The softcore porn specialists that launched Martin Scorsese’s career: “You must have some nudity”
He might be a devoutly religious man, but Martin Scorsese didn’t hesitate to accept a helping hand from a company that specialised in softcore pornography so he could jam his foot in Hollywood’s door.
Scorsese’s faith has been central to his filmography, but wanton acts of libido have not, which makes it so against type that the only way he could secure the platform to launch himself as the director of feature-length films was by agreeing to the outfit’s one and only demand: a mandatory sex scene.
Who else enjoyed making low-budget pictures that showed a bit of skin and cleavage? Roger Corman. Who was the producer and distributor of Scorsese’s sophomore effort, Boxcar Bertha, which led him to his first passion project, Mean Streets, and everything that followed? Roger Corman. It’s reductive as fuck, but it’s not untrue to say that the legendary auteur owes it all to some T&A.
When the debutant got into bed, figuratively, with skin flick experts Joseph Brenner Associates, his movie was retitled from I Call First to Who’s That Knocking at My Door. With the promise of theatrical distribution on the table, Scorsese did what any aspiring director would do, and headed off to Amsterdam to capture a last-minute romp in the sheets between Harvey Keitel and Anne Collette.
“When I was in Paris in 1968, someone told me that Joseph Brenner Associates, who were a softcore porn distributor, would handle it if one nude scene was added,” the Academy Award winner recalled. “Everything was opening up in America at that time; Brenner was going legitimate, and just one scene with nudity would be enough to get the film distributed.”
There was still one hurdle to overcome: the notoriously strict obscenity and censorship laws in the United States. Fortunately, Scorsese had a solution. “There was no way of getting it back through customs,” he said of the single salacious sequence. “So I stuck the film in one pocket of my raincoat and the soundtrack in the other, and I shaved on the plane to look respectable.”
Little could Brenner have known at the time that he’d lent an invaluable assist to a director who’d become known as one of cinema’s all-time greats, since he was too busy securing the distribution rights to anything and everything even remotely gratuitous that he could get his hands on. Scorsese may have thought the seedier part of his career was out of the way early, at least until he worked for Corman.
“Roger just told me, ‘Read the script, rewrite as much as you want, but remember, Marty, that you must have some nudity at least every 15 pages,'” his Boxcar Bertha producer told him. “Not complete nudity, maybe a little off the shoulder, or some leg, just to keep the audience up’. This was very important for the exploitation market, so it was what he had to have.”
These days, it’s hard to remember a time when Scorsese wasn’t one of the industry’s most endearing and beloved veterans. And yet, to manoeuvre himself into that position in the first place, it took softcore porn distributors and non-negotiable nudity.
