Raging Bull: Never Got Me Down

At the time, UA’s output was interesting and scrappy enough that you might take it for the artist-run outfit it began as—its 1919 founders were D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks. By the late seventies, one of the company’s biggest properties was Rocky. But before it was a franchise for UA, it was a low-budget film that its screenwriter, Sylvester Stallone, wouldn’t let go of unless he was assured of being cast in the title role. This was unheard-of, but Stallone got his way, thanks to his producers, Winkler and Robert Chartoff, and UA got a big hit. The studio was at the time also backing other movies people talked about: Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, and more.

But David Field and Steven Bach, top executives at the company, had a problem with Raging Bull, and in the late fall of 1978, accompanied by Winkler, they went to Scorsese’s apartment to meet with him and De Niro. And it was here that Field remarked that he didn’t feel comfortable making a movie about a protagonist he considered “a cockroach.”

“He is not a cockroach,” De Niro said. Scorsese remembers the actor standing far from the executives, looking at them with suspicion and speaking flatly. “He is not a cockroach.”

On leaving the hospital, Scorsese took a trip to Italy for, he tells me, “personal reasons.” He remembers Winkler becoming exasperated with him about that: “Irwin said to me, ‘Fine, I don’t care what you do.’” After he returned, he and De Niro got back to work. “We were on a road. And we were continuing. And I didn’t give the studio a second thought. Maybe part of it was hubris. Maybe part of it was that I had no choice. All I knew is that I was alive. And that Irwin could get [Raging Bull] made anywhere.”

Winkler, in his 2019 memoir A Life in Movies, shows his hand: he and Chartoff “made it clear to [Andy] Albeck [the CEO of UA, and Field and Bach’s boss] that there would be no Rocky II if there was no Raging Bull. We were serious; it was not a bluff.” (Scorsese says, “Irwin never let me in on that until about twenty years after the fact.”)

More than any of his peers, Scorsese hewed to the gospel according to John Cassavetes, as delivered to him by Cassavetes himself. Scorsese made his first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967), in New York City, while still working at New York University, where he studied and then taught film with Haig Manoogian (the dedicatee of Raging Bull). Upon learning that he could get a distributor for the picture if he threw in a scene featuring female nudity, Scorsese added a dream sequence featuring several unclothed models in a loft. After moving to Los Angeles, he next made Boxcar Bertha (1972), a sincere tale of the scrappy early days of American labor that is enlivened by the exploitation touches that producer-distributor (and stealth patron of the arts) Roger Corman required of all his pictures. Scorsese showed it to the maverick Cassavetes, whom he had by then befriended. According to Scorsese, the older filmmaker said, “Marty, you just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit. It’s a good picture, but you’re better than the people who make this kind of movie.” And here Cassavetes goaded Scorsese: make the kind of picture you want to make. This led to Mean Streets (1973), a critical breakthrough that also got the attention of both discerning audiences and studio executives. 

Scorsese often talks of having to find his way into the material from which he’s obliged to make a film. With Mean Streets, it was easy—the material was his life. With Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), the impetus was to stretch and make a film from the perspective of a female protagonist. Taxi Driver (1976), Scorsese has said, he understood immediately: the title character’s loneliness, alienation, pent-up rage. With respect to all of these pictures, it can be said that the system was giving enough, at this point, to provide Scorsese with the latitude he required in order to execute his vision. And here’s the rub about the New Hollywood, such as it was. Genuine artistic visions were not solicited by studios. They were indulged, because the studios were dying, and the moguls were throwing a lot of stuff on the screens hoping for something to stick.

As Biskind laments in his book, perhaps the two biggest successes amid that stuff—the ostensible prototypical summer blockbuster Jaws (1975) and the colossal, multi-paradigm-shifting Star Wars (1977)—were made by a couple of the so-called movie brats, Spielberg and George Lucas. When Coppola was recently awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, he said, “Although it seems as though I’ve been a rebel against Hollywood, in fact I am a Hollywood creature. I was created by Hollywood, and I’m very proud of being part of the Hollywood tradition.” Scorsese was, and remains, more ambivalent. “I’m not a Hollywood director. I’m an in-spite-of-Hollywood director,” he once said. His post–Taxi Driver filmography up to 1990 is a kind of testament to that.

And yet, with New York, New York (1977), his first film with Winkler and with United Artists, he semisurprised himself by leaping at an opportunity to do something very Hollywood. That is, make a musical—albeit a musical that crossed Vincente Minnelli (whose daughter Liza would costar with De Niro) with, yes, Cassavetes in a way that confounded film audiences, who at this time also weren’t entirely as adventurous as history would like us to believe. Regardless, Scorsese’s next project, the 1978 concert film The Last Waltz, which allowed him to follow his love of rock and roll, was also with UA.

For as long as he had been interested in the La Motta autobiography, De Niro had insisted that Scorsese—his boss on Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and New York, New York—was the only man to direct Raging Bull. It’s not as if the actor had no other options. Since making Mean Streets, De Niro had worked with some of the greats—Bernardo Bertolucci on 1900, Coppola on The Godfather: Part II (as young Vito Corleone, for which he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar), Elia Kazan on The Last Tycoon. But De Niro, for reasons he did not articulate, needed Scorsese for this picture. Scorsese had initially demurred. He didn’t like, or know anything about, sports, particularly boxing—the romantic/gritty cinematic view of the sweet science depicted in distinctive Hollywood pictures such as Body and Soul and The Set-Up didn’t rub off on Scorsese the same way it did on De Niro, apparently.

Scorsese’s way in here wound up being not pugilistic virtuosity but violence itself, and specifically violence against oneself. And for him that discovery was a painful one.

Years later, when I was speaking to Scorsese for a book I was writing about his film Goodfellas (1990), he told me: “I thought [Raging Bull] would be my last film. I was involved with friends in Rome, personal life, and I was going to go to Italy and make films on the lives of the saints.” Why he said “last film,” and then that he’d intended to go on to make films in Rome, is easy to understand in the context of what Scorsese’s career became. He meant “last Hollywood film.” Which, of course, it wasn’t.