Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/942009
21 Q1 2018 / CINEMONTAGE THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY supervisor, and had recently won her first Oscar for Raging Bull. She has edited all of Scorsese's features since. Starting out, progress on the cut was painfully slow. In the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998), about the "movie generation" filmmakers, Scorsese explained to author Peter Biskind, "It was partly because I shot so much footage — almost a million feet of film I had to sit through… I just couldn't do it." Also contributing to his "editor's block" from November 1981 through March 1982 was the breakup of his three-year marriage to actress Isabella Rossellini. More than the fervent exhortations of DeNiro, Milchan and Schoonmaker, a real-life event may have gotten the director back to work. On March 15, Theresa Saldana, who played a major supporting role in Raging Bull, was savagely stabbed outside her West Hollywood home by an obsessive fan. Scorsese and Schoonmaker continued to work through October mainly at night. For the book Conversations with Scorsese (2011), the director told film critic Richard Schickel, "Raging Bull was edited only at night, so nobody would call us. The King of Comedy was edited at night, and we got into a rhythm. That's when making a film is really the most fun." The Band's Robbie Robertson produced the soundtrack for the film, a mix of popular music and orchestral score. At completion, the budget for the movie came to $19 million; it eventually grossed $2.5 million. Even though The King of Comedy died at the box office, it got some attention in awards season. While getting no Oscar nods, it received five BAFTA nominations — including for Actor (DeNiro), Supporting Actor (Lewis), Direction (Scorsese) and Editing (Schoonmaker) — with Zimmerman winning the British Film and TV Academy's original screenplay award. The London Critics Circle Film Awards named it Best Picture, and Bernhard was named Best Supporting Actress by the National Society of Film Critics in the US. Today, unscripted television seems to have merged almost completely with the media's portrayal of events directly affecting society and culture on a day-to- day basis, and The King of Comedy's portrayal of the ordinary people and their regard for celebrity rings truer than ever. Pupkin's pointed yet obsequious hostility nags and resounds within us just like any bully's jarring gibes. In the Empire article five years ago, Bernhard nailed it: "Today, the immortals are the stars… People get angry because they can't have that kind of rich and famous success and beauty. It's a real double-edged sword of 'I love you,' 'I hate you.'" f The King of Comedy. 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation/ Photofest