The movie Martin Scorsese made up as he went along: “I think we got some real good stuff”
By the end of the 1970s, Martin Scorsese was ready to try something completely different. He didn’t want to become known for one type of movie above all others, but his drastic detour ended up causing plenty of issues for the filmmaker, both personally and professionally.
He burst into the cinematic consciousness with his third feature, crime classic Mean Streets, stretched his wings and directed Ellen Burstyn to an Academy Award win for ‘Best Actress’ in romantic dramedy Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and steered Taxi Driver to seminal status and a ‘Best Picture’ nomination.
Scorsese had no intention of being the guy famed only for telling street-level stories rooted in reality, though, so he opted to make a major swing for the fences. That led him to his final feature of the decade, which turned out to be a touch too ambitious for not only the auteur but his leading lady and potentially even his marriage.
He’d wanted to direct New York, New York before Taxi Driver had even started shooting, and his position as director was confirmed in April 1975. Reuniting with muse Robert De Niro, his saxophone player Jimmy Doyle falls hard for Liza Minnelli’s Francine Evans, with their musical double act and undying love bringing them together, pushing them apart, and eventually bringing them back together again.
Scorsese wanted to combine the classic ‘Golden Age’ musical with a more realistic and documentarian style, which saw him combine showstopping numbers with large amounts of improvisation. De Niro knew how to do that, but Minnelli wasn’t comfortable working on the fly, and the affair between director and star saw the filmmaker’s then-wife Julia Cameron regularly show up on set to try and catch them in the act.
His first cut was four and a half hours long, New York, New York went millions of over its agreed budget, and it was greeted with a mixture of bemusement and indifference compared to his three most recent successes. It was an experiment that didn’t work, but Scorsese appreciated the lessons he learned along the way.
“I think we got some real good stuff out of it, and some real truth about that world and relationships between creative people,” he told Rolling Stone. “But I think it could have been more concise, maybe shorter. Maybe there was too much music. The repetition of scenes between the couple was really more like life.”
Reflecting on the production, Scorsese confessed that “we made it up as we went along,” which was “crazy” with the benefit of hindsight. At least he tried something daring, even if New York, New York isn’t remembered as one of his very best works. On the plus side, his next one after that was Raging Bull, even if he had to take a three-year sabbatical from filmmaking and overcome his demons to get to that point.
