community that I know has had to, like, empathetically deal with someone who has a condition. But like, you can't be tough. You can't be in this action because you're too delicate and everyone being, right. Yeah. Um, read the women. I also just think it's like, it is fairly reflective of what I imagine these men, like

49:58how they perceived women. Maybe. I mean, it's not like, who's that knocking straight up sexist, just garbage, like someone named girl, like just real bad. I would say, I mean, I think Marty is pretty down on who's that knocking, right. Like, he's like, it's kind of sucks. Like, I mean, in a nice way, but he's sort of like, it's kind of a mess. Uh, I agree. Who's that knocking is, is so juvenile. Like not, and not in like a, the humor way or anything. It's just like, it's just all these like juvenile ideas bouncing around in his head. But yeah, I mean like, you know, look, Anna Paquin will be silently sitting for every

50:31episode. I already made that clear, right? Yes. Uh, of course she's sitting right there, Anna Paquin, she won't speak at any point. She's a guest on every episode. Um. And we don't want to hear you complaining about how rarely we ask her questions. Uh, right. So, okay. Uh, Scorsese, um. That, that's what's interesting to me though, is I think he relates a lot to the Teresa character, but he's obviously not building the movie around her and she's kind of treated almost like a secret in the film. Totally. Yeah. He's ashamed of her. Right. Or ashamed of the relationship. But the movie hides her in a way that's similar to the way that Charlie treats her.

51:04Yes. Which is a thing you get into with Scorsese. It's, it's, it is the same with the Anna Paquin thing. It literally will be a running discussion for like decades of his career of if he is sidelining women, when is that an oversight or a failing of his and when is it a very pointed statement? Yeah. I, I think like, um, uh, yeah, it's something like people will say that about Scorsese. Like PTA and I don't, I don't agree with it there, but with Scorsese, it's hard, you

51:35know, it's not his strength. I mean, he's gotten into it. Like he's obviously, um, like more recently, Killers of a Flower Moon, interesting. He's grown into it. Sure. He's grown. He's like done that. But like for this film, it kind of feels like, oh, you make a movie, you got to have a woman. Like, you know, like it's kind of like you make a dish, put a little salt in it. She's a conflict. She's a story element, not really a character. I think, by the way, that's why he says yes to Alice. It's not an I'll prove them thing. It's a, I should work on this, right? Like if I want to be an actor's director, let me figure out different rhythms of actors,

52:10not just working with like actors of a different gender, but also just like, here's a different milieu. Here's a different like cultural type. Uh, I need to have that range. At this point, he's making films where the women represent what women were when he was growing up, which was these men are obsessed and driven by sex, but also kind of need to compartmentalize it. Yeah, I don't know. It's not as, as interested as the, the, the, the bromance, if you will.

52:41But I want to talk about the other woman, um, who was probably what first drew me to this film in that there's that opening scene where, um, or it's very early on where Charlie, uh, Keitel is like watching the woman who's a stripper, Jeannie Bell playing Diane, I think. And, um, yeah, Diane, and it's so beautiful. And you've got these like really beautiful closeups that are kind of abstracted. And, um, I love this woman. She's so beautiful.

53:12I looked her up. She is a fitness influencer. Currently? Yes. Wow. On Instagram. She was the world's oldest competitive jump rope skipper. Wow. For her? Yeah. She's, she was a play, at the time she was a Playboy model. I mean, she's just gorgeous. And she goes by Annie Judas now. And you can find her on Instagram. But, um, yeah, I think I love her. I love her presence in this. But, you know, so there's that scene where he's like, well, she's really good looking. Yeah. But she's black. She's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

53:42Right. No, but he's like, but she's black. Right. Like, obviously, it doesn't make a difference. And that's, that's Scorsese's. I'm pretty sure that's his, because, you know, they, they alternate. He's interchangeably cutting between Keitel doing voiceover and him doing voiceover. Yeah. This really personal thing. It's like, he's saying that. So I'm going to say, this is my other wild take, is like, this is a film about race. Like, you know, like, there's that with, like. It's in there. But then he, like, he stands her up. What is it? Moulignon? Do you know? Is that it? Moulignon? It's another. It's a slur. Yeah, it's a slur.

54:12And then he, like, and then there's someone who's kissing an N-word and, like. Moulignon means eggplant. Like, that's the, you know, it's from the Sicilian, I mean, it's a nasty thing. Like, it's a nasty thing to say. Right, I know. And so maybe I should have said the M-word. I don't know. But, like, I feel like that's part of the religious thing. The changing of this Italian-American family. You know, talking about Francis of Assisi. But, like, what is his real sense of empathy? Because there's these, like, dueling ethnic groups. I think that's a key theme in this. I think it's also going back to the Little Italy talk.

54:44What confounded me about Little Italy as a child. But what I didn't understand is, like, this is this idea of almost fighting against the melting pot of not just America, but New York specifically. Yeah. Where that's the great promise. But then also it's like, eh, but these five blocks, it's just us. Yeah. It's just us, and we're going to maintain tradition and evolve tradition to figure out what the Italian-American experience is versus the Italian experience, but also Italian gets first billing over American.

55:15And so there's that feeling of, like, we've got to keep everyone at a distance because we can't lose what we are. And even if it's not driven by, like, racial animosity, I think there's that protectiveness where even just to make a gangster film, a crime film in the 70s and not keeping those things on the sidelines in the same way that you're keeping the women at the sidelines is, like, what this movie is really about, which is sort of like a masculinity crisis of its time.

55:46Yeah. I mean, masculinity crisis, but so much of identity. So I say it's about race, but really what I mean is it's about racism. It's a really interesting thing about this movie is that he goes and tries to pitch it to Corman, to finance. And Corman's like, yeah, I love that. Can you make it a blaxploitation movie? Oh, yeah. Can you take the same script and, like, cast it with black actors? Because that is in vogue right now. That there had been enough successful blaxploitation films that he was like, that's sellable.

56:17The Italian-American version of this movie doesn't really have a precedent, especially before Godfather came out. But even post-Godfather, it's like, well, that's Tony. That's sort of the class of the old mafioso kind of thing. You know, he says, like, I said I'd consider it because you always have to say you'd consider anything. But I don't know that I really would have known how to make that movie. And it goes against the exercise of what's driving him to make this in the first place, which is what we're saying.

56:48Like, what's the most personal thing I can make? What's the thing I understand the most? And the blind spots of this movie are, I think, a self-conscious awareness of what he doesn't understand, if that makes sense. Yeah. You know, like, he was one of his teachers at NYU, or maybe it was just called Washington Square University or something. But, like, had said, you know, make what you know. But he said there was no one else like him in his classes. Like, there was no one else that was from this, like, you know, lower middle class.

57:19From the neighborhood. I know. And, like, again, a few blocks away. Right. Yes. Yes. It was a whole different world. Yeah. And NYU was not what we think of it as, you know, now at all. No, he also said, like, he'd be going and, like, studying, like, English literature and then meeting his childhood friends at clubs that are, like, the clubs you see in this movie. Right. Like, they were two completely disconnected worlds, even though they were five blocks away from each other. Yeah. He said, like, De Niro says, when he brings the Weintraub girls, he's like, they're from the village.

57:50Right. You know, like, there's this other world. Yeah. So he brings Mean Streets to AFI. They are just starting their feature program. And he says the outline he'd written was ridiculous. There was no female character, basically, at all. It had no characters. It had basic elements. Gets turned down there. He takes it to Joe Brenner, who's a sex film distributor, who's the guy who distributed Who's That Knocking? Mm-hmm. And he said, no, probably because it's just not. You know, sexy enough. Mm-hmm. One of the old professors at NYU told him, hey, no one wants to see films about Italian-Americans anyway, so forget about it.

58:22So that's, like, a subnaught the guy who's encouraging him. Yeah, it's like he's shopping around a genre film that doesn't conform into any of the sellable areas of genre at this point in time. Totally. I mean, he invents a kind of movie here. He does. He does. Right. So instead, he works, obviously, on Woodstock, editing Woodstock, which is, you know, a formative Scorsese thing. Mm-hmm. And he enters Roger Corman's orbit. We talked about all that last week, I'm sure. Mm-hmm. So, Boxcar Bertha. Jay Cox, who's working at the New York Times.

58:52Mm-hmm. Cox spelled, like, the cool way. Multiple penises. Right. Mm-hmm. He's the one who shows John Cassavetes, who's that knocking at my door. And Cassavetes responds to it and says, like, what's the film you're dying to make? And he's like, I have this thing, but it needs a rewrite. And Cassavetes says, well, rewrite it then. Right. You know, like, what are you waiting for? Cox, obviously, is a guy who works with Scorsese a bunch. Yeah. You know, over the years. But that's also very indicative about why Scorsese, or why Cassavetes said the, like, you've wasted a year of your life by making a piece of shit.

59:27Because he knows the thing he wants to make. Right. Totally. So, Sandy Weintraub, obviously, he's dating at the time. She's the one who says, right, put in the funny stuff, take out the religious stuff. So, he puts in the pool hall. He puts in the mook scene and the firecrackers and all that stuff. It ends up in Corman's hands. Corman is basically like, I've just made The Cool Breeze, which is like, it was sort of like a blaxploitation asphalt jungle. And so, he's the one who's like, yeah, could we make this a blaxploitation movie, essentially, like an all-black cast.

59:58And Scorsese, he's like, I don't think so. He's still, Corman does still eventually agree to distribute the film, but then Warner Brothers ends up distributing it. So, I guess, like, Corman backs out when it becomes more of a real thing. But there's a tribute to Corman in there. Yes, a lot of Corman crew. I mean, this is one of those movies where when you get into it, it's like the money appeared and then disappeared like six times. It kept coming together and falling apart, but it would happen in quick enough rotations that the movie never fully collapsed. Jay Cox was married to Verna Bloom. Right.

1:00:28Who I remember best as being Dean Wormser's wife in Animal House. Sure. My version of the way you're describing Goodfellas, Miriam, a movie I watched way too many times before I was 10 because my father basically treated it as the Bible. Yeah. Um, but she was the one who I think helped locate the money that freed him from being dependent on Corman. It cost about $150,000, I think. Jonathan Taplin is also very important, who is the touring manager for the band.

1:01:01That's who I believe Verna Bloom connected with. Bloom introduces them. Right. She saw that he was talking to Corman and that he was, that he felt like, I can see Marty in a month starting to bend on his principles in order to get the money he needs and it's going to dilute the movie he actually wants to make. So she goes and finds. 300 grand. 300 grand. She finds the money in a way that wouldn't make him have to constantly justify his decisions. He's like, you'll make it in Cleveland. Yeah. Then the money falls through and then, right, and then they end up with $175,000 and they get some other stuff from like CFI Labs.

1:01:40I don't know. You know, they scrape money together. They, obviously he had written Charlie for Harvey Keitel because it was essentially going to be a sequel to Who's That Knocking? Like you guys said. And then he decides to separate it, which is smart. Right. At one point, John Voight is involved, but then they shoot the festival stuff before they even start doing pre-production. And at that point, Harvey is basically locked in. John had already done Midnight Cowboy. And apparently Voight says to Scorsese, like, I'm too famous. Like, you need unknowns. Like, you need, like, this needs to feel real or whatever.

1:02:11There's the other thing, which is, we were talking about it when you came in, David, and I was watching. There's a Q&A discussion between. We were watching a Linklater interview. Linklater and Scorsese, Rick and Morty. Uh, and it, it was a series called Game Changers that the DGA was curating of, like, movies that changed the industry. And Linklater was like, this is the definitive game changer for, like, filmmakers taking their careers into their own hands and self-realizing what they want to do.

1:02:42But he was talking to him about how much of this movie was shot in L.A., which is the craziest fucking thing. Yeah. That, like, more than 90% of this film was shot in Los Angeles. Right. And the New York exterior stuff they did, especially San Gennaro, is so impactful. And then Scorsese finds the right locations in L.A. without building sets that he can sort of double, that you don't question it when you're watching it. And Linklater's asking him, were you concerned at all about, like, the concession of needing to move to L.A. and if you were going to lose some of the authenticity in the character.

1:03:13And Scorsese was like, well, I wasn't concerned because we just didn't have money. Right. It's like, you need to make the movie. We just need to make the movie. There was, like, no principal stance that could be taken. Right. But the other thing he said was, he kept saying, but I got the guys. I knew I cast the right people. De Niro and Keitel are. It's not an act. They're New York guys. David Proval, they find him at this John Voight workshop, as with Richard Romanos. But they're both Brooklyn, they're New York guys. These guys have a shared language. Amy Robinson is from New York. If I put them in the same room, even if that room's in L.A. instead of New York, they're going to talk like they're in New York.

1:03:46Right. That's what the audience will connect to. They shot, they did 10 days of rehearsals in New York. They shot all the interiors in Los Angeles, a fair amount of the exteriors, including the big crash at the end, too. Then they did some hallways and the beach in New York. And the weirdest, we were talking about this before we recorded, when De Niro's shooting the gun on the roof, the roof is New York, because you can see the Empire State Building. But the window is Los Angeles. Yes. And so, like, there's no establishing shots, right? There's no, like, they didn't have time for that.

1:04:19They shot the whole movie in about 27 days. This movie has so much accidental language like that, where there's something that you don't even clock the first time about the fact that it's not giving you those establishing shots, that you're just in the places without a feeling of being eased into them. That is just a result of them not having the time to shoot establishing shots in New York, but it becomes its own language. And then the handheld stuff is just, like, we didn't have time for fucking tracking shots. Yeah. We didn't have money for the equipment to do anything more complicated.

1:04:50And you need longer shots. You need scenes playing out in longer takes. And you need the camera being able to just move really quickly from one focus to the other, because that's the only way we're getting our pages done. And the DP on this movie, remind me his name. So the DP on this movie's name is Kent L. Wakeford. It was his first movie. He was, like, a commercial director. He did documentaries and stuff. I think, like, with the handheld, Altman famously saw it at, or I don't know how famously, but saw it at New York Film Festival and said that if he, he would have done tracking shots instead of the handheld.

1:05:25And Scorsese was just like, well, if we had, we'd still be shooting it out. Right, right, right. The other thing Wakefield said was, like, there wasn't. Wakeford. Wakeford. That there was no intentional strategy, but then even when they started watching dailies, it was like, oh, this feels anxious. Yeah. This is a camera language that we've landed on just out of necessity, but it actually is reflecting the energy we want, so then they lean into it. And everything is like that, where it's like, we're doing it this way because we don't have any other options. And then they look at it, and they're like, this is a miracle. This actually is better than we could have planned.

1:05:57I don't know how he feels about it now, but I think immediately afterwards, he kind of thought, Scorsese thought it was, like, a little sloppy, you know? Right, right. But, like, it's, what I love about it is how, like, handmade it is. And for me, this is going to be my wildest take of all, but to me, I prefer this to The Godfather. To me, they're very similarly about, like— They're such different movies. Yeah. It's like, this is the termite Godfather. Yeah. This is like— Right. The Godfather's, like, the porterhouse, and this is a burger or whatever. You know, like, I mean, they're so different. Like, I love them together.

1:06:28I've never loved The Godfather while also never denying its power. Like, I have no complaints about it, but it's just not— It's brutal. Wow, we're going to get killed. It's not my movie. No, it's fine. Slash movies. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's not your movie. That was a big movie for Team David. I cannot tell you. Yeah. I love The Godfather. Godfather's great. I love this. But this is way more my vibe. It's also, like, that roughness you're talking about is, like, what people are still chasing today. Like, the Safdie's careers are built on, can we figure out a way to get back to that feeling? Wait, which—I was wondering, which Safdie's movie is Mean Streets?

1:07:02Is it Daddy Long Legs? Yeah, it's Daddy Long Legs. Yeah, yeah. Right, because that's the personal one. Yeah. Yeah, it's the personal one, and, like, it's, like, something like Heaven Knows What is so about, like, drugs and, like, addiction and stuff. Like, that's more fucking, you know, New York, New York, or whatever. I don't know. And that they all weirdly become, like— Yeah, Heaven Knows What is their New York, New York. What am I talking about? I sound like an idiot.

1:07:25Go ahead, Daddy Long Legs. No, Marty Supremus, they're condemned. No, I was just gonna say that, uh, the other movies become kind of genre movies. Yeah. Because they start to get so into the kind of, like, chase structure. Right. The outrunning thing. Go, go, go. Right. Which, this has that narratively of, like, when is shit gonna catch up to Johnny Boy? But the movie doesn't have the narrative engine of they're getting closer. I said this to you when I came in. Yeah. Read the Wikipedia synopsis. Yeah. It's four paragraphs. The final three paragraphs of the last 15 minutes of the movie.

1:07:57There's nothing else. Right. There's no plot in the movie before then. Because it's just hanging out. The first paragraph is a bird's eye overview of the table setting of the movie. You know, Charlie lives in Little Italy and he's dating this girl and he's got Johnny Boy and all that. And then he's torn between Catholicism and gangsterism. Devoted to 15 minutes. Anyway, at the end, they try to fucking get some money from Johnny Boy and it all pops off. Like, that's all that happens in the movie. There's no complex structure here. Yes. I mean, it's just about, like, the ending. Yes. And the end, they're banished. And I feel like that happens in, like, not to bring back the Safdies, I feel like that happens in it, too.

1:08:29They, like, end up leaving. That is, like, Daddy Long Legs. But, yeah, like, it's, yeah, not a lot happens. It's just, it is kind of a hangout movie. And I think. You hang out in the club with Johnny Boy and the boys. A lot. You hang out with the mob a little bit. Yeah. Or you have the, and then you hang out in the church. And you hang out with Teresa in her apartment. I was also thinking a lot while watching this of Mikey and Nikki. Oh, meet you in the graveyard. Right. It's like, here's the one who's a little bit more of a straight arrow. Here's the fuck up. Yeah, they're like, why can't you fucking stop it? Right. And as much as that's, like, a one crazy night movie that has hangout elements,

1:09:01that movie is also a funereal march. That movie has the narrative engine of, you know, this is going somewhere bad. Yeah. And Mean Streets, even though everyone's kind of saying, like, you got to get Johnny Boy under control, it doesn't feel like it's pushing you towards some obvious outcome. Well, Mikey and Nikki also, you're kind of like, they've been doing this dance for so long. They're older. Right. Like, this has become untenable. Like, Mean Streets is a little bright. They're young. And it's just kind of this, like, you got to pick your friends moment of, like, are you

1:09:31really going to stick with this guy? Like, can you be a grown up? That's the thing. It doesn't feel like, well, obviously, this movie is going to end with either Johnny Boy getting killed or killing everyone else. You're like, there's a scenario in which this guy just stops hanging out with Johnny Boy and that's the end of the movie. Is Johnny Boy fun? Do we want to hang out with Johnny Boy? He's really fun to watch. Hell yeah. It's fun to watch. Hell yeah. When I was a younger man, I used to just love the chaos of the character. Like, is it? I mean, this movie's sort of about when you start to get a little be, you know, like, hey, could we actually just hang out without you doing something insane, like, one time?

1:10:03Right? Getting a little bored of it. One of my best friends in high school was very much a Johnny Boy. A Johnny Boy. And I was very much the Charlie to his side. Yeah. I would gravitate to those types. Because they're fun and exciting. There was something about the, like, adjacency to danger. Sure. Even if I never was the person getting into danger. And if anything, I felt like I was the one sort of trying to moderate him. But there was something, I don't know, as a very neurotic, anxious person about watching someone right next to you cross the lines constantly, you know?

1:10:37Yeah. Or just, like, push things to the extreme. Yeah. But I see it now and he's just so sad and clearly suffering. Johnny Boy? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is he? Wow. Because I think he's suffering because he is stuck. He is stuck. He has no, like, path. He's stuck in his position. Yeah. He really, he can't get the job. The mob doesn't want him. Right? Right. With Charlie's uncle. Right. Charlie keeps denying him. Because he's too chaotic. The mob doesn't want that. Like, they don't want those guys. Right. Right.

1:11:07But he can't be honorable like his friends. Right. Right. Sure. My take is slightly different, which is that he, everyone's looking at him like, is this guy fucking dumb? Doesn't he realize that he's, like, putting his neck out there? Right. That he's not playing this, uh, that he, shit's going to catch up to him eventually. And I think for him, it's like, what's the fucking alternative? Right. What's the end game? There's not, like, none of the options available to me seem interesting.

1:11:38So why don't I just do what's fun to me? Like, I think it's less that he's saddened that he's trapped and more that there's something he finds freeing in the idea of, like, then I'll just, like, fucking be an instinctual hedonist in a way, you know? Like, let me do whatever is most interesting to me at any given moment. Because the long game just doesn't seem worth playing to me. The long game is a dead-end job. Right. Right. Yes. So they're, when they're making this movie, I just want to say, in the Lower East Side, the few days that they are, people would come up to them and see the title on the clapper

1:12:12and be like, the movie, nothing wrong with these streets. Call it nice streets. Yeah, these streets aren't so mean. Yeah. What's your fucking problem? They get into a fight with him. What is the matter with you? He sees the title as an homage to, like, a Cagney movie. You know, right? Like, you know, like, to a Warner Brothers gangster movie or whatever. Wait, I think it has a different reference. It's a Raymond Chandler essay called The Simple Art of Murder. And it has the line, but down these mean streets, a man must go who is not himself mean,

1:12:43who is neither tarnished nor afraid. So it's about, it's about, it's about Charlie. Yeah, right. That makes sense. So the mean streets is about, like, yeah. But it also, I mean, Scorsese is the one saying, like, I was trying to make a kind of homage to those gangster movies of, like, you know, it's a punchy title. But Jaycock showed him the essay and said, like, that's a good fucking title. Right. And it does have that kind of. It's better than the season of The Witch. But it has that thing like White Heat where you're just like, those two words are interesting together. Oh, man. White Heat's so normal. I love that movie. Well, speaking of, can we talk about the gangster movies?

1:13:15Yes, please. Yes. I think something that he said is that the big movies, the big, like, Warner's movies that they would watch were Public Enemy and Little Caesar. And he said that he hated Little Caesar. He thought it was, like, vulgar, very overdone, heavily acted, but loved Public Enemy. Little Caesar is Edward G. Robbins, right? Edward G. Robbins. So that's Mervyn Leroy. And then Public Enemy is William Wellman. So this was the other person who's really important for this movie and for Scorsese is

1:13:47Andrew Sarris. And the cinema guy, the auteurist. Because when these guys were coming up, it was Andrew Sarris and these French guys were appreciating all these, like, movies that they grew up with. These, like, junkie movies, like, movies that at the time were not seen as, like, they were being just claimed. Yeah, they were just on TV. Crime movies, westerns. Totally. Yeah, they were, like, and so, like, and so he was figuring out the ones that he liked and the ones he didn't. And so he was going to, you know, no offense to Mervyn Leroy, but he was not a Mervyn Leroy

1:14:19guy. He was, like, a William Wellman guy. He was a Fuller guy. He was a Hawks and Ford guy. And so that's really important to figuring out the films. These same films that all feel junkie, but some of them are really good and some of them are not. And he was specifically, Public Enemy was about Irish people, but he was like, we can still relate with this, like, even though it's about Irish gangsters. Right, because that's Cagney. Public Enemy is, like, young Cagney.

Music and soundtrack choices

1:14:45Public Enemy, yeah, exactly. And it's like, what he was really, there's actually also some, like, street noises. I don't think it's a festival, but something like that. He said he was really influenced by the way that film used popular music in the background. So it was not score, it was source music. The last shot is a record player. And, like, that was, like, important for him. So it was important for him to bring in the music. Because we talked about Jonathan Kaplan, but Jonathan Kaplan probably also helped get all this music. No, no, he totally did.

1:15:15He was the music supervisor. Right. This was the soundtrack he wanted for Who's That Knocking at My Door. He was always like, my movies are going to have a soundtrack that reflects the music of my life. He did not have the budget to get any songs for that movie. Yeah. This one, he said it somehow was only, like, $65,000, $75,000 for the soundtrack, of which $15,000 was just to the Rolling Stones. $30,000. $30,000, right. It was $15,000 each. The Stones was $15,000 each. And they have both Jumpin' Jack Flash and Tell Me. Yeah. They have Be My Baby, which is the most important one.

1:15:46Yeah. And they have various other, you know. But, like, Be My Baby was the one that he was like, that obviously was the song. Like, we needed that one. And those female singing roots right before the Beatles, like, that's his music. Linklater said a thing in that DJ talk I thought was really interesting where he was like, there's, there are things like Easy Rider that come before this that have famous soundtracks and contemporary soundtracks. He was like, every other music, movie that used popular songs up until this point, it felt

1:16:17like the soundtrack was above the movie. Right. And Mean Streets, to me, feels like the first movie where the music is coming out of the film. And Scorsese said, like, yeah, it was important that it's like you're seeing, even when it's not supposed to be diegetic within a scene, that you get the sense that it could be. And that often enough, you point at, this is coming from a jukebox or whatever. It does invent this shit. It does. You can hear the pop and the hiss. Yes. He said these were actually his records. Right. Like with, with, with bringing a baby, which is a huge difference, right?

1:16:48It's not just bringing a baby, bringing a, bringing a baby.

1:16:55The music thing, I just, it's, I, I was saying it to my wife last night. I'm like, I was just like, I know this sounds so boring, but like no one had ever done this before. No, it's so true. Like it's, and it seems like the most, like, what do you mean? No one had ever like put pop music in a movie before, but it's like kind of no one really done that yet. Not this way, not in this sort of, um, but the thing is, it's hard to watch this movie and not see all the people who've ripped it off. Like Sam Levinson, all the terrible copies that we've gotten.

1:17:27We've gotten so far all the, all the, Sam Levinson is one of our great reterps. He just released a magnificent new season of his great show Euphoria, right? We've got like, we've, and the, you know, the horror movies with the ironic pop music, you know, and like this sort of thing. And every trailer with like the slowed down, like hit song or whatever. Be my baby, my baby, my baby, my baby. Someone's definitely done that, right? Has someone done that? And then the film flickers and then a knife cuts through it. I think it's in, I haven't seen it, but I think it's in like Barbarian or something, right? I think maybe, is there a baby?

1:17:59There's a lot of baby stuff in that movie. It would make sense. Yeah, it's in Barbarian. Yeah. Oh, okay. And so, but like the thing that's interesting is that like, and then all the guys, the better than Sam Levinson, I feel like all the, the Gen X guys, all these like mixtape guys, you know, all these like. I kept thinking while watching this, it is crazy how much of this movie is in the DNA of the early Wes Anderson stuff. Yeah, Wes Anderson, PTA, honestly, Tarantino. And much more. Also, Sofia Coppola, like these are people who wrote to mixes, to like pop mixes.

1:18:32But the thing is, those were from all over. Those were like from all over, you know, and that was, they were from all eras and it really was like a mixtape or something. And it was like, and they would, they would write in the same way Scorsese would to like write this, the scenes to these songs. But the thing that's different about Meastries is it's capturing a specific era. It's like present tense. It's capturing the 60s and the early 70s. And like those songs, Bill Spector and those stones have been used in these like other

1:19:03kind of mixtape things. But this is something we've gotten away from, which is like capturing a specific era. I mean, that's what like Linklater does with Dazed and Confused. You know, it makes sense that he talks about how much that soundtrack felt like eye opening to him. But, you know, Scorsese won our Mark Madness thing. Marty. It almost came down to him and Wes Anderson. True. And there was a nerd part of me that really wanted to see that matchup happen for the final two. Sure. Because there's that article I'm obsessed with that I think Esquire magazine did in

1:19:371999 that was, who's the next Scorsese? We've decided. I know it. Scorsese is the definitive filmmaker of the last 50 years. You know, the second half of the 20th century. This was after Bottle Rock. And they had like a bunch of, it was like the Wachowskis were in this. People made their case. They asked like a bunch of different film scholars and critics. And then they asked Scorsese and he said Wes Anderson. He said Wes Anderson off of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore. And when he. Shall I tell you all the nominees? Because it's crazy. Yes. Andrew Sarris nominated Kevin Smith.

1:20:07Yes. Which his essay is fascinating because he's like, I know this one sounds crazy. Right. It's basically on the strength of Chasing Amy and if he pursues this. Is he far from paradise? What is he? I don't know. Kenneth Turan nominated David O. Russell, which is interesting because David O. Russell, I could see that at that time. But that's more obvious. This guy is going for that nervy comic energy. Yeah. Todd McCarthy nominated Paul Thomas Anderson. Sure. Tom Carson nominated Alexander Payne.

1:20:38Sure. Although I don't really see that in Payne's work at all. But okay, Elvis Mitchell nominated the Wachowskis, which I think is a fun pick by Elvis. And then Martin E. says Wes. And he, you know, after Gene Siskel dies, Scorsese does the best of the decade episode with Ebert. Yes. I've watched it multiple times. It's so good. But he puts Bottle Rocket on his like top 10 of the 90s. Of the 90s, right. He was like one of the early champions. And I think versus a lot of these filmmakers who were more clearly influenced by Scorsese

1:21:09and the type of film they were making and the subject matter, he saw like this guy is making movies about his own life and his own worldview that is more analogous to what I did and also the way he is experimenting with form and language. And this movie is, it's obviously not symmetrical, but like Bottle Rocket and Rushmore are a lot rougher around the edges than everything becomes from where Al Tannenbaum's on. And even just like the colors of the bar and the energy of the characters and their costumes.

1:21:43Yes. It's like so much of Wes Anderson starts here weirdly. You know, I've never seen The Horse Thief. I haven't either. You know, on that list. And he's like, I mean, number one is this like Tibetan movie called The Horse Thief. And I'm like, I've always like, I gotta watch that. What else did he have on that? The Puppet Master, Heat. He's got Malcolm X, Fargo, Crash, Bottle Rocket, Breaking the Waves, Bad Lieutenant, Eyes Wide Shut, Thin Red Line, Borrowed Life, and The Horse Thief. Borrowed Life is a Chinese or Taiwanese movie that I've also never seen.

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Visual style and camera movement

1:25:12Mean Streets. Should we talk about it? Because, I mean, we've talked about the production just plenty. Yeah, well, let's talk about, let's, well, like, back to the, what you were saying about, about Wes Anderson and about this as being a very personal thing. I mean, I think they're both also big fans, they're big supporters of, like, classic films, you see those references, they're, but they're also just, like, finding, like, a color and movement to express emotion in biography.

1:25:43Right. And that's kind of what Scorsese has said about this in, like, the, you know, the commentary for the Criterion, I think, from the old commentary when I first saw it in, like, 2004 or something. He says, it's hard for it to describe this as a film. He feels like instead it's, like, the final culmination of everything I was to do and who I am. Yeah, yeah. There's that synthesizing of personal experience and all the films he had studied. And even you talking about him trying to study and figure out which gangster films dug in on him and which ones bounced off of him, it's like, well, there's two silos.

1:26:21It feels like there are the people where he's recognizing the craft, he's recognizing the formalism of what they're doing and how they're able to express contradictory things through the language of the filmmaking. And then there's the people like Fuller where it's like, what's going on with this guy? You know, there's, like, some psychology that's seeping into the movie of a personality that you cannot get out of their system, even if they're doing for hire work. For sure. But for Fuller was also specifically the movement. And that's when we're talking about this film and we're talking about the difference between, like, who's that knocking?

1:26:52This film moves. Yes. It has, like, this, like, dynamic, and I think he called it, like, an involved camera. And obviously we talked about it's, like, handheld. We've got that weird, he's got Harvey Keitel, like, on a dolly in some weird cherry brick. Yeah, where he's, like, going through. But he's drunk. He's, like, wearing it like a harness. That's so fun. Yeah, I love that shot. Like, before there was Steadicam, they invented it. Like, this thing. But he said he was really inspired by Fuller, specifically, like, Shock Corridor and, like, Park Row. Because there's all this, like, movement. Park? Yes.

1:27:22Are you kidding me? I've never seen it. I've seen Shock Corridor. I've never seen Park Row. Master. Oh, my God. It's a masterpiece. I'm not a huge Fuller. Like, I like Fuller a lot, but I'm not an expert on Fuller. I feel like I've seen, like, three or four Fuller movies. I want to hit some more of those thriller blind spots before Shutter Island. I mean, I've seen, like, Shock Corridor, Naked Kiss. Obviously, I've seen, you know, Big Red One and, you know, the later ones. Oh, okay. So, Park Row. Park Row's an early one. I mean, I love Park Row. I used to work on Park Row. Yeah. It's a newspaper movie, I assume. It's totally a newspaper movie.

1:27:53It's, like, the newspaper movie. It also has, okay, we'll do another thing in there. It also has, like, I would like to do a review of that film just listing all the classic cocktails. Oh, interesting. Because there are so many. Anyway, it's a great movie. Yeah. So, it was, again, like, for Fuller, it was, like, the movement. But hiring a documentary DP and Scorsese also having come off of being a cameraman himself on Woodstock, where he's holding a camera and feeling that urgency of, fuck, something's happening here.

1:28:25Can we catch it in time? Yeah. It feels like the movie has that energy despite being a scripted film. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of the camera being worried it's not going to catch the thing. Yeah, I mean, he was editing docs, the Scorsese was, so it totally makes sense that that combination of that. But it's interesting, because this guy, I don't know, I saw an interview, and he was talking, they were asking him about, like, the lighting setups and stuff. I just get the feeling that Scorsese told him what to do, because he was saying, oh, why the red in the bar?

1:28:57And he's like, that's just what it seemed like to me. I'm like, you liar. This is totally Marty. This is Duel in the Sun. This is the red shoes. This is, like, Gone with the Wind. This is Marty. I do also agree with him that that's how bars feel. If you take a picture in a bar, it might not look like this, but that's what it feels to be inside a bar. No, it's true. It's also, the movement and the energy of the movie feels like, versus Altman, who's like, you know, a god for me, but what I love about the Altman tracking shots is they do feel like a god telling you, this is the interesting thing.

1:29:38You might not be drawn to this at first, but I'm slowly going to push your focus over here. Mean Streets is like a panic of, can this movie keep up with its characters? You know? You feel the urgency and also the stress of, they might be moving too fast. They might leave the frame. Well, and Charlie is so alienated from, or is so increasingly alienated from his, his only world, which is these bars and these, these streets, these mean streets. And, like, I think it's just, like, shots like the Dolly shot just, they're so good at making him feel a little alienated or separate in a way.

1:30:14Like, it's so, and just then the calm of the church, like, you, I, I would hang out at the fucking church. Like, if I was, like, if I had to grow up in Mulberry City. It looks nice, sure. It's quiet. Yeah, right. It's just like, okay, finally, I can, like, read a book and sit down. Well, so Scorsese's like a kid where the asthma is so bad that it's like, if I get in a fight, I might die. You know? Like, if someone punches me the wrong way, and it takes a while for someone to pull my body up, like. It's in the dock, and it's in all, you know, it's like, they, they, he was born in Flushing, right? And they lived in Queens, and then they were kicked out of Queens, because his dad, like, got in a fight with the local, like, mob.

1:30:49And in the dock, he's like, that felt like being kicked out of paradise. Kicked out of paradise. And, like, you could, like, you feel it in this movie. You're just like, I just want the wide open streets of Flushing. It's like, still an urban environment, but I just, I long for, like, the relatively open skies. Yeah. I mean, and, you know, that's not a plot in this movie, but, like, the way he makes New York feel in the, like, the San Gennaro, like, shots and all that, just, like, it's, it's alive, and it's cool, and I'm watching it being like, ah, fuck it, yeah, New York, this rocks. But, like, it's, it's overwhelming. But he also, I mean, I saw him say in an interview, maybe it was in the Linklater thing as well, that, like, the entire social life was built around these after-hours clubs.

1:31:29Yeah. Where ostensibly what was driving you was the pursuit of women. Right. But women were rarely at these places. Why would they fucking go? You were hoping that one might show up almost by accident that night. What, do you want to drink Rolling Rock with degenerates? Right. So, he's like, more often, you're there with degenerates, and you're either recounting your victories with women in the past, which are probably bullshit. Right. Or you're telling people your aspirations of what you want to do with women someday. Yeah. Or you're just, like, getting in a fight over pool. Right. And he said, all these people still basically live with their parents, because even though they were driven by sex, it was like, if you're living on your own, that's an admission that you're living in sin.

1:32:05Yeah. Right? It's like, the only reason you would have your own apartment is so you could have sex there, which is a thing you, like, can't do. Sounds pretty cool. Even if you're talking about it all the time, you can't be that visible about it. And, like, he was like, the guys who moved, moved around the corner. You know? Yeah, sure, sure. Like, the idea of moving to the village. Well, it's the old joke, like, you bid your mother tearful goodbye, give her a big hug, and then you move downstairs. Right. You move to the apartment downstairs. And the implication is, you need your own space, you know? And maybe it's more, you need private space because the work you're doing is violent and unseemly, and you need to hide that from your parents.

1:32:41But also, they're close enough that your mom's gonna fucking come over and make your bed and do your laundry. You're still basically, it's like living in their garage, you know? Does Johnny Boyd just need money because he's a gambler? Like, that's where he's blowing his money? Yeah. I think so, yeah. It's mostly just that, right? Like, it's just, like, on the horses or whatever. Because he's always trying to get ahead. I know. It's tough. But there's no end goal. Like, it's important that he's not— Right, Johnny doesn't want to, like, open a barbershop. Right, he's not—you know what my dream is to someday make enough money that I can move to Boise, you know?

1:33:12But he doesn't— There's a farm I want to buy. He can't dream because he just doesn't see any path forward. His friend's a business owner, right? Yeah. The other one's working for his uncle. The other one is, like, I guess, making his way up as far as being a maid guy. And he's just kind of stuck. He's the loser of the group. Well, like, the Carradine bar fight, right, that basically plays out without dialogue, largely. And is, like, brother actors and ending in a death. Carradine on Carradine violence. Carradine on Carradine action. David and Robert. Yes. Right, yes, yes. And that's what these guys—

1:33:42Recently dead, died, Robert, right? R.I.P. Yes. Yes. But that's what these guys are witnessing. And it's like, so, right, at any fucking moment, a guy can just walk in here drunk with some petty grievance and shoot you. And it's over. Like, what's the fucking point? There is that, like, even if you're trying to stay clean out of this stuff and you're not becoming a made man or working, your adjacency to these things puts you on, like, the battlefront to a certain degree. And Scorsese said that that scene is based off of a thing that happened at one of those clubs in his 20s.

1:34:17And he was like, and we went to the other club that night. But it was like a coin flip. There were two places that we went back and forth to. And we picked the other one and then heard the next day, did you hear some guy just came in? He got drunk and he was upset and he shot that dude. And that guy's dead. And it's like, that's—it could have been us by the difference of, like, which block we walked down. Are we in trouble? Are we off course?

Improvisation and dialogue

1:34:41No.

Improvisation and dialogue

1:34:42We're fine.

Improvisation and dialogue

1:34:43This is what this podcast is. For better or worse. Well, also, like, what other big scenes should we be talking about? Because, again, this is not a film with a very, very, you know, heavy plot. Let's talk about just how personal it is. Like, from the very beginning, we have, like, a scene about German lenses and Jap adapters. Yes. Like, you know, we've got Super 8 footage. We've got, you know, it's so about Marty. I just, yeah, I love the mook scene. The mook scene, there's a fight that he witnesses at a bar, which is what happens in the movie.

1:35:12And it starts with, the bartender called you a mook. Called me a mook! And everyone starts fighting. And then someone says, what's a mook? And the guy's like, I don't know. Yeah. What's a mook? You know, I looked it up. Like, what is it? It means big mouth. Big—is it? Okay. It's like Neapolitan, like, sort of slang for, like, talking too much. Big mouth. Interesting. Yeah. There's a Reddit thread that is, like, every possible iteration of, like, they're like, did Scorsese invent it or where did it come from? And it obviously goes somewhere, but it's—

1:35:44According to Marty, he later realized, he didn't know at the time, that it's Neapolitan. Yeah. And he is a Sicilian. You know, the Sicilians and the Neapolitans always hated each other, and the Neapolitans, you know, Naples. And, like, it was a Neapolitan word for, like, a loudmouth Sicilian. A mook. Like, mookka. I mean, it is that thing, and I've learned this a couple times, unfortunately, on Mike, on this podcast. But as someone who was raised on, like, Bugs Bunny and, like, old comedy shit, I was, like, so obsessed with all this slang of mid-20th century guys.

1:36:15And then you unpack it, and you're, like, 9 out of 10 are, like, racially charged. Yeah. Like, all these sort of up-yours names that the wisecracking characters will throw at people. But you're right that people don't even understand what they're saying. And it's like they're throwing these Molotov cocktails and not quite sure what the impact of them are. You brought Wes Anderson. One of my favorite sort of generic unknown racial epitaphs is when, in Royal Tenenbaums, when he's like, did you just call me Coltrane? Yes. One of the fucking funniest things that is in any Wes Anderson movie ever.

1:36:48It's so good. Like, those kind of things where you're like, is that racist? It feels bad. The way that Hackman reacts, it feels pretty racist. Right. Yes. Right. No, it's so great, though. But I love these sort of, like— It's so funny. It sort of abstracts some of the language we use. But I have to say, I did say it was about racism. I do want to do my due diligence and say that Mean Streets was the first film to be rated by CORE, the Congressional Congress on Racial Equity. Really? Yeah. It was the first one, and it was declared extremely offensive for its black perspective because of the stripper and the policeman who, like, takes a ride.

1:37:30Oh, sure, sure. And, like, I don't know if I agree with that. I mean, I think—I would say—I mean, again, I really do think it's about these, like, you know, these unknown racial epitaphs. It's about racism. It's about, like, that with morality. But I will say what I do find really offensive is the gay couple. That's just— Oh, sure. And that must be so far from Marty's understanding at this point. Yeah. I don't think of gay characters in Marty movies. Well, so we should call it—De Niro's father was gay. De Niro's father was gay. Yes. That's another fascinating part of it.

1:38:00I don't know how much that's being discussed at the time. No, no, no. No, but that's what I'm saying. Like, De Niro does have a model in his life, and obviously he was married to a woman at one point. He was out later in his life, although it was sort of more quietly. Who knows what De Niro knows about his father at this point, what his father self-identifies as and whatever. But his father was a man he lived with who was a more realistic, you know, version of a West Village artistic homosexual man in the 60s, 70s.

1:38:32And this movie presents what, like, feels like the most kind of laugh-in version of that character. Totally. Wait, sidetrack. Do you know his mom dated Manny Farber? No. De Niro's mom? Yeah. And, like, when they were just, like, you know, bohemians in the village and stuff. So I had said that this was, like, the termite, like, to the godfather. So that's, like, Manny Farber is one of the great film critics, and the whole termite versus white elephant is him. And I guess Manny Farber came up to—he really liked Mean Streets. I don't know what point he reviewed it, but he really liked it.

1:39:03At one point he came up to De Niro at a party and was like, Ah, I remember you when you were a kid in, like, 14th Street. And De Niro just ran away. Wow. Yeah, because I guess his parents split up pretty early, right? Yeah. I think there's something, too, of, like, what? I guess these guys would be, like, third-generation Americans, theoretically. These guys? Yeah. Like, their grandparents came, you're saying. Their grandparents immigrated. Yeah. Yeah, I know what you mean. Their grandparents immigrated probably with their parents as young adults.

1:39:36Yeah, I mean, well, Marty's parents were—Katherine was born in New York. I forget about the dad, Charles. Second or third, right? Yeah, he was born in New York. Charlie. Their parents were immigrants. This sense of this inherited tribalism that isn't even actually motivated by anger in talking about, like, the racial dynamics of this movie, that it feels more like they're just worried about, I don't understand what's going on outside of these three blocks, these clubs. Totally. The ten people I know, you know? It feels deliberate.

1:40:06Yeah, it feels, like, really this changing, like you were saying, like, this time period. And even the kind of, like, corrupt black cop character, it feels like what is driving him is just, like, I just don't even want to have to deal with you guys. I love that guy. The way he, like, accepts the bribery is just, like, can you please just make it easy for me to disengage from this? Yeah. I want to just let this be whatever the fuck it is. It's so funny. He's like, yeah, I'm going to Jersey. You know what? Actually, I'm going to Philly. Right. Perfect. But the way he sort of is just kind of exhausted and being like, actually, more money.

1:40:38Yeah. I changed the ride home. That's where I think the movie is kind of knowingly about how limited their worldview is. I mean, they live in, like, forced blocks. Right. The way Teresa's character talks about moving uptown. Yeah. It's like, she's leaving the country. Yeah, exactly. Good call. Yeah. Scorsese said that'd be the equivalent of a girl telling you she was moving to Ohio. You're never going to see her again. That's impossible. Right. Can we talk about Kytel a bit?

1:41:10Yeah. You know what? I mean, I assume we, we're recording this one a week before. Yeah. There's that knocking because Miriam's in town. I assume we talked about Harvey a little bit. But Harvey, very important. From this moment on, now that he's discovered De Niro, Kytel becomes more of a stock company player. And more often he is presented as a villain or a rival. Like, he's in Alice. Yeah. And Taxi Driver. But he's, right. He's a fucking pedophile pimp in Taxi Driver. He's literally Judas. But between Taxi Driver and Last Temptation, he doesn't work with Marty.

1:41:41Right. And then is there anything between Last Temptation and Irishman? I was trying to remember if there was, like, one thing. Maybe not. It feels like every time he uses him after that, other than Irishman, which feels like a kind of, like, isn't this nice to put them all at the same table again? Yeah, I know. The other ones, it feels like what he's using Kytel to be like, I want to show that this guy has range. Right? I want to test him and put him in a different light. Obviously, like, Scorsese was such a, you know, he loved Bad Lieutenant or whatever.

1:42:13Like, he would pump, you know, praise other Harvey stuff. And I think they remained very close and still do. I wonder if Harvey's like, fuck you, why am I not, you know, why do I not get to be your De Niro? Like, why does De Niro get to be your star? On my rewatch, I really had that. I'm like, what happened to Kytel after this? He's a great actor. This is what struck me watching it, right? Is, like, it's interesting that he had this guy who was so much the stand-in for him. And then he picks this other guy who was so different from him, who becomes the driving force of his movies going forward, or at least a majority of them.

1:42:46And then you look at the filmography and you're like, all of these movies are personal in that they are explorations of the things that clearly Scorsese wrestles with constantly. But his movies no longer, past this point, really feel like they're about characters that reflect him. They become explorations of his worldview and of his interests. Or, like, some psychologics. But, like, and also, right, he doesn't write as many movies. No. And when he does write, it's often an adaptation, you know, like something like Age of Innocence or, you know, like Gangs of New York.

1:43:19But I wonder if part of that is him recognizing in the sort of, like, the forcefulness of what De Niro is able to do as Johnny Boy and putting a character that sort of exciting, that much of a wild card into the mix, that he's like, I'm kind of a passive protagonist. I'm a guy who looks at the window and watches what's happening, who thinks about it, who will stand a little close to the danger but never actually place myself, you know, in real harm's way. And he wants to start to build movies around characters who are actively moving the plot.

1:43:53So then Kytel becomes sort of an odd duck, you know, in a way that maybe his association with him was too strong at the beginning. Yeah, maybe you don't want to get locked into it, but then he gets locked into it with De Niro to some extent. Which is why he then from that point on is like, Harvey, I'm going to ask you to play all sorts of wild different things. You're just an actor I'm, like, throwing interesting challenges at. How do you feel about Harvey, Miriam? I like him. I mean, I was really like, what happened? Like, you know, I was thinking about, he's got some great roles. I mean, he's Jewish, right?

1:44:24Yeah. So that was the whole thing. It was this, like, Polish-Jew place. His parents were Russian-Jews. Yeah, so he was like, Brighton Beach guy. So first he was the stand-in for Marty. And then, but I was, you know, just now when we were talking, I'm like, could Harvey Kytel have been in Casino? Yeah, totally. Like, in either role. Yes. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. Like, Harvey Kytel is a good actor. Yeah. If he's in a movie, it's usually good. Yeah. I mean, his performance. He's in lots of bad movies. Like, I mean, he just was one of those guys who, I feel like, just made five movies a year for 30 years, right?

1:44:58Like, 80s and 90s, like, he just says a zillion credits. And he can do big. Yeah. Or he can do restrained. Like, you know, he doesn't feel like an egotistical actor to me. I, I, I, there's a part of it. And some of this is conjecture on my part, right? But you look at him in, like, the 70s and the 80s. You look at the stuff he did with Toback, which is very Tobackian, you know? Of course, yes. It is that he, for a while, I would say until the 90s, really wants to be the leader, the co-lead of the movie.

1:45:34And sometimes these guys do just get into a place where they're like, I'm willing to play the dilemma. I'm willing to play the side character or the villain for Marty. But otherwise, I'd rather be the guy. And that sometimes can dictate the choices, you know? There's a lot of weird stuff in the 80s. Yes. With Keitel? Yeah. Was he, was he, when was Piano? Was that the 90s? 93. I love that performance. It's a great performance. We've talked about a fair amount of 90s and 2000s, Keitel.

1:46:04Right, because we've done Campion, so there's multiple, you know, Campion performances from him. What else have we talked about? Well, of course, we did the National Treasure movies on Patreon. Probably his two finest performances as Guy Behind Desk. But that's the thing. It's like, what's he doing there? So you want to steal the Declaration of Independence. I mean, there's like, right. And which is like, that's just like Thelma and Louise, right? Like, it's like, he does Thelma and Louise, and then he'll just like do that every so often, ever since. Like, do you want me to play the tired, like, Clockers? Sure. He's good in Clockers. Yeah. Like, and he's sort of the lead of Clockers, but he's not really.

1:46:36Like, Mackay Pfeiffer is the lead of Clockers. But Harvey's like the face. That's the other thing. That's like, right. Tarantino and Spike Lee and all these other filmmakers using him almost in a mixtape way. He is so good in Reservoir Dogs. Yeah, he's incredible. I've never seen it. You've never seen Reservoir Dogs? Why have you never seen Reservoir Dogs? Is there an active avoidance, or have you just not gotten around to it? I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. It's just. It's like 90 minutes long. They play it in rep cinemas constantly.

1:47:09And bars and like. Yeah, exactly.

1:47:12Um. Kytel is incredibly good in it. The whole thing with Reservoir Dogs is like Michael Madsen, I assume, you know, is kind of like the character that pops or whatever. And Buscemi is being so funny. And she's doing the James D. kind of thing. Right. You know, but and Kytel is the lead. And he's the center. Super emotional role. And he's so good. And it's it's different, but it does feel like Tarantino is casting him because it's like using an impactful pop song, you know, there is he becomes somewhat representational by the 90s for a lot of filmmakers who grew up inspired by the Scorsese movies.

1:47:46And then I think they'll I don't know. They'll rework him in interesting ways. I mean, even the way Wes Anderson uses him is very fascinating. Hey, which one Wes Anderson is in? He's so fun in Budapest. Yes. Oh, I forgot about that. And he's also in Moonrise Kingdom as like the major troop leader at the end. They keep going up the ladder to who's the ultimate troop leader. And then you reveal like old Harvey Keitel in little khaki shorts. And Keitel's like.

1:48:11Just have to say it. It's not even that he has a great face. He has one of the most fascinating skulls in history where you're just like, who has a head like this? Right. He just doesn't look like anybody else. And it's it's hard to read him. It's really kind of fascinating to watch him listen to people because you can't really tell what's going on. And I think similarly, when he talks, it sort of feels like a struggle to him. Not that it's nonverbal, but that it's really like an effort to get things out.

1:48:47It's funny because I feel like in press interviews, he's far more gregarious that he is not a guy who's like incredibly self-serious or protective about his process. But then on screen, he plays things that feel often a little bit closer to De Niro, maybe as a guy where this guy doesn't have the language to get what he wants to say out of his system. And also so much of that is just like Keitel's insane body. Right. Yeah. I feel like he can also I mean, maybe I'm just misjudging from certain roles, but I feel like

1:49:18there's like a dangerous eroticism to a lot of his performance that I don't really see with De Niro. Like I feel like De Niro, De Niro's like I'm sure a sexy guy, but there's not like a real sexuality with it. Keitel is weirdly sexual and feels transgressive. And he also moves towards that. Right. Like in the roles he takes. But he's got this fucking pit bull thing. You know, he's got this kind of like perma frown. Yeah. I love his walk. And this furrow. And he's so kind of weirdly like compressed. Yeah. He's like stockier, although I don't know if he was really stocky.

1:49:50Like because they're all little guys. This is all just how things read on camera. I know it's how it reads on camera. But he's just a guy where you're just like, it's just fucking shoulders and biceps at a time where people in American movies aren't really built, you know? And it's not like he's like a jacked bodybuilder, but he always just had kind of like a weird spilling of muscles in his upper body. He's a funny body and he shows it off a lot. He likes to show his penis. I've never thought about Harvey Cartel's body as much. Well, like if you think of like Bad Lieutenant, the sort of iconic him, like, you know, when

1:50:22he's like, you know, it's on the, you know, he has a fun and then the piano and stuff. As Marie would call out, a very deep V too. I feel like those movies like Bad Lieutenant and the piano where he's getting naked. He's got, he's got the V. Okay. He's got like a tiny little ripped tongue. He's got the deep V. Miriam is covering her mouth in shock and shame. As she should. I'm blushing. Miriam, on the desk there, we have a postcard of Austin Powers frozen in ice because when we watched that movie, Marie Barty said, is Mike Myers cut?

1:50:55And then just kept calling out the deep V.

1:51:00Hytel obviously doesn't have the Austin Powers chest hair. Okay. Other scenes we should talk about. How about the Vietnam vet party? That feels significant. Yeah. Is that where he- Speaks to the time that it's at. I mean, it's still, we're still in Vietnam. Yeah. What, is that what? Sorry. But then he gets drunk. Is that where he gets drunk and he walks, and he's like blessing? I think he's like, he's baptizing people. He's like- Yeah. Going around with water and like baptizing people. But you were thinking specifically of the, the, of the Vietnam thing of, of the era of what-

1:51:31And then the vet is clearly suffering from, you know, his experience there. And he attacks that woman. And then Kytel has that moment where he dances with her in the closet. Oh yeah. I forgot about that. Oh, that's weird. It's so weird. I don't know what to read from it. Yeah. It feels like another story, like that, you know, Scorsese remembered or whatever. And it like makes so much sense, obviously, if we threw a party for a Vietnam vet and we're like, let's set off a bunch of loud noises and streamers and shit that it was like, obviously

1:52:02like, could be very traumatic for them. Yeah. I mean, the literal opening of this movie is him lighting the candles in church, right? Is that the opening shot? Uh, yeah. I mean, the, the opening is the monologue and the narration, which is Scorsese's voice is you don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit. And you know it rather than it being a movie where the pull is, is this guy going to follow faith? The movie's telling you upfront while the guy is going through the motions and the rituals that this is kind of all, not that it's bullshit, but that it can't overpower the rest.

1:52:37It's, it's actually like an impossible battle that you've already lost. It's not that it's bullshit. It's just that you have like all these opportunities for like empathy and savior and saving people and like, and, um, and real testing of stuff. And then the real work isn't going to happen here in a theoretical space. It's going to happen in your actions outside in the world. Yeah. Yeah. One scene that we didn't talk about is most of this is the scripted, but they would do like kind of like, you know, they would do like little sessions then add into the script.

1:53:08But there is one like improv scene and it's like right after the trash can. Yeah. Yes. Oh no. Yeah. That might be. But I was thinking about when they go into the back room. So when De Niro first walks in, it's the, it's the stones and you know, it's the slow motion and we're really in a Scorsese movie. And then they go into the back room and that's when they're like, they're like the Tuesday after the Tuesday, after this Tuesday or, you know, and they're doing all this wordplay and talking about Joey Clamps. No, Joey Scalett. No, they're the same person. Yeah. And like this whole thing that was all improvised.

1:53:38And that was something that, um, Scorsese said he was really feel like he needed something there and he needed something to set the tone and the comedy. And he was really influenced by like Abbott and Costello and who's on first, but also like the road movies and Bob Hope and, and, um, Bing Crosby and this like, you know, someone always trying to get one over. But I think the wordplay is really key. I love that. The line where he, he's like, which girl he's like, my left or your left. We were sitting, we were on the same side. My left or your left. It's so good.

1:54:09The same shit. It's like, it's rock music and it's like old vaudeville comedy dynamics. And it's the language of how people fight with each other verbally. You know, it's all rhythm shit. It's rhythm and word selection, which I feel like are always the thing, like the metronome that his movies go off of. Um, David Denby, when this came out said that Scorsese has used improvisation better than anyone in American movies so far, which is an interesting line to me because a less of this movie is improvised than people think it's really those two big moments.

1:54:42But a lot of what you said, there was a really solid script. Then they would do rehearsals. And then if they came up with something good, an improv exercise, they would transcribe it and tighten it and just writing. A lot of times when there are these fucking famous moments in movies where people go like, and do you know that was actually improvised? It's like that was improvised when they did the blocking rehearsal. Yeah. And then they wrote it into the sides and then they did it 80 times and they refined it. It's not like the moment you're watching is the one time that happened. And this is one where the improvisation is happening developmentally.

1:55:13But I think what they're getting at, and even just the way Denby words that, it's like they're talking about improvisation like it's 3D or something. Like there's this new technology in movies and people are like, is this a gimmick? Do you make whole movies out of improv? Is this something that you can use as part of the language? Right. It's been going, it was going on for so long. Like Gregory LaCava was doing it. Like it's so interesting when people like people are, I mean, you know, if you guys have ever been to an awful Q&A, they're always like, was that improvised? That's everyone's fucking first question.

1:55:44It's so annoying. Was that improvised? Just let the cameras roll, you know? But the answer is always if people see something that sounds, it sounds to them like real dialogue, they want to believe it's improv. And, you know, movies, you do fucking a thousand takes of everything. Things are like iterative, you know, it's rarely like improv in the way you think of seeing a fucking improv show where two people are making up a scene from the get go. But I think versus a lot of these other things we're talking about where improv was used as

1:56:15like, this is like an interesting formal experiment. Scorsese kind of figured out a way to harness the energy of improv into more conventional. Seasoning. Lightning in a bottle. The whole thing is. That's the other part of it. De Niro. Right. If you're like Cassavetes, where those films are less improvised than people think. Yeah. But they have the energy of the main purpose of the camera here is to capture what the actors are doing rather than say something with the camera themselves. I think in later Cassavetes movies, he does meaningful things visually, but it's really

1:56:48like serving the performances first and foremost. And to have a movie that has improv energy in it, but also has complicated camera moves, you know, has like three minute traveling shots through an apartment and things like that is where people start to feel like, oh, improv isn't an either or thing. I mean, all these conversations just fucking cycle themselves, but it's like what kind of kills the American comedy movie in a way is they all felt really stagnant and high concept. And then improv comes in back into them and people enjoy that these movies feel riffy, but then they

1:57:23all start to feel really visually static because they need three cameras running at the same time to get what actually is a real improv riff.

1:57:41David. Yes. Red alert. Oh, there's been an outbreak. Biohazard of a new Patreon series. It's contagious. Oh, that's so true. It's, it's, uh, it's been cooked up in the lab for your pleasure. From the fine folks at the Umbrella Corporation, we are covering Resident Evil. The film franchise. Yes. We've got the first franchise. Six movies. Yes. That beautiful second franchise.

1:58:11How many? Six? Seven? It's got the one movie. Oh, it's got the one. We'll be covering all of them on Patreon, doing commentaries on, yes, the Resident Evil, Apocalypse, Extinction, Afterlife, Retribution, the final chapter. Welcome to Raccoon, Sydney. This is an exciting time. Zach Craig, our friend of the podcast, has a new Resident Evil coming out.

Box office and release history

1:58:31And we thought this was a good opportunity to revisit the history of Resident Evil movies. Why not? Why not? Why can't we? Why can't we? We can. Check in for that August 1st. And it's going to be running all the way through November 1st. Followed by your March Madness winner. Dracula. Dr. Acula himself. That's so fun. So that's great. That's great. Thank you. Thank you so much.

1:59:06So are you guys all the Charlie in your bromance? Yes. Yeah. I'm not even Charlie. Am I the Charlie? Are you the Charlie in your male friendships? I don't want to go out with these people. Or maybe you're, I feel like you might, you have a little Johnny Boy sympathy. I think I'm Amy Robinson, you're Johnny Boy, David's Charlie. I love this. I mean, I definitely, I always had less tolerance for the guy who is like, let's throw a firecracker in a mailbox. I'd be like, I'm going home.

1:59:37I find this movie invigorating because I love like New York movies. I love how Marty tells any story or whatever. This has never been like my favorite Marty because I don't relate to it very much. But I do, I love this movie though. I got no beef with this movie. This is a big movie for my mom. My mom loves this movie. Why does your mom love it? Because she's a good girl. Like, you know, I don't know. She, I think it was probably, she, what, this is 73. So she was 22. Yeah. Like, you know, she saw it at the right time and it was thundercrack kind of movie for her.

2:00:07Like the later Martys are too fucked up, I think. Stuff like Taxi Driver. Like she's seen Taxi Driver. Right. But like, she's like, oh, but those are so dark. Like, and those are so violent. Mean Streets is sort of the appropriate amount of violence for her. It is fascinating too, where it is a movie where even living 50 years past its release date in a media landscape that is like permanently influenced by what this movie does. It's, you feel like you're watching the Big Bang. It doesn't, you understand that what you're seeing is all of these things starting to

2:00:39crystallize for the first time. Everything he's synthesizing together and what he'll do in the rest of his career and how other people will be influenced by it. Like Bonnie and Clyde feels that way to me too, where even if you've seen all the movies that come after it, when you watch Bonnie and Clyde for the first time, you're like, I can tell this is them breaking the sound barrier in certain areas. Same with this, totally, you're right. And there's stuff like MASH, which for how much I love Robert Altman, that's a movie that I think like you cannot watch without context of what it was coming out of and actually fully understand it because so much of what people like my father who saw it in 1970 and

2:01:15were like, this is just, no one talked like this. Stories weren't structured like this. When you watch it now, it just feels kind of sloppy. And there's stuff in MASH that I think is incredible. There's stuff in MASH that is beyond retrograde. Sure. I haven't seen MASH in 20 years. But there's also a lot of it that's just kind of mushy. MASHy almost. David, five profundity points. But at the time, every single thing people were seeing was that's never been on screen before. Nothing's ever felt like this. It's never sounded like this. It's never looked like this. And Mean Streets still has all of that power, even though we've seen everything it's influenced

2:01:49after. It also, I feel like, you know, your mom was the right age, like 22 or whatever. Like, it's just so captures the, like, in jokes and language of a friendship group in your, like, late teens and early 20s. You know? Doesn't it? Of course. And though I never worked for the mob nor hung out at Italian American social clubs. And say that again. Let's make sure you have that on the record then. Yet, my phone number is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. I never yet is a funny sentence structure.

2:02:20They want to call me and offer me a job. I have never, and I mean never, worked for the mob. I would like one of those jobs. Yet. And I may be telling tales at a school here where you do not show up to it and get the money anyway. A no-show job, if they can give me one of those. One of those, please. Like a mob desk job? No, you know, a no-show job. Like the whole thing the mob does where they're like, you know, we run this union now and you're going to have five extra salaries. Oh, oh, yes, yes. I wonder if the mob is in on podcasting yet. All right. Well, I'm in the audio business.

2:02:50What do you want from me? It's a legitimate business. Hey, I talk to my friends. What do you want from me? I make audio go boom. I turn heads into gum. Oh, boy. Wow. I was looking up letterbox logs for this movie. Okay. And there was one from Paul Schrader from 2019, the before times, where he just wrote all caps, Mean Streets, watched it tonight for the first time in almost 50 years. I'd first seen it in Rough Cut. What struck me most was how well I remembered it line for line, scene for scene, needle drop

2:03:23for needle drop, and how in place Marty's aesthetic was. I was tempted to think, quote, this director's been watching a lot of Scorsese films. Way back then, I knew it was very good. I fancied myself a film critic after all, but I didn't realize it was a fucking Roman candle. Perfect. The Roman candle thing really stuck with me. Because it is not a movie with this very clear direction to it. It is firing off in all directions. And he wasn't seeing it for what it was at the time, because also, he was part of the movement that it was coming out of.

2:03:53It's so funny. It was happening. I know. It is so funny that Schrader and him find, and Scorsese start working together, because Scorsese's the Catholic thing versus the Calvinist thing. Like, very different approaches to religious sort of guilt and fervor. And, yeah. Yeah. They've made some good movies together. But speaking of Schrader, do you think that, like, I mean, because obviously— Do you think that his AI Facebook posts are good? Of course I do. I think they're hilarious. Yeah. We love them. But do you think Scorsese, like, obviously—I don't think his screenplays are his strengths.

2:04:27And I actually think this is one of his strongest screenplays. Even though you're right, it doesn't do anything. It's immature. Yeah. The language. Goodfell is the most incredible screenplay, and at the same—like, in the same way where you're like, is this just improvised? Like, all these guys talking, like, did Scorsese really write this down? Yeah. I mean, what are his other screenplays? Now I want to look. But this is—when Departed came out, I feel like he kept making the joke of, like, it took me 40 years, but I finally made a movie with a plot. Yeah. That he always was this guy who—you know, and he's very self-effacing about it, but

2:05:00he talks about it like, it's not even that I don't find that stuff interesting. I'm not good at it. Right. I don't know how to do it. I feel like I've told this story before. Okay. But on the set of vinyl, there was this point. I was in the worst thing Scorsese ever directed, Miriam, and— Let's wait to see Shine a Light. Okay. Let's wait to watch Shine a Light. There was a moment in the pilot where there was a boardroom scene with, like, 15 speaking roles, which is just the worst fucking thing in the world to shoot. It's stagnant. Everyone's at chairs. You have to get so much cross-coverage, and then the angles are like, fuck.

2:05:31He delivers most of his lines to this guy at one end of the table, but one line to the other end of the table, so we need to get coverage from the other side as well just for that one line. And he comes in, and they're like, Marty, what should we get next? And he stands there, and he's sort of muttering to himself, and he's, like, pointing and doing directions, and he's trying to figure out the math on, like, what coverage are we still owed? What do I need? What would help me? And he just looks up, and he goes, I've just never been good at this stuff. Right. Okay, so his scripts are Mean Streets, Goodfellas.

2:06:03Wow. No screenplay credit between those two movies. Yeah. Age of Innocence. Casino. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, you know, and then, like, Silence, Killers of the Flower Moon, like, more recently. It's also obviously very hands-on with his writers are his closest friends, his closest collaborators. He works with the same people often. Jay Cox. It's years and years of development. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:06:26Cannavale was like, Marty, what the fuck are you talking about? You're Martin Scorsese. You know what coverage you need. And he was like, I really, I just don't have a head for that. But, and you realize, not that he's being, like, falsely modest, but much in the same way that, like, the anxious camera work is a byproduct of we don't have time to set up multiple shots, that a lot of his language comes out of, like, I'm just not going to do the stuff that doesn't come to me innately. Yeah. I'm going to go to the stuff I feel like I can do better than anyone else. And I think similarly, he's like, I'm not a tight plot construction guy.

2:06:59Yeah. You know, and I can do it when I need to. And when he does it, it's usually the things that are more conventional genre riffs like Cape Fear or Shutter Island, where he's playing in the tradition of a type of movie. And then what he's doing is having fun stylistically or making the performances unconventional within it. But left to his own devices, it's like what he likes is finding a world. What he likes is, like, digging into the corners. What he likes is exploring every little sub-dynamic. But he's not someone who is into, I think, tight story construction.

2:07:30I do want to say as far as, like, coverage for this one, I think because he'd worked on it for so long, for, like, whatever, eight, seven years, he had drawn everything. He's an incredible fucking artist. So he's had done shots. So, but as far as, like, the actual coverage, he brought in the Boxcar Bertha Horman team to be like, OK, how do we do this, like, efficiently? Right. And stuff. But yeah, so he had drawn, like, every scene. And so. He had a version in his head of what his perfect movie would look like.

2:08:01Yeah. But then the reason you bring in the Corman people is they are, like, the A-team. They are, like, the weirdos who know how to just, like, fuck. Well, actually, if we only have five minutes, here's the way to do it. Like, they exceed under pressure. Also, I want to say the different, like, what makes this film a little different than the rest is he edited it. He edited this and Boxcar Bertha. He's not credited because of Guild rules, but he says the original editor who is credited.

2:08:31He's got a co-credit, but there was a Guild rule that you couldn't be the sole editor of your own movie. No, he's not credited. He's not credited. I saw, like, an additional editing or something. I don't think he was credited, but he did. He said he edited it, but he couldn't take credit. Yeah. The original edit was terrible, like, by whoever gets credit. So this is, like, so Shoemaker, Thelma Shoemaker did his first one, Who's Not Knocking? But, and then, so, and this one is, like, is Marty without Thelma? Yes. Right. Well, she's also, like, working on Woodstock for years.

2:09:03Yeah. But Woodstock comes out in 70. Okay. Which he worked on, too, obviously, but she is sort of what, I mean, that's where they reconnect or, yeah, but she doesn't come back to him until Raging Bull. Yeah, which is crazy. Like, Taxi Driver is edited by somebody else, I forget, yeah, Marshall Lucas and Todd Rolfe. Oh, I forgot. Wait, I actually have some interesting points about Marshall Lucas I'm going to make in the next episode. What were you going to say, Miriam? Well, you can edit this out because it's probably, you're going to get to it, but is New York, New York very bounced? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. New York, New York is the first bounce.

2:09:35This is a classic, I mean, this is an arc of, but the way we used to, when the show started and things were more narrow and we were like, we need people who fit into these very classic tight arcs. The first 10 years of his career are so thoroughly that, of like, you have two developmental movies, then you have the movie where it all comes together, that's the guarantor to like, we're going to let you elevate to Taxi Driver, which is the crazy breakthrough.

2:10:07And then he cashes that in on New York, New York, where people are like, you're fucking done. And New York, New York is just the classic bounce of like, he spent too much money on a movie that didn't need to be expensive. And he had like, a whole artistic idea of like, how to present this story and do a musical differently. It's very similar. And everyone's like, ah! It's very similar to Spielberg with 1941, where it's like, overloaded with ideas and passion. I can do a different genre. And you're like, you have overthought this movie. And cocaine. Both are overloaded with cocaine. There's a little bit of cocaine. And then Raging Bull is the like, I gotta show people I can just like, focus it up

2:10:41again. But like, King of Comedy is a bounce. I mean, he's got a lot of bounces. I'm saying just that. No, I know. I agree with you. Because who's that knocking is 69 or 70? 67. So it's 67 to, and then Raging Bull is 80. Yeah, that's where there's a real tight, like sort of, this is how a career develops, grows, crashes, rebounds. And then the 80s are up and down. You disagree, David? I see. No, I don't disagree. I, the 80s are more up. I mean, like, Last Temptation nominally made money.

2:11:12Like, it did ruin things for him a little bit. Yeah. And like, his other big bombs are King of Comedy. That's a huge bomb. Yes. Like, that makes no money. And was framed as an embarrassment. Right. Like, people were like, shame on you. Yeah, right. Yeah. And Bringing Out the Dead was like, honestly, like a really big bomb. Yeah. Because that movie's also pretty expensive. And that was, I feel like Bringing Out the Dead is another kind of low point for him, career-wise, of like, why should studios keep giving you money? You know, like... When we were talking about... After that, he's been able to do whatever he wants. We were talking about, because the series is so long, do we, like, split it in half and

2:11:46do we do a little short series in between so that there's a little bit of a break in Marty and every time... Which we're probably not going to do. It feels like there's enough new releases coming out the end of this year and the beginning of next so that will kind of naturally happen. Yeah, it's fine. But when we talked about it, I was always adamant the only place to break it up is 1999 to 2001. Because, like, what happens between the 20th century and the 21st century is Leo unlocks everything. And it feels like from Gangs of New York on, he's working with bigger budgets than he's ever worked with. Yes. He's got this hot young star who will do anything for him.

2:12:18And everyone is like, it's time when's he getting the fucking Oscar? And then after he gets the Oscar, it's like he gets to do whatever he wants. And Bringing Out the Dead feels like the last time there is, like, an attempt at doing a classic Scorsese movie that doesn't work for people. A movie I love and think is a masterpiece. Yes. But his otter films in the 21st century are him going way outside of his wheelhouse. Miriam, are there movies you don't like or love?

2:12:49Good question. Are there Martys you sort of respect or stick up for or whatever? I do not like The Aviator, but that might be partly because I'm too loyal to the source material. I do not like seeing a Katherine Heffern invitation. I need to see it again. I'm very curious to rewatch because I also haven't seen it since release. It's never been a favorite. I've seen it since release, but it does so many bananas visual things that I bet I will enjoy on rewatch. I think I would too. And it's like early Leo. Like you were saying that transition. It's really good Leo. I was like, let's see, is there anything?

2:13:20I don't remember loving Bringing Out the Dead. Possibly worth a rewatch. Yeah. And so I think the only one I haven't seen is The Color of Money. The Color of Money rocks. Yeah. I bet. Hot movie. I bet. I never think of it as a real Scorsese, but I know it is. I know it is. His 80s are so weird because that's kind of like a commercial play of like you got to get back in the good graces of the studio. And it's a big hit and he gets Newman an Oscar, but there was a little bit of like Scorsese sold out, right? And then after hours, it's him trying to be like, I can be responsible.

2:13:52I can make a low budget thing. I can like get on base, but it's like a comedy. It's not seen as like a major work. It's fascinating how up and down he was there. Yeah. Yeah. But the rest I love. I love. I love. I was saying if I didn't do this, I would do Shutter Island. Love that film. Yeah. I fucking love Shutter Island so much. That's going to be a fun app. I love you guys. I'm in good company. Oh, Miriam. We love you too. I can't wait to see who's going to do Kundun. We have guests lining up around the block.

2:14:23Well, let's just say it. The Dalai Lama is a blankie. I don't know if we can get him because, you know, we ask people to be in person. We don't want to do a Zoom episode, but yeah. Kundun famously filmed in the same place as Ishtar. Really? Yeah. Same studio in Morocco. I know that. That fucking rules. I've visited the Kundun set. It's amazing. And Kundun, the soundtrack is mostly Rogers and Clark, right? Exactly. They use mostly their... Yeah. That's the director's cut. I have never seen Kundun before and I've never seen Last Temptation. I'm very eager to see that.

2:14:53You've never seen Last Temptation? Never seen it. Last Temptation is amazing. It's the best. I just re-watched it, which caused our fans to go insane. Being like, they're recording out of order. I was like, nope. I re-watched it. Not because of the podcast. Yeah. Let us watch movies, please. Let me watch my movies. Please let us watch movies. Let's do the box office game for Mean Streets, which came out... Actually, before I do the box office game, I should just note its release. It premiered kind of a surprising choice here at the New York Film Festival. Huh. I don't know why they picked that one.

2:15:24Interesting. No. Yeah. So it premieres in fall of 73 at the New York Film Festival. Um, Warner Brothers had, you know, it does end up distributing it. They get shopped around and they pick it up. Mm-hmm. Um. And you know what? In that Linklater thing, Scorsese was saying, they showed it to Columbia, maybe? And they passed on it. They showed it to a different studio first. Paramount. Paramount. Thank you. And then they went over to Warner Brothers and he was like, we're there with all the Warner Brothers execs and they're getting their sandwiches delivered.

2:15:56We're screening the movie for the second time in two days. The first day they were like, this is well-made kid, but there's no money here, right? Right. And he's like, I'm spooling my movie up. It's starting and the guys are arguing over like, is that the corned beef? I got the corned beef. And he was like, I'm losing them. And then De Niro came on screen. Right. And one of the guys looked up and went like, oh, this guy's interesting. And then they all started looking and they all started engaging with the movie and they bought it. And you have to imagine that's a moment that changes his entire life where he's like, huh,

2:16:30this guy unlocks doors for me. Yeah. There's something here that is undeniable that translates across audiences where if I have this guy in my movies, people are going to watch. Even if he's not famous yet, he makes people lift their heads up and stop paying attention to their sandwiches. Totally. That's so true and such a good story. But also, I think what was happening then is that the guys were like, these Warner Brothers guys were like, oh, I know a guy like that. I know a Johnny. Like, he's just like a guy from back home.

2:17:00And that was also the thing for Scorsese. It was like, yes, like if this works for, if this is familiar to people, then this works. People don't want to watch a movie about a guy like me. They want to watch a movie about the guys I know. And the movies can still be personal. But yes, if I can put those guys on screen, I really have something. Um, so the release strategy, Scorsese was not very happy with, um, you know, uh, Warner Brothers didn't really know what to do and was against them opening in New York because I think New York Film Festival was not really as glitzy back then, maybe.

2:17:35And they had no idea how to sell the picture. I mean, it's funny because the poster's so iconic. But don't you think? I mean, like, yeah, it's such a famous poster. Yeah, but they don't have stars yet. No. Yeah. Um, The Exorcist is coming out around the same time, although it is not in the top five, so that's not a spoiler, thank God. Okay. And Warner Brothers is more worried about that. They don't really care about mean streets. Mm-hmm. Um, so the film comes out, it gets nice reviews, it makes $3 million domestically, but it maybe

2:18:06doesn't, it's not like a huge hit. And it was interesting in that Linklater convo we watched, where Linklater, they were talking about how it got no Oscar nominations. It got, De Niro got a couple critics, he got like the New York and National Critics Awards. He got National Society and New York Film Critics Circle, supporting actor, and it got a WGA nom. Um, but like, the Oscars ignored it, but Marty was like, nobody saw it. Like, it was just not like a widely seen movie. The Academy was different, but also just, it wasn't like really out there very much. It didn't feel like we were in the conversation. He wasn't surprised it didn't get the nominations. Uh.

2:18:36Right. So, when this film was coming out, number one at the box office, this is crazy, is, I believe, I think it's a double feature, the way I'm reading this chart. I think it's a double feature. Well, I don't think that this chart is trying to tell me it's a tie. I think that these were double features, because the first is like an erotic comedy. Okay. Whoa. Uh, you know, I think a bit of a fun, sexy movie for you to go see. Hum-ma-hum-ma-hum-ma-hum-ma. And then the other is an animated film that is famously raunchy.

2:19:07And I imagine they were being presented together. Okay, so Fritz the Cat. Fritz the Cat is the animated film. The first one. The 1972, you know, the back she, Fritz the Cat. And then it was on a double bill with a sex comedy? Yeah, I doubt you've heard the other. It's a sex comedy directed by Paul Glickler. Uh, you, I don't know why I'm trying to give you guys clues. It's called The Cheerleaders. Oh my God, I was going to say Paul Glickler. Was it The Cheerleaders? Okay, I was wondering. See, Miriam, I was like, make Miriam nose. But I didn't want to patronize her. I didn't know. No, I love this movie. Okay, tell me about The Cheerleaders. Let me, let me see.

2:19:37Uh, they don't bring it on. They take it off. Okay, I'm guessing that that tagline was put on a DVD later. Uh, it's pretty good though. The Cheerleaders, they're these like- Pretty fucking good. These great softcore films that, hey, that they made like, I think three of them. And all these like experimental filmmakers like worked on these. The Swing Cheerleaders in 74 and then Cheerleaders Wild Weekend at one point. I don't know, there's a bunch of them. Yeah, just abstract TNA. Love these films. It's just Cheerleaders having fun. So that was the same week that Mishri's came out. So this is the, right, that is number one at the box office when Watchtakes comes out.

2:20:11So that is number one. Number two is a martial arts film. Probably the most famous martial arts film ever made. I'm sorry, I'm on the Cheerleaders Wikipedia page. Right up at the top, this article needs additional citations for verifications July 2013. Someone flagged this 13 years ago and has not followed up on it. But also there's a section at the bottom that says streaming media. And then it just says, the film is often available at licensed streaming movie sites with two citations. Oh, interesting. Feels like a real abandoned wiki page.

2:20:43Yes. Sorry, number two at the box office. What's the most famous martial arts movie ever made? Enter the Dragon. So that's number two. Austenus, right? Correct. And that's been in the box office for three months at this point. And it's a huge hit. That's another example, though, of like, his other films had been, you know, kind of cult successes. And it was like, he's finally ceded into the consciousness enough that everyone's ready for the big mainstream breakthrough. Warner Brothers makes a Bruce Lee movie. And then he dies and it becomes a phenomenon because it's like, fuck, this is the final object.

2:21:15Yeah. Do you like Enter the Dragon? I haven't seen it. Fair enough. I need to do a double feature. Pretty fucking awesome. With Reservoir Dogs. Yeah. Number three at the box office is a porn film. So, like, I think Cheerleaders is more like softcore. But, like, this is like a classic, like, golden age of porn movie. Is it Green Door? Not Behind the Green Door.

2:21:37Misty Beethoven. Not Misty Beethoven. Not Deep Throat. It's not Emmanuel. Not, no. It's not the horny Alice in Wonderland. No. No.

2:21:49Devil in Miss Jones. Oh. I knew. I knew. Just, like, name the big ones. Yeah. The Devil in Miss Jones. In Miss Jones, the Gerard Damiano, is that his name? Right. Yeah. Who's the guy that her Reynolds character is basically based on. Right. Who also made a movie. Uh, I apologize in advance to all of our listeners and our guests. Uh, Let My Puppets Come. Wow. Gerard Damiano made a puppet porn film. Wow. That was not presented as, like, this is like a parody of porn.

2:22:20It was like, do people want to jerk off to puppets? Wow. And so the parody, the title's a parody of Let My People Come. And instead it's just horny puppets. I'd like an apology as well. I own it on Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray. Um. Didn't get the slipcover. It's just. I need to speak my truth. You own it? This movie made. It's an interesting artifact of film history. I'm not saying I get my rocks off watching it. I don't look at puppets that way. Griffin. Griffin, relax. He bought it for the liner notes.

2:22:52Friedkin calls Devil in Miss Jones. A really good essay in the book. Says Devil in Miss Jones is the best, like, porn movie of those, of that era. Because it, like, has a plot. I saw it at Bologna, at this film festival for restorations. Sounds fucking great so far. It was so, it was weird to watch a film with, like, you know, all these, like, academics and stuff. It is, right. It was weird. But, no, it's a good film. I've seen it. She kills herself. And then, like, the devil, right, is, like, or the, like, an angel or a devil is basically, like, there's, like, you can earn your place in hell by being a horny lady on earth.

2:23:27Something, I think so. Something like that. There's sort of a celestial element to it. Yeah. The Cheerleaders has a better plot where, like, if you want to win the football game, you have to, like, outfuck the other team. Right. Right, right, right. I mean, look, we love a good plot. Let My Puppets Come has a plot. Owning, owing a mob boss half a million dollars that must be paid within 24 hours, a group of executives come up with ideas for in films, a pornographic movie, but the characters are puppets. It's kind of, I watch the movie for the story.

2:23:59Of course. That's what I watch it for. Number four, the box office. This is a crazy box office because it's all kind of, like, you know, underground-y kind of movies. This is, like, a Chinese action movie starring the female Bruce Lee as she was built. Oh.

2:24:19Is this?

2:24:23Fuck. Sorry. Tell me. The actor is called Judy Lee. Yes. The film is called Queen Boxer. Okay. Yep. And I've never seen it, but she's, like, a kickboxer who's taking revenge or whatever. Yes. And, uh, yeah, uh, that's number four. That's new this week. And then number five is, well, it's a film that, uh, you just told me that, um, the director wanted Marty to be in. Uh, Let My Puppets Come.

2:24:49This was another thing revealed in the Linklater thing that, uh, uh, American Graffiti is basically filming the same time as, uh, Mean Streets and that George Lucas wanted Scorsese as an actor in the film. Ah. To be the leader of the pharaohs, he said. In American Graffiti, which, of course, is one of the biggest hits of 73. And he said, George, I, I, I, uh, I don't even drive. I'm from New York. I'm not a Californian. We should note, of course, that Marty is in Mean Streets and does shoot Robert De Niro in the neck with a gun. Yeah. Nice work if you could get it. We didn't really talk about the ending, but the ending is so fucking insane.

2:25:21Like, it really, I love that you just don't know what happens to Johnny Boy, or really to any of them. You know that they're making it to the hospital. It's the other part that was making me think of Mikey and Nikki, that it just, like, the, the big dramatic burst of violence happens and the movie ends, like, immediately. And then you get your other clip, you get the big heat when the wife dies, and, like, it's so devastating, so you're like, I don't know. And weird music, that's such a crazy ending. What were you going to say, Ben? When they're on their way to Brooklyn, I wrote down this really funny quote from Keitel.

2:25:52Do I know Brooklyn? Do I know the jungle? And I just love that at that time, Brooklyn, all of the outer boroughs were truly just, like, no man's land for people in Manhattan. It's not even that, it's just, you don't leave your place. Right. Sure. You got your spot, this is your neighborhood, this is where your people are, you know? They filmed it in Brooklyn. I mean, it took place in Brooklyn so they could film it in L.A. Yeah. I think David already talked about that. Yeah. Yes. So. How long has American Graffiti been out at this point? American Graffiti's been out for 11 weeks.

2:26:23Wow. So, you know, three months. I astound. So, other films, a reissue of Clockwork Orange is number six. Okay. That's obviously a couple years old at this point. A reissue of Camelot. The Musical is at number seven. And a reissue of The Last of Sheila. Oh, sure. With Richard Benjamin is number eight. Yeah. Then you have Electra Glide in Blue at number nine, which is, I want to just double check, you know, this movie. That's like the sort of biker movie, but it's like a sort of spoof of biker movies.

2:26:53A little bit. Yeah. Okay, with Robert Blake. Postmodern. Yeah. And then there's the movie Hit with Billy Dee Williams, the Sidney Fury movie. Okay. That's like, you know, it's maybe not even blaxploitation, but it's like a sort of like all black cast action thriller from Paramount, like a big sort of action-y movie with Billy Dee Williams and a young Richard Pryor. I just remember that when we were talking about the soundtrack, I wanted to mention Michael Schultz's Cooley High, which was two years later.

2:27:25And that used all these Motown songs and that he said, recently he said, like, it was dirt cheap to get those songs then. And then just like right after this and that. Then they went out. They were everywhere. I'm sorry. What were you going to say? No, I was just going to say Scorsese in that DGA thing said Badlands was the closing night film at New York Film Festival the same year. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. What a year. And those two guys being roughly the same age, feeling like putting on the board new methods of like film language for American artists.

2:27:58And he was like, that was the one that had all the heat and the energy behind it. Like we were in the festival and we got a good reception, but the energy was something incredible is happening over here with Badlands. But I guess Badlands ends up actually releasing a little bit later. It was released in 74, I believe, but it was the closing film of the 73 New York Film Festival. Yeah. Yeah. The big 73 movie is obviously Exorcist. Yeah. Well, I don't know what wins best picture that year.

2:28:25For 73?

2:28:30It's not The Godfather. I'll tell you that much. Yeah. That was 72. It is The Sting. Yeah, it's The Sting. Which, you know, was a giant hit that everybody loved. But also is a very old fashioned movie. Not just in being a period piece, but it feels. Well, they play the piano like, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. You know, they do that. It's just interesting that you've already had like Midnight Cowboy winning best picture and being like, oh shit, is everything different now? And a couple of years later, they're like, we watch, like watching movie stars in expensive costumes pull off cons. Right. We've been going through that in the last 10 years, too. We keep swinging back and forth.

2:29:01And then Mean Streets plays director's Fortnite at Cannes, right? Right. And that's like, you still see it. If you guys go, like they do this like kind of screensaver sort of like iPhone kind of collage of all the films that have played. And they always play Mean Streets and Sean Dillman. So it's an iconic director's Fortnite. That's also so funny because it must have been like six months after the movie came out in the States, right? Yeah. But back then. No, no. Totally. Yeah.

Legacy and next steps

2:29:28So the film obviously holds a special place in Marty's heart because it's so personal. But he says he's never really sat down and watched it from beginning to end because it's too close. And indeed, he wanted to make a sequel about Charlie living on Staten Island with a couple kids. Again, I am kind of like, and what is the story of this film? Like, it can't just be Charlie hanging out. Yeah. Like, does Johnny boy come back? He's dead. You're talking robo Johnny boy? Well, you don't know that he's dead. You don't know what happened.

2:29:58Yeah. Like, you see, he gets shot, he's bleeding out and he like runs into the street. You assume Johnny boy is probably not making it, but like. I've heard him say that nobody dies, but that they can never go back. And like, that's how he reads it is that they don't die or maybe we don't know, but that if he survives, he needs people basically to think that he's dead at the very least. They just can't go back. And so they're exiled. Yeah. That's, that's interesting. Yeah. Instead, instead, Warner Brothers, who had released this film and found him very promising. Right.

2:30:28Through him, Alice doesn't live here anymore as a challenge. Right. Which comes out basically like one year later. Like, so it's like, he goes right to that. And whereas I assume taxi driver. Well, but that's Schrader's thing. So like, I don't even know that he's like nursing tax. Like, it's like, I don't think after this, of course, as he's like, okay. And now. No. New York, New York. That was his thing. I guess that's the next fixation. I read an interview and he's like, the next thing on his mind is New York, New York. Because again, it's another genre. I did the gangster film. Now I do the musical. He knows it's going to take a lot of money and a lot of production resources to put that

2:31:00movie together. He needs to play the studio game. Right. To be able to be entrusted with those things. Because it's the only game back then. Yeah. And like, it's funny because it's like, all right, so Jaws is what, 75? Yeah. And American Graffiti is 73. Mm-hmm. De Palma is, like, Sisters is what, 72? Like, what's De Palma doing? De Palma's probably in the weirdest place. Yeah. Yeah. Because what, Carrie's not until 78? Carrie's 76. 76. Okay. But so, you know, all these guys are trying shit and doing exciting stuff. Right. But they're not quite, you know, they're not quite atop the Hollywood pile yet.

2:31:33Whereas Coppola is, like, immediately atop the Hollywood pile after he does Godfather. But he was also older than all of them. And he's in San Francisco and he's, like, doing his own thing. He had made more films before Godfather. He had gone through a whole sort of arc and he was, like, the mentor to all of them. He was kind of, like, the camp counselor trying to encourage all of them to follow their things. My 73 list is, I mean, like, my favorite movies that year are Don't Look Now and Long Goodbye and The Exorcist. And Spirit of the Beehive and shit like that, which, you know, like, the great hero art movies. Fucking rules. Spirit of the Beehive's pretty cool.

2:32:03Yeah. That guy rocks. I don't know if you've seen any of his other films, actually. They're all good. I mean, he's only made, like, three. Yeah. Do you like Victor Ricci? Yeah. Is that what you've seen? Like, Ricci? Ricci? Also a great band. Spirit of the Beehive? Really? Yeah. Let's be done. Let's stop talking about Beehive. Miriam, are there any other sort of general overarching Scorsese takes or thoughts in your relationship with him and his work that you want to throw out as we start this journey for months? I think I've drained the Scorsese love for now, but I—

2:32:37We love him forever. Yeah. I mean, he's the best. He's like—the one thing I'll say, The Departed, I was wrong about it. People say—like, I used to think it was like he just got the award because, you know, it's a career achievement. The Departed is amazing. It's so good. Like, now that I've seen more Hong Kong movies, I'm like, this movie fucking rocks. It's also—it's just so watchable. When will he work with Mark Wahlberg again? It's crazy because— It'd be nice for him to rescue Wahlberg, yeah.

2:33:07It would be nice, but also I'm like, how disappointed would it be to see them work together again and not reactivate the same thing? I mean, this is—this is another thing I remember—sorry, just—but this was public knowledge. But at the time we were shooting vinyl, it was pretty recent that he—William Monaghan wrote a Departed sequel to star Wahlberg. Yes. And Scorsese— That was in pre-production. He was on board to direct it, and Warner Brothers said, we don't believe that Wahlberg can carry this movie.

2:33:42Okay. It was going to be—De Niro was— He was the only one nominated in that film. That's crazy. Although that is also crazy that that happened. But De Niro was going to play—it was going to be the fucking rat in Congress, right? Like, the final shot. De Niro was going to play, like, a corrupt congressman. I just died. Yeah, and it was going to be Wahlberg. All this—I'm not saying anything proprietary, but I just remember him. You know what would be funny, though, if, like— You know what would be funny, though, if, like— What's, like, the stupidest thing? Like, turns out Martin Sheen didn't die. He's just, like, in traction. I'm trying to think of, like, the worst Departed sequel. Sure.

2:34:12Like, you know, what else happened? But he was—I think it was at the rap party, and he was, like, holding court with a bunch of us youngins. And he was like, I was ready to make it. The film won Best Picture. It was a big hit. I had Mark Wahlberg. He's a movie star. They wouldn't do it. He said, Marty, you don't see the vision. Sure. Well, I mean, that's funny. He was like, I've given up on it. I spent five years trying. I'm not. It's over. Miriam, is there anything you want to plug? Um, no. I'm just, uh— You're vibing. I'm vibing. We love it. We love to see you vibe. We're here to vibe. It's very nice to have you on the show again, Miriam.

2:34:43It's so nice to be back. It's been far too long. It's, uh, yeah. Years-long project. There have been other episodes we've circled, and then trips changed. No, I'm sorry. No, no, no, no. There's one I would have loved to do. Which? Remind me. Vamps. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah? Which now we've both— I fucking love Vamps. Vamps, yeah, I told you. Hosted a Vamps screening in L.A. I think that movie's awesome. Yeah. Um, anyway, it's such an honor to be on this episode for this series. Oh, it's nice to have you. So glad I worked out.

2:35:14Um, and thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe, uh, as we go through five more months of Martin Scorsese. Yes, next week will be Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Another gangster picture? Oh, God. Ugh, the same thing every week? Why don't you try silence? We are gonna try— Silent Burstyn. Yeah. Right. She once told Griffin to shut her fuck up. In a nice way. Well, it wasn't nice, but in a more polite way. In fact, the way she said it was, Griffin, try silence.

2:35:44Who said that? Ellen Burstyn. Academy Award winner Ellen Burstyn. Oh, my God. One of the most devastating things that has ever happened to me. To anyone. No, that's incredible. I think to anyone. It was incredible. I wear it as a badge of honor, but, uh— And then you went on to become a professional talker. Yeah. You know what? You know what, Ellen? You know what, Ellen? Eat this. And it's good that you didn't. Anyway, tune in next week. Oh, I need you with the— Tune in next week. As Against Her Wishes, we talk extensively about Ellen Burstyn. And as always, I want to say, I only watch Let My Puppets Come as a student of cinema.

2:36:19That is the only thing—that's the prism through which it's just important for film history, Ben. Sure. And there's some good puppetry in it. I don't endorse what the puppets are doing. I don't like it. They can do it if they want. I'm not telling them they can't do it. Blank Check with Griffin and David is hosted by Griffin Newman and David Sims. Our executive producer is me, Ben Hosley. Our creative producer is Marie Barty Salinas.

2:36:49And our associate producer is A.J. McKeon. This show is mixed and edited by A.J. McKeon and Alan Smithy. Research by J.J. Birch. Our theme song is by Lane Montgomery in The Great American Novel, with additional music by Alex Mitchell. Artwork by Joe Bowen, Ollie Moss, and Pat Reynolds. Our production assistant is Minnick. Special thanks to David Cho, Jordan Fish, and Nate Patterson for their production help. Head over to BlankCheckPod.com for links to all of the real nerdy shit. Join our Patreon, Blank Check Special Features,

2:37:21for exclusive franchise commentaries and bonus episodes. Follow us on social at BlankCheckPod. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Checkbook on Substack. This podcast is created and produced by Blank Check Production.