Authors: Shawn Levy
The controversy over the story’s veracity dogged
Sleepers
into theaters, and virtually every review took a stand on the question, usually scolding. Couple that with the deeply disquieting theme of child abuse, and no amount of star power could draw people into the theater. The one bright side: De Niro enjoyed working with both Levinson and Hoffman (“He really is terrific,” he gushed to a reporter); it wouldn’t be long before they tried it again.
S
COTT
M
C
P
HERSON
’
S 1991
play
Marvin’s Room
was a cri de coeur from the first decade of the AIDS plague, even though AIDS wasn’t explicitly a part of the story. It centers on two sisters whose father has been slowly dying after a stroke. One sister has cared for him for almost twenty years, but now she has leukemia, and she needs the help of her flighty sister, whose son has been institutionalized after deliberately burning down their house. McPherson wrote the play after caring for a partner who was dying of AIDS, and Tribeca Productions acquired the film rights in 1992, just as McPherson himself was dying of the disease. Jessica Lange was attached to play one of the sisters at that time, and De Niro was planning to produce it.
By the time it was made, in the late summer and fall of 1995, Lange
was gone and De Niro had taken on a cameo as a physician with a goofball sense of humor and a contentious rapport with a colleague (Dan Hedaya). The sisters were played by Diane Keaton and Meryl Streep, the troubled son by Leonardo DiCaprio, and, in his final feature film performance, the dying man by Hume Cronyn. Jerry Zaks, best known for Broadway comedies and musicals, made his feature film debut as director.
The play had been dark (despite jagged bits of humor) and small, and it wasn’t obviously film material, a sense that was borne out after Zaks finished shooting it. There seemed to be no appropriate distribution moment: it would get lost in the summer and wasn’t quite powerful enough to be a serious awards season contender. It was released, finally, in February 1997, to modestly warm reviews and negligible box office.
I
T WAS COMMONLY
believed that De Niro and Martin Scorsese worked so well together because they understood each other’s essence and background so well, but that wasn’t entirely true. While De Niro had some firsthand knowledge of the Little Italy world of Scorsese’s youth, Scorsese could only imagine what De Niro’s childhood in the bohemia of the Greenwich Village art scene had been like. In 1996, though, De Niro met a director who, like him, had grown up in an artist’s household.
James Mangold was the son of two artists—the painters Robert and Sylvia Plimack Mangold. He was raised in the Hudson River valley north of New York and had attended film school at CalArts and Columbia University, where, under the tutelage of Milos Forman, he developed two scripts: a story of a sad, overweight loner, entitled
Heavy
, and a loose remake of
High Noon
set in the world of contemporary police corruption.
Heavy
had been Mangold’s debut and won him the Best Directing prize at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival. It brought Mangold to the attention of Miramax Films and Harvey Weinstein, and Mangold’s other script, now entitled
Cop Land
, was put into production.
On the heels of the massive success of
Pulp Fiction
, and especially
the resurrected career of John Travolta, the idea of an ensemble crime story from Miramax was exciting enough to attract a number of top stars to at least consider the film, including Travolta, Tom Cruise, Sean Penn, even Tom Hanks. However, none of them proved willing to work for what the studio was hoping to pay for the lead role, a hapless cop who finds that he has a nest of corrupt New York City detectives running his small Catskills town like their personal realm. Instead, seeking to bring back another star of the 1970s whose career had faded into self-parody, Weinstein landed Sylvester Stallone. Around him, as corrupt cops, were Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta (with Cathy Moriarty as his wife), and Robert Patrick, while De Niro had a key role as an NYPD internal affairs investigator trying to convince the small-town cop to help him make his case against the bad guys.
“We feel overwhelmed and blessed that Robert De Niro has joined this project with his enormous talent, integrity and brilliance,” Weinstein gushed to the press when it was announced that De Niro was in. He might later have wished that he’d tempered his words. Despite his association with De Niro and the Tribeca Film Center, Weinstein was the odd man out when De Niro and Mangold discovered the unusual coincidence of their parentage. “We both spent our childhoods at gallery openings,” Mangold recalled. They bonded as well in wanting to see
Cop Land
made as Mangold intended it and not as Weinstein, who had earned a reputation as a heavy-handed producer in the old-time Hollywood style, wished to see it. Mangold was pressured by Weinstein in matters of casting and in shooting an alternative ending (which Weinstein himself wrote), and in both cases Mangold turned to De Niro, who, much to Weinstein’s dismay, backed up the director’s vision and authority. Both times—including the new ending, which De Niro simply refused to show up to shoot, no matter the fee dangled in front of him—Mangold won out.
De Niro didn’t pour himself into the role. He’d played cops before, he knew the milieu, he trusted the director. He spent a little time boning up on the hierarchy of rank in the NYPD and on the off-duty lifestyle habits of cops, particularly the ones who chose to live outside the city. Otherwise, he knew he was merely a piece of the puzzle. The film
shot throughout the summer and fall of 1996 and, after the typically protracted and painful Miramax editing process (not for nothing had Weinstein been nicknamed “Harvey Scissorhands”), it debuted the following summer to generally good notices and modest box office.
T
HE ONE INDISPUTABLY
true thing to come out of
Sleepers
was the relationship that De Niro and Dustin Hoffman had forged in their few working days together. De Niro admired Hoffman’s breezy personal style—“I always envy the way he can speak and be funny and smart”—and he liked to remind Hoffman of their very first encounter, back in 1968, when Hoffman was a rising star and De Niro, six years younger, was a struggling actor serving him drinks and canapés at a Eugene McCarthy presidential campaign event.
It was presidential politics that would bring them back together, in a fashion. In 1996, with
Sleepers
in theaters, Barry Levinson and New Line Cinema acquired the rights to
American Hero
, a 1993 novel by Larry Beinert that proposed, with tongue in cheek, that President George H. W. Bush had started the first Gulf War as a means of inflating his approval ratings and increasing his chances of reelection. “What we were interested in was the blurring of the line between Washington and Hollywood,” Levinson explained. Screenwriter Hilary Henkin was called on to adapt the book, and then David Mamet was hired to punch up and energize her script. Late in the year, Levinson invited De Niro, Hoffman, and Anne Heche to a table reading of the most current draft, and they had a blast. As it happened, Warner Bros. was stalled on Levinson’s pricey sci-fi film
Sphere
, which would star Hoffman, and a window of a couple of idle months lay ahead. With less than $20 million of New Line’s money and a shooting schedule of less than thirty days, the three actors and Levinson agreed to go forward with the film, which had been retitled
Wag the Dog.
De Niro was to play Conrad Brean, a political campaign strategist who has the luxury of a popular president running for reelection as a client. With a few short weeks to go before the election, however, and with the candidate abroad in China, a sex scandal breaks out involving
the president and an underage girl whose youth group toured the White House. Called upon to distract the media from the ensuing firestorm, Brean hires Hollywood producer Stanley Motss (Hoffman) to stage a phony war in Eastern Europe, complete with fabricated atrocities and heroes, a theme song, a fad, and a logo. Heche was cast as the White House aide charged with riding herd on the pair of schemers, and Woody Harrelson, Dennis Leary, and Willie Nelson were among those with supporting roles.
De Niro was concerned that, despite the over-the-top nature of the story, there be an air of credibility throughout, and he sent the script to friends in the New York media, including Tom Brokaw of NBC and Judith Miller of the
New York Times
, to vet it for plausibility; he also asked for a review from veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke. All three told him that the thing might be overly broad and was defiantly cynical but that there was a vein of realism in it. The film was shot in early 1997, just after the reelection of Bill Clinton, and, being a small movie with big stars, was released in late December, when film award talk was heating up—albeit on only three screens in New York and Los Angeles, to qualify for Oscar consideration.
It’s hard to see how anyone thought of De Niro to play the WASPy, donnish Brean, but he seems to love the role: the shabby, vaguely academic mien and wardrobe, the slippery logic, the nonstop motion and rat-a-tat patter. He plays it low-key and, indeed, low-fi, not trying to create a character so much as slip into the role unnoticed, rather as he had in recent years in the likes of
Cop Land
and
Marvin’s Room.
He carries much more of the film, though Hoffman is funnier by far and would be nominated for an Oscar (as, a bit curiously, Best Actor). There’s an ease and likeability to Brean: he appreciates the skill and energy of his colleagues. He relates beautifully to Motss in the way they talk, the way they seem physically relaxed around each other, the way their minds and skill sets meld. In reality, Brean is a bad guy, intent on fooling the public and corrupting the government for the sake of political gain. But De Niro plays him so offhandedly and agreeably that the audience can’t help but want him to succeed. Ultimately,
Wag the Dog
is remembered best for presaging eerily a real-life political drama,
but it’s still, in the main, a film dotted with pleasures, and De Niro’s unaffected work serves it well.
The full release came a few weeks later, on January 11, and it made a respectable $7.8 million. And then, just one week later, a scandal involving Bill Clinton and a former White House intern, a young woman named Monica Lewinsky, stunned the world, leaking first on fledgling Internet-based news sites and then into the mainstream media, creating a long-running furor that ended in the impeachment of the president before the year was out.
It was a perfect instance of life catching up to art: among the commonly seen images of Lewinsky was one in which she wore a beret just like that sported by the underage girl in
Wag the Dog.
The tiny movie made on a lark had become synonymous with the juiciest presidential scandal since Watergate, and the film went on to play in theaters until spring, earning a healthy $43 million box office and Oscar nominations for Hoffman and the screenplay, and making the phrase “wag the dog” a kind of shorthand for the political use of media to distract the public from unpleasant realities.
D
E
N
IRO CHOSE
yet another ensemble role with his next picture,
Jackie Brown
, an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel
Rum Punch
by writer-director Quentin Tarantino. De Niro was cast as Louis Gara, a newly minted parolee who’s back in business with his sometime partner in crime Ordell Robbie. Sloppy and out of sorts, Louis sits in quiet wonderment at the new world that has emerged during his years in prison: the technology, the sexual mores, the cat-and-mouse game with law enforcement. He was once sharp and dangerous, but incarceration has softened and neutered him, and even though Ordell wants to take him back on as a colleague, Louis needs more supervision than the services he can provide would seem to warrant.
Tarantino was an immense De Niro fan, both as a film buff and as an aspiring actor. “De Niro was it,” he once said. “He was who everyone in my acting classes wanted to be.” On British TV in 1994, not long before the release of
Pulp Fiction
, Tarantino provided introductions to
a “Season of De Niro,” including airings of
Mean Streets
,
Taxi Driver
,
Raging Bull
,
The Deer Hunter
, and
Once Upon a Time in America.
Getting a personal hero into the film was a coup for the director, but it may have paled in comparison to the fact that his producer, Harvey Weinstein, let him fill the principal roles in the film with two nearly forgotten stars of the 1970s: Pam Grier and Robert Forster.
The mammoth success of
Pulp Fiction
meant that the follow-up would be gobbled up by the film press and audiences alike. But Tarantino chose, cannily, not to push the wild tenor of his previous films any further. Rather,
Jackie Brown
would be closer to a character study, the story of an airline hostess (Grier) coerced by law enforcement into turning against Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson) and using her own wiles and the help of a friendly bail bondsman (Forster) to keep herself alive and free.
De Niro, like Bridget Fonda, Chris Tucker, and Michael Keaton, was but a minor player in this deadly roundelay. As a result, he did very little work to prepare for the role. He grew out his hair and a goatee, he made a very few character notes in his script (“
Do I smoke?… I’m trying to be hip, black … High now! Feeling good”), and he concentrated mainly on wardrobe. Nothing about Louis is stylish, but he does carry a sort of cool old-school vibe. To that end, Tarantino dressed De Niro in bowling shirts and Hawaiian shirts, some designed for the production, some of them vintage items from the director’s own closet. A few of those items were actually worn by De Niro in the film, but he and his director failed to bond over anything more substantial than shirts; rumors from the set indicated, in fact, that De Niro didn’t care for Tarantino’s manner and found the working environment uncomfortable.