Conversations with Scorsese Read Online Free

couldn’t say anything, because I was the youngest. So I’d go in the church, and I became fascinated by the rituals of the mass. It was 1949, 1950, and the image of the Catholic church was the one from
Going My Way.
Barry Fitzgerald.Bing Crosby.Ingrid Bergman,
The Bells of St. Mary’s.
You know, it was a pretty good image. And inside that cathedral—the sense of peace. It was quite, quite amazing.

     
    Marty, happy in Queens, plays Indian without a cowboy in sight.
     
    And then, of course, my father didn’t know what the hell to do with me. After working in the garment district all day he’d go to my grandparents’ and deliberate with them about family issues at night, and my mother didn’t like that very much. And then he’d come back around eleven o’clock, having picked up the tabloids, the
Daily News
and
Daily Mirror.
They’d argue it out a little bit, and then everything was fine. And the next day he’d go back to work. So I didn’t see him much. But he was forced to take me to the movies; he took me to the movies all the time.
    RS: Relating the movies to the church, was there something in the movies that was ritualistic, that appealed to you that way? An analogy between the big picture on the screen and the gorgeous altars of the church?
    MS: I think that’s a good point. My asthma isolated me from everybody else. And so in this isolation, I was made to think that I couldn’t do anything physical. I had to be very careful, and be sort of coddled in a way.
    So the ritual of going to the movies with your father—it didn’t matter what film you saw—became important to me. It was a matter of going to the Loew’s Commodore on 6th Street and Second Avenue, which is now part of New York University, by the way. (In the sixties it became theFillmore East.) And going to theAcademy of Music, which is gone now, on 14th Street. We were always walking into the middle of the film. There was a sense of peace there, too; there really was. You had faith when you went into the church. And you had faith when you went into the movie theater, too. Some films hit you more strongly than others, but you always had that faith. You’re taken on a trip, you’re taken on a journey. The posters outside sell you dreams, you know. And you go in there, and the dream is real, almost. And then if you’re sharing these very strong emotions with your father, whom you don’t really talk to very much, this became the main line of communication between us.
    I mean, he took me to see
The Bad and the Beautiful—
the first movie I saw about the process of filmmaking. I lovedwesterns, so he used to take me to westerns.
The Day the Earth Stood Still
was one of the great theater experiences: a Sunday afternoon at the Academy of Music, a couple of thousand people reacting to that picture. Or
The Thing—
Christian Nyby andHoward Hawks—that was an amazing experience, the shock of it, the humor of it, the overlapping dialogue, the moment when they open the door, andJames Arness [playing the monster] is standing right there—you ever see two thousand people jump at once? That was an amazing experience.
    RS: Movies in those days, because the Code was in place, were judgmental, or, shall we say, moralistic? I mean in a certain sense there is an analogy between the churchand the conventional morality of movies. I wonder if we could explore that a little more.
    MS: Around 1954 you started to get the United Artists films
—The Big Knife,
even
Autumn Leaves,
with an extraordinary performance by Cliff Robertson. And you haveOtto Preminger,Stanley Kramer, producing and directing. One way or another their pictures were addressing serious social and psychological matters. And all of a sudden the whole Code is breaking down.
    RS: Did you like those Stanley Kramer movies? I mean, try and think back to then, not what you may feel now.
    MS: Sure, we went to see them. They were pretty strong and shocking, you know. I don’t know if they hold up over