Martin Scorsese
1973–1989: Breakthrough and acclaim

Championed by influential film critic Pauline Kael, Mean Streets was a breakthrough for Scorsese, De Niro, and Keitel. By now the signature Scorsese style was in place: macho posturing, bloody violence, Catholic guilt and redemption, gritty New York locale (though the majority of Mean Streets was shot in Los Angeles), rapid-fire editing and a soundtrack with contemporary music. Although the film was innovative, its wired atmosphere, edgy documentary style, and gritty street-level direction owed a debt to directors Cassavetes, Samuel Fuller and early Jean-Luc Godard. In 1974, actress Ellen Burstyn chose Scorsese to direct her in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress. Although well regarded, the film remains an anomaly in the director's early career as it focuses on a central female character. Returning to Little Italy to explore his ethnic roots, Scorsese next came up with Italianamerican, a documentary featuring his parents Charles and Catherine Scorsese.

Scorsese followed with Taxi Driver in 1976, which depicted a Vietnam veteran who takes the law into his own hands on New York's crime-ridden streets. The film established him as an accomplished filmmaker and also brought attention to cinematographer Michael Chapman, whose style tends towards high contrasts, strong colors, and complex camera movements. The film starred Robert De Niro as the angry and alienated Travis Bickle, and co-starred Jodie Foster in a highly controversial role as an underage prostitute, with Harvey Keitel as her pimp. Taxi Driver also marked the start of a series of collaborations between Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader, whose influences included the diary of would-be assassin Arthur Bremer and Pickpocket, a film by the French director Robert Bresson. Writer–director Schrader often returns to Bresson's work in films such as American Gigolo, Light Sleeper, and Scorsese's later Bringing Out the Dead. Already controversial upon its release, Taxi Driver hit the headlines again five years later, when John Hinckley Jr. made an assassination attempt on then-president Ronald Reagan. He subsequently blamed his act on his obsession with Jodie Foster's Taxi Driver character (in the film, De Niro's character, Travis Bickle, makes an assassination attempt on a senator).

Taxi Driver won the Palme d'Or at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, also receiving four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. The critical and financial success of Taxi Driver encouraged Scorsese to move ahead with his first big-budget project: the highly stylized musical New York, New York. This tribute to Scorsese's home town and the classic Hollywood musical was a box-office failure. The film was the director's third collaboration with Robert De Niro, co-starring with Liza Minnelli. The film is best remembered today for the title theme song, which was popularized by Frank Sinatra. Although possessing Scorsese's usual visual panache and stylistic bravura, many critics felt its enclosed studio-bound atmosphere left it leaden in comparison with his earlier work. Despite its weak reception, the film is regarded positively by some critics. Richard Brody in The New Yorker wrote:

For Scorsese, a lifelong cinephile, the essence of New York could be found in its depiction in classic Hollywood movies. Remarkably, his backward-looking tribute to the golden age of musicals and noirish romantic melodramas turned out to be one of his most freewheeling and personal films.

In 1977, he directed the Broadway musical The Act, starring Liza Minnelli. The disappointing reception that New York, New York received drove Scorsese into depression. By this stage Scorsese had developed a serious cocaine addiction. However, he did find the creative drive to make the highly regarded The Last Waltz, documenting the final concert by The Band. It was held at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on American Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1976, and featured one of the most extensive lineups of prominent guest performers at a single concert, including Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Ringo Starr, Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Paul Butterfield, Neil Diamond, Ronnie Wood, and Eric Clapton. However, Scorsese's commitments to other projects delayed the release of the film until 1978. Another Scorsese-directed documentary, titled American Boy, also appeared in 1978, focusing on Steven Prince, the cocky gun salesman who appeared in Taxi Driver. A period of wild partying followed, damaging the director's already fragile health. Scorsese helped provide footage for the documentary Elvis on Tour.

By several accounts (Scorsese's included), Robert De Niro saved Scorsese's life when he persuaded him to kick his cocaine addiction to make his highly regarded film Raging Bull. Writing for The New Yorker in March 2000, Mark Singer summarized Scorsese's condition stating:

He (Scorsese) was more than mildly depressed. Drug abuse, and abuse of his body in general, culminated in a terrifying episode of internal bleeding. Robert De Niro came to see him in the hospital and asked, in so many words, whether he wanted to live or die. If you want to live, De Niro proposed, let's make this picture—referring to Raging Bull, an as-told-to book by Jake LaMotta, the former world middleweight boxing champion, that De Niro had given him to read years earlier.

Convinced that he would never make another movie, he poured his energies into making the violent biopic of middleweight boxing champion Jake LaMotta, calling it a kamikaze method of film-making. The film is widely viewed as a masterpiece and was voted the greatest film of the 1980s by Britain's Sight & Sound magazine. It received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Robert De Niro, Best Supporting Actress for Cathy Moriarty, Best Supporting Actor for Joe Pesci, and Scorsese's first for Best Director. De Niro won, as did Thelma Schoonmaker for editing, but Best Director went to Robert Redford for Ordinary People. From this work onwards, Scorsese's films are always labeled as "A Martin Scorsese Picture" on promotional material. Raging Bull, filmed in high contrast black and white, is where Scorsese's style reached its zenith: Taxi Driver and New York, New York had used elements of expressionism to replicate psychological points of view, but here the style was taken to new extremes, employing extensive slow-motion, complex tracking shots, and extravagant distortion of perspective (for example, the size of boxing rings would change from fight to fight). Thematically too, the concerns carried on from Mean Streets and Taxi Driver: insecure males, violence, guilt, and redemption.

Although the screenplay for Raging Bull was credited to Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin (who earlier co-wrote Mean Streets), the finished script differed extensively from Schrader's original draft. It was rewritten several times by various writers including Jay Cocks (who went on to co-script later Scorsese films The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York). The final draft was largely written by Scorsese and Robert De Niro. The American Film Institute chose Raging Bull as the number one American sports film on their list of the top 10 sports films. In 1997, the Institute ranked Raging Bull as the twenty-fourth greatest film of all time on their AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies list. In 2007, they ranked Raging Bull as the fourth greatest film of all time on their AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) list.

Scorsese's next project was his fifth collaboration with Robert De Niro, The King of Comedy (1983). It is a satire on the world of media and celebrity, whose central character is a troubled loner who ironically becomes famous through a criminal act (kidnapping). The film was an obvious departure from the more emotionally committed films he had become associated with. Visually, it was far less kinetic than the style Scorsese had developed previously, often using a static camera and long takes. Here the expressionism of his previous work gave way to moments of almost total surrealism. It still bore many of Scorsese's trademarks, however. The King of Comedy failed at the box office, but has become increasingly well regarded by critics in the years since its release. German director Wim Wenders numbered it among his 15 favorite films. Also, in 1983, Scorsese made a brief cameo appearance in the film Anna Pavlova (also known as A Woman for All Time), originally intended to be directed by one of his heroes, Michael Powell. This led to a more significant acting appearance in Bertrand Tavernier 's jazz film Round Midnight. He also made a brief venture into television, directing an episode of Steven Spielberg 's Amazing Stories.

With After Hours (1985), for which he won a Best Director Award at Cannes, Scorsese made an esthetic shift back to a pared-down, almost "underground" film-making style. Filmed on an extremely low budget, on location, and at night in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, the film is a black comedy about one increasingly misfortunate night for a mild New York word processor (Griffin Dunne) and features cameos by such disparate actors as Teri Garr and Cheech & Chong. Along with the 1987 Michael Jackson music video " Bad ", in 1986 Scorsese made The Color of Money, a sequel to the much admired Robert Rossen film The Hustler (1961) with Paul Newman, which co-starred Tom Cruise. Although adhering to Scorsese's established style, The Color of Money was the director's first official foray into mainstream film-making. The film finally won actor Paul Newman an Oscar and gave Scorsese the clout to finally secure backing for a project that had been a longtime goal for him: The Last Temptation of Christ.

In 1983, Scorsese began work on this long-cherished personal project. The Last Temptation of Christ, based on the 1955 novel written by Nikos Kazantzakis, retold the life of Christ in human rather than divine terms. Barbara Hershey recalls introducing Scorsese to the book while they were filming Boxcar Bertha. The film was slated to shoot under the Paramount Pictures banner, but shortly before principal photography was to start, Paramount pulled the plug on the project, citing pressure from religious groups. In this aborted 1983 version, Aidan Quinn was cast as Jesus, and Sting was cast as Pontius Pilate. (In the 1988 version, these roles were played by Willem Dafoe and David Bowie respectively.) However, following his mid-1980s flirtation with commercial Hollywood, Scorsese made a major return to personal filmmaking with the project; Universal Pictures agreed to finance the film as Scorsese agreed to make a more mainstream film for the studio in the future (it eventually resulted in Cape Fear). Even prior to its 1988 release, the film (adapted by Taxi Driver and Raging Bull veteran Paul Schrader) caused a massive furor, with worldwide protests against its perceived blasphemy effectively turning a low-budget independent film into a media sensation. Most of the controversy centered on the final passages of the film, which depicted Christ marrying and raising a family with Mary Magdalene in a Satan -induced hallucination while on the cross.

In 1986, Scorsese directed the 18-minute short film Bad featuring Michael Jackson and Wesley Snipes (in his film debut). The short also serves as a music video and was shot in the Hoyt–Schermerhorn Streets station in Brooklyn over a 6-week period during November and December 1986. The short film's cinematographer was frequent Scorsese collaborator Michael Chapman. The dancing and filmmaking was heavily influenced by the 1961 film West Side Story. Scorsese also noted the influence of his own film Taxi Driver (1976) in Spike Lee 's documentary about the 25th anniversary of the short titled, Bad 25 (2012). The short has been praised by critics as one of the most iconic and greatest videos of all time; Jackson's outfit has been cited as an influence on fashion. That year, he had signed a deal with upstart major The Walt Disney Studios to produce and direct features, following the success of The Color of Money.

Looking past the controversy, The Last Temptation of Christ gained critical acclaim and remains an important work in Scorsese's canon: an explicit attempt to wrestle with the spirituality underpinning his films up until that point. The director went on to receive his second nomination for a Best Director Academy Award (again unsuccessfully, this time losing to Barry Levinson for Rain Man). As a separate film project, and along with directors Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola in 1989, Scorsese provided one of three segments in the portmanteau film New York Stories, called "Life Lessons". Roger Ebert 's gave the film a mixed review, while praising Scorsese's short as "really successful".
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