De Niro: A Life (20 page)

Ironically, he was as close to the real thing as
Mean Streets
would have. In the other crucial parts, Scorsese had cast complete unknowns: David Proval, like Keitel a Jewish guy from Brooklyn, and Richard Romanus, of Lebanese descent, from a small town in Vermont, as, respectively, Tony the barkeeper and Michael the loan shark, the other members of Charlie’s circle; and Amy Robinson, a Jewish girl from Jersey, as Teresa, Johnny Boy’s cousin (and, in a key plot point, Charlie’s on-the-sly girlfriend). He was making a movie about the insular ways of Little Italy, and he had only one full-blooded Italian actor—Cesare Danova, playing Charlie’s mobbed-up uncle—in anything like a key role. But these quixotic casting decisions were nothing compared to
the confident heedlessness with which he went about actually making the thing.

S
HOOTING OF
Mean Streets
began with the New York portion, which included rehearsals, in October 1972. Most of the street action, a couple of shots involving the Empire State Building and St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, some of the interior hallway shots (the location scouts found nothing in LA that looked quite like the innards of a Lower East Side tenement), and, most crucially, the footage of the famed San Gennaro Feast on Mott Street were all filmed in hurried, guerilla fashion. People in Scorsese’s old neighborhood didn’t know exactly what to make of the shoot. Chary of the negative impression of Italian Americans created by
The Godfather
, they were alarmed to see the title
Mean Streets
on the production slate. And the feast presented nightmarish logistical obstacles for the tiny crew. For one thing, they endured terrific winds and rain during the shoot, along with massive crowds so choking the street that it could take a half hour to move a single block. “
The neighborhood was just a sea of heads,” Scorsese remembered. “We got caught in the middle of the crowd with the camera and we couldn’t move and just about passed out, which was worse than Woodstock, and I know because I was on the stage there for four days.” Too, filming the famously mobbed-up San Gennaro Feast without the permission of the shadowy powers who ran it was a real risk. Eventually, Scorsese said, the organizers billed him $5,000, a sum he borrowed from Francis Coppola and then repaid as soon as the film was bought by a distributor.

The Los Angeles portion of the shoot was just as fast and loose, taking barely three weeks. De Niro stayed at the Montecito Hotel in the middle of Hollywood and kept himself deep in his role, impressing the relative newcomer Romanus with his determination to play the part as he thought he could and never settle for a take that wasn’t fully committed. The gulf between De Niro’s full-blooded immersion and Romanus’s inexperience became an issue in a scene in which Johnny Boy taunts Michael as a fool for lending him money. Romanus reacted instinctively by laughing—“I was saving face,” he said—but De Niro
became increasingly agitated with him, feeling Michael should be angry. As Scorsese later remembered, “
They had got on each other’s nerves to the point where they really wanted to kill each other.”

The rapport between De Niro and Keitel was different. Both savored the use of improvised rehearsals to build scenes, and some of the best-remembered and most revealing moments in the film would result from their experiments before the cameras rolled: a late-night battle in the streets of Little Italy using garbage can lids as shields and the justly famous “Joey Clams” scene, a touch of Abbott and Costello, in the backroom of a bar. Remembering the advice of Sandy Weintraub that the atmosphere was at least as important as the storytelling, Scorsese kept adding little bits like these to the film as he and his actors invented them.

The strain of the shoot was evident on the director’s hands: as production wore on, Scorsese took to wearing white cloth gloves to prevent himself from nibbling his fingernails down to bloody stubs. But he managed to get the film wrapped on schedule less than two weeks before Christmas. Editing took up the rest of the winter and much of the spring, after which he started to show a rough cut to such trusted friends as Brian De Palma and John Cassavetes. De Palma didn’t care for the improvised moments, which didn’t sway Scorsese to cut them, but he did make a successful case for the removal of material relating to Charlie’s dabbling in academia by taking a class at NYU: “
Literary reference—cut it out!” he shouted at a screening. Cassavetes didn’t care for the bedroom scenes and the brief nudity, but Scorsese was unmoved. A final hurdle was presented by, of all people, John Wayne, who wouldn’t let Scorsese use a clip from his film
Donovan’s Reef
because
Mean Streets
would be released with an R rating; Scorsese settled instead for a sequence from
The Searchers
that didn’t include Wayne.
^*4
By summer, Jonathan Taplin had had a chance to show the completed film to potential distributors and submit it to film festivals for a fall debut.

The festivals were first to respond: both the Chicago International Festival (where
Who’s That Knocking?
had debuted and been celebrated) and the New York Film Festival accepted it. But Taplin and Scorsese were having no luck with distributors, driving around Los Angeles with cans of 35 mm film, screening the movie at several studios and getting nowhere. Taplin, who’d failed to acquire financing from the studios the previous year, knew he had a quality product on his hands, but the lack of name stars, the strange environment of the film, and the shaggy storytelling made executives at the first studios he approached uneasy. Eventually they showed up in Burbank at Warner Bros., which had acquired a reputation as being a youthful, even hippieish studio, where end-of-the-day martinis in the executive suites had been replaced by joints, and such films as
Woodstock
,
Performance
,
THX 1138
,
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
,
Superfly
,
Deliverance
, and
Billy Jack
had found a home. There wasn’t really a tenor of youth culture to
Mean Streets
—bohemian Greenwich Village and its drug scene are actually anathema to the main characters—but the impact the film had on the executives in the Warner screening room was real, and they bought the rights to it on the spot, perhaps thinking that they had just discovered their own streetwise answer to
The Godfather.

One other person saw
Mean Streets
before it was entirely finished, in the spring of 1972: Francis Ford Coppola, who invited Scorsese to his San Francisco studio to screen it for him. Coppola, of course, hadn’t found the right role for De Niro in
The Godfather
, and Paramount had even traded him away. Now, though, the through-the-roof critical and commercial success of that film encouraged Paramount to demand a sequel almost immediately. And, with that production looming, Coppola looked at
Mean Streets
with the hope of finding actors for the film.

As Scorsese remembered, Coppola’s response was instantaneous: as soon as he saw what De Niro did with Johnny Boy, “
immediately, he put him in
Godfather II.
”

H
E HAD TESTED FOR
M
ICHAEL, BUT, AS HE CORRECTLY REMEMBERED
, “
Everybody tested for Michael. The whole fuckin’ city tested for Michael. Even Al tested for it, but everybody knew that he had the part and that Francis wanted him.”

He had tested for Sonny, and he was good, but in a way
too
good. “
I thought he was very magnetic and had a lot of style,” Francis Coppola recalled. “He seemed like a crazy kind of kid with a lot of energy.” Sonny was all those things, yes, but he was also an eldest son, a father, a future boss; to play him would require at least an appearance of stability. De Niro’s take on the role was too, well, Johnny Boy.

Now, however, De Niro was being offered something truly extraordinary, a real challenge, and he could have it without having to go through any readings or screen tests: not just a role in the sequel to a film that, commercially and critically, was one of the biggest hits Hollywood had ever produced, but the role of the young Vito Corleone. In essence, De Niro would be able to reverse-engineer the part that Marlon Brando had immortalized just a year earlier.

Scorsese believed, not without reason, that it was the sight of De Niro as Johnny Boy that cemented Coppola’s decision. But in fact Coppola had been sufficiently impressed by De Niro’s tests for the first
Godfather
that he had kept him in mind for future roles—not knowing, ironically, that it would be a
past
role for which he would find the actor best suited. “
It kept rolling around in my head that in a funny way De Niro’s face reminded me of Vito Corleone,” Coppola said. “Not of Brando, but of the character he played, with the accentuated jaw, the kind of funny smile. De Niro certainly is believable as being someone
in the Corleone family and possibly Al’s father, as a young man.” He noted, too, that underneath De Niro’s wildness lay an aspect of his character that suited the role: “De Niro had a sort of stately bearing, as if he really was the young Vito who would grow into that older man who was Marlon Brando.… He had grace.”

Paramount had famously tortured Coppola over his casting decisions the first time out, but eleven Academy Award nominations and three Oscars, including Best Picture, and a take of more than $100 million at the box office when that was an almost unimaginable sum had led them to believe he knew what he was doing, and they let him make his own choices on the sequel, more or less. De Niro was one of those choices: “I just decided that it would be him. Very early, I just made the decision, unilaterally, that he was right and that he could do it.”

The director knew he was setting the actor up for a titanic task. “
De Niro’s assignment,” he said in the press notes for the film, “is incredibly difficult when you consider that he’s being asked to become a well-known character created by one of the most famous actors in the world in a role for which he received tremendous credit. To have the audacity to play him as a young man. To evoke that character without doing an imitation of him. And, in addition, to do it all in Sicilian, which he doesn’t speak.”

Oh, that. De Niro knew New York street Italian, and he had augmented his Italian American vocabulary with a bit of Neapolitan for
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.
But Sicilian, as he knew, was another thing entirely, and with the exception of a handful of lines, Vito Corleone’s dialogue was entirely written in it. De Niro got the first chunk of script—131 draft pages—in early July 1973, and, seeing the challenge in front of him, he dove into the task of learning the language with characteristic fervor.

He enrolled at a Berlitz school in New York, getting high marks from his instructors. Then the studio found him a tutor, Romano Pianti, a Sicilian-born linguist who was working as a director for an Italian-language TV station in the United States. He supplied De Niro with books, including a dictionary of Italian hand gestures, and lots of one-on-one tutelage. It was a crash course in a difficult language, and De Niro respected the singularity of it. “
Sicilian is something else,”
he said. “It is much more staccato, far less rhythmic than Neapolitan. It seems to be related to Greek. I took my tape recorder and talked to Sicilians in California and New York, and then I went to Sicily.”

He visited Sicily in October 1973, when Coppola was shooting the Nevada scenes of the film. He stayed for a while with Pianti’s family in Trapani, spent time in the towns of Scopello and Castellammare del Golfo, and then, most delicately, traveled to the now-famous village of Corleone, where he ventured alone in order to, as he had in Georgia before
Bang the Drum Slowly
, get a sense of how his lines should sound in the local manner of speech.

He didn’t make a secret of his motives. “
I was always up front about what I was doing,” he said. “I feel it would be underhanded not to say anything. I’m just an actor doing my work. I’ve found people enjoy helping you and if they understand what you’re looking for, you save a lot of time and unnecessary suspicion.” But even that attitude could seem overly hopeful in Sicily and especially Corleone. “
When I went into a bar, I was a little hesitant about mentioning the picture,” he confessed, “because I didn’t know what the reaction would be. But they seemed genuinely proud of
The Godfather
and complained because the picture wasn’t filmed there.”