Authors: Shawn Levy
And he wasn’t shy about voicing his discomfort: “
I’m feeling angry about this,” he told Grobel. “I’m being pressured into doing an interview, and I resent that. I don’t like the feeling. Why should I have to put myself in a position that makes me feel this way?” Prodded to explain his reluctance, he added, “I’m not good at editing how I feel. And those personal things that I feel … are not something that I care to let anybody know about. That’s my own personal thing.” Grobel, diplomatically, let the matter drop.
That wasn’t enough, though. Whether counseled, coerced, or contractually obligated, he continued to meet, painfully, with the press. In 1989, he agreed to a major sit-down with
American Film
magazine, which, published under the aegis of the American Film Institute, had a more sedate, less tabloid vibe to it. The writer, Barry Paris, reported no incidents of tape recorders being turned off.
But by then, seeking an interview with De Niro and then writing up how frustrating the experience was had become its own trope of magazine journalism. And the tenor had shifted from amusement with a fellow who seemed to struggle with words offscreen to a mystery about a reclusive movie star to waves of thinly veiled hostility toward and superiority over someone whom most of the authors seemed to feel wasn’t the great icon that fortune had made him out to be. “
Don’t talk about world politics, sports, fine wines or clothing. He doesn’t know a lot about those things, which is why he comes off terribly in interviews,” an “associate” told one such writer, who went on to quote a “friend” of De Niro’s as saying, “His mother is quiet. His father is inarticulate. Bob is both of them.”
Those comments came from a January 1991 cover story in
GQ
, which would inspire a small pile of imitators. Billed as “15 Mumbling Minutes with Robert De Niro,” it “reported” what it was like for its author, Alan Richman, to prepare for a chat with De Niro, only to be
left standing at the altar—in this case, a hotel bar in Manhattan. Their encounter wasn’t technically an interview. It was rather an audition for the interview, a little tête-à-tête to see if De Niro would feel sufficiently comfortable with Richman to conduct a full-scale conversation at some other time. De Niro arrived late, and the pair had barely started conversing when Richman sensed De Niro starting to hold back. And then De Niro surprised Richman by asking him what his first five questions would be if they did in fact schedule a proper interview. Richman stammered, and De Niro changed the deal: the first two questions would do. So Richman, feeling the opportunity slip away, asked him flat out why he’d consented to the meeting if he didn’t want to do it. “
I guess … ummm … because … the ummm … the ummm … a lot of free clothes. It’s
GQ
… umm, but I want it to be more interesting. Frankly, if there was no interview I’d be just as happy, but I have to justify getting the clothes. It’s a way to justify the whole process and help the film to a degree, though I’d rather not do it, the movie will fly by itself whether I do an interview or not, not that it matters … No reason for me to do it except ultimately all the wrong reasons.” And with that, the interview ended.
*1
B
UT WITHIN A
matter of years, the situation had reversed itself. De Niro suddenly found himself in need of publicity, seeking the press. In 1992, Tribeca Productions released its first home-grown picture,
Mistress
, and he did a fair number of interviews for it—albeit short and finely focused on the subject of the film. Then in the fall of 1993, he
did even more, a veritable ocean of publicity by his stingy standards, and all of it with a more expansive attitude toward being interviewed, scrutinized, analyzed, and exposed. In the span of some six weeks, major profiles of him, written with his cooperation, appeared in
Interview
,
Vogue
, and the
New York Times Magazine
, and he sat down with journalists for perhaps a dozen or more shorter stories. He had directed a film, his first, and he was beating the drum for it as much and as loudly as he could stand to.
The film was called
A Bronx Tale
, and it had followed a roundabout path to the screen. It was adapted from a play—an elaborate monologue, really—written and performed by an actor named Chazz Palminteri who based it on the childhood experience of seeing a man shot to death right in front of his Bronx home. It was a gangland killing, and despite the horror of it, Palminteri (whose given name was Calogero) grew up looking upon the local gangsters as heroes, a fancy discouraged by his father, Lorenzo, who drove a city bus and consistently told his son, “The workingman is the tough guy, not the guy who pulls the trigger.”
In his play, which started out as a brief reminiscence and then grew over time to a one-man show in which he acted all the parts, Palminteri explored the push-pull of his youthful self: the dazzlement with the gangster’s style and aura and seeming nobility, the filial devotion to the honest, true, and caring father. An important subplot concerned an interracial romance between the adolescent Palminteri and a neighborhood girl of mixed heritage.
He mounted the show first in LA in 1989 with $6,000 given him by the actor Dan Lauria, who had gone to acting school with Palminteri and then hit stardom on the TV sitcom
The Wonder Years.
A slicker but still bare-bones production followed at Theatre West, financed by nightclub impresario Peter Gatien, for whom Palminteri had worked as a doorman. Word got around about the quality of the show, particularly the movielike tenor that Palminteri had achieved, and studio acquisitions people started showing up at performances, hoping to scoop up the rights from a hungry actor willing to make a quick deal.
But Palminteri, in his late thirties, was too savvy to go for the first big check that was dangled in front of him. Regarding the sale of his
hot property, he remembered, “
I had three conditions: I play Sonny [the gangster]; I write the script; and my friend Peter Gatien, who put up the money to produce the play, is the executive producer.” The studios thought they needed a movie star as the gangster, though, and they were chary of dealing with a journeyman actor who sought to transform himself into a bigshot screenwriter and movie star. So they took what they assumed was the easiest way to get what they wanted.
“In Hollywood,” said Palminteri, “when you say ‘No,’ they think it means, ‘He wants more money.’ So they kept raising the money, until it got to seven figures and over.” He held firm: “I wanted to write it and I wanted to star in it. So even though I only had $173 in the bank, I turned the offer down.”
Among the people who saw
A Bronx Tale
onstage in LA was De Niro’s personal trainer, Dan Harvey, who strongly recommended the show to De Niro, who in turn asked Jane Rosenthal to have a look at it. She, too, was favorably impressed and urged De Niro to see it. He did, more than once, and he believed that he could make a film of it that did justice to the material. “
What I liked about it was, it was very specific,” he recalled. “With that, you’re ahead of the game right away. You’re not doing somebody’s idea about that world. You’re doing the world.”
He arranged to meet with Palminteri at the bar at the Bel-Air Hotel, where he put his own personal pitch to him. At first De Niro offered the idea that he would take on the role of Sonny, but when he saw how determined Palminteri was to play it, he backed off. In fact, he offered Palminteri everything he sought in a partner. As Palminteri recalled, “
He looked me in the eye and said, ‘You will play the part of Sonny, and no one else will touch the script.’ ”
Still, Palminteri didn’t let go of his golden goose right away. He brought
A Bronx Tale
to New York, where it was staged at Playhouse 91 to yet more acclaim and yet more interest from movie people. But the promises De Niro had made stuck with him, and in July 1991 they reached a deal. Universal Pictures acquired the script for $1.5 million, with De Niro set to direct and to appear as the father of the protagonist, Palminteri writing the script and playing the role of the gangster, and Tribeca Productions on board to produce De Niro’s directorial
debut—one of the key reasons the company had been founded in the first place.
Initially, Universal imagined that the film would cost $15 million, but the budget soon spiraled upward, often because of De Niro’s demands and preferences. He would be paid $4 million to appear, he would only make the movie in New York with a union crew, and he refused to guarantee cost overruns with his salary. Sensing the budget inching over $20 million, Universal agreed to let Tribeca go elsewhere to find new partners. (“We thought it would be an inexpensive movie,” a studio executive said. “We were wrong. [De Niro] doesn’t come from a guerilla filmmaking school.”) Tribeca’s white knight came in the form of the newly established Savoy Pictures, a production and distribution entity founded with $100 million of Wall Street money. Savoy bought the project with financial support from Penta International, an Italian-based company that would handle foreign distribution rights. They jointly agreed to a budget of $21 million, and an August 1992 start date was set for production.
De Niro finished work on
This Boy’s Life
in May and immediately buckled down on
A Bronx Tale.
Only then did his obsession with the most minute details of the production emerge. Casting was always going to be an issue, and he’d charged his casting director, Ellen Chenoweth, with a mission long before he’d need his actors. “I said, ‘It’s not going to be the usual way of casting a movie. You have to hit the streets now, a year before we start shooting. You gotta get out there and look. I
know
the people we want are out there.’ ” Chenoweth scouted throughout New York, Philly, Chicago, and Boston for people with faces that didn’t scream “movie actor” but who could still play the roles assigned them. She used local theater directors, such as Marco Greco of the Belmont Italian-American Playhouse in the Bronx, as scouts. De Niro was exacting. Insisting on approving every face on-screen, he looked at a pool of fifty potential extras and singled out one man who he felt didn’t give off the proper vibe. It turned out that he had identified the only Irishman in a room full of Italian Americans.
They went to extraordinary lengths to fill the gaps in the cast. As De Niro remembered, “
I read some actors to play [the character named] Eddie Mush. They were good, but then I said, ‘This has got to
be unique.’ So then we looked at some neighborhood guys who weren’t actors, and they were very interesting, so we were getting closer. Then I said to Chazz, ‘Maybe Eddie’s around. Where is he now? Can we find him?’ And eventually Eddie came in. He read once. I said, ‘We don’t have to look any further. Where are we going to find someone else like that? Never in a million years.’ ”
The most crucial missing piece, though, was the adolescent protagonist, Calogero, the young Palminteri figure who would vacillate between fascination with Sonny the gangster and respect for Lorenzo, his bus-driving father. The summer was already upon them and they still hadn’t identified the ideal actor to play their leading man. One day, one of Chenoweth’s assistants was out at Jones Beach looking for faces when he saw a young man who he thought resembled De Niro. The kid responded, “You don’t want me, you want my brother,” and he ran toward the water shouting for his older brother to come and talk to the guy with the video camera. The boy, a sixteen-year-old from Yonkers named Lillo Brancato, mugged for the casting agent, doing impressions of De Niro from
Cape Fear
and
Raging Bull
and
Goodfellas
, and throwing in a little Joe Pesci for good measure. The guy with the camera fell into stitches. Brancato had grown up on De Niro, and the next day he got to meet his idol. Chenoweth called Brancato and asked him to visit De Niro’s office in the Tribeca Film Center. A few meetings, a screen test, and, boom: he was hired, almost literally on the eve of production.
So: a first-time director, a first-time screenwriter, an absolutely untested lead actor, a cast full of nonprofessionals, shooting a period film set in the 1960s on streets in Queens and Brooklyn that people lived and worked and shopped on every day (the actual Bronx locations were too busy to shut down and, moreover, had lost their vintage appearance). What could possibly go wrong?
A lot, as it happened.
Just before shooting began, De Niro stumbled on the stairs and broke a bone in his foot, delaying production for a week. Then there was a long rainy spell that played havoc with the shooting schedule. Then Francis Capra, the young actor cast as the eight-year-old Calogero, lost a front tooth, delaying
his
scenes while he was fitted
for a prosthesis. There was constant mechanical trouble with the two vintage buses being used as Lorenzo’s work vehicles. (De Niro actually learned how to drive them, and had to take the DMV exam for the bus driver’s license twice because his first effort was erroneously marked as failing.)
Too, De Niro’s habitual meticulousness could be crippling to the schedule. A fair bit of the activity of the film was to be focused on the stoop outside Calogero’s house, and De Niro and his crew dithered over the location for what seemed like ages. “We used to joke about it all the time with the production designer,” De Niro explained. “Because he was waiting to know where to put the stoop. And we’d say, ‘No, we changed our mind. We’ll put the stoop back here.’ Two weeks later, we said, ‘Put it over here.’ ”
It may have made for amusing anecdotes, but it added up to money. After five days of shooting, the film was already two days behind schedule. By the time De Niro wrapped production in December, he had shot more than 200,000 feet—some twenty-nine to thirty hours of footage, fifteen times the length of the final film, a long but not excessively indulgent ratio for a major studio production, an absurdity for a small indie drama. The delays and slow pace meant that shooting ran several weeks late, and the budget had risen from $21 to $24 million; despite his earlier reluctance, De Niro covered the overage out of his own pocket. (The prolonged production also delayed the wrap party, which would have fallen in the middle of the holiday season; it was held in January instead.)