Conversations with Scorsese (60 page)

RS:
Even in Milestone’s later films, which were sometimes banal thematically, there’s some beautiful filmmaking.

MS:
His films were part of a United Artists television package—all the
Alexander Korda films, plus things like
The Shanghai Gesture,
which was repeated all the time. I became obsessed with it.

Of Mice and Men
was repeatedly shown, and that too affected me a lot. Lenny and George were like brothers.

RS:
It resonated with you because you have a brother?

MS:
Yes. But
Aaron Copland’s music was also important to me. That was when my ear began to be attuned to scoring. We actually wound up using a section of that on the television in the background of the scene in
Raging Bull
when De Niro is fixing the TV, and he’s questioning his brother, which builds to the moment when he asks, Did you fuck my wife? That’s literally synced up to the end, when Bob’s walking up the stairs to confront his wife—the ending music of
Of Mice and Men.
All the dialogue is there, too. My ear became attuned to that kind of music. I saw
The Red Pony
on its release in 1949, and that was Copland’s music. My father liked guitars, and he bought some records. One record I still have is considered the first rock ’n’ roll record, one of the first “boogie-woogie” records. It was made in the forties by a guy named Arthur “Guitar” Smith and was called
Guitar Boogie.
The flip side was something by the
Tennessee Ramblers, which you can’t get a copy of anymore. It was basically bluegrass. We had maybe twenty-five records and I played them over and over again. My father used to play ukulele, apparently; I never saw him do it live, but in my Italian documentary we have film of him that his brother-in-law shot. My father always talked about appreciating how people played guitar, banjo, bluegrass fiddling. My brother then started playing guitar, and sometimes my mother was washing dishes or something, and he’d be playing something, and she’d be singing along—songs like
“When Day Is Done,” standards that we all knew.

When I was growing up, my mother used to like listening to country western. I heard it in the morning in the late forties, early fifties—Hank Williams and others.

RS:
How does an Italian lady get to like country western?

MS:
She just liked country western because of the guitars. I remember that we liked
“Clear, Cool Water,” by the Sons of the Pioneers. Do you remember that?

RS:
Do I remember it? Are you kidding?

MS:
The thing about that was, for me as a kid, it was a very interesting story.

RS:
[
Sings.
] “… don’t you listen to him, Dan, he’s a devil not a man …”

MS:
A devil, not a man, yeah. Then the guy dies in the song. It’s a dramatic song. I guess the epitome of that kind of song is the “ride away” chorus in
The Searchers.
[
Sings.
] “Ride away.” It clicks in there with the opening shot and the last shot.

RS:
Given all that, did the rock revolution really hit you hard? I mean, did it just blast into your consciousness?

MS:
It did—because it was 1953. The songs up to that point were, you know—

RS:
“How Much Is That Doggie in the Window.”

MS:
Right. And
Frankie Laine—“Jezebel”—or
Perry Como singing “Round Round Round” and “Papaya Mama.” These are the bad ones; Como did good ones, too. And Frankie Laine sang “That’s My Desire,” which was not bad. But you had that extraordinary singer named Johnny …

RS:
Johnny Ray?

MS:
Yeah. “The Little White Cloud That Cried.” You’d hear this echoing in the streets, the 78s. I was thirteen years old, the right age, when I first heard
Fats Domino, singing “I’m in Love Again,” and “When My Dreamboat Comes Home.” And then Presley’s “Hound Dog,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “All Shook Up”—that was a key one. The other important singer for me was
Little Richard—“Tutti Frutti,” that was major, right at that same time. My uncles loved music so much, and when I would play that, one of them would say, “He’s not singing. Listen. He’s out of breath.” They didn’t like it.

The other key voice for me was
Ray Charles—“Hallelujah, I Love Her So.” That I have on 78, and on the flip side is a song called
“What Would I Do Without You?,” which was a seminal song for many listeners of that period. It was seminal for
The Band, I know; they would refer to it. It’s extraordinary. Only two, two and a half minutes, a
blues number, but Ray does something with his voice at the end where it cracks, where it’s just overwhelming. Everything in the early fifties was changing. And at the same time you had pictures that were dealing with subject matter that was previously taboo. By 1954 there was
On the Waterfront.
The year after
Blackboard Jungle
appeared. To me it’s not a great picture, but once you hear—

RS:
“Rock Around the Clock.”

MS:
Exactly.

RS:
Richard Brooks had a wild story about that. He could have bought the rights to that song.

MS:
He would have never had to work.

RS:
You know for how much? A thousand dollars.

MS:
Then there were the other films that came out of Hollywood about rock ’n’ roll that were absolutely terrible.

RS:
That one wasn’t so great, either.

MS:
No, no, it wasn’t.

RS:
But the opening is great.

MS:
The only truly great rock ’n’ roll film is
The Girl Can’t Help It
[a 1956 comedy by comedy master
Frank Tashlin, in which a gangster tries to make his talent-free girlfriend (Jayne Mansfield) into a singing star]. They actually took the care and the time. Not every performance in it is on the level of a
Little Richard or
Fats Domino or
Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps. But that’s an extraordinary movie in terms of musical treatment.

RS:
There is the big scene in
Blackboard Jungle
when the delinquents break all of Richard Kiley’s records.

MS:
That was terrifying, very disturbing.

RS:
It was, wasn’t it?

MS:
Because I had those records at home.

RS:
Of course you did. So did I.

MS:
We had those records from the older generation. Those are the records we grew up on.

RS:
It was symbolic—“Rock Around the Clock” is our music, the records we’re trashing are your music. And your music is moldy fig music.

MS:
But you know, it wasn’t. I had it all. I mean, I appreciated the old and the new.

RS:
Of course. But they were trying to say something about that generation of kids.

MS:
It was a very tough transition. Some of the rock music wasn’t very good, but some was classic. The sound of a Fats Domino, for example, the New Orleans sound; it’s very special. It comes from many different sources: Cajun, the Acadians from Canada, Creoles. It’s a very special sound. Remember Professor Longhair playing
jazz piano in
Clint Eastwood’s
documentary, doing “Tipitina”? It’s a great moment.

RS:
Yes, it is.

MS:
Some of it sustains itself better than others. For example, for me, the early Presley songs were fine. After that, once “Love Me Tender” came out, we rejected him. Some of my friends didn’t like any of the films he made except maybe
King Creole,
and
Flaming Star,
Don Siegel’s picture.

RS:
I liked
Flaming Star.
It was a pretty good western.

MS:
Flaming Star is
pretty good.

RS:
But he doesn’t sing in it, except the title song. The one with Barbara Stanwyck wasn’t so bad.

MS:
What was that?

RS:
Roustabout,
I think.

MS:
I hated those titles,
Roustabout
and
Viva Las Vegas.
By that time we wanted to see him transform as a performer. Those were the years of
James Dean, and
Montgomery Clift, and Brando, people coming out of the Hollywood cinema who spoke for the young.

RS:
He should have adapted, he could have. If he hadn’t been managed by that terrible man—

MS:
Colonel Parker, yes.

RS:
I think he might have instinctively found his way to it. But, you know, Colonel Parker wasn’t having that.

MS:
Oh, I know. They had to make their money with him. I helped edit the
Elvis on Tour
film. It was enjoyable. He certainly performed, there’s no doubt about it. But he didn’t develop or evolve. They just created something, and they kept him where he was.

RS:
He just got fatter and crazier.

MS:
I stopped listening to Presley, I think, after, oh, maybe 1958. I didn’t take him seriously anymore.

RS:
What were you taking seriously at that point?

MS:
There was still
Chuck Berry, as a sort of a chronicler of the time if you listen to his lyrics. He was an originator. And being a New Yorker, doo-wop was very important to me. I hate that term, but those were the songs that were sung in the hallways. We would imitate those songs.
Buddy Holly was very important to us—really key. There was something about the country and western influence. Did you know that Buddy Holly’s song “That’ll Be the Day” comes from
The Searchers
?

RS:
Sure, of course. That line of Wayne’s.

MS:
Because they saw that movie, and
John Wayne does get those laughs when he says, “That’ll be the day.” The timing is perfect. I saw Buddy Holly at the Brooklyn Paramount in one big rock ’n’ roll show that ended with
Jerry Lee Lewis, whom I also took seriously at the time. Buddy Holly up there on that stage—the thin suits, the narrow, narrow lapels, thin ties, big glasses. He had amplifiers that went to the ceiling.

We were stunned. Buddy Holly only played three songs, but they were extraordinary. Then Jerry Lee Lewis came out and just destroyed the place, I mean, took it down. That whole thing of attacking the piano. If you go back,
Jimmy Durante did the same thing. And
Franz Liszt—Lisztomania.

Leader of The Band: Robbie Robertson, who starred in
The Last Waltz,
became Scorsese’s good friend and, often, a musical collaborator on the director’s later films.

RS:
Yes, right.

MS:
Liszt would do what
James Brown did.

RS:
Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar. I mean, there’s a whole tradition of it.

MS:
My father’s favorite performer was
Cab Calloway. He loved
Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald. You can’t touch them.

RS:
Oh, absolutely.

MS:
I appreciated all that. But my father kind of stopped listening after swing music. He didn’t really get into
jazz. I bought some jazz in the fifties that was pretty interesting.

RS:
But cool jazz is not emotional.

MS:
You’re right. That’s the problem I had. But a lot of emotion did come in through the scores of movies
—Sweet Smell of Success, Man with the Golden Arm,
Elmer Bernstein.
Odds Against Tomorrow,
and
Duke Ellington’s
Anatomy of a Murder.

RS:
That’s a very good score.

MS:
In the early sixties,
Quincy Jones did a good one for
The Pawnbroker.
I was trying to learn more about cool jazz. But I went another way. I’m too hotheaded for cool jazz.

RS:
That’s a contrast between you and Clint. The big, WASPy West Coast guy went for the cool.