CineMontage

Q1 2018

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18 CINEMONTAGE / Q1 2018 THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY pulling the film out of US distribution. In 2013, for its 30th anniversary, the movie was restored digitally in 4K from the original camera negatives and screened on April 27 for the closing night of the Tribeca Film Festival (co-founded by DeNiro). On stage afterwards, Scorsese, Lewis and DeNiro joked about the shoot and talked about how the film had held up over time. According to a Huffington Post article the next day, the director noted, "We knew we were commenting on the culture of that time, but not thinking that it would blow up into what it is now." Two months before Tribeca, in an article about The King of Comedy in the British film magazine Empire, Sandra Bernhard, who played Pupkin's partner in crime, Masha, in her first major film role, pointed out, "It was ahead of itself in exposing what motivates our whole culture. Everyone wants to be near the immortals." Zimmerman got the idea for the screenplay in 1969 while watching host/producer David Susskind's interview show on New York's educational public broadcasting channel WNET. The subject being discussed was "Celebrity Chasers and Autograph Hounds." In Mary Pat Kelly's book, Martin Scorsese: A Journey (1991), Zimmerman said, "I was fascinated by the intimacy with which autograph hunters spoke of these people they didn't really know." Seeing a connection between autograph hunters and assassins, he added, "Both stalked the famous." The scriptwriter was also influenced by an Esquire article about a man who kept a nightly diary analyzing every one of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show broadcasts. Early in the 1970s, Zimmerman took his treatment to Milŏs Forman and they collaborated on a script until the director dropped it to work on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). The writer completed his own draft and, in 1974, showed it to DeNiro and Scorsese at the Cannes Directors Fortnight, where their film Mean Streets (1974) was being screened. At the time, the director dismissed it as "a one-gag film," as he admitted to The New York Times in 1983, but DeNiro liked it well enough to option the screenplay for himself. Four years later, his Deer Hunter (1978) director, Michael Cimino, signed on to the project and DeNiro secured a $10-15 million investor's deal with producer Arnon Milchan. When Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980) failed at the box office, DeNiro tried to get Scorsese interested again after the release of their critically acclaimed Raging Bull. With a sense of his own growing fame, the director now saw more in the screenplay — as he told the Times, "I can identify with Rupert Pupkin." Retaining Zimmerman's structure and much of the dialogue, he and DeNiro revised the 1974 draft to reflect a darker perspective on a story that its original writer had seen as a fantasy. The writer explained, "Marty and Bobby are realists. They made it much better, much deeper, tougher, more important." He had seen Rupert as a Danny Kaye- like figure and Masha, his accomplice, was, he said, "weepy and sentimental," adding, "Marty gave her that predatory quality." The only character added to the script was Pupkin's mother, heard only in voiceover, played by Scorsese's own mother, Catherine. Zimmerman still got full credit for the script — as had Paul Schrader for Taxi Driver (1976) and Mardik Martin for Raging Bull — despite rewrites by the director. While the project was being prepped, current events at the time lent even more relevance to the script. John Lennon was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman (who wanted to be famous) on December 8, 1980; and the Oscar ceremony that gave DeNiro his golden award the following March was postponed a day because of the attempt on President Ronald Reagan's life by John Hinkley, obsessed with Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, in which DeNiro starred. NBC icon Carson was fittingly offered the part of the talk show host, originally named Bobby Langford, but he turned it down. Working on the fly five nights a week on TV, he had no interest in doing any kind of show that required multiple takes. After considering Orson Welles, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin for the part, Scorsese sent the script to Lewis, Martin's former partner. "He understood it without even reading it," Scorsese recalled in the aforementioned Empire article. "He knew it inside out." Lewis even insisted that Langford's CONTINUED ON PAGE 20 The King of Comedy. 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation/ Photofest

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