There is something very familiar about Bringing Out The Dead. As paramedic Nicolas Cage rides through the lonely and dangerous streets of late-night New York, literally haunted by his past, there is a different kind of ghost present: the trace of another film. It’s in Cage’s haunted eyes, and in the sense of chaos on the streets.
“The Taxi Driver comparison is there,” says Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplay for both films. “It’s unavoidable. We had to make this feel like a bookend rather than a sequel. Travis Bickle wants to be alone: this character wants to be with somebody. This is a more adult version of those rolling emotions Marty and I felt 25 years ago.” Martin Scorsese puts it more simply: “We’re mellower now.”
Any Scorsese film is news. Any new Scorsese film set in near contemporary New York, rather than the Tibet of Kundun in 1997, is an event. And any Scorsese film written by Schrader is a big deal indeed. There is probably no more famous pairing of a director and a writer.
Not that this is a big claim: writers have traditionally had no status in Hollywood. IAL Diamond worked with Billy Wilder on 12 films, including undisputed classics such as Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. “If I ever lost this guy, I’d feel like Abercrombie without Fitch,” Wilder said. But how many people have heard of Diamond? Ruth Jhabvala has written 21 films for James Ivory, but producer Ismail Merchant provides the second half of the brand name.
True, Schrader’s work as a director has raised his profile more than other screenwriters. But there is also an aura about the two first Scorsese-Schrader films – Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. The heady mix of film-making genius and testosterone brutality brings in the true obsessives. After all, it has been claimed that Taxi Driver was the inspiration for John Hinkley’s attempt to kill Ronald Reagan. (“If the movie really had been great he would have killed him,” the left-wing producer Bert Schneider grumbled at the time.)
According to Schrader, “There are warning signs in the film that could help prevent someone who is isolated from becoming like Travis Bickle. If you are on the edge, this is the film that could pull you back from the precipice. It certainly did for me.”
Those two films put Scorsese and Schrader at the heart of the ever-growing mythology about Seventies Hollywood. Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and trashy autobiographies such as Julia Phillips’s You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again and Robert Evans’s The Kid Stays In The Picture sell us the idea that this was the time more than any other in Hollywood when there was the greatest creative freedom and self-destructive excess.
The Biskind thesis is that the Movie Brats, a group of pale, geeky film students, went to LA, effortlessly made a string of ground-breaking movies, then blew everything on women and drugs. Scorsese and Schrader seem to fit this blueprint as well as anyone.
They were sickly boys from deeply religious families: Scorsese a Catholic, Schrader a Dutch Calvinist; both dabbled with the idea of joining the clergy. But there were differences. Scorsese’s family, from Manhattan’s Little Italy, was poor; Schrader’s family in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was wealthy. As a boy, Scorsese went to the movies constantly, and his was the first local family to own a TV. The young Schrader was forbidden from watching TV or going to the movies: he sneaked into his first film at 17. Scorsese was a star student at New York University, Schrader got kicked off the film programme at UCLA.
Brian De Palma introduced them in 1972, when Schrader, a film journalist, was trying to sell a script he had written after being kicked out by his girlfriend. “When I wrote it I was very enamoured of guns. I was suicidal, I was drinking heavily, I was obsessed with pornography in the way that a lonely person is, and all of those elements are in the script.” This was Taxi Driver.
Schrader made people uncomfortable, even those who had not read his script about a disturbed Vietnam veteran. He ostentatiously left a Smith & Wesson on his bedside table. “Schrader always scared me,” producer Julia Phillips wrote. “After I read the script, I refused to be in the house alone with him.”
But Scorsese, who was about to direct Mean Streets, was not put off. Far from it. “When Brian De Palma gave me a copy of Taxi Driver I almost felt that I wrote it myself. Not that I could write that way, but I felt everything. I was burning inside my skin and I felt I had to make it.” With vital input from Robert De Niro, who improvised the legendary “You talkin’ to me?” scene, the film went on to become both notorious and an indisputable part of the film canon.
The relationship between Scorsese and Schrader changed after Taxi Driver. Schrader, now also directing, no longer had to sell his projects to other people. By the time Scorsese asked Schrader to take over the writing of Raging Bull, they were both addicted to cocaine. According to Biskind, Schrader had a $12 000-a-month habit. Scorsese had to be admitted to hospital because his asthma medicine reacted with cocaine to induce a massive haemorrhage.
Traumatised after making New York, New York, Scorsese decided that Raging Bull would be his last movie, his final big statement. But this time Schrader’s script was too bleak, anti-social and unpleasant even for Scorsese. Brutal as the version that made it to the screen is, Schrader’s version was far harsher. De Niro and Scorsese went away to rework the script, but took no credit for it. This was the issue that started to pull Scorsese and Schrader apart. Writing a film is always collaborative, but some people are more relaxed about it than others. Schrader wasn’t.
He wrote a script for The Last Temptation of Christ in 1982; the film was made, after an expensive false start in 1987. By that time Scorsese and comedian Jay Cocks had made changes, and Cocks was credited with Schrader on the film’s posters. Schrader appealed to the Writers’ Guild and had Cocks removed. As the film that allowed them to make the religious undercurrent of their earlier work explicit, Last Temptation should have brought Scorsese and Schrader closer together, but it had the opposite effect.
The pair kicked around the idea of making a George Gershwin biopic before another dispute about writing credits in the late Eighties made them decide never to work together again. Schrader says: “We had an idea to remake The Bad and Beautiful, with De Niro. It would be about our three lives: writer, director and actor. So I did an outline and met them both and it turned out to be very acrimonious. Constantly arguing. Marty wanted the credit and I said, ‘I’ve done three films with you, I’ve written three scripts for you, I’m not going to start sharing credit.’ As the situation got more and more tense I said to him, ‘This is going to end up in one of two ways. Either this film is going to get made and we’re going to become enemies, or this film is not going to get made and we’ll stay friends. So let’s just assume the latter is true and just quit. We’ve done three films, that’s enough. We’ll have dinner once a year.'”
It would suit the Biskind rock’n’roll Hollywood myth to see Scorsese and Schrader as the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the movies, helpless on their own. But it wouldn’t be true. Scorsese has made more great movies away from Schrader than with him – Mean Streets, King of Comedy and GoodFellas. And Schrader is an accomplished director, with powerful films like Blue Collar and Affliction to his credit.
Unlike Francis Coppola, Roman Polanski or William Friedkin, they have done some of their best work since the Seventies. It is because they are interesting film-makers now, not relics of a golden age, that Bringing Out the Dead is worth the wait.
Although it is 17 years since the falling out over The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese says he had no choice when it came to choosing who was to write Bringing Out the Dead. “When I read the book I thought ‘Who do I know who can get inside this man’s spiritual crisis, driving through the West Side of New York at night?’ The only screenwriter I know who can get inside that man’s soul is Paul Schrader.”