After rapturous critical acclaim for his first three major features Mean Streets, Oscar-winning Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Cannes’ Palme D’Or for Taxi Driver, his latest, ambitious musical New York, New York, had been a critical and commercial flop. Ill health and troubled relationships with women – the latest, an imploded relationship with Liza Minnelli while his then-wife Julia Cameron was pregnant – were commonplace to Scorsese but this was his first encounter with professional failure. “I’d reached a certain nadir,” the sixty-four-year old director now recalls, “In many different ways.” Those around Scorsese know that his malaise runs far deeper than dodgy pharmaceuticals. Officially, a dangerous cocktail of asthma medication, prescription drugs and a batch of bad coke is to blame. Hospitalised after blacking out, he’s bleeding, by several accounts, from every orifice. Labor Day, September 1978: Martin Scorsese is too sick to work, let alone celebrate the public holiday. 25 years after creating a legend, Leigh Singer asks how a punch-drunk Martin Scorsese, backed by Robert De Niro, got off the canvas to deliver the knockout of Raging Bull.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |