Martin Scorsese at the time of "GoodFellas"

My friend Brian Koppelman has a piece up at Grantland as part of its “Oscar Travesties” mini-series, called “The Boning of Goodfellas.” It treats, of course, what a sham of a mock­ery of a sham it was that Kevin Costner’s more do-gooderish Dances With Wolves swept the Oscars for 1990. While I feel Brian’s pain, I can­’t share his indig­na­tion, for a num­ber of reas­ons. But read­ing his feisty, funny, and for all that entirely even­han­ded piece, I could­n’t help recall the very first time I met Martin Scorsese, which was in late 1989, when he was in the very final stages of edit­ing what was then called Good Fellas. 

At the time I was an edit­or at Video Review magazine, self-advertised on its cov­ers as “The World Authority On Home Entertainment.” The book was about to cel­eb­rate its tenth anniversary, and I, hav­ing worked my way up from edit­ing the magazine’s very tech-wonky equip­ment test reports (I swear I’ve for­got­ten more about this tech­no­logy than most people have ever known), was one of sev­er­al staffers dep­u­tized to fetch pro­gnost­ic­at­ing sound­bites and in some cases full essays from luminar­ies lit­er­ary, cine­mat­ic, and oth­er­wise. (J.G. Ballard: “I look for­ward to the day when spe­cialty video producers—the equi­val­ent of Sun Records and the like in the music busi­ness 20, 30 years ago, and the equi­val­ent of small pub­lish­ers in the book trade—really can begin to reach out to the pub­lic.” Paula Abdul: “The big movie music­al will return to prom­in­ence in this dec­ade, as record­ing artists take the video music concept one step fur­ther.”) I had already fielded essays by Paul Slansky and Dave Barry and of course the idea of approach­ing Martin Scorsese to do one was a no-brainer. I con­tac­ted his office and laid out our idea and terms (which were pretty good) and got a guardedly enthu­si­ast­ic response from Scorsese’s then-assistant. Two issues were of con­cern: Scorsese’s sched­ule, which was tied up in fin­ish­ing his latest film, and Scorsese’s com­fort level with respect to sit­ting down and writ­ing some­thing. Not a prob­lem: I could come up to Scorsese’s office with a leg­al pad and a tape record­er and go over the top­ics we wanted to cov­er, I’d draft an essay out of it, he’d dic­tate changes where neces­sary, then approve, and there we were. Deal, Scorsese’s assist­ant said. 

It was right before the Christmas hol­i­day when I went up to Scorsese’s office, which was then in the Brill Building. The man imme­di­ately struck me as, sure, intense, but also warm, friendly, con­sid­er­ate. Not at all intim­id­at­ing. We talked about the work in pro­gress, and he invoked the old tele­vi­sion series The Untouchables, in terms of both the pace and the bru­tal­ity. The last thing on his mind was Oscars; there was a sense, almost palp­able, of his delight that he was try­ing some­thing really new for him, and also a slight sense of trep­id­a­tion, as in “what are they gonna make of this?” And of course the work was con­sum­ing. “I ran into Paul Schrader in the hall the oth­er day, he’s fin­ish­ing his movie. I said to him, ‘It fig­ures I see you here, we’re the only two guys who are gonna work through Christmas’,” Scorsese said, laugh­ing the slightly nervous laugh he had back then. 

We settled in to his private office and got star­ted. He mostly stood and paced, and some­times took a hit off of his inhaler—his asthma was act­ing up a little—and I’d just sug­gest a spe­cif­ic top­ic and off he would go. It did not take all that much more than an hour, and when we were through, I asked him to sign my copy of the then-new inter­view book Scorsese on Scorsese, pub­lished by Faber. I’m sit­ting here look­ing at it now; he inscribed it “To Glenn Kenny/Thanks & appreciation/Martin Scorsese/1989.”

The piece came out well, I think. I was more inter­ested in pre­serving Scorsese’s voice than in mak­ing it work as an essay, and it shows, but I don’t think that’s neces­sar­ily bad. In sub­sequent years I would com­mis­sion and edit oth­er essays by him for Première, includ­ing his double obit for James Stewart and Robert Mitchum called “The Men Who Knew Too Much;” by this time, his com­fort level with respect to prose writ­ing had increased, so our inter­ac­tion was a more simple mat­ter of request and acknowledgement. 

In any case, the piece called “The Second Screen” has always held a spe­cial place for me, and even though it is now an extremely ana­chron­ist­ic look at the tech­no­logy that has, indeed, trans­formed cinema and cinephil­ia, I think it still bears read­ing. So, without per­mis­sion, I’ve input­ted it into doc­u­ment form from my old and increas­ingly raggedy copy of the April 1990 edi­tion of Video Review magazine, and am repro­du­cing it here below the jump. Enjoy. 

The Second Screen

An Acclaimed Director Tells How Home Video Has Changed The
Way We Watch Movies—and the Way He Makes Them

 By Martin Scorsese

            I
first heard about home video around 1978 or ‘’79, and I recall my friend Jay
Cocks (who writes for Time and is just
as much a film enthu­si­ast as I am) and I think­ing that it was some sort of
bless­ing. The idea that we could go into a store and pick up a paperback-sized
cas­sette of a favor­ite movie, take it home and put it on the shelf like a
book—well, it was a child­hood dream of ours, the idea that you could have a
whole wall of your favor­ite films. 

            Prior
to video, I used to screen pic­tures all the time, either in a screen­ing room in
35mm or at my home in 16mm. And I still do that, because I feel that the best
way to see a movie is as a film, on a screen. I remem­ber doing a lot of
screen­ings when I lived in Los Angeles in the mid-‘70s. Many of the directors
from that time would come over, and we showed all kinds of movies. There was a
really great exchange of ideas from doing that, and the whole thing was like
one long salon—a film salon rather than a lit­er­ary salon. 

            With
video, this kind of exchange is easi­er. For example, I’ll be talk­ing with my
daugh­ter and I’ll bring up Karl Freund’s The Mummy. She hasn’t seen a lot of pic­tures from that era or
genre, so if we want to look at it, video makes it pos­sible for me to say, “Oh,
great, I have the laser disc right here,” and we’ll throw that on and look at a
scene or two or maybe at the whole movie. That might lead us into oth­er great
hor­ror movies of that time, and also into oth­er directors—from Freund we can
cross-reference to James Whale, who made such great movies as The
Bride of Frankenstein.

            So
hav­ing instant access to movies, being able to pick some­thing up and show it at
the drop of a hat, is great. That’s the biggest thing. The improv­ing qual­ity is
also very import­ant. With the advent of big­ger screens, bet­ter home sound and
the grow­ing pop­ular­ity of laser discs, you can almost repro­duce, in your home,
the theat­er exper­i­ence. I’m hope­ful that this will change the way people watch
movies on home video. If you’ve got a room in the house with a big-screen
mon­it­or and sur­round sound, maybe you’ll start watch­ing movies like movies. In
oth­er words, you don’t talk to your friends, you don’t take phone calls, you
don’t get up and go to the kit­chen and come back. You watch it like you’re in a
theater. 

            Because
that’s the biggest draw­back of video. It encour­ages a short­er atten­tion span.
And there are cer­tain films you have to be very care­ful about. Take Michael
Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. It’s an extraordin­ary film, and the Criterion laser
disc of it is won­der­ful. I showed some of it to Powell, who was amazed by the
qual­ity of it and how beau­ti­ful it looks. But here is a movie that, unless you
watch it straight through from begin­ning to end, you lose the emo­tion. Now for
many years I’ve been fol­low­ing the pro­gress of Colonel Blimp, and the many mutil­ated ver­sions of it that have
cir­cu­lated, and it’s a mir­acle to me that this restored ver­sion is accessible
to so many people now. But when you watch it on video, just please make sure
you can sit through the whole two hours and 45 minutes in one sit­ting, with
maybe one little break, because it has an over­all emo­tion­al effect that’s so
strong, it stays with you. 

            The
short­er atten­tion span encour­aged by tele­vi­sion and video also affects, I
think, how movies are made today. Your shots have to go faster. You realize
some­times as you’re mak­ing a film that today’s audi­ence may not sit for a shot
of a cer­tain length. This may not change the way I’ll make a pic­ture. Whatever
the pace, if it’s right for the shot or scene, that’s the way it’s got to be—as
in The Last Temptation of Christ, where
a num­ber of sequences take on the tone and mood of the desert. When I was in
Morocco I got a real sense of time­less­ness, of everything mov­ing at 120 frames
per second—extreme slow-motion, almost like a trance. That’s part of the effect
that I wanted from the movie, and it’s part of the reas­on the movie is two
hours and 46 minutes long. I decided that cer­tain ele­ments of Temptation would be fast, fine. But in the desert, there’s a
sense of mys­ti­cism you exper­i­ence that often comes in a trance­like man­ner. With
the com­bin­a­tion of images and sound effects and Peter Gabriel’s music, I tried
to re-create that mood in cer­tain places. As for my new film, Good
Fellas, even if it’s 2 ½ hours long, I’m
hope­ful it will be one of the fastest-paced pic­tures ever made, because it
tells a story in a style heav­ily influ­enced by doc­u­ment­ary TV report­ing and
these new tabloid shows. 

            While
I don’t let video change the way I pace my movies, I have always been aware
that because of the sub­ject mat­ter of a lot of my pic­tures, they would more
than likely find a big­ger audi­ence on cable or video than they would in
theat­ers. A very intense movie like Taxi Driver would, of course, have to be cut to be put on net­work TV, because
after all it’s going into people’s homes unso­li­cited. When we made it, we made
it the best we could for the big screen, and if it ever showed up on
tele­vi­sion, they would have to do what they had to do to make it palatable.
When cable came along, that meant people could see it in full. And I knew,
mak­ing movies like After Hours or
The King of Comedy, that they
would prob­ably be seen by more people on home video. (That’s also the case with
The Last Temptation of Christ,
although we nev­er expec­ted the kind of anger and resent­ment and violent
reac­tion we got. We expec­ted some dif­fi­culty at times, but not to that extent.)
And that affected my com­pos­i­tions somewhat. 

            This
may change in the future. The pub­lic has to be con­tinu­ally re-educated about
the import­ance of main­tain­ing a movie’s ori­gin­al aspect ratio on home video.
How do you do this? Well, I don’t think that aca­dem­ic argu­ments really convince
people. To say that they’re miss­ing “more inform­a­tion in the frame” isn’t
enough. You have to say what this really means, which is they’re miss­ing out on
more enter­tain­ment. If the viewer’s not see­ing the whole pic­ture, he’s not
get­ting the full enjoy­ment. That’s the thing. Take the let­ter­boxed laser disc
of Die Hard. It’s very dif­fer­ent from
the cropped or scanned ver­sions on cable or video­cas­sette. A great deal of the
strength of pic­tures by dir­ect­ors like John McTiernan [Die Hard] and James Cameron [Aliens, The Abyss] is in their tech­nic­al prowess, how they handle sound and edit­ing, how
one pic­ture cuts to the next, how one sound cuts to the next. To fully enjoy
those strengths, you’ve got to see the whole pic­ture. Looking at a scanned
version—well, if you cut from half a frame to half a frame, you’re going to
lose the full effect of the movie. 

            Now
that laser discs are intro­du­cing let­ter­box­ing and, I hope, show­ing the public
that the best pos­sible way of look­ing at a film at home is in its original
aspect ratio, I think from now on I’m going to start shoot­ing in Panavision,
and really use the frame in the way Sam Fuller and Nick Ray did—not to mention
Max Ophuls in the best widescreen movie of them all, Lola Montes. That’s just the most remark­able use of widescreen.
And of course there’s Anthony Mann. If I could ever go near what Mann did with
his wide images in movies like El Cid or The Fall of the Roman Empire…And now I know that when I shoot in Panavision, there will be at least
one video ver­sion that will be true to what I shot. 

            I
also like to use video as an edu­ca­tion tool. It’s ideal for that. I did a
lec­ture at NYU about a year ago, where I showed the story­boards I drew for the
fight scenes in Raging Bull on a screen
and com­pared them to how the actu­al movie came out. In some cases it was
abso­lutely identic­al. I put the story­boards up on a screen and I showed the
video and said, “That shot cor­res­ponds to this one, shot num­ber one, and that
cuts to this,” and it was exactly as story­boarded by me. 

            In
anoth­er case, the fight scene in which Sugar Ray Robinson gives Jake LaMotta
that hor­rible beat­ing in the final bout between them, dur­ing round 13—“the hard
luck round,” as the fight announ­cer puts it—I showed how the final version
differed from the story­boards. That ruth­less beat­ing, about 20 seconds of film,
took 10 days to shoot. And dur­ing the edit­ing, we put it togeth­er the normal
way, shots one, two, three, four and so on—it was a total of 36 setups. We
real­ized after we put it togeth­er that we had our struc­ture, but we then
dis­covered oth­er val­ues of move­ment, light­ing, spe­cial effects, and started
jug­gling the shots. And it was very inter­est­ing to show these film students,
through the use of video and my ori­gin­al story­boards, exactly what was done. 

            You
could nev­er show some­thing like that before home video. When we were film
stu­dents we were extremely lucky to get 16mm prints to show. I remem­ber these
essen­tially well-meaning kids who weren’t really crazy about film but took film
courses any­way. They would get a hold of this beau­ti­ful 16mm print of Citizen
Kane, put it through a Movieola and go back
and forth over and over because they were doing a term paper on it and needed
to see where all the dis­solves were in the open­ing sequences. Of course the
print got all scratched up. Those prints of Citizen Kane are now gone. And these kids all went on to be
doc­tors or law­yers or whatever—they didn’t even go into film! Now you can get a
tape or disc of it and study it that way, and noth­ing gets hurt. 

            Finally,
the way video gives a new life to some great films is very import­ant. The
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is an
excel­lent example. So is anoth­er Powell/Pressburger film, The Red
Shoes, which, since its res­tor­a­tion and
video release, is on its way to becom­ing a per­en­ni­al favor­ite in the tradition
of The Wizard of Oz and It’s
a Wonderful Life.

            Video
also can edu­cate film stu­dents and enthu­si­asts about the neg­lected mas­ters. I
read an art­icle in a magazine recently that lists all the Anthony Mann movies
on video, and I think that’s great too. A lot of film stu­dents today have no
reas­on to know who Anthony Mann was or what he did. So to have video mak­ing all
these things so read­ily attain­able, for people to learn from and enjoy, is all
for the good in the end.