De Niro: A Life (37 page)

Right away, he knew that there
was
a good movie in
Raging Bull
but that Martin had been too faithful to the source material to find it. He began doing research of his own—he hired an assistant and
did interviews with Jake LaMotta, his brother Joe, his ex-wife Vicki,
^*2
Pete Savage, and various other acquaintances, dug into newspaper clippings about LaMotta’s career and post-boxing spiral, visited key sites in LaMotta’s life, and watched kinescopes of LaMotta’s fights. As he worked, Schrader came to believe that the problem with Martin’s scripts—and with the film as it was being conceived—was that Savage had inserted himself overly into the Jake LaMotta story and was being granted a little too much input into the prospective film. As he explained to a Writers Guild arbitration board when the final credits for the film were disputed in 1980:

By the end of May, Schrader submitted a draft, which differed from Martin’s in the use of key fight scenes to break up the domestic and psychological drama, and in framing the film with scenes of the older, retired, and out-of-shape LaMotta working in nightclubs. Then, after
he finished post-production on
Hardcore
, Schrader spent five days in Palm Springs and Las Vegas working on a thorough rewrite, which he submitted to Scorsese and De Niro in early July. The character of Pete Savage was still in the film as part of a troika with the LaMotta brothers, but, Schrader felt, he had been whittled down to more appropriate dimensions.

Still, though, Scorsese remained elusive, unable to focus on a new film while his personal life whirled and deteriorated. Then, around Labor Day 1978 he hit rock bottom. At the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, where he’d traveled with De Niro, Mardik Martin, and Isabella Rossellini, whom he’d started dating seriously and would soon marry, Scorsese collapsed. The whole group of them, Martin later claimed, were using some badly compromised cocaine on the trip, and Scorsese, his system almost entirely shattered by his unhealthy regimen, started coughing up blood and blacked out. He was rushed to New York and admitted to a hospital in grave condition, just in time for doctors to begin reversing the damage he’d been doing to himself. De Niro, who would prove over the years to be loyal and helpful to friends who hit health crises, particularly those involving drugs, came to see him in the hospital and put the idea of
Raging Bull
to him once again. Scorsese had originally been repelled because the character of Jake LaMotta seemed so dark and irredeemable to him. Now, though, at his own nadir, he could see the power of the project. “
We could do a really great job on this film,” De Niro said to him. “Do you want to make it?” Somewhere Scorsese found the resolve. “Yeah,” he said.

They faced new problems, though, when they thought about shooting Schrader’s script. For one thing, there was still the question of Pete Savage. Schrader had trimmed him down as much as possible but felt that the best thing to do was to remove him from the story altogether, a revision that De Niro, who had been working with Savage for almost four years, was loath to consider. Then, too, there was the brutality and frankness with which Schrader had imagined the film, culminating in a scene a couple of pages long in which the imprisoned LaMotta tries to masturbate by conjuring the women in his life, only to lose his erection when he recalls how cruelly he treated them all; add that to a scene depicting LaMotta becoming sexually active with Vicki before
a fight but then dousing his erection with ice water to preserve his strength, and you had something that would be unimaginable to shoot or to screen—or, of course, to finance.

Money, pointedly, was the next obstacle to making
Raging Bull
at all. Chartoff-Winkler had a production deal with United Artists, where they had scored a tremendous success a few years prior with
Rocky
(which had beaten out
Taxi Driver
as Best Picture at the Oscars), and they were already engaged in
Rocky II
for the studio. With this kind of leverage, Irwin Winkler felt able to convince the studio to budget as much as $18 million for
Raging Bull
, even in the wake of
New York, New York
and the poor performance (which, to be fair, nobody blamed on De Niro) of
1900
and
The Last Tycoon.

On a wintry day late in 1978, Winkler had Steven Bach and David Field, relatively new production executives at United Artists, accompany him to a meeting with Scorsese and De Niro at Scorsese’s East 57th Street apartment. The pair had read Schrader’s most recent script and had some legitimate concerns, and they wanted to at least pay the would-be star and director of the film the courtesy of having a meeting to discuss them. Bach, as he would later write, had significant issues with the script, which he called “
brutally depressing and depressingly brutal.” And he wasn’t very comfortable in Scorsese’s apartment, which, because the director had only just decided to move back to New York, had the bare-bones feel of a dorm room and was filled with mysterious and vaguely creepy friends and hangers-on.

Bach was further disquieted when he realized that one of these odd folks, a skinny guy in jeans and bare feet who wandered in from another room and greeted the executives in near silence, was in fact De Niro, who sank into a chair in the living room and contributed not one word to the ensuing conversation. After Winkler pitched the film to them, Bach allowed Field to take the lead in stating the studio’s objections to and hesitancies about the project. For one thing,
Rocky
had created a new fad for boxing movies, and in addition to its sequel there were as many as a half dozen other fight films in some stage of production—a lot of competition, in other words.

There was also the matter of censorship, which Schrader’s script would surely entail. United Artists would not put its name on an
X-rated film, as that designation had come to be associated with hardcore porn; they would find it impossible to book an X-rated film into normal theaters or, indeed, to advertise it in newspapers.
Raging Bull
would have to be delivered as an R, Field reminded them, and “
this picture as written is an X.”

“What makes you so sure this is an X?” asked Winkler.

“When I read in a script, ‘
CLOSE UP
on Jake LaMotta’s erection as he pours ice water over it prior to the fight,’ then I think we’re in the land of X,” Field retorted.

Winkler explained that his team wasn’t happy with the script yet, either. Field countered that UA’s concerns went deeper than a few scenes. “It’s the whole script.… We have a real question whether this story can ever be made as a movie any audience will want to see, whatever the rating.”

“Why?” Scorsese asked.

“It’s this
man
,” Field replied. “The problem is will anyone want to see
any
movie about such Neanderthal behavior? Can any writer make him more than what he seems to be in the scripts we’ve seen?”

“Which is what?” Scorsese wondered.

“A cockroach.”

The room went quiet. The deal was nearly dead.

Then De Niro spoke for the first time since his mumbled greetings: “He is not a cockroach. He is
not
a cockroach.”

It all ended with the status quo in place: De Niro and Scorsese had a script that no one was ready to make.

B
UT
D
E
N
IRO
had made
Taxi Driver
happen because he determined that he wouldn’t be dissuaded from doing it. Similarly, he had been focused on making
Raging Bull
for years, and he wasn’t going to give up. He’d been working with the same boxing trainer who’d prepared Sylvester Stallone for
Rocky
, he’d maintained a strict diet and fitness regimen even while working on
The Deer Hunter
, and he had become increasingly involved with Jake LaMotta himself.

LaMotta had spoken with Mardik Martin and Paul Schrader, and of course with Pete Savage and his book- and screenplay-writing partners,
but he and De Niro had developed an extremely intimate bond over the previous few years. And now that De Niro was focused exclusively on
Raging Bull
, the actor pushed the relationship even further, enlisting the old fighter to teach him to box in the exact style he had used; visiting the home LaMotta shared with his fifth wife so often that she mentioned De Niro in her 1979 divorce claim (“He was in the apartment constantly, for nearly two years”); probing him like a therapist about scenes from his past, about his emotions, fears, drives; trading admiration and understanding for the chance to dig into the very soul of the man. The movie, and LaMotta, had gotten under his skin.

De Niro was, LaMotta told a reporter as far back as 1977, “
more qualified to be a psychiatrist than a psychiatrist. He goes very deep. He’s telling me things about me that I never knew. I thought I was a pretty bad guy for a while, but he made me realize I’m not. I’m a pretty good guy.” (He added, as if slightly unnerved: “Every once in a while I catch him looking at me. He studies me.”)

In fact, De Niro relied on a combination of skills to comfort and probe LaMotta by turns. “
I just kept repeating in his ear, ‘You’re not so bad, you’re not so bad,’ ” he said. “People did not like him. Jake had done some low-life things that were supposed to be bad, but I felt that the drama in his life—with the brother and all that stuff—was real.”

There was a limit to how far De Niro could get, even with great tact, sympathy, and sensitivity and a subject who was game to be mined. “
I admired the fact that he was at least willing to question himself and his actions,” De Niro said. “But what’s he going to do? Should he be like a college professor and try to say, ‘Well, I think the reason I did that was because …?’ He would talk that way sometimes, but he was more cunning. He’d look at you deadpan, or he’d laugh about certain things. He would protect himself sometimes, but then he would say, ‘Aah, I was a son-of-a-bitch.’ ”

Finally the actor exhausted even himself: “
I tried to ask him every kind of question,” De Niro later admitted, “but it’s hard to get somebody to be straight and honest about himself, because he is not even sure himself.” Or, as he put it another time: “
You can only go so far with people. Like I can only go so far with you here. There are things I can’t tell you, I can’t consciously or unconsciously give them up.”

There was one thing, though, that LaMotta offered that gave De Niro and Scorsese the last impetus they needed to apply themselves successfully to the film. During one of their lengthy conversations, LaMotta stood up and started banging his head against a wall. As Scorsese said, “
De Niro saw this movement and suddenly he got the whole character from him, the whole movie. We knew we wanted to make a movie that would reach a man at the point of making that gesture with the line, ‘I am not an animal.’ ”

W
ITH THEIR DEEP
knowledge of LaMotta, and with Paul Schrader’s suggestion that they jettison the Pete Savage character from the script, De Niro and Scorsese decided to make a retreat of sorts to the Caribbean island of St. Martin, where they planned to take one final stab at getting the thing right. They spent two to three weeks there—Scorsese suffering from the tropical climate, De Niro patiently taking care of him—working and reworking the pages. Somewhat reluctantly, because Savage was still connected to the project, they did as Schrader suggested: no trace of Pete was left in the final film.

Or, rather, no trace of a character named Pete was left. Fatefully, they took some of the actions, words, and situations involving the real Pete Savage and the character Pete Savage and ascribed them to the character (and, by implication, the real man) Joey LaMotta. Some of these were innocent things, but a few, including a beating given to a mobster acquaintance who was caught by Savage squiring Jake’s wife to a nightclub when the fighter was out of town, amounted to defamation. To make matters worse, they had been so busy working with Savage, Jake, and Vicki that they somehow neglected to obtain Joey LaMotta’s permission to use his name and likeness in the film. They had, in effect, stolen his life rights and
then
defamed him, which was why De Niro wound up being deposed in a lawsuit.

But that, of course, was later, after the picture was made—which finally, on the basis of a new draft of the script delivered in early 1979, seemed likely to happen. This version, Steven Bach noted, bore no screenwriter’s name and was accompanied by none of the usual paperwork the studio and the Writers Guild would normally rely on as they
arbitrated credits and payments for the work. Rather, he remembered, the title page said, “in small type, tucked modestly in the lower-right-hand corner, ‘RdN.’ ” De Niro had finally willed
Raging Bull
into life.

A
S EVER
, his preparation took De Niro well beyond merely learning the script. There was the training, years of it, which put muscle on his eternally skinny frame and then taught him how to use it. He was in his mid-thirties and had never been athletic, but now he worked his body into something remarkable: rock-hard, sinewy, articulated. He had daily training sessions through long spans of 1977 and 1978, learning specifically from LaMotta about his idiosyncratic crouched style, his technique, his mentality; he took tutelage from Tony Mancuso, a journeyman fighter from Canada whose style sufficiently resembled LaMotta’s that he was often hired by LaMotta’s opponents as a sparring partner. And he kept extensive notes about what he learned:
“
Don’t
leap and lunge with wide punches which will ultimately miss … Be
constantly
aggressive and punch to the
body exclusively
 … Try to rally when you have opponent on ropes or in the corner … Don’t throw one punch at a time.
Combinations.
” Scorsese would meticulously storyboard and choreograph the fighting sequences like dance numbers (a nice carryover from
New York, New York
and
The Last Waltz
), but De Niro still felt he had to be able to improvise and create like an actual fighter in the heat of battle. Eventually his skill was such that he hurt LaMotta during sparring sessions and fought a few amateurs in competitive settings.