KC as a turning point for Scorsese and De Niro
The following is information I’ve gathered over the years, some of which is etched on my memory as long established and credible, and bits of which I might have to go digging for references for (so I’ll delete most or all of these). First, De Niro wanted to do the film more than Scorsese did. De Niro was keen on the script, written by (according to the film's Wikipedia article) is Paul D. Zimmerman. Scorsese, for his part, was going through a rough patch in his life independent of the merits of this film. I believe that his substance-abuse issues came to a head while he made this film (I can't find backing for this in his Wikipedia article, but I know I've heard about it from a reputable source; possibly in the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which I reference in previous entries). KC was produced in 1981, though not released until 1983, and obviously it was done in the immediate wake of his acclaimed, possibly his greatest film, Raging Bull (1980). Whether due to the pressure of trying to meet heightened expectations in the echo of Raging Bull or due more to ongoing personal issues, Scorsese’s drug use was a climaxing problem in this period.
Maybe not coincidentally, one big problem with this film was a production issue (and note that its budget was rather high for the time for such an indie-like film—$20 million, with only $2.5 million earned at the box office, according to Stephen Whitty, The Star-Ledger (April 15, 2012), Section Four, p. 4, sidebar: “8 That Aren’t All Bad[:] Flops Worth Seeking Out” (see also the film's Wikipedia article). Here, Scorsese was being a kind of crazy perfectionist, apparently on the scale of Stanley Kubrick, who has long been noted for putting actors through many takes in his later movies. Scorsese did numerous takes, at least with De Niro (I don’t know if the latter complained). And I admit, De Niro’s performance in this film is well-tooled, if it isn’t a typical kind of character he does.
But whether because of the onerousness of the shoot or not, De Niro and Scorsese would not work again for almost a decade, when the two worked on Goodfellas (1990), which seems today like something Scorsese did to get his public esteem back on track (which, in general, it did).
Scorsese himself has said, and this is very memorable to me (I may paraphrase a bit), “I had to keep reinventing my enthusiasm for” doing KC. This would seem to suggest depression, whether or not this was a significant component of what was predominantly a drug problem. As it would turn out, this movie is well regarded by critics (if it isn’t popular among the public; it’s become a cult film). Scorsese was able to adhere to his craft. And one thing an interested and sympathetic fan would have to say is that, throughout his career, if he is consistent in anything, not least in his recent renaissance for the past 10 or so years, it’s in his being a good craftsman. He is the last great director who knows that film is largely about what a motion-picture camera can do—and that means in an “analog,” not a digital sense—and he opts to go as far as he can with this. And his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker seems essential, at least as much as any editor to a director, to keeping his craft alive for fans.
I think critics would say that he still can make interesting films—regardless of which you esteem more, Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), Shutter Island (2010), and/or Hugo (2011). But if he consistently scores in any way, it is in delivering the goods along the lines of cinematic technique. His technique of panning or dollying with the camera (even with an actor who is performing without moving) goes at least as far back as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), and overall, arguably, this method makes him the one baby-boomer director who is a true successor to Hitchcock in terms of consistent use of moving-camera technique to readily rouse enthusiasm in the audience. Meanwhile, within this directorial style, specific performances by actors may flag a bit (such as, I felt, Sacha Baron Cohen’s in Hugo, or even Daniel Day-Lewis’s in the earlier parts of The Age of Innocence [1993]). As far back as The Color of Money (1986), a sort of Paul Newman vehicle, we remember the virtuoso camera shots of action at the pool table (and something about Newman’s performance) more than anything else.
If there was a major turning point when Scorsese went from (1) being a director, like so many others of the 1970s, who espoused making a film out of passion for the material, a passion married to the performances, and a passion for the story (no matter how bleak), to (2) being a competent but more drily professional technician, it had to have been with KC, where we are impressed by the technical accomplishment of the film, but may feel there’s a certain triumph of technique over a certain “soul” we might want from a resonant and dramatically satisfying film.
Taxi Driver, however appalling we find its protagonist and story, at least feels like what it was—a febrile expression of some inner sense of alienation melded to a wish to create a work of art on same, on the coinciding parts of all three of its main makers, Scorsese, De Niro, and screenwriter Paul Schrader; this point, as involving “serendipity,” is underscored by one of them, Schrader, in the very interesting extras on the DVD of it (and Schrader's religious affiliation is referred to by him on the DVD, and is conspicuous in a Wikipedia biography of him). Scorsese says amid the fulsome commentary on this DVD that the film “came from the heart,” even though (we can infer on our own) what was in the hearts behind it was at least as much about anger, bitterness, and fear as it was about love or a wish to inspire; but passion for a certain story, with rising and falling arc and some sense of destination, is the point here. Meanwhile, KC seems like a labor of love for technique if not so much for the story of arch-noodge Rupert Pupkin. (See note at end of this entry on Taxi Driver.)
Indeed, after KC, Scorsese’s career entered a sort of fallow period. He tried in about 1982 to get financing for a pet project, The Last Temptation of Christ, which fell through. (The film didn’t get made until years later, for a 1988 release.) According to “extra” commentary on the film After Hours (1985), he seemed (to himself, apparently) all but washed up, and then was able to make After Hours—which I hope to review in another entry—which seemed (including with enthusiastic support of colleagues who helped make it) to be as much about showing Scorsese he could “still do it” after what he’d recently been through, as about the actual story.
But KC still holds interest after all these years, though I would have to say I look at it quite differently, and in part that’s probably a function of “growing up,” and what is not necessarily the same, “getting older.” But also, knowing the media/arts world as I do, I temper my view of it as I couldn’t have in 1984. Let’s take a closer look at issues tied to the world-class noodge, Rupert Pupkin.
Rupert Pupkin as echt banality—why should we laugh at him? Is he the right banality to scorn?
When you’re in college, and you tend to be rather strongly competitive (and critical of the foibles of peers) whether this is deeply in your nature or not, a film like KC seems like a template to show “just how bad a banality can be.” You allude to it when seeing a “Rupert Pupkin” in your career travels. As if we can find a Rupert Pupkin on almost every block (or so it seems, at least to the younger).
But in recent years, what I have trouble with is how this film focuses on a sort of “artist wannabe”—a consumer who wants to make the big time with his act. As if the only banalities in the arts and the media are the aspiring dorks coming out of Podunk.
But while a film need not always focus on social issues as if every piece of art has to be “social realism,” I think if you’re going to take the trouble to etch a very detailed, richly humorous portrait of a banality in regard to the arts and media, then more important—because of its aspect of social threat— is the banality in the managerial role in the media, not the wannabe. This, of course, you can’t appreciate if you’re young and haven’t worked in the media, but after having done so for years, I would say that a focus on a Rupert Pupkin who does his first-ever comedy act is a rather smug exercise in self-congratulatory self-defense by New York media long-timers. And it has a limited appeal to that extent.
But a really interesting story is the pretender in the managerial role, ensconced there however many years, in a media or arts job, who didn’t really get there based on any (or much) exercise of solid talent (shown in initial work on a “craft” level). This is the banality who, as he or she quickly reaches his or her limits of competence, ends up seeming a lot stronger in fighting off and trashing up-and-comers who prove to have far more talent than does the banality, who thereby in some inevitable sense pose a threat to the banality’s job.
This is the Rupert Pupkin we should be looking at: the incompetent, self-serving managing editor; or the charlatan of an agent who can’t face career failure, who starts to badmouth clients he or she couldn’t serve in a normal way, preposterously insinuating the clients were “wrong all along,” not even asking of him or herself—in light of this criticism—the obvious question, “If they were so bad, why did you start to represent them?”
What makes this portrait valuable is, with this kind of Pupkin, people are unfairly denied breaks in the arts or the media world; the incompetent manager or agent (if he or she is able to at all) promotes people who only kiss up to him or her, and obviously, culture suffers to some extent as a result.
Note about Taxi Driver
I hope to do a separate little entry on Taxi Driver, which—not needing as much discussion as KC because of its familiarity—is one of the great 1970s movies, even if Travis Bickle is no one with whom people in a healthy frame of mind would identify. Taxi Driver, for better or worse, is one of Scorsese’s masterpieces, for its formal qualities, how it melds the highly adept creative input of numerous of its makers, and its salute to movie history, in line with Scorsese’s being a film professor who can import imitations of shots or techniques from old movies drawn up from his encyclopedic knowledge of same.
